Many have puzzled over this question, but the answer has never quite been forthcoming.

Until now, maybe. I stumbled across this on a LiveJournal account — no permalinks, scroll down to 29 August at 9:54 am — and it seems as good a definition as any:

(Boldface as in the original.)

The only issue I might raise is the possibility that men, at least of the straight persuasion, want to see damned near every woman they know to which they are not related in a state of déshabillé.

(Should this technically be déshabillée? My French is limited to the ordering of dressing and/or fries.)

About the third lesson in Bloggage 101 is "Find someone who says what you want to say, only better, and put up a link." Well, I can't very well link to a 45 (or, for that matter, an LP), but with apologies to the appropriate copyright holder and to anyone else who might take umbrage, here is something said better than I could, said many years before I could, by a chap who calls himself Lobo:

Repeat and fade. (Which, of course, I will.)

Jan Haugland's Secular Blasphemy teeters on the brink of Too Much Information:

Frankly, I think I'd have better luck with a big, floppy, um, hat.

From The Journal of Doubt, 10 October (no permalinks, sorry), on the results, or lack thereof, of placing a personal ad on the Net:

Speaking as someone who has never had any charm to lose ("hideous" and "unattractive" are somewhat more debatable), I can say only that women as a group are indeed a complete mystery. But I believe, for some reason unknown, and in spite of an almost total lack of supporting evidence, that each and every one of them has a clearly-defined path to her heart, and when this road is not taken, it's more often than not because (1) we simply don't know where the hell to find it, or (2) it's not in her best interest to point it out. Sometimes both.

Of course, I can afford to act detached about this, since I in no way resemble anyone's ideal and therefore am not likely to disappoint on this basis.

The Doubter continues:

I shudder to think how long this man's dry spell has been, and I shudder even more when I contemplate my own, which likely dwarfs it.

But admitting to desperation is absolutely the most useless thing to do under the circumstances. It does nothing to enhance the possibilities; in fact, since women can detect desperation at the parts-per-billion level, it's likely to make matters worse — assuming there exists a condition that can be described as "worse".

So what's the solution? If I knew, do you think I'd be home blogging on a Saturday night? I generally don't recommend giving up except in the direst of circumstances, but the only alternative is to fall back on cliché: "You don't find love. Love finds you."

The irritating thing about cliché, of course, is that too often it contains entirely too much truth.

Hard as it may be to believe, when I was younger I was actually even more clueless about all things romantic.

(Muchas gracias, sort of: The World Wide Rant.)

The only way through this is to quote it directly:

As a practicing (well, actually, out of practice) leg man, I should pay no attention to this, but a few of these assertions demand a response.

In the first place, Pamela Anderson's bust size has gone up and down more than the Nasdaq, what with old implants being replaced by new implants and God knows what other sorts of tweaking going on; the only thing one can reasonably assume about Her Pamness is that she has a fairly high credit limit. (These things ain't cheap.)

And I suspect, based on having heard too many songs and having once read her autobiography, that Dolly Parton would have essentially the same personality if she had a B-cup.

Gwyneth's and Debra's sexual proclivities are unknown to me, and probably to Dr Shiga as well, but I assume their names were thrown in for, um, balance.

My own experience in this realm is too limited to be statistically significant — additional research is, alas, extremely unlikely — but I tend to believe that women generally would benefit more from stuffing their brains than from stuffing their bras.

Now if Dr Shiga wants to extrapolate about the male half of the species based on, say, penis length, well, that's a tale for another time.

Jonathan Owiecki, literally on the edge of seventeen:

Been there, saw that. [sigh]

Susanna Cornett is not one to mince words, anyway:

I could argue, I suppose, that "that's not my style," but that would imply that I actually have a style.

Spark is not happy with the unsolicited assessment she received:

And apparently this is not something to which she aspires:

What better place to trap a sex kitten inside the body of an intellectual than at the Reference Desk?

Lloyd Dobler would understand.

For a Saturday the 14th, today definitely seemed more like Friday the 13th.

Quite apart from the fact that I go into a coughing fit every time I assume a horizontal position, I was downright weepy most of the morning, though I attribute this to unlucky programming of the background music. Imagine this block of four in sequence on your local oldies station:

"Past, Present and Future" - The Shangri-Las

"Ask the Lonely" - The Four Tops

"The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" - The Walker Brothers

"Save It For Me" - The Four Seasons

From back to front, hope, dashed hope, permanently dashed hope, and paranoia. Curiously, the Walkers track started out as a Frankie Valli solo effort, which inexplicably flopped; in some almost-but-not-exactly-parallel universe, this set might have ended with a Four Seasons twin-spin.

The real killer here is "Past, Present and Future", which contains this truly twisted text (it's not really a lyric, since it's not sung):

Beyond that, deponent saith not.

The real fun to come, however, was in cyberspace.

The next office over has a couple of Authentic Beauties. I, of course, strive to avoid them, simply as a matter of maintaining equilibrium; I'll toss out an occasional flip remark, but it never goes beyond that.

Yesterday, one of them (the younger) was sporting an engagement ring. "It's about time," I said. Certainly she thought so; they'd been dating seemingly forever.

And for some reason, this stung me, and I can't come up with any justification for it. I'd never even considered her as a potential companion — she's gorgeous, and she's fairly bright, but she's half my age (more or less literally) and we wouldn't have a whole lot to talk about — so it shouldn't matter if she goes into the Permanently Unavailable file. Yet somehow I mourn, even as I wish her great heaping gobs of happiness, and I mutter deep, dark curses against the person who causes me all this heartbreak.

