The standards are low, but I can meet them. Hooray!

And I didn't have to cheat by going to a therapist.

heh.

Once again, social sorting comes into play! Men who are at least sorta-kinda egalitarian tend to hang out with men who are at least sorta-kinda egalitarian and sorta-kinda egalitarianness gets reinforced; ditto awful baby men hanging out together. And therefore once you have, eg, a godawful misogynist social circle it gets difficult to break out.

On masculinity in a liberal city: I went to dinner with a friend last night. As some here may recall, I am a transmasculine person although not on hormones for a variety of reasons - so my gender confuses people but is consistently read as "non-feminine". My friend is gender non-conforming but not really on the masc side per se.

So anyway, every time there was an ordering question or a question about how to handle the check, the waiter looked at me and deferred to me despite the total absence of other social cues - no date vibes, friend did all the ordering, etc.

I've definitely noticed that in liberal circles, there are times when, rather than gender norms being interrogated, I get put with the men. On the one hand, cool, people are correctly reading my gender as "not a lady", on the other hand, well, it is kind of weird to assume that I am in charge of the dinner.

I was recently at a grown-up couples kind of party and realized that I had sort of drifted into/been assigned to the "unattached men who came with someone else" group. I mean, I met a couple of nice guys and we talked about work and dogs and I did appreciate that I got into the men group without having to, eg, deal with bathrooms, but again, it is really weird to see the way that gender norms in left-liberal circles have accommodated queer/trans people is simply "you are a man or a woman, you can pick, now the men order dinner and pick up the check and the women mind the children and talk about feelings".

Lots better than the alternatives, I appreciate it, it's enlightening...but it's also weird!

I had sort of drifted into/been assigned to the "unattached men who came with someone else" group.

This might not be your goal, but I found it pretty great. People just feed you and expect nothing from you but basic table manners. And they're often flexible on that.

Since it last came up here, Ace has dropped use of the words "girl/daughter/sister" in favor of kid/sibling, and is now using "nonbinary".

The thing is:
1. they obviously will have my 100% support in whatever they want to do
2. being 9 years old means it doesn't play out like it would for adults, in ways that are sometimes confounding to me but, see 1.

So for example, Ace wanted to see about using the nurse's bathroom instead of the gendered bathrooms. The first day that this was to play out, they dressed in a fairly feminine way - flowered jumpsuit, headband with bow. If this were a teenager or adults, there'd be a lot more articulation and language attached to different modes of presentation, but as a 9 year old, Ace was just kind of bopping along.

Ace then came home and told me that they chickened out and didn't end up going to the nurse's station, but also didn't want to use the girl's room. I'm wondering if Ace feels like the girl's room is off-limits by some external force, once you've declared yourself non-binary, or if it's an internal force and they are originating the idea that they don't feel comfortable doing so. The latter is how we project this playing out, with a 9 year old assigned-female-at-birth who will not be perceived as threatening by other students' parents. But Ace is not quite up to that level of conversation yet, and it could easily be the former. So we muddle along. But see 1!

The striking thing about the article is that it's entirely written in terms of "a rising number of men who are stuck in singledom" - while the number of women similarly stuck, because of whatever despicable psychological problems they have, is not mentioned.

Now, the article doesn't actually give a figure, because it's clickbait written by a joke doctor rather than anything actually rigorous, but the figure is 39% of 25-54 year old men, up from 29% in 1990.
For women, the figure has gone from 29% to 36% over the same period. (As you'd expect - male and female babies are born in roughly equal numbers).

Is that 3% difference interesting? Well, maybe.

What could it represent? Lots of 59 year old out-of-sample men with 54 year old in-sample wives, probably. There's some evidence to suggest that older couples tend to have a slightly wider average age difference (from 2 years for couples in their early 20s, to 5 for couples in their late 40s). And this won't be counterbalanced by a lot of 26-year-old in-sample men and their 24-year-old out-of-sample wives, because there are so many more married couples in their 50s.

Even more so, now, due to economics - the median age of marriage is rising and has been for years, mainly for economic reasons.

Anyway, if 29% of the sample were unpartnered in 1990, and it's 39% now, then presumably 29% of that 39% is due to causes that predate 1990 - so, not internet dating or whatever.

And a lot of the rest of the rise, for men and women, may be due to demographic changes since 1990: Hispanic adults are more likely to be unpartnered than most other groups, and there are a lot more Hispanic adults in the US now than in 1990. (Black adults are vastly more likely to be unpartnered than any other group, but the black population hasn't risen much.)

