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There are a few ways to look at a little study like this. 1: "Great! Now I can make my profile look just like the hottest people's profiles! Then it'll be impossible for all those suckers to tell the difference between really hot people and me!" 2: "Well, now I know why I've been going on first dates with people who seemed awesome but were total duds in person!" 3: "Hey, here's some information I can use when I'm thinking about what to highlight in my profile! Neato!"

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Some psychologists put together a really amazing review of the psychology of online dating. It's a bit dense, so I'll try and pull out the most important findings. The authors ask two questions: is online dating different, and is it better? The answers are "yes" (well, sure) and "sort of" (thanks). Online dating's biggest difference can also be its biggest weakness - you can have a bunch of information before you even think about meeting someone. The degree of access might be the best thing about online dating (because you can get a good sense of the wealth of people "on the market") but is probably also counterproductive. Rather than evaluating possible matches one at a time, with some leisure and chance to exchange some pheromones, online dating encourages users to evaluate dozens of matches at once. Worse, they're evaluating profiles - essentially ads built by people seeking to attract potential mates. The enhanced pre-meeting communications options fostered by online dating can be great news! Or not... The good news is that a few messages exchanged in the run up to a face-to-face meeting can enhance first impressions. That makes sense, insofar as you can front load some basic questions about communication styles and establish a little bit of trust. But you've got to got to got to meet in person to establish a connection, and the literature on the question is thin but suggests that less than 6 weeks is better than more. I'd suggest aiming for less than ten days, but that's a matter of personal preference, not scientific research. Finally, the project of developing and implementing matching algorithms is deeply problematic. Predicting long-term relationship success is a freaking bear trap, scientifically speaking. The best predictors of long-term relationship success are factors relating to stress and coping mechanisms. Things like long-term career prospects, economic stability, low-stress family relationships! and even just socio-economic status matching are all fairly good at predicting whether a couple will stick together, but it'd be a neat trick to get that kind of data about two people who haven't met. So matching models are based on the lowest-hanging fruit: self-reported individual characteristics. But, while similarity can be fairly predictive of initial attraction, personality only accounts for about 6% of one's own relationship satisfaction and 1-2% of one's partner's satisfaction. So most of these models are both targeting difficult-to-reach goals (and, subsequently, over promising) and are choosing inadequate strategies for matching potential partners. On initial consideration this article has little impact on my online dating strategies. I will continue to invite anyone who seems interesting to coffee, tea, or drinks, and proceed. I will, in the words of the review's authors, "avoid an assessment mindset," because that's not even a little bit conducive to meeting rad people. I'm going to continue being evaluative (at and after initial contact) though, because this article tells me nothing about that. And, really, is it not said that the leopard cannot change his shorts?

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This isn't really meant to be a sex advice blog. It's supposed to be about dating!

Keeping those two things apart is ridiculous. Here's a really swell little bloglet ith some Things to Think About if you are, or are with, one of those people who are terrified of, er, equipment. But that's not why I'm sharing it. Long excerpt:

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself… "But I want to know that I can get her off all by myself,"and/or "I want to be enough for her." This is not the way to think about sex. A woman is not a chunk of the moon for you to put your flag into. She’s a partner, and someone you have sex with. Talk to her. There might be times she will orgasm with just you, and that will be really exciting for both of you. But go into every encounter with the willingness and enthusiasm to do whatever she wants you to do to her.

This is a pretty good way to treat sex. But it's also a really great way of thinking about relationships in general. "I want to be enough for you" is a really great way of telling someone it's not actually okay for them to want anything other than what you're providing. Which is a really lousy way to conduct oneself, right?

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Getting dates is not hard if one will act with a bit of courage and show himself to be sincere.

Fear of not being asked or fear of being refused can ruin our social lives if we let them.

Girls have their problems, just as fellows do.

A dignified occasion requires dignified clothes.

Good manners never interfere with fun.

Relax. Be natural. Talk.

It’s foolish to be jealous. It’s your own fun you’re spoiling.

People never like to blame themselves so they blame others.

Simplicity is always the safest policy.

Keep trying. Be sensible.

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For ease of identification.

September 25, 2013 at 06:00PM

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"Don't Date a Girl Who Reads"

"Don't Date a Girl Who Reads"

By Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. 

Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same. Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

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Indubitably.

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And?

I had a really great conversation with a great friend recently about cultivating an and. What's an and? Excellent question!