Which is, of course, myself.

(10:20 am: Modified slightly to increase vagueness.)

Sometimes I schedule a book for future reading on the basis of the title, and the title doesn't have to resonate positively, either; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, a title I would love to hate on general principle, will simply have to be read.

In the meantime, the author has been interviewed for Atlantic Unbound, and some of her observations did strike me at, um, interesting angles.

The inference, as I see it: all else being equal, we guys would prefer to be the brains of the operation. This is certainly true of some of us; historically, I have often been drawn to women of greater intelligence than mine, but there's always that nagging thought in the back of my mind: "If she's that smart, what in the world would she want with the likes of me?" The author does in fact touch upon this phenomenon; asked if some men felt they "were being spurned because they aren't impressive enough", she replied:

I think there's more to it than that — I don't think I'd be any more desirable (or, more precisely, any less undesirable) with a sheaf of postgraduate degrees — but frankly, what would a plumber have to say to an art historian? Or, for that matter, what would an art historian have to say to a plumber?

And when there is a perceived socioeconomic gulf, the ability to communicate becomes even more critical; the lack of common experience means that more often than not they'll be scratching around for conversational topics. According to the standard stereotype, men don't really want to talk about things, and maybe there's some truth to that, but the man who can't talk, I suspect, is no real improvement over the man who won't talk.

Women, I have always believed, have a Mate Template of sorts, and whether a man has any chance with her depends on how closely he conforms to the standards she has proposed. Some points are more negotiable than others, and perhaps some won't budge in the slightest, but ultimately, what determines the course of the relationship is how much she's willing to compromise on that template. (Men's selectivity is somewhat less linear, I think.) I don't want to get all Mick Jaggery here, but he was right: you can't always get what you want. Still, some do seem to get what they need.

Meryl Yourish's take on my "A few good men" piece:

This does work both ways; of course, it could simply be that I hate having to explain myself. And while I'm no Einstein (not even Bob Einstein), I'm not quite as dumb as I seem.

There exists as a legal construct in some parts of the country something called "covenant marriage", designed by churchly types to be harder to get out of than the standard variety. (In Oklahoma, this is not a particularly difficult task, as the laws here are flexible, even bendy; I have yet to see anyone claiming, say, "watching too damn much football" as grounds for divorce, but it seems to fall within the guidelines.)

Yesterday a clergyman, having read the piece I wrote on it — or maybe not having read it, given its slightly-jaundiced tone — wrote me and thanked me for this bit of outreach, and suggested a link back to his own ministry, for the greater glory of the Lord and all that. There are times when someone else's earnestness outweighs my snarkiness, and this was one of them, so I duly tacked on a new paragraph.

Besides, given my tendency to look for connections where none likely exist, this weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the one time I took this particular step, a step for which I was poorly prepared and which led to some serious backpedaling not too many years later, and while I'm not arguing that what goes around comes around, certainly what goes around leaves little reminders of where it's been.

On general principle, I refuse to watch things like Joe Millionaire.

What principle, you ask? I did time in pre-AOL chat rooms in the Eighties, and even then, the dating/mating ritual was seventy to eighty percent artifice, and most of the balance actual fraud. And back then, only the best and the brightest (well, and me) would be willing to spend a week's pay every month to observe this phenomenon.

So these days, I have to rely on other people's takedowns of these tawdry telespectacles, and fortunately, The American Prospect's Noy Thrupkaew is on hand to point out how Joe Millionaire is like lobbing a rock into a tree full of howler monkeys. Thrupkaew's most illuminating observation:

Gad, I hope Greg Hlatky doesn't see this.

(Via Hit & Run)

Update, 9:45 am: Monty Ashley at TeeVee tosses in this perspective:

Does this mean I'm only half as undeserving?

Donna filed this under "Been there, done that":

Oh? How many?

Never mind. Don't answer that. Our numbers are legion and our dance cards are empty, and some of us should be left on our side in the dark until we mature.

Pretty much the entire dating cycle is beyond my comprehension, so I am always interested in other people's methods, especially when they're less unsuccessful than mine.

On the other hand, this technique of Dawn Olsen's seems awfully familiar somehow:

On the basis of the available evidence, I surmise that she is more efficient than I.

And an example of the irony committed: I come up as #4 in Google for "women will desire you".

Sounds like #2 to me.

(Apologies to any Spider Robinson fans.)

Thus spake Bitter Hag:

I can assure her, and you, that she's not.

And if there's some vast quantity of pent-up resentment, well, so much the better. The Hag wants to hear your story. And there will be a prize for the most bitter, or least repentant, or whatever criteria she chooses.

You've got until midnight (Pacific time; you slackers on the East Coast can slide until 3 am) on the 12th, so get with it.

Okay, maybe I'm somewhere between giddy and delirious, but I dearly love stuff like this:

Just one minor obstacle. After striving for all his life to get out of a 1.5-horse town like Seguin, Texas, he'd finally made it to New York City. She, however, lived in one of those 1.5-horse towns: Seguin, Texas.

You should probably read about it now, before it turns into a movie with Reese Witherspoon.

I am speaking, of course, of what Tammy Wynette referred to as D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

No, I'm not contemplating one; after having gone through the process in 1987, I have no marriage to undo. But I've always found the concept a bit disquieting, an uncomfortable reminder that the best of intentions will not always guarantee the best possible results. And seeking some connection between theory and real life, I looked at my own parents, who were wed on this date in 1953. My mother died in 1977; had she lived, they would be celebrating their 50th anniversary.