7.1: Presumably because women who can't find a partner don't tend to shoot up schools.

I am inherently sceptical of arguments along the lines of "young men today are awful" because it doesn't actually seem to reflect the reality of measurable awfulness in terms of things like crime levels. What young men - well, young people - today are is poor, and if you keep that in mind all sorts of things, like age cohort splits on voting patterns, higher median age of first marriage, lower childbirth rates and so on, suddenly make sense.

Yes, poverty is the big issue. That and mass shooting.

You make a good point about symmetry -- for every single man there's a single woman, roughly. The framing of the article may be relying on something that is half-alluded to in the article: that men are generally happier and healthier when in a relationship. What's not in this article but I've seen claimed elsewhere -- not sure with what degree of reliability -- is that women aren't: relationships are overall beneficial to men and neutral at best for women.

The energy of the pull quotes (I didn't read the link) is so "we can fix you, you broken men." I am amused, but also by the rigorous sampling technique ("I do a live TikTok..").

11. Yes, it's really convenient.

I am inherently sceptical of arguments along the lines of "young men today are awful" because it doesn't actually seem to reflect the reality of measurable awfulness in terms of things like crime levels.

To be fair, this article isn't claiming that. This article is claiming that men have always been awful, and women are now less economically dependent on them and also less inclined to put up with it by choice.

Also on the gender-symmetry part, the author could say that they're single for asymmetric reasons - women having higher standards, men for failing to clear the lowest bar, and that this article is describing the latter phenomenon.

6: At this stage I'd guess that Ace is really wanting to find some hard-and-fast markers for their new identity; it's not like people will look at a 9yo and think "nonbinary" before you tell them, and even once you've told them there will be a lag until (in the best case) everyone's using the right pronouns most of the time. So the bathroom is an obvious thing that's under Ace's control and can signal to everyone else that this is a real thing. I hope they find an arrangement that works!

Oh, that's a good insight. Thanks, lourdes.

What's not in this article but I've seen claimed elsewhere -- not sure with what degree of reliability -- is that women aren't: relationships are overall beneficial to men and neutral at best for women.

I'd heard that too but the source he uses seems to disagree. "The gaps in economic outcomes between unpartnered and partnered adults have widened since 1990. Among men, the gaps are widening because unpartnered men are faring worse than they were in 1990. Among women, however, these gaps have gotten wider because partnered women are faring substantially better than in 1990."

But note that, for both men and women, partnered is better than unpartnered, and the benefit of partnership is growing - at least in economic terms. There also seem to be health benefits to marriage for both men and women: https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/effects-marriage-health-synthesis-recent-research-evidence-research-brief

What does seem to be true is that being in a bad, stressful marriage is worse in health terms for both men and women than being single, and the damage is greater for women.

There's been some interesting research more recently on the effect of getting married - and indeed getting divorced- but that relies on self reporting of health rather than any actual measures.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4061612/
First marriages are good for you if you're a man
Divorce is good for you, unless you're a man over 50.
Your husband dying is mildly good for you.
Your wife dying is really bad for you.
Second marriages are good for you if you don't leave it too late. (55 for men; 40 for women.)

But there is a distinction in health terms between getting married and being married. The overall health of the married, divorced and single is pretty much the same. What seems to happen is that the event of getting married, divorced, widowed etc produces a strong but presumably temporary change in your health before and after.

16 and 17: I'm trying to figure this out right now. There's someone at church whose sex at birth was female and had a baby a couple of years ago. They're non binary and the pronoun on the name tag was they/them. But this person also identifies as trans and had chest surgery. And I noticed the name tag had they/their AND he/his. We actually had a conversation about the surgery and why they picked the surgeon, and part of it was that some surgeons won't do the surgery unless you take testosterone. They didn't want to do that, because singing was really important to them, and they didn't want their voice to change, and that was too binary. So, I mostly haven't used pronouns other than the 2nd person pronoun (which in my dialect of English is ungendered) and will stick with "they" unless the name tags switched to "he" exclusively.

I think also it's a big leap to assume that this is a phenomenon of people deciding not to get married rather than deciding to get married later. Average age of first marriage rises with education level. Average education levels are higher now than they were in 1990. Therefore, higher age of first marriage, therefore more of that 25-54 cohort not married.
Also, as well as being more educated, they are poor and can't afford it.

The undeniable truth is that for health reasons everyone should be frantically getting married and divorced as often as possible up to the age of 40 (55 for men), and then stop.

