I think you're taunting us with that Calvin Klein Pleated Solid One-Piece!
More links to Macy's! It's way better than the times!
m, lingerie would be good too!
Apparently I missed the bad link, and instead had to read the lame article. Loving someone who cannot be yours is heartbreaking, and could be the basis for a beautiful, sad, sweet essay. This is not that essay. This is exhibit 1 in the case for the proposition that there is a difference between tragedy and just being stupid, and in the latter case, it's best to keep it to yourself.
Loving someone who cannot be yours is heartbreaking, and could be the basis for a beautiful, sad, sweet essay. This is not that essay.
This is fantastic.
I'd like to hear Labs's side of the story before I jump to any conclusions.
Don't you mean you'd rather here the guy's side?
Wow. Usually the writers of bad ML columns try to depict the situation in such a way that the reader can identify, even if halfheartedly, with the delusional lover, but this: "That sealed it: We were soul mates who had been together in previous lifetimes." Because these are the only times anyone has ever mentioned DC? Maybe, if it was Marietta, Oklahoma or something, I could see getting excited.
And I wondered if she was just humbly trying to depict herself as dumb at 25, but would arrive at some deep realization about the solipsism of infatuation or something, but no. She just bitterly realizes he doesn't love her, and "with all due respect to Kinsey's sliding scale of sexual orientation, sometimes gay really means gay." Yuk, yuk.
Worst ML evar.
The point where she tells him he can't really be gay is spectacularly tasteless.
I like the part where, dizzy with love and despair, she collapses into a New Age bookshop. I can't say that urge has ever struck me.
In my previous life Ogged really annoyed the fuck out of me. We were supposed to work as a team mucking out the stables, but he was all "You know, in my previous previous life I was a prince of the blood". Screw him.
This essay is adapted from the anthology "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys," to be published in May by Dutton.
Joy!
other gay men I had met, who would start off talking to me alone but then trot me over to their friends as if I were a show-and-tell item, usually urging me to be "fierce" and funny.
I'm so unconvinced that this has ever happened.
...which reminds me of this Slate piece.
...which reminds me of this Slate piece.
I had a friend who worked in a bookstore who, whenever she had to fart, went either to the New Age section or the Self Help section.
I had a friend who worked in a bookstore who, whenever she had to fart
So, like, she held in her farts? Temporarily but with intent?
For some reason, this is puzzling.
I love how, in her soulmatey fervor, she tries to convince both him and herself that not only is he into her, but that he was never actually gay. Apparently bisexual would not have been good enough for her. Also, the bit where she describes moving from SF to LA for a third date as "spontaneous passion" rather than "pathological neediness." Wow.
In some cultures you don't just fart. Farts have their own meaning and etiquette. Obviously you are a barbarian.
Wait, what if he was actually interested in sleeping with her, but then she pulled the "I think I love you" card and he decided to let her down easy by pulling the "totally gay" card? I buy that he was attracted to her, but everything she said and did screams "psycho with whom one should never have sex."
It's really the soulmates line that makes the article. How lucky for Brian that he did indeed turn out to be really gay.
Ooh, I totally missed this part:
Anna David, who lives in West Hollywood, Calif.,
Not over it so much, I'm guessing.
What's the oldest you can get away with calling someone your soulmate? 19? Proportional to how long you've been together?
I propose: 15 yr olds can call each other soulmates instantly. For each year that you're over 15, you have to have been together six months to pull out that word.
24:
agreed, so long as it goes up to 1yr/yr after 25, and 2yr/yr after 35.
It's a lot harder, as a woman, to get a gay dude to think he's your soulmate than it is to get a gay dude to sleep with you. Most people are not that fixed in their sexuality and, given the possibility of free play without relationshippy commitment, will sleep with either gender, given attraction, etc.
I think she enjoys making herself look slightly nutso for dramatic purposes, but isn't a good enough writer to make it work. In any case, here's her website.
24: Sounds about right. 15-year-old souls are a dime a dozen, or the cost of the corsage at the homecoming dance.
AWB, that article is great. Burn Fat Faster!
"Grog" means "group blog"? News to me.
It's a lot harder, as a woman, to get a gay dude to think he's your soulmate than it is to get a gay dude to sleep with you.
It's a lot harder to get anyone to think they're your soulmate than it is to get them to put out.