Or would they? Is it possible that somewhere along the line, after five children and however many harsh words, they might have decided that enough was enough?

If the topic was ever discussed, it certainly wasn't discussed in front of me. And I tend to doubt that anything was in the works in 1976 when she took ill, what with a nine-year-old still in the household. (Feel free to point out that in 1987, my younger child was six, and there had been a separation prior to that.) But for the life of me, I can't think of anything holding them together except the five of us: I may be wrong — it wouldn't be the first time by any means — but it always seemed to me that within two hours of the last child moving out, they'd put the house up for sale and head in opposite directions.

Second marriages, they say, are often better. After the standard Decent Interval following Mom's funeral, Dad married a co-worker, and theirs (she was also previously wed) might be; while there were certainly some rocky periods along the way, there's less of a sensation that there are burning issues being suppressed, and by now it's lasted two decades and more. My ex-wife's probably wasn't; while the chap in question was a bit more exciting to be with (and how difficult is that?), he had far too much fondness for the Peruvian marching powder to suit her.

Still, one doesn't get to a second marriage without going through a first. And with the hated Valentine's Day looming, I wonder about this mysterious force that works to bring together people who seemingly shouldn't even be speaking to one another, let alone making a vow to remain together for always.

But that, I suppose, is an entirely-different word.

Jackie DeShannon says it so much better than I:

Cue the guitars playing lovely tunes....

Apparently I was wrong: it is possible to defend Valentine's Day. (No permalinks: scroll to 2/14/2003 12:15:41 AM.)

And there's one point I've made before, though in a decidedly less upbeat manner. Quoth Jonathan:

Contrast and compare to this bit from Vent #136, four years ago:

(No, I didn't enter Bitter Hag's contest. Why do you ask?)

At first, Donna reports, she was disappointed, but finally it dawned on her:

Maybe that should be the sequel. (I can see the ads now: "Got a couple of hours? Lose a dozen guys!")

Well, not to me, anyway, but I still believe in all that hearts-and-flowers stuff.

And here's another reason why.

At JoniElectric, the statement that many of us would like to make but comparatively few of us have dared:

Geez, if only they'd had these things at the start of the Eisenhower administration.

Actually, during the last two World Tours, I did manage to do the in-person meet/greet thing in a few instances, and I was startlingly successful (translation: there were moments when I didn't look like a complete idiot). I might do it again for WT '03 if circumstances permit. But absent a truly cataclysmic lifestyle change (translation: none of your business), I'd just as soon be left alone the other 49 weeks of the year.

(Muchas gracias: Venomous Kate, by way of — no, I've already used that joke.)

Please tell me this isn't catching on.

Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. I don't know what percentage of literature follows this basic pattern, but it's got to be considerable; writer-director Preston Sturges, in the Forties film The Palm Beach Story, sums up all this arcane man/woman stuff as "Topic A", and he wasn't exaggerating a bit.

If you tell the tale from her point of view, you inevitably end up with something called the Romance Novel, a genre of fiction scorned by readers of lad mags and embraced by women (and a few men) for whom this simplest of stories neatly splits the difference between fantasy and fact. Susanna Cornett, a respected fantasy figure in her own right, has done, shall we say, lots of research in this area:

Said rancher is an archetype: if you seek to win her heart, a resemblance to him is a definite plus. And truth be told, I'm not exactly immune to this sort of thing myself.

I found this at a friend's LiveJournal; LJ eschews such things as permalinks, so if you want to read the whole thing, you need to scroll to 27 April, 7:26 pm. Before you ask: no, it's not about me.

There's a noble (as distinguished from Nobel) prize for the person who does make this discovery.

I just hate it when it imitates mine.

Something I posted at the end of January:

Pretty much the entire dating cycle is beyond my comprehension, so I am always interested in other people's methods, especially when they're less unsuccessful than mine.

On the other hand, this technique of Dawn Olsen's seems awfully familiar somehow:

Now comes this from Donna:

When even the Major Babes feel like they're getting nowhere, those of us on the fringes of date-ability must surely be doomed.

The erstwhile Mrs Willis isn't entirely devoid of appeal, I suppose, but I tend to fall on the "not" side of this question, inasmuch as I have a near-allergic reaction to some plastics.

The former manager of her Idaho ranch wasn't interested, either, and he claims she fired him for his lack of interest.

Donna? Dawn? Anyone? Does this seem plausible to you?

(Muchas gracias: Phillip Coons, who so far has kept discreetly silent.)

I thought I was picky, but get a whiff of this:

These days, someone who doesn't have allergies might well be described as unnaturally healthy.

(West L.A. or Manhattan Beach? Marina del Rey is out?)

Six foot three? In flats?

Then again, that would almost certainly guarantee long legs.

I'd say this guy has narrowed the field more than he can possibly imagine — and I've quoted less than half his laundry list. (Besides, if I brought this up, all of you would bust out laughing.)

After the dispiriting experience described in "No experience required", I was ready for some good news, and needless to say, I didn't get it.

There exists something called the Soulmate Calculator, which will "calculate the number of American singles you must meet to find your soulmate." This being a Microsoft Active Server Page, I figured it probably would fail on dividing by transfinites, but I went ahead and plugged in some data anyway. Since I have a marked tendency to fall for women who are geographically unacceptable, I chose to limit the pickings to this general area; otherwise, I tried to be as unpicky as I could without making a mockery of it all, specifying a height range of four foot nine to six foot one (this would eliminate the lovely and talented Jane Galt, but she doesn't live around here anyway), ages 33 to 55, no preference on ethnicity or relationship status, and indicating a preference for some form of Christianity, on the dubious basis that leaving it blank would not expand the local field substantially.