I am reminded of the joke on "American Dad":

"Straight women don't ask for much, do they?"

"No they do not. Use coasters and don't whiz in the shower on their birthday."

Our shower drain is too slow for me to want to do that anyway.

Physical, emotional, and financial well-being under {single vs married vs partenered} can all pull either in the same direction or in different ones depending on people's circumstances, which makes aggregating for conclusions pretty difficult. Worth knowing the averages and useful to see the data even with that qualification.

There's a writer, Anne Helen Peterson, who made initial steps at setting up a website where anonymous askers and anonymous answeres (who provide some background info, age, gender, some optional more detailed ones) could be paired up. Interesting idea for an experiment, I didn't register but thought about it.
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/ask-a-divorced-person

Petersen not Peterson

I am unpersuaded by the emphasis on communication as the savior of relationships. Male therapists get divorced at the same rate as other men and you would assume that they would be great at communication.

Way more women go to college than men now and that creates a lot of effects on the dating market.

The trouble with things like "women's standards are getting higher in terms of acceptable level of emotional availability" is that it is completely impossible to prove or disprove. We don't have a good set of historical data of male emotional availability for married and single men, and if we did it would be unusable because Americans would measure it in cubic feet per second and the rest of the world would use the much more rational measure of megahertz per watt per square metre.
What we can do is look at the things that we can measure and that we know affect the decision to get partnered up - like demographics, like educational level, like economics - and ask ourselves "how much of the observed change do these probably explain?"
And if the answer is "most or all of it", well, there you are.

Another thing that might be driving this - mass incarceration. A lot of these people are not single because they are disgusting oafs, or because they have higher standards regarding the non-disgusting-oafishness of their prospective romantic partners. They are single because they are in prison, at far higher numbers than in 1990; because their lives and economic prospects have been severely damaged by imprisonment; or because they can't find a partner in their communities because so many of the men in their communities are in prison.

Way more women go to college than men now and that creates a lot of effects on the dating market.

This too. "Higher standards among women" doesn't just mean "no longer prepared to put up with disgusting oaf" but also "still insists on partner having a higher educational level and higher income than self, even though own level and income is higher than in any previous generation".

Yeah, communication is way over-rated. It might be a necessary part of not being a turd (though I doubt it), but it is not sufficient.

A friend of mine in grad school studied among other thing population demographics in early modern England, and birth, baptism, marriage, and death records are useful to that. As a result, she could see that age of marriage (for men) almost always tracks the economy - if one is expected to be a provider or in a position to set up a household before one gets married, a few years of bad harvest mean the men are older when they get married.

If one's baseline is "finish school and have a house before you start a family", then a weak economy (hi 2007-8) and stupid housing market is going to push up the age of marriage. "Millennials don't want houses" pretty quickly turned into "it turns out they wanted houses but couldn't afford them at the age we bought our house."

29: both ways, too. The man doesn't want to be less educated/less income making than the woman.

But only because it makes your penis smaller.

32: probably not, actually. True, the pattern of "husband makes more than wife" could be evidence that either women want higher earning husbands, or men want lower earning wives, or both; you just can't tell.

But other studies suggest that partner income's far more important to women than men - https://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf.

And this paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4133976/ also contradicts your argument - not only is there no declared preference among men for less-educated, poorer wives, there's a declared preference for better-educated, richer wives. Both sexes want to marry people richer and better educated than themselves; it's just that the preference is far stronger among women than men.

Both women and men report that they are most willing to marry someone who is better educated (and has higher income) than themselves, although men are more willing to marry someone with less education... From a job search theory perspective, these preferences reflect the recent turn toward greater consideration among men of their partners' long-term economic characteristics prior to marriage (Oppenheimer 1988). Earnings are now positively associated with marriage for both men and women and have become increasingly important for women's overall position in the marriage market (Sweeney 2002; Sweeney and Cancian 2004)...women in marriage markets with a favorable sex ratio (that is, in markets with more men than women) were more likely to marry high-status, better-educated men. In contrast, women--especially highly educated women--in tight marriage markets characterized by fewer available men were more likely to postpone marriage rather than "marry down" to someone with less education than themselves.

Wholly endorse 31.

My wife got more educated than me after we got married, which probably isn't fair.

I'm the least educated person in my family, unless you count children.

36: I think that means you won, Moby.

Americans would measure it in cubic feet per second

No, in the West, we measure it by miners inches. Or just inches, for short.