Wait, doesn't the plot of her book Party Girl remind you a little too much of the plot of the movie Party Girl? Except without a cute falafel salesman and the Dewey Decimal System?
She looks a lot like my niece FWIW.
She seems to mine her sex life for articles, so I don't think we should worry about her much. The poor faggot dude may just have been a story concept all along.
She's got an intensive media operation going, so we can probably expect a visit soon.
The worst part about the article is that it casts yet more dark shadows on the whole "soul mate" theory.
I'm a big believer in the soul mate theory, personally. My wife and I feel pretty sure we're "old souls" who have been together many times before -- but it has a lot less to do with sex, drugs, and glamorous partying, and more to do with serious, long-term committment to each other.
Not that sex and drugs can't be a part of that -- it's just that you have to take them seriously.
21+22
Its that magical thinking thing that makes the "I think I love you" and "soulmate" tape go into rewind. Lucky for Brian indeed. And to think she also has a sex advice column. Its like Ann Nichole Smith writing a legal column on how write a will.
In some cultures you don't just fart. Farts have their own meaning and etiquette. Obviously you are a barbarian.
I had a friend who belched spontaneously and loudly when the urge hit. It was initially shocking to my delicate sensibilities, and people muttered behind her back, then it was worth a grin, and eventually it just called for my saying, "Oh, hi, Jen."
I should maybe go read the Modern Love column in question. Though.
I don't know about you guys, but I subscribed to Ms. David's newsletter. I can't wait to hear about the next time she's quoted in Glamour.
I feel like there's something we're supposed to be getting out of this, like she intended to write a funny article on how stupidly self-absorbed she was at 25, because haven't we all, &c., but couldn't rock the arch tone necessary. Surely, at however old she is now, writing sex columns, she's not this dumb. Where's the descant of authorly self-condescension in this piece, though? Somebody needs to review the genre of Bildungsroman before she strikes again.
I don't believe in soulmates. There's a set, maybe, the members of which could all serve a soulmate function. But there's plenty of people I could be perfectly happy with, and I'm pretty sure that's true for everyone else.
This is not a sentiment that can be expressed during wedding planning, but come on. Haven't you ever watched a movie with a soppy tragic teenage love story and thought that they'd be over it in a month?
But there's plenty of people I could be perfectly happy with, and I'm pretty sure that's true for everyone else.
[emerson]
Uh, no.
[/emerson]
Cala, that's pretty much how I feel too. Also I suspect the more robotically practical you are about selecting a mate, ie are they responsible? Do we agree on our value systems? Do we have fun on vacation? Am I embarrassed by them? the more likely for the longterm happiness.
37: No, she's still stupidly self-absorbed.
Check out the blog:
http://annalytical-annalytical.blogspot.com/
About her NY Times piece:
"Please click on it a lot -- that, combined with the fact that it's about dating, sex and trying to convert a gay guy straight, could potentially make it a most viewed story."
And almost every post has a picture of herself.
Thank you, AWB. I can't do it all myself.
I'm tending toward the idea that the piece is more or less fiction. The lady has turned herself into product. If she starts writes about her cocaine addiction sometime, it will just mean that she's not getting enough stories out of her booty and needs to diversify.
John, I'm sure you've hashed this out a million times here, so I'm not actually going to argue with you. But since I missed all those threads: in a nutshell, what was the downside of relationships that soured them irrevocably for you?
"But there's plenty of people I could be perfectly happy with, and I'm pretty sure that's true for everyone else."
I think the soul mate thing goes beyond being perfectly happy with someone. It involves a set of circumstances that are indeed "magical" for lack of a better term. It's the kind of thing that makes you tend towards thinking there's more to life than the emprically demonstrable.
"Haven't you ever watched a movie with a soppy tragic teenage love story and thought that they'd be over it in a month?"
Hence the fact that long-term committment is a key indicator soul-matedness.
I found out last night that a woman with whom I had recently had a long, interesting, pleasant conversation with at a party had called around to her friends there afterward, very smitten and trying to arrange a date. The party was almost entirely gay, I have no idea where she would have gotten the idea that I was the one straight guy there. Very embarrassing (for both of us, I'm sure).
40: I also think that it comes down to mostly whether one is a satisficer or an optimizer with regard to preferences. It's not quite the same thing as settling. Plus, I think it's sort of unhealthy, though a useful fiction, to have everything bound up with another person as being "the one." It certainly creates too much teenage angst.