There are fourteen characteristics which may be specified in percentile terms; on only three (emotional intelligence, compassion and humor) did I request higher than the median.

And after the server digested all this, it tossed out the following statistics:

• My probability coefficient is 0.0080751 and a bunch more digits; I will need to meet 1,238 women to find The One.
  
• I might have to move.

Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, I'm quite accustomed to desperation, or I might be tempted by something like this.

I reprint this NCBuy item (via Fark) without comment:

Was I sleeping all those years? I don't remember anything quite like Philly's Hottest Teachers.

Obligatory Up the Down Staircase reference: I am sure that were I to write a love letter to an English teacher (see text for contestant #21), it would be returned graded.

(Via Vincent Ferrari's Insignificant Thoughts: he doesn't remember teachers like this either.)

It has now begun to sink in at the office and among family members that yes, I'm hitting the road for three weeks, and yes, I have a number of prescribed stops along the way.

And someone inevitably asks, "Got a hot date, huh?"

Long and arduous practice has made it possible to stretch "Oh, puh-LEEZ" into six, even eight seconds, but the question persists regardless of the scorn quotient exhibited.

I'm toying with a Mellencampy "No, and what if I did?" as an alternate response, mainly because I hate the prospect of having to explain "Basically, I fear that underneath it all I'm just a fribbler at heart."

One never, ever admits to fear.

No, the next line isn't "He's dead, Jim," but thank you for playing.

What's worrisome here is the potential death of a cliché.

It has long been said that what a woman really wants from a man, even more than sixpack abs and a handful of platinum cards and [this item deleted in a desperate attempt to appear tasteful], is a sense of humor.

Now Frank J. of IMAO is to humor what Jim Traficant is to bad hairpieces. And yet here's Frank, trying to get a date.

What's wrong with this picture? And if, heaven forbid, Frank should fail, what chance have the rest of us?

I'm going to bed. This is too much to take.

Virginity has never done a thing for me, so to speak; while a case can be made that too many people are having sex too early, you'll never convince me that I derived any benefit from waiting until I was [actual age suppressed due to acute embarrassment].

Still, I'm not quite ready to embrace Mark Morford's call for lubricity:

I hasten to point out that this is not why I got divorced. (And even in Oklahoma, it's possible to obtain Nina Hartley videos.)

But do we really need national sexual role models? Do we need any kind of national sexual policy at all? Should there be a Cabinet-level Department of Screwing? (And will the IRS move out of Treasury when there is?) The less the Feds have to say about the subject, the better I like it, even if Morford is correct about our level of dissemblage:

I admit to being perplexed, and barring divine intervention, I've probably had all the sex I'm ever going to have, but I suspect that Morford's concept of sex in the, um, hinterlands is somewhat skewed; okay, people in Des Moines probably don't have the sort of access to glory holes that's available in San Francisco, but I don't think that this necessarily means that Iowa is some sort of hotbed (or coldbed) of repression.

As to those "bitter ass-clenched proto-Christian" conservative types, well, I'd like to see the research that found a correlation between political stance and sphincter diameter.

Rachael at Mookie Riffic has issued the Idiot's Guide to Teenage Dating. Not having dated any teenagers since I was, um, fifteen, and inasmuch as my children are well into their twenties and more or less permanently attached, I don't quite know why I noticed this, but what the heck. Here's the very first rule:

Apart from the minor pronoun issue, this seems to be eminently sensible. There are nine more, seven if you count 8 through 10 as a single item, which you probably could.

Touchingly lyrical, yet totally vulgar, this High Truth straight from Donnaville:

(If I had the slightest bit of sense, I'd kill comments on this item. Fat chance.)

Tiger would like you to know that it's possible to kick a marriage to death with a single pair of size-six Manolo Blahniks:

I'm not so sure that women are less choosy in this day and age; if they truly were less selective, surely they'd be lined up on my porch more than none deep.

More to the point, we all have romantic delusions, and one of the worst of them is expecting the other person to meet every conceivable emotional need we may have. We marry, and we think all of our troubles are over, all of our fears assuaged. In practice, this lasts about thirty-six hours at most.

Similarly, the woman who believes she can change a man will likely merely exchange him for another.

I've already figured that there isn't anyone for me, but this isn't because women have fluctuating levels of pickiness or because I'm some sort of "sex-crazed dog"; it's because marriage ultimately is a transaction, and I have very little of value to bring to the proceedings.

And if you approach the altar with more than the usual degree of trepidation, perhaps you might be better served by the Lewis Grizzard system: "I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house."

Jay Solo has been there:

A path I should follow, except that I've discovered that trying to become uninterested in someone stresses me out severely — which means that I tend to hang on until, you should pardon the phrase, a change of heart.

But damn, she's cute.

The top of the navigation bar at Chaotic Not Random contains the following item: Involuntary Celibacy Watch.

As of this writing, it's at 242 days. (And it got a chuckle from Ravenwood, for reasons I don't even want to think about.)

I have no plans to post a similar counter here, mainly because — well, just because, okay?