If one may just make shit up out of whole cloth, maybe one could say that a substantial portion of divorces in the 70s was men trading in for younger women, while a substantial portion of divorces now are women ditching men who won't meet minimal standards. To be sure, both types existed in both periods, and maybe it's a matter of cultural narrative rather than actual quantifiable differences.

Definitely measure that by inches.

(In Montana, 40 miners inches is a cfs. I think California might be higher [ie, their inches are smaller?])

This, from the internet:

a miner's inch is 0.020 cfs (1/50th of a cfs) in Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, South and North Dakota, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and southern California.

In northern California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, and Montana, a miners inch equals 0.025 cfs (1/40th of a cfs) , while in Colorado it equals 0.026 cfs (1/38th of a cfs).

Naturally, this makes the miners inch the perfect measurement tool in the US.

It's a healthy relationship if rat orgasms (output) divided by miner's inches (input) exceeds the Gomez Addams Threshold.

Another reason might be the end of segregation. There's still a very strong preference in the US for marrying within your own racial group, but workplaces, universities etc are now integrated. So if you're an American woman with, say, 15 good male friends, all single, that doesn't mean you know 15 eligible men. It used to, because all your friends would be the same colour. But now it means you know 10 eligible men, because the other 5 will be the wrong race foe you to marry.

"How can men reap the benefit of the algorithms? Level up your mental health game. That means getting into some individual therapy to address your skills gap. It means valuing your own internal world and respecting your ideas enough to communicate them effectively. It means seeing intimacy, romance, and emotional connection as worthy of your time and effort."

Horseshit. They can get a haircut, take flattering pictures, hit the gym, and earn more.

In another experiment, OkCupid found that ratings for attractiveness and personality correlate very closely. The site showed profiles to one group of users who saw pictures and text, while another group of users saw the profiles with photos only. Instead of being asked to submit separate ratings for personality and and attractiveness, the users involved in this experiment were asked for just one rating per profile examined.

There was (continues to be?) a massive amount of research done on dating sites. In one paper from the mid 2000s, the researchers generated a model that predicted the likelihood that a man would reply to a woman's message and the likelihood that a woman would reply to a man's message.

The three most import components of male attractiveness:
-facial attractiveness (assessed by a panel of undergrads)
-height
-income

The two most import features of female attractiveness:
-facial attractiveness (assessed by the panel of undergrads)
-BMI

The number of friends that expressed their dating preferences as "he must be taller than me when I am wearing heels ..."

It's worth keeping in mind that two of the three ones for men are pretty easy to lie about over the internet.

I'm not saying anyone's being defensive in this thread, but if I had to write a Psych Today article without doing any actual research....

@29 - one of those OKcupid posts did a cross-tabs on likelihood of response by a woman to a message from a man, broken out by education.

Women without a college education did not discriminate between men with and without a college education. Women with a college education discriminated massively against men without a college education.

Another interesting effect was that everyone claimed that they were willing to date people in other racial groups. But people were much more likely to respond to people from their self-identified racial group (except asian women, who responded to white men at rates only slightly less than asian men).

@47

Data is cool. And the amount of data that these dating sites generate is just staggering.

It is also interesting to observe resilient social narratives about dating, and see where these narratives differ from the preferences revealed by dating site behavior.

What functions could these structures serve?

Also, I certainly think this article is silly. BUT, using data from the mid-2000s doesn't really disprove anything, since the point is that this is a new zeitgeisty thing, and, well, it's been awhile.

39: Good to know I had a good old-fashioned classic divorce.

they sold ok cupid to tinder and tinder made the data guy stop doing posts so that is why all the data is so old

@52

Yeah. They also took down some of the less acceptable posts.

There was a definite early 2000s "information just wants to be free" / "knowledge will make the world a better place" vibe to the whole enterprise.

It's like watching that video from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

People are superficial on dating apps because why not filter people you haven't met before on looks? That is the time to be superficial; you are not hurting anyone's feelings.

Not with that attitude.

My brother met his wife on Tinder even though he's shorter than average. Maybe he's rich, but I don't think so.

But my sisters have both been in relationships with really tall men.

I don't know that it connects to any big cultural shifts, but it does seem like dating apps dis-fulfill men and women in distinctively different ways. Positing (a) that initial matches are mostly looks-based, and (b) that people can be ranked on a scale of conventional attractiveness, what I've read, and which matches my experience, is that the apps keep resulting in something like the top 60% of women matching with the top 10% of men (or a similar disproportion), with the latter good at stringing along the former. So the majority of men get very little activity period, while the majority of women get pretty unsatisfying experiences.