She's in her twenties, semi-cute, and in "The Industry". The only possible cure for that is hitting one's late thirties or getting canceled.
She was trying to play the story for comic effect of how ridiculously unrealistic her notion of love once was. Somehow she doesn't quite get the tone right to convey that she's aware how stupid the things she's saying are.
I got over the idea of "the one" at 15. Now I'm pretty sure I'm getting over the idea of "ones."
47 - If she's still in her twenties, then it's even more ludicrous that she's waxing nostalgic about when she was 25.
Here's a concept: hot Christian babe meets her gay soul mate. Her pastor authorizes using every trick in the book in order to save his soul. She chains him up a la "Black Snake Moan", puts in a stripper stage, buys the sex toys, invites all the other hot Christian babes over for a pillow fight, etc. A laff riot. Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, and Ann Hathaway. Slow motion shots of the erction when he's finally therapized.
50: Actually, maybe it's only while one is still in the 20's that one's 20's can still be nostalgic and not grotesquely embarrassing.
I actually kind of agree with both Cala and A. Chandler Moisen. There's a set of people out there with whom you're really compatable. If you meet one of them under the right circumstances, and stay committed, the relationship can acquire the "magical" quality of the soulmate scenario if the two people are able to let go of that last little self-protective reserve we tend to hoard, and let their trust become complete.
The world "soulmate" makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time I read it.
52: Wasn't that movie, minus the strippers, called Saved! ?
I don't believe in soulmates.
Word. "Soulmate" should never be uttered in any context.
Oh my.
That story is so fucking embarassing. Did someone say, upthread, "keep it to yourself"?
And what's with the paragraphs comprised of no more than 2 to 3 sentences per? (She says as she writes paragraphs so comprised.)
Truth is that I do believe in soulmate, transcendent love, but it's most rare, is not based on someone's cheekbones, and blabbering about such a thing so cheaply is a transgression. Seriously annoying.
She's 36 or 37.
That's about what I figured from her pictures. Emotionally she's still late 20s at best, though.
But since I missed all those threads: in a nutshell, what was the downside of relationships that soured them irrevocably for you?
You need reasons? I didn't give any, but everyone else pretty much understood. You must be a terrifyingly lucky person.
My main argument was that people with relationship problems are like people who lose the lottery. They think that they're exceptions, but they aren't. Almost everyone loses the lottery.
I'm teaching Wuthering Heights right now and trying desperately to keep them from reading it as a love story. Instead, it should be read as a horror novel about a terrible failure of ontology in C and H to distinguish between souls, resulting in terror, violence, and multigenerational destruction.
44: Alrighty. Let me modify my claim then: the vast majority of people who think they've found their soulmates are full of baloney. The vast majority of people who think "there's a special kind of magic here" are just horny. If there are real soulmates, most of us probably won't find them due to...events, my dear boy...
So people should stop acting as if finding one's soulmate is the only satisfactory basis of a relationship. Shivbunny and I are very happy, but I'm quite sure if I died tomorrow, he'd be suicidally depressed for about three months, depressed for six, and move on in about twelve.
From Wikipedia: Anna David is in the process of writing another novel titled "Rap it before you Tap it", it is said to have a late 2007 or early 2008 release.
Is this supposed to be "Wrap it before you Tap it"? Like, condom advice? Or is she suggesting we play the dozens with potential mates?
60: cheekbones don't exactly hurt the situation, however
While I mostly agree with 54, (and agree with 58 that soulmate is a word best not said), I believe, and experience has showed me, that while there is a set of people with whom one could fall in love and live a happy, full and contented life, there is a much much smaller set (I doubt it is just one person, but it isn't big) where the connection is palpably different and more special. Where two people just fit together, maybe not perfectly, but in a way that is so qualitatively different you can feel the difference.
You must be a terrifyingly lucky person.
People crap their pants when I walk through traffic, it's true.
"Wrap it before you tap it" is circa-1993 slang, man. What are her other novels called? Take a Chill Pill? All I Wanna Do Is Zooma Zoom Zoom Zoom and a Boom Boom?
I'd be less gentle than 64. In most cases, "soulmates" is the word someone busts out when they want to justify the stupid, stupid things they're doing in the name of what everyone else would call infatuation.
Which is directly counter to how A. Chandler Moisen describes his relationship to his wife, so he gets a pass.
Another generally idiotic one is "psychic twins". I hear it and I think "kidding themselves about merging souls and other horseshit."