He wants to be able to say that he's a Developer and a Saxophonist. Or maybe and an Artist. I'm going to be a lawyer in a few weeks (how this works is miles beyond our scope here), but I don't just want to be a Lawyer. I want to be a Lawyer and... Well, that's the tricky part.

I want to write about sex and relationships because those things are both really important to me and really intellectually stimulating. I want to have that be a part of who I am, a part of what I do. And is about building a hobby into something of an auxiliary career - something you can put everything into for ten or fifteen hours a weeks. It's not a hobby, it's something that you own and something you're committed to.

I've said before that good relationship advice is good life advice and vice versa. Here's today's dose of medicine: having a career, by itself, probably isn't enough to have a really rich life. A job almost certainly isn't. You have got to have something that you love, that you're good at, that you do for yourself in addition to whatever mercenary work keeps your freezer full of hot pockets.

A full life is one of the most attractive things a person can have. Better than a hot car or a sweet apartment or even a pony. Better than a bank account or a butt like woah.

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Sound.

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I have no idea how old or how healthy this guy is but there's a chance he's got a medical issue which might be serious. So when you talk to him again mention that that's a possibility and that he might want to see his doctor about it. But if he's able to have and maintain erections in his own company? Probably not a medical problem.

I'm going to tell you something that would violate all kinds of bro code provisions if I weren't trying to get this guy laid. He knows exactly what's wrong. He just doesn't know how to say it. He's very likely just a nervous wreck. He felt some pressure to perform, the boner fairy didn't visit, and he couldn't figure out what to say other than "this never happens," which is the thing every nervous-bordering-on-terrified guy has ever said when he felt like he'd let someone down.

So what do you do? Ease the hell up, is what. He "can’t take [you] in his arms and make [you] feel like a woman"? As long as you're loading sex up with that kind of emotional freight you're going too be putting altogether too much pressure on your partner. I've got two specific suggestions for you:

1. Start by reexamining your relationship with your sexuality. You've got to own your pleasure and take responsibility for it. Now, some things you can't get without a cooperative partner and your desires aren't at all unreasonable. But no one should ever ever ever have a "failed attempt[] at sex" unless your definition of "sex" is ridiculously narrow. Any activity that involves sexual gratification is sex. If there's anyone out there whose sole means of sexual gratification was penetrative sex (or even orgasms!) I haven't met them. So broaden your mind a bit. Play together. Get imaginative about what sex will mean for you and this partner and...

2. Take the pressure off. You might do this by taking penis-in-vagina sex off of the table. You'll get to fool around a bunch and establish lots of physical intimacy and trust - things most men also want as a prerequisite to good sex. You might also ask for specific things other than vaginal intercourse. He's a lot more likely to feel like he's doing a decent job in the sack if he can use his face/hands/whatever to please you rather than being forced to rely on a less reliable appendage. You might also try, well, dry humping. Clinically, frottage. Rub yourself against him in a way that is mutually pleasurable, perhaps in a position that simulates sex. If he gets hard - great! - don't just hop on! Practice, together, getting him aroused and comfortable. Keep practicing at it until it's unfuckingbearable for both of you, then you're ready to talk about sex. In any case you should definitely tell him that it's not an existential threat at this point - almost nothing kills boners like feeling like there's something on the line.

And if you give it the ol' college try and it's just not happening? Well, then you get to be a grownup and decide whether this relationship is one you want if it's boners-optional.

It’s been almost 3 months and we have had 3 failed attempts at sex. Not a good feeling for me. So for those who know my dilemma they say I should wait it out some more and give him time. More time. But how much more time can I give the guy? He wants to see me all the time. I see him about 3 times a week. He Texts me all day and is so attentive to my needs....

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t know what happened and that he will be able to perform. But the idea of the possibility that I won’t have that intimacy ever with him is killing me. What should I do? Ugh… He is such a great guy… But I can’t fall in love w/ someone who can’t take me in his arms and make me feel like a woman. Yes, sex isn’t everything but it’s important to me. Important enough to know that I need that intimacy. :/

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I don't really read, I'm too Type-A for that.

Person Who You Should Not Sleep With

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Noted without comment.

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On Growth

There are about a million different things that really smart people have said about growing as a person. I'm not going to try to summarize that literature or confront any particular omission, I just want to note something.

It's this: sometimes it really sucks. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes the weak little homunculus inside of you will howl and claw at you to keep you from changing.

When that happens I try to lower my shoulder and lean into it. That homunculus is not my friend. Its anger or fear or resistance is a sign that I'm moving in the right direction. It's a sign I'm on the right track.

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This woman wins so hard. So hard!