Before the internet, we used to get turned on by a process of pure reason.

And bangs being held up to stunning heights by AquaNet.

@58 Sounds plausible. I imagine "just using for sex" reads as "emotionally unavailable and unwilling to communicate."

34: interesting! Working from anecdote as well as some sociology stuff that suggests more conflict when the guy is not as educated/successful. Maybe the women are pickier and driving it but IME a lot of guys tend to write off the woman who is their equal, preferring the bright enough but less threatening woman (younger, in a less ambitious career, etc.). Sister's experience on apps was a lot of men who were her peers thinking she was too old for them.

If you go on a Tinder date, but sure you haven't completed the organ donor form on your driver's license so they can't take your kidney.

Haven't had a chance to read the thread or the link, but I have to say, this is the opposite of correct:

It means valuing your own internal world and respecting your ideas enough to communicate them effectively.

No! Stop that!

The point of communicating is to make a pun so bad it hurts the listeners.

I get a free subscription to Psychology Today when I have a profile on their therapist finder thing and I think must have finally managed to cancel it because it's garbage. Some therapists won't list themselves on PT because the magazine is not just crappy but apparently racist in some way (no stories about POC? I don't quite remember) but it's extremely widely used so I just accept that most things are at least tangential to something crappy.

62: the older man/younger woman tendency is definitely real, but, once again, it's a preference that exists on both sides.
Im not sure if, like other preferences, it is stronger among women than men. Women are far less willing to date outside their races, break the "man earns more" and "man is taller" rules, or date partners with a lower level of education. Men tend to be more flexible on all of these.

Sister's experience on apps was a lot of men who were her peers thinking she was too old for them.

How did she know? You (I think) list your age on the apps up front, so surely anyone who thought she was too old simply wouldn't have matched with her, and she would never have known why not.

Were men matching with her, messaging her to say "I just matched to tell you that I think you're too old for me", and then unmatching? (I am ready to believe this, btw. It would be far from the weirdest dating-behaviour story I have heard.)

And her peers in age, or in other regards?

⏸

The folks who wrote a how-to book about Git sure missed an opportunity by not titling the first chapter "How to Git Started."

▶

{On topic because 65}

Older man means the man and the woman are more likely to run at the same speed when they try to steal the Declaration of Independence.

The average age of Declaration of Independence theft has been rising since the 1980s - 39% of US men between 25 and 55 have never even attempted to steal a state-level constitution.

Were men matching with her, messaging her to say "I just matched to tell you that I think you're too old for me", and then unmatching? (I am ready to believe this, btw. It would be far from the weirdest dating-behaviour story I have heard.)

I got essentially this at least once in the year I was on apps -- matched with a guy a couple of years older than I am who messaged to tell me that I seemed interesting but he was really looking for someone to have kids with, which obviously I was too old for. And then he said maybe we could get into a FWB thing while he looked for the future mother of his children. Weird interaction.

You should have stolen his kidney in a New Jersey hotel room.

I guess his kidney was probably too old to sell.

I think in the moment I just said "Good luck with that!" and ended the interaction.

And of course there's the fundamental experience I had of matching overwhelmingly with men older than I am, and only rarely with men my own age or younger, which suggested that in the aggregate I shared Cala's sister's experience of men who were my age peers thinking I was was too old for them, although I can't establish that as the reason for any individual non-match. You don't need communication in each individual case to develop a strong theory about the explanation for an observed trend.

(As it happens, I am happily involved with a younger man, but I had to meet him organically.)

That means any children won't inherit titles.

72 is weird but, as I said, not unexpectedly so.

To pick 9 up and run with it, not only are they poor but ever since it became obvious that they were, around 2009, there's been a substantial demand for content that either denies that this is so, comes up with spurious alternatives to it being so, or claims that they're just bad people and hence deserve it. With a bit of creativity it's possible to extract all kinds of variations on these three basic themes. Remember when it was all because of video games, until someone actually tried to find out how people use their time and the biggest growth item turned out to be study?

It's also amazing to see the faith people seem to have in "therapy" as a generic solution to pretty much everything, although I seem to recall when I worked for Mobile Communications International magazine we were broadly in favour of mobile communications so it's no real surprise a magazine called Psychology Today that runs classified ads for therapists is keen on psychotherapy...