I have a feeling this is going to end up in an annalytical blog entry. I criticized a sex columnist on my old blog once, she found it, wrote on her blog that it made her cry and cry, and then I got rape threats from her fans for months.
68: You have the soccer dads terrified too. A superheroine, vulnerable only to carp.
She's 36 or 37. Then there's no hope for self-awareness except for the advent of a major traumatic event like a big zit that can't be hidden under makeup.
"Grog" means "group blog"? News to me.
yeh, it's in common usage. Like the word "grope" which means a group grope.
So a "greg" is a group blog beg, right? Or would that follow the military system to be come a GroBloBe?
"Grope" means group blope, you mean.
the military system to be come a GroBloBe?
That's the Navy. In the Army it would be a "GBB." The Air Force would call it "a question for the group." In the Marines it would be "a fucking question on some website."
One thing about the Modern Love essays - they do develop an incredible sense of empathy for the other person in all these relationships. I read this and felt so sorry for the poor guy. I could just hear him thinking "I told her I'm gay; what do I have to do to make her go away? Set her car on fire?"
Where's the descant
Modern Love should borrow from PopCanon's borrowing from Robert Coover and title its collection of itself Pricksongs & Descants.
Is this supposed to be "Wrap it before you Tap it"? Like, condom advice?
In this situation, what's getting wrapped and what tapped? Oughtn't "it" have the same referent in each use? Yet one generally hears of asses being tapped. I am unaware of condoms meant to be put on the ass.
I could see setting her car on fire as a passive-aggressive move here. Passive because she would never ever suspect that he had done it, and would write in her article "After the fates chose to separate me from my beloved car, I decided it was an omen that my quest was not fated to be realized."
No, the two "it"s have two different antecedents. It's a fucking zeugma, you idiot.
BY ANTECEDENTS YOU MEAN REFERENTS YOU IDIOT.
By all upper-case, you mean a convential combination of upper and lower-case, you caps-happy-locker.
God you people are bastards. She's a writer who's playing the "crazy airhead chick" role for comic effect and in order to get published. And obviously it's working.
The ML article is content-free fluff, of course, but that's what ML is for. And she's obviously right--it is getting linked. Here, for instance.
Maybe the pain of it is that one can imagine good, interesting, heartfelt articles being writting in the place of almost everything in the ML column, narrating exactly the same stories. But every single one of them is written by someone with not the least sense of nuance and with an obsession for cliche and stereotype that it dashes every hope for a good read.
I dare one of us to get something published in ML. We have interesting experiences, good prose style, a sense of narrative--it could be a coup. I did it with Metro Diary just to see if it could be done, and it was published immediately.
Do you make up all those things you submit to overheard/in/new/york too?
No, they're all true, as was my MD piece. It's all about the framing of it.
That's exactly the pain. It's similar to the pain watching, say, one of the more recent Star Wars. You know there could be a good story in there, somewhere, it has all the pieces. You know it could really shine. But then they went and handed it off to an idiot, and all it does is sell like hotcakes and inspire mockery.
God you people are bastards. She's a writer who's playing the "crazy airhead chick" role for comic effect and in order to get published. And obviously it's working.
Everything is good of its kind, huh?
89: It's a fluff column, not a fine writing column.
I'm just being a bitch, of course. There are regular columns that make me gnash my teeth, too. But the Ethicist seems so much more worthy of hatred, because he's actually giving (really bad) advice, whereas ML is just new writers doing a few hundred words of fluff that isn't pretending to be anything butt.
Clearly, there are insights to be made on the subject of "Modern Love," but absolutely nothing I've read in ML qualifies as "Modern" in the least degree. Every article ends with someone succumbing to the joy of a foolish heteronormative metanarrative, not creating something beautiful and new out of the possibilities of a non-heteronormative future.
Yeah, the framing. I've had it about up to here with overheard/in/pittsburgh, because just about everything that ends up on the site seems to have had random words italicized to make it less funny and more confusing. Less is more, guys.
93: Even bitchy philosophy graduate students, yes.
94: Butt, ha! Unintentional, really.
Every article ends with someone succumbing to the joy of a foolish heteronormative metanarrative, not creating something beautiful and new out of the possibilities of a non-heteronormative future.
Someone has weird preconceptions about what "modern" is.
Tia could write an awesome story out of that blog post: "My Pretend Internet Friends Managed to Cockblock My Date."
My contribution to 99 should have been something like this is the analog of
.you call this the future? where are the rocket cars?
for humanities geeks.
Instead, it should be read as a horror novel about a terrible failure of ontology
Ha!
As for soulmates, the appropriate scale is logarithmic: 15 year olds get to say it after a week, and every for every, say, two years of age after that, we the permitted time-till-soulmate-utterance by a factor of 10.
The airhead narrative voice may be played for comic effect, but here it is not funny.
ML is just new writers doing … butt.
Okay, Ben, by "Modern" I assume they mean unconventional--relationships that tread off the well-beaten path and treat love not merely within a modern context, but as itself somehow modern, different from the kinds of love that came before. Maybe I'm taking the George Meredith connection too seriously.
White Bear, a thread at the Snake Goddess might interest you: "How do you feel about Birth of a Nation?" Can even use a little help over there.
I don't know Snake Goddess. Where is it?
I shall try, but I'm leaving in 15.
You know, instead of stumbling into some New Agey place, Anna should have just gone to Necromance and picked up some tiny mammal skulls. They're good for what ails you.
Also, I think I'm going to open a goth boutique here in Mpls. called "Endless Night," and then open an ice cream parlour next door called "Sweet Delight." Or maybe "Suite Dee-Lite".
Also, they should change the title of that column to "Love in the Age of Bird Flu."
Also, if you really love somebody, they're your "partner in crime", not your "soulmate." Yecch.
Do you think that Modern Love would like my theory of love as a negative-sum game where the house takes 75%+? I could make up stories.
Okay, swampcracker, I've put in a few cents.
I'm going to open a goth boutique here in Mpls. called "Endless Night," and then open an ice cream parlour next door called "Sweet Delight."
Minneapolitan, I am now in love with you.
Emerson, I think you have an absolute obligation to pitch your relationship-free philosophy to Modern Love. The world awaits your wisdom!
Wait, who represents "the house" in your scenario, JE? Like, God? Or Satan? Or, uh, Eros?
No, "These Sweet Delights" should be next to a climbing/caving emporium that divides itself into "These Dizzying Heights" and "These Bottomless Pits".
106: You just made the joke explicit, for the benefit of those who can't deal with inference.
It would be God = Satan = Eros, of course. My theory is nothing if not Manichaean.
Actually, that's pretty good to an actual description of some forms of Gnostic theology. (Kotsko will be no help, he's an inveterate, hidebound Chalcedonian, enslaved by the fossilized consensus forced on the church by the godless Emperor Marcian and Attila the Hun.)
BTW, JM, are you aware of the liberal quasi-Mormons, the "Community of Christ" , fromer Reorganized LDS? They describe themselves as a "Peace and Justice Church" and give awards to people like Jane Goodall.
I didn't read anything about underwear or early marriage to cousins and uncles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Christ
I commented at that echidna blog too. (But where are all the cute pictures of puggles?)
AWB, I have to confess that that idea did not burst from my forehead, fully formed. I saw a kiosk at Mall of America today call "Sweet Delights" which consisted of multiple gumball/candy machines. But, I suppose it's better to have been loved and cast aside by AWB, than to never have been cast aside at all.
120.--That seems to be Emma Hale Smith's branch. It's good to see that they've succeeded in finding a niche. That Wikipedia entry might have been directly uploaded from their PR materials.
It's the casting aside you cherish, minneapolitan? Masochist.
Maybe we could scientifically deduce the perfect ML story. Either via survey, a la Komar & Melamid did, or just by a little textual analysis.
The latter might be too easy. The story requires: bourgeois heteronormativity; some teeny frisson of crossing some boundary that really isn't all that important to begin with (old/young, white/black, red-state/blue-state); a woman making an ass of herself; and a lesson. What else?
New age talk, therapy talk, personal liberation talk, futurology. Yuppie consumer items, perhaps including a pet. Stuffed animals?-- probably not. A runaway streetcar?
123: Good name for a masochist boutique: Venus In Fur-Jeans
Maybe I'm taking the George Meredith connection too seriously.
When the Modern Love guy was answering questions on the Times' webbage, I asked if the column were named after the Meredith sequence, and he said no, David Bowie.
Then I asked him why they published such crap and the question wasn't approved by the moderators.
You just made the joke explicit, for the benefit of those who can't deal with inference.
It's OK, B, I don't expect my genius to be accessible.
I asked if the column were named after the Meredith sequence
"were" s/b "was"
Teasing. I love it when you screw up.
Has ML done a story yet about a middle-aged woman infatuated with her son's college roommate? who is gay? Even though she knows better? And she goes out and gets botoxed and so forth in a terrible, humiliating attempt to be charm him? We could just take "Death in Venice", flip the genders around, and change the location to Wellesley or somewhere. "It felt like a last chance to _______"
Of course, she couldn't die at the end, either.
While we're on the topic of widely reviled writing, check out the top of the TPMCafe right now. I must say I didn't expect her to look like that.
I can write a kickass one involving the internet, distance, and immigration. How many words does it have to be?
See, I think we can put together, from real experiences, a quietly subversive ML story about love-that-is-itself-modern, but frame it in a not-dangerous way that will get them to accept and publish it. It could be uplifting, about accepting one's desires for what they are, except, instead of telling "The story of how I finally became a Woman Fully Growed and married A Great Guy and mothered A Great Baby," it would end in some other, far more interesting and soulful way that is true-to-life and radical.
Do it, Cala. We'll support you.
And finding out that the title comes from Bowie is fucking depressing. Can we at least pull the reference from Jonathan Richman?
I find this quietly distasteful. Having had an internet, distance, would-have-been immigration love that ended; having had a love that sure as hell seemed sacred, and still does after several years, though it's over now, though we're heartfelt friends, sacred friends, even,
Joking about this shit is just not favorable. Call me humorless.
Hmm, my story ends in a wedding, assuming everything goes okay. But it could have a great start:
"This is the sort of story that ends up with you dead under a bear," my dad exclaimed.
Sorry, parsimon. Wasn't making fun of long-distance immigration internet people, though, since that's more or less a fair description of how shivbunny & I got started.
Have you been fucking the shit out of bears, Cala?
Aren't you obligated to suck it up when this fairly unusual situation comes up in public, parsimon, you mellow harsher?
139:
No harm. But don't write about it in some Modern Love column. No matter how well it's done.
Joking about this shit is just not favorable. Call me humorless.
For Christ's sakes, every situation has been real to someone, somewhere. Doesn't mean it's not funny.
Goddammit. You take away all my fun. The best part is, that quote isn't made up!
Washing-ton, Washing-ton.
The best part is, that quote isn't made up!
Do it! How awesome would it be to see that qoute at the start of an ML column? I say, pretty fucking awesome.
It's not so very unusual. My long-distance love didn't pan out either, parsimon.
And I wouldn't do long-distance again. There is really nothing good about it. And no more foreigners, although I've been wondering if I should get my law degree instead of this pesky PhD and then go into immigration law.
I did long distance a long time ago, but found it overly inflaming. Drama where there is no drama arose because of physical separation, and "love" where there was no love, or at least an inability to tell the difference. I wouldn't do it again. The fact that it succeeds ever is always surprising and impressive to me.
Toby's penchant for long-distance relationships was among the reasons why I thought it would be wise to call it quits. He can stand not being physically with someone. To me, that's pretty much all there is.
There is really nothing good about it.
False! All the not-worrying about finding a mate, none of the accommodation!
no more foreigners
This, however, is wise.
151: You mean it makes for a nice beard?
"Something makes me think that you didn't come here just for the huntin'" said the bear.
141, 143:
"Obligated to suck it up," meaning accept it, read about it with grace and humour. You miss the point, which is that some things never quite become funny. Not that they're grim, but look: one sense of the sacred is that which isn't spoken of (lightly).
Check in with me in another 5 years and see how I feel. Somehow I doubt it'll change. I love that guy, always will, he's a beauty.
That said, no, I wouldn't do the long-distance thing again.
Cala: Yeah, one part of the problem was the horrible hurdles that would have been involved in my emigrating.
154 is the punch line to the greatest joke ever.
Unfogged is the top hit for "no relationship policy".
Nearly every relationship I've had has some period where we were separated. Boy X graduated from college, Boy Y started a new job, I picked up and moved to graduate school. In most of those cases, the relationship just didn't go anywhere. We'd go from being in a holding pattern where we missed each other, to being reunited and happy that we were reunited, and then back to the holding pattern. It never grew.
154 is the punch line to the greatest joke ever.
You miss the point, which is that some things never quite become funny
Not funny to you. The point of sucking it up is to let people have their fun with a situation that isn't quite so tragic for other people.
151: Yes, but you also have all of the drama, all of the fights, all of the daily sorts of annoyances that happen when two people talk to each other daily, but you're not getting laid and you're not getting laid.
But maybe people have to do the long-distance thing just so they can let the flame die out that way and say they tried their best. When you end a relationship before its natural death, it's left with an air of mystery and longing. (I wouldn't know anything else. I fucking LOVE mystery and longing!)
See, I think we can put together, from real experiences, a quietly subversive ML story about love-that-is-itself-modern, but frame it in a not-dangerous way that will get them to accept and publish it.
Various versions of this plan have been proposed, you know; sometimes the story to be submitted is more fake than real. We never get around to it, alas. I even had an idea for a silly conceit of the sort they might go for.
so they can let the flame die out that way and say they tried their best
Eh, you can feel like a failure that way too.
He can stand not being physically with someone. To me, that's pretty much all there is.
Does it matter who the person is that you're with? I don't understand this attitude.
"This is the sort of story that ends up with you dead under a bear," my dad exclaimed.
This sounds like the required first sentence of an essay in a prompt that might once have graced the pages of the University of Chicago's undergraduate application, back in the good old days.
164: No? I mean I like physicality. I don't get much out of talking on the phone.
165: That was my favorite application, by far.
162: I have an idea for a relationship with a dog that uses that same conceit. I would get a pug and name him Boswell and I'd introduce him as my biographer. He'd write down the witty things I say.
That doesn't quite capture the crucial "Johnson" part of the conceit.
Sounds like a fun application. I wrote a fable for Northwestern's.
161: I don't think it's so much that as that if the only reason to break up is distance, but you're otherwise in love and happy, it just doesn't feel like a sufficient reason in an age of cars and airplanes.
I haven't read this whole thread, but even absent the unrelentingly shitty writing, something about the way the author looks makes me want to throw things at her head.
169: Depends how far, I guess. I get grumpy just having to go to Queens.
Also, if you believe in soulmates, you are obligated to also believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Not funny to you. The point of sucking it up is to let people have their fun with a situation that isn't quite so tragic for other people.
I get it.
Let us all write a novel in which we mock our own loves and losses. Then we will be so insincere that we graduate.
Gravitas, indeed.
"Laughing at" is not the same as insincerity, to me. Being able to narrate my own personal tragedies with a sense of humor is how I process them. I don't think it's necessarily worse or better than mourning and sanctifying; it's just what gets me through a day.
I think it might also be fun to do a Modern Love column based on a TV show. Write up the Buffy-Angel romance in that cheesy writer's workshop style. See how long it would take them to notice if you just omitted the word vampire.
174: Not because it's worse, but because it's far.
I'm unsymathetic to your point of view, AWB.
What I liked about a LD relationship was the intensity of the together time.
It can work, even with a foreigner. Not that I'd want my kids to date foreigners . . .
177.--That's because you live in Brooklyn, which is half the time inaccessible except by canoe and car.
I guess I should say that any references I might make to my preferences regarding my daughter's dating should be read with an undertone of bitter futility.
In China, before most people were born, a husband and wife could be separated for twenty years at a time, and they liked it. That relationship relates best that relates least.
Of course they liked it—they took lovers like nobody's business.
Now there's a locution I like: to take a lover. One of the humorless feminists on this here web BBboard will now probably object to its possessive ring, but I say PHOO.
I used to employ that phrase a lot, but people objected.
See, relationships are failures of empathy.
Could I stand to be the wife of someone like me?
Of course not. What a hellish fate.
(What if someone answers "Why yes, I would love to be the wife of someone like me?" Well, obviously, someone who says that is a pervert.)
That was the big breakthrough for me, understanding that the Golden Rule and the Categorical Imperative both forbid relationships.
"Take two lovers and phone me in the morning if you don't feel better".
Also, in the old-fashioned kind of long-distance relationship, there was none of this "oh, do you think we can work it out?" business. No, you were married, and so you lumped it.
175:
"Laughing at" is not the same as insincerity, to me. Being able to narrate my own personal tragedies with a sense of humor is how I process them. I don't think it's necessarily worse or better than mourning and sanctifying; it's just what gets me through a day.
I'll leave this alone momentarily.
But "worse or better than mourning or sanctifying" gets it wrong. The point I have been trying to make is that some things you don't, or shouldn't, narrate in a