The late-night guy at the oldies station was spinning out a spiel, and suddenly he came up with something like this:

It was after midnight and I was somewhere on the cusp of drowsiness, but this bugged me for some reason. Admittedly, their playlist doesn't include any of the pimp material that rules elsewhere on the dial — and even that crap is somewhat sanitized before being allowed on the air — but "safe"? Has anyone listened to "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" lately? "So tell me now, and I won't ask again"? This is seriously adult stuff, even if it was being pitched to teenagers forty-two years ago.

But it's a slogan, and one does not get a good night's sleep worrying about radio station slogans, so I shrugged it off (and if you've never seen a horizontal shrug, you haven't missed much) and let it go.

Until this afternoon, when I'm snarled in traffic north of the ever-scary Northwest Distressway, and Diana Ross comes crooning out of the speakers:

And of course, I've started singing along, and I'm weeping profusely before she ever gets to "precious words". God knows what the people in the next lane thought.

"Safe for your kids"? This stuff isn't even safe for me.

Lesley goes all Positively 4th Street on those males (we won't dignify them by calling them "men") who have given her the treatment recently attributed to Mr. Schwarzenegger:

Bottom line: She'd rather see you paralyzed.

Your health-insurance plan — even one as blinkered and philistine as CFI Care (not its real initials), which pays a smidgen of our medical bills at 42nd and Treadmill — will probably cover some measurable fraction of your expenses when you're suffering from a broken arm. It is less likely that they will cut a check when you're suffering from a broken heart. (If they actually did such things, I probably wouldn't have needed to spend an hour and a half importuning a loan officer this week; I could have bought a house out of pocket change.)

"But," says researcher Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, "the human brain sounds the same alarm system for emotional and physical distress." There may be no superficial resemblance between road rash and rejection, but the same two brain regions respond to both, and in very similar ways.

I'm not sure what the ultimate meaning of this may be, but I have noticed that I always have about a two-year supply of painkillers on the shelf. And that doesn't even include Jack Daniel's.

Self-absorption, probably a key component of the successful blogger mindset, has its uses, but it tends to be more of a drawback when the screen is off and people are approached one at a time.

Then again, I was that way before I got a Web site, and I suppose I'm in reasonably good company.

(First such statement is here.)

Alan Farnham, writer for Forbes.com:

Last I heard, the death rate in this species was around 100 percent, and the only man reported to have beaten those odds — well, the extent of His sexual activity is not documented in detail.

Still, if there's something to this, my days (and my otherwise-empty nights) are obviously numbered.

And a side note to younger readers: That study was conducted among middle-aged men. Extrapolate at your own risk.

(Muchas gracias: The presumably-frustrated Combustible Boy.)

Lenore Skenazy isn't advising "Lower your expectations," exactly. Or is she?

I would dearly love to endorse this viewpoint, except that (1) improving my appearance to "subpar" level is something that CFI Care deems "not medically necessary" and (2) I've never even seen the hill these guys putatively descend.

(Muchas gracias: Kimberly Swygert, who probably looks better than this.)

Someone wandered onto the site today with the perhaps-anguished search string why are women so devious; apparently he (I'm guessing) was serious enough to go through four pages of previous results before landing at Vent #300.

This is what I actually said on the subject:

Which, from the vantage point of a year and a half later, seems to make even less sense than when I wrote it.

What say you?

Helen the Everyday Stranger has some, um, pointers for measuring one's love-tackle.

And that goes for the 51 percent of you who are concave rather than convex, too.

(Before you ask: I think the technical term is "ill-hung", not to be confused with Kim Ill-Hung, last seen as the Dear Leader from Pyongyang.)

(Aside to Geoffrey: Dayum. Um, you're excused. Yeah. That's the word.)

This was emailed to me, and I reprint it without comment:

Once upon a time, I came up with this:

Donna was quick to back up Mrs. Parker. Personally, I'm not at all persuaded that Donna is as spinsterish as she claims; for one thing, she's too darn funny, and for another, she's too darn pretty.

Now comes the lovely April Joy, and she, too, buys into Parker's Law:

I don't believe her, either.

Acidman, damn his hide, has come up with yet another post that provokes too much thought. "What makes the RIGHT ONE?" he asks, and takes a couple of stabs at it:

I'd avoid the gears comparison: my synchros are shot.

The problem I have with the answer is basically the problem I have with the question: I don't actually believe that there actually exists any sort of one-to-one correspondence, or even a close approximation. "Love is all around," said the Troggs, but that doesn't mean it's evenly distributed; some people, for whatever reason, find that their cups runneth over, while others sigh and shake the coal dust out of their stockings.

This isn't, however, anything like an argument for blowing off the RIGHT ONE in favor of something RIGHT NOW; while I can almost — barely — work up some sort of rationalization for a quickie affair, I would hate to think that it's the best I could do. Especially if it is.

What I'd really like to do is to proclaim that Biology Is Destiny, that I've done my part already by passing on the family DNA to the next generation, and that I don't have to think about such things anymore. If I could say that with a straight face — but never mind, it's not going to happen. What is going to happen is that I will continue to encounter, on a not-especially-regular basis, women I can only dream about, and then not dream about them. At this level, the brain and the heart work together on exactly one thing: self-preservation.

Well, when Pejman falls in love, anyway:

I'm going to have to file this under "Wish I'd said that", I think.

Not that there's anyone meeting that description for me, of course.

Dawn Eden is not impressed by this campaign by the American Foundation for AIDS Research:

(I break in here to note that I don't know anyone meeting the above description, and if I did — well, never mind, you know the joke.)

Myself, I don't claim that my ongoing extended period of celibacy is any kind of moral statement. On the other hand, it is quite clearly effective in warding off HIV, not to mention substantially less expensive than other techniques. (Condoms cost money; dates cost even more money.) And while I have had my own doubts about abstinence-only programs, it's clear that at least some of them work, and I'm not inclined to sneer at the results they get: the age groups at which these programs are directed really should not be sexually active, for reasons which go beyond the simple Thou Shalt Not.

Then there's this:

Twenty years ago, I probably would have scoffed. Not today.

The wisdom of Jay Solo:

Few of us are so fortunate, but a Good Thing it most assuredly is.

My congratulations to Jay and Deb. May they find every happiness along their way to eternity.

I have almost always been puzzled as to the reason why perfectly desirable women would willingly embrace the term "spinster," a word which to me has always seemed fraught with despair and desolation and all those other D words I used to toss around so frequently.

After reading this, perhaps I understand a little better. I'm reasonably certain that not everyone using the term subscribes to every single item in the list, but I think they might buy this line:

Heh. She said "offshoot."

Now maybe I should look for a comparable term for myself — besides "dork," of course.

I note in passing that I got married twenty-six years ago today, in the middle of a blizzard.

Today: sunshine and 58, and I suspect both of us are happier four hundred miles apart.

Some poor soul waded through five dozen links proffered by Yahoo! Search for the keywords desperate unattractive dating before landing here.

Whether the individual in question is desperately seeking a date despite being unattractive, or desperately seeks to date someone unattractive, or finds dating out of desperation unattractive, is impossible to determine from the search string.

Joni Mitchell has the jump on me here:

I've looked at love from both sides now
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

With this thought in mind, and this being the feast of Valentine, patron saint of jewelers and greeting-card manufacturers, I have chosen to celebrate with a 25-track mix tape that captures both the frolic and the frustration of the day. I have no reason to think that the musical selections therein will do anything for your love life, but they will demonstrate both acceptable taste and relative diversity, neither of which is likely to hurt. The period covered is 1959 to 1972, which inevitably brackets the time when I first became aware of the existence of girls and the time when I realized that they weren't going to be aware of mine.

Or not. After all, it's love's illusions I recall, and just as perplexingly, it's more likely to be Judy Collins' version of "Both Sides Now" I recall than Joni's.

As of this morning, if you Google for "why women pick losers" and press the I'm Feeling Lucky button, you will be taken to this very blog — specifically, this page.

Somehow, "lucky" is not my most immediate reaction.

At least I don't show up for "miserable failure".

A common complaint among guys of a certain age has to do with the general dearth of Major Babes: they may know lots of women, but no one that will really knock your socks off, you know?

Given the emphasis we tend to place on the visual, I've generally assumed that since I know a fairly substantial number of women who are eminently capable of destroying my entire sock wardrobe with a couple of glances, my tastes, if that's the word, are fairly small-c catholic.

And indeed, after following this link thoughtfully provided by Michele, which brings up a fairly lengthy test (presented by Match.com) that purports to determine the ingredients that contribute to that sock destruction, I felt I had confirmed my thinking on the matter, inasmuch as in the test, just as in real life, the women I found most attractive from a purely-physical standpoint didn't look that much alike. Obviously, I felt, I had fairly elastic standards of beauty.

And then came the bombshell in the middle of the results, which I quote:

Damn.

In addition to being unappealing, overbearing, mercurial and generally annoying, now I'm also excessively (like 98th percentile) selective?

And come to think of it, I haven't bought any socks in over a year.

Dawn Eden, on the wisdom of compiling lists of desired (and undesired) characteristics possessed by applicants for the position of Significant Other:

Needless to say, she supplemented this wisdom with exactly that sort of compilation, which is of course the very same thing I would have done had I made such an announcement.

And after reviewing her desiderata, I decided that I probably should not make such an announcement. While I know several individuals who match my own list decently well (say, seven or eight out of ten desired characteristics and no real bêtes noires), I also know that when contemplating matters of the heart, my higher brain functions tend to dissolve into synaptic chaos.

Besides, the criteria I apply tend to be either absurdly vague or embarrassingly superficial, to the extent that I have no faith in the ability of those criteria to produce any reasonable results. But what's the alternative? Take the first person who doesn't immediately reject me out of hand? Been there, done that, and the rejection came on its own schedule.

I have never quite believed that there was exactly one person for everyone: the symmetry is beautiful, but the evidence is lacking. I try to encourage my friends who are still looking, lest they become downhearted and frustrated. (Been there, done that too.) But I think there's a definite limit, and not an especially high one at that, to how much you can affect the outcome; the factors that set a relationship in motion, more often than not, are random. (I'm not ruling out divine intervention, but assuming it exists, it is sufficiently unpredictable to meet my definition of randomness.)

And I'm quite a long way past 35½. Had I any sense, I'd accept that there was no one for me, and go on.

No prospect is more daunting, I maintain, than meeting up, thirty-five years later, with your first love — and this applies no less when the object of your devotion is purely fictional.

Just over a year ago, I said this:

Indeed, the film did not play here in the hinterlands at all, and when the DVD was released in December, I ignored it for two months, contrived somehow to have it back-ordered for two months, and when it finally arrived this week, I stared at it for two days, almost afraid to pop the seal, lest all the connections I've made to the book all these years might be disrupted somehow by the visuals. Finally, late last night, I worked up the nerve and started the disc, promising myself I would not spend four minutes out of every five looking for insignificant yet pickable nits.

I'm not writing a detailed review here — for that, I recommend this piece by Seattle's Three Imaginary Girls — but I must state for the record that whatever fears I may have had were unfounded. The castle itself is just what I envisioned; the countryside is classically beautiful (Wales and the Isle of Man stand in for Suffolk); and the cast is well-nigh perfect. It's a talky sort of film, but then these are people who have a lot to say. And Romola Garai brings Cassandra to life in a way I wouldn't have thought possible: not a girl, not yet a woman, struggling with both the cerebral and the hormonal but sworn to do the Right Thing come what may, this is the character for whom I fell so hard so many years ago.

Mere nostalgia? Hardly. In the grand scheme of things, one's first love ranks second among the most important romantic relationships of a lifetime — one's last love, of course, is the first — and Cassandra Mortmain, confused yet resolute, completely fictional yet utterly real to me, contributed as much as anyone to the structure of my life. And in one way, the film version improves on that structure; the book closes with nine words, a triplet spoken thrice, while the film ends with eight: "I love, I have loved, I will love." If the ending is not technically happy, it's not technically the ending, either.

Dodie Smith's book was published in 1948, the same year that C. B. Warr directed the construction of the house which today is mine, a reminder, to me anyway, that what we are doesn't start with when we're born. And life itself is much like I Capture the Castle: even when it's carefully plotted, it's still vaguely out of control. Heady lessons at fifteen; still viable at fifty.

About twice a year, someone has the temerity to ask me why I would think any of the pop songs I grew up with could possibly have any relevance today. And my answer is always the same: I turn to the shelf, pull down Scepter 1211, then start the turntable. An opening perilously close to lounge music, and then Shirley Owens, somewhere between wistful and wanton:

This was the first composition for Brill Building publisher Don Kirshner by Carole King (music) and Gerry Goffin (lyrics), and as the story goes, it was first offered to Johnny Mathis; Columbia Records boss Mitch Miller is said to have blackballed the song, claiming it was immoral.

Dawn Eden might think ol' Mitch may have been on to something:

If it's encouraged for women, it's almost mandatory for men; a woman who is not sexually active is pitied, while a man who is not sexually active is mocked and ridiculed. (Which may be one reason why very few men — Frankie Valli is one who did — ever recorded this song.) "Tell me now, and I won't ask again" turns out to be a variation on a theme by Scarlett O'Hara: "I'll think about that tomorrow."

And, says Dawn, "if you have to ask someone if they'll still love you tomorrow, they don't love you tonight."

I still love this song, and always will. But if you thought it was just an innocuous pop tune from forty years ago, you might want to think again. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" contains the seeds of the sexual revolution — and, perhaps inevitably, the counterrevolution as well.

I've quoted the Shangri-Las' "Past, Present and Future" a few times in my lifetime, mainly because its words (you can't call them "lyrics," really, since they're not sung) are so odd, yet so apt, that they fit very much into a lifetime as odd as my own.

This is the heart of the matter:

My first (some may say last) Moment When was thirty-five years ago today.

And quite apart from the heinousness of their crime, I will never forgive Messrs. McVeigh and Nichols, and any of their friends and acquaintances who may have been involved, for displacing a good memory by a horrifying one.

Somebody planted this sign — complete with a color scheme redolent of Valentine's Day — in the grass adjoining a prodigiously busy intersection:

I'm pretty sure I'm single; I have a copy of my divorce decree. How much additional info do I need?

(And it damned sure wasn't free, either.)

Now I happen to think that Queen Latifah is a Major Babe, and there's no reason why she shouldn't be on the cover of Glamour.

And I suspect that Friedrich von Blowhard might agree with me on that point, but apart from the photo, much of what's on that cover and what's beneath it, he says, is worthy of the 2004 Nobel "General Rottenness To Humanity" Prize.

Of course, this cover conforms to the recent rule which says you must have something with an enormous number attached to it: in this case, "We tried on 1,300 swimsuits!" But digits are the least of your worries, young lady. As Blowhard notes:

The conventional wisdom has it that everyone's sex life is inadequate, and something should be done about it. (Well, mine is, but I'm stuck with it. So there.) And you have to figure that magazines like Glamour are bought largely by women just barely out of their teens, which strikes me as a hell of an age to decide that your sex life is inadequate; what frame of reference do you have at twenty-two? (And if you're not out of your teens, you can get much the same harangues from, of all places, Planned Parenthood, which I suspect is a plot to insure continuing demand for their more, um, visible services.)

What you see in men's magazines, we are told on a regular basis, is transparently, flagrantly unreal, fantasies polished to a high gloss and airbrushed to perfection, utterly disconnected from any semblance of Real Life™. It may even be so. But it's hard to imagine that the dreck that clutters up the lad mags is any worse than the toxins that routinely course through material aimed at women; reading that stuff, says Friedrich von Blowhard, constitutes "masochistic abuse."

Why there will never be a romance novel written about me.

She's fifty today, and has three (almost certainly) lovely girls.

But to me, she will always be fourteen.

Before you ask: Yes, I'm over her. But that first rush of emotion, the first ray of hope in a life mostly distinguished by a general lack of it — that, I miss.

"Even if you're not single," says Men's Journal (June '04), "it's nice to be in a place with some eye candy." Accordingly, they recommend the following communities:

1. Athens, GA
   
2. Santa Barbara, CA
   
3. Columbia, MO
   
4. Gainesville, FL
   
5. Charlottesville, VA
   

To explain:

That's what they said: "best female populations."

I have always assumed that my own criteria were dubious, arbitrary, and generally shameful, and no doubt they are, but I cringe at the thought that there are guys far more shallow than I.

Especially if they have dates.

Points on the curve, as determined at Altered Perceptions:

Now to find a term that fits a random Skittle, a clapped-out Chevy Vega, and the view from the inside of the car wash.

I had totally forgotten that May was National Masturbation Month.

Not that I have time to participate. I'm horribly overworked at the shop, as is the case every May, and it takes every last bit of energy I have to squeeze out the occasional blog entry or two.

In fact, apart from Palm Sunday...er, never mind.

Why search engines, even the most sophisticated, will never, ever replace good old fashioned human research:

This site (specifically this page) is listed at RomanceStartsHere.com as a Resource for "Dating Intellectual Single Men".

Can one cry and guffaw at the same time?

Note: I reprint this only as a public service; I am not able to corroborate any individual entry personally.

Courtesy of gratiot.pitas.com (18 May '04, 10:14 pm).

Francis W. Porretto fells a romantic fantasy with a single bullet:

Which is perfectly true, but then he threw this in:

Mental note: Leave after three minutes. Saves a lot of trouble in the long run.

Joanne Jacobs points to this story in The New York Times Magazine which details the semi-detached suburban sexual encounters of contemporary teenagers, and there's something vaguely, maybe not so vaguely, impersonal about the entire process:

I rather think Dawn Eden might disagree with that last bit.

And Dr. Drew Pinsky, he who hosts the "Loveline" show, sees a downside, particularly for girls:

And what the boys wanted, when I was growing up, could be graphed on a baseball diamond. No more:

I don't know. (Third base.)

No one seemed particularly anxious to accept my nonexplanation of why I wasn't dating, as affixed to this piece, and I can't say I'm especially surprised.

The fact is, whatever ideal I have kicking around in the back of my heart is ill-defined at best; I have a few desiderata that can be translated into words, but after so many years of vague, inchoate yearning, I don't think it's possible for me to be too specific about the object of my halfquarter-hearted quest.

On the other hand, some people know exactly what they're looking for.

A commenter to this post asked me, more or less point-blank, why I wasn't dating Dawn Eden.

The obvious answer: she's 1498 miles away, give or take a wrong turn. "Hey, you wanna take in So-and-So at the Such-and-Such?" simply isn't feasible.

But there are deeper fissures between us than mere distance, and this one may be the deepest of all:

Fain would I relieve fair maiden of her burden, but for the following:

(1) I actually have a copy of The World's Worst Records Vol. 2.

(2) What's more, the same horrid little tune shows up on The Force, one of the infamous Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders, which I also have.

A genuinely crummy and marginally offensive record, and I have two copies of it. Any chance of winning her heart has obviously gone straight into the toilet.

It's called Intrinsa, a name I expect to see inflicted upon a handful of poor, defenseless baby girls a couple of years from now, and it's a testosterone patch for women that, says manufacturer Procter & Gamble, improves sexual desire and satisfaction in women whose ovaries had been removed.

Geez. I don't have ovaries, for obvious reasons, and my libido is basically shot to hell. Hmmm.... True Blue Deb says that she's not familiar with the technical term "female sexual dysfunction," but:

I suppose I could quit taking Paxil, but that would require me to start taking Paxil.

Inasmuch as I don't have a partner to disappoint, though, this is probably less of an issue than it could be.

The real source of male slovenliness, says Andrew Sullivan, is women:

Unfortunately, it's not a diamond: it's a kidney stone.

Of course, I wouldn't have this problem if I didn't persist in falling for women who are so far out of my league it seems impossible we could be playing the same game.

(Update, 6:35 am, 18 June: Dawn Eden rakes Sullivan over the coals.)

You gotta love this. From Dawn Eden:

The numbers being what they are — J. Random Guy being a 96-percent flop — it becomes a better-than-even bet that one of these fellows might do the trick once you get seventeen in the room. (0.96 to the 17th power comes in at 0.4996; in other words, the chance of a match is 1 minus 0.4996, which is 0.5004.) It never becomes quite a certainty, as Zeno might have pointed out, and there are always imponderables to figure into the mix, but by and large, it shouldn't take a pool of candidates large enough to fill the Albert Hall to come up with Just The One.

Still, it's probably a good idea not to get too enthusiastic about the odds. As Dawn says:

Is there a chapel in the pines, waiting for us around the bend? I don't know. But one thing I do know: respect the power of the storm. When the atmosphere is right, things can change literally within seconds.

Anyone who has spent more than thirty minutes at a party, or fifteen minutes in an online chatroom, knows that some guys are real jerks yet somehow manage to land the babes.

If you're The Washington Post, however, it takes you days in a secondary-education compound and 2600-odd words to come to the same perfectly-obvious conclusion.

(Via the delightfully-terse Michelle Malkin)

I found this in Caren Lissner's novel Starting from Square Two (Don Mills, Ontario: Red Dress Ink, 2004).

Well, I definitely have no business singing in piano bars.

Still, I feel compelled to raise the possibility of a new deal, so to speak.

(Update, 10:40 pm: Fixed links.)

You know, those boring old monogamists may have been onto something.

Really. "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study" [it will cost you $5 to read the whole thing] is a National Bureau of Economic Research study by David G. Blanchflower (Dartmouth) and Andrew J. Oswald (Warwick). The idea: to link the common happiness survey to information on sexual behavior.

The following executive summary, sort of, appears in The Atlantic (September, "Primary Sources"):