When I taught precalculus in graduate school, the textbook was sponsored by Motorola, and every photo involved the subject on their flip phone, and the word problems frequently involved cell phones, and then the more in depth applications were called something like "Field Trip to Motorola!" There was no therapy though.

Is textbook sponsorship common? I don't think I've ever seen a sponsored textbook.

You live in a different dystopia.

80 is hilarious.

72: I have an old high school/college buddy who's a doctor out in Sacramento now. He and his husband (both my age), I believe using surrogates each time, now have two sets of twins and a fifth kid, all kindergarten age or less. And y'know, follow your dreams no judgment et cetera, but every time he posts pictures, cold dread settles over me at the mere thought of it.

My brother just turned 50 and his wife is due with their second in a couple of months. I don't know how he does it except that's he's not making his wife do everything.

My ex had a kid a year or so after leaving me, when he was about 52 or so. While I have no reason to believe it was anything other than an entirely happy decision, I must admit to a certain amount of malicious reflection on how entirely relaxing his middle age isn't.

This is my brother's first marriage and only kids. There will be 91 years between the birth of my dad and his youngest grandchild.

76.last: Congratulations

86: Heh

I've always been totally fine dating men shorter than me or with less money than me, and have done so on multiple occasions. There was a BIG economic disparity (in my favor) with my last ex, which absolutely created a difficult power differential, though.

My sisters feel strongly that anyone I date in the future must have equivalent education (BA) and money to me, but that seems like a stupidly rigid restriction to me. It's only been 2 years since the end of my last relationship, though, and I'm definitely not ready to date again, so the issue is moot for now. I do strongly prefer to date people in my own age range (+/- 3 or 4 years), which continues to make life harder the older I get. I don't want to date someone who is 15+ years older than me, but it seems some of them want to date me.

In semi-related news, an animal chewed wires in my car and the wheel sensor has to be replaced. It costs $275 and is not covered by warranty, even though car is 18 months old and a lease. It is a huge luxury -- that I don't take for granted -- that this is an annoying inconvenience to me rather than a major blow to my monthly budget.

Wheel *speed sensor, sorry.

And yay LB! And yay for organic matches.

I have a coworker whose brother (I think in his sixties, maybe fifties?) married a younger woman who wanted kids, had 2. Young wife died unexpectedly.

Aside from the workload and stress of raising kids, they are not a cheap proposition, and I say this having raised one to college age without real complications so far. Also, I'm now in my fifties, both of my parents are healthy and self-sufficient, but

My dad had a second pair in his fifties. He loves the kids but was a much more short-tempered father with them. He will admit that he was too tired to be as good a father to them as he was to me and my sister.

He probably tells them he was too new to parenting to do as good with you as them.

68,72: basically that - they'd chat, guy would say, huh, 35? You're too old to be a mom to my future kids. (Guy was similar age.). And I meant educational/career peer. Not that sis didn't also have impossible standards but there was definitely a significant number of guys who need to be older/wiser/wealthier. (Sis is fine and had her first kid at almost 40 which is exhausting but fine.)

You should have stolen his kidney in a New Jersey hotel room. She even knows a transplant surgeon! Imagine the opportunities.

(As it happens, I am happily involved with a younger man, but I had to meet him organically.) A man of the right kidney, one could say.

A transplant surgeon with her own farm. Synergies abound.

Stealing kidneys is against medical ethics. It's not against legal ethics, except if it's a client.

I would have thought that stealing anything was against legal ethics.

I might be forgetting something in the model code of professional responsibility, but I think Moby's right: as long as it's not connected to my representation of a client, stealing doesn't specifically violate any obligation of legal ethics. For a doctor, on the other hand, once you start taking active steps to access the kidney, I think you're doing doctor things and so you've implicitly taken the victim on as a patient.

What if you take the victim on as livestock?

99 definitely reads like it was written by a lawyer who is planning to steal a kidney at some point

89 I've always been totally fine dating men shorter than me...

You are one in a thousand, possibly more.

I tend to date shorter men. I seem to have a thing for men who are 5'6", enough that if I feel a very fast attraction, the odds are excellent that he is 5'6". I figure that I imprinted on boys who were one inch shorter than me when I started having crushes.

I guess I'm the same height as you, but you could wear clogs.

103: was it you that said that you would only date men you knew you could beat up? Or did I make that up, out of some perverse need to find women that would hypothetically date me?

That was me.

106: Well, just for the record, while I am certain you could beat me up, I might be a little tall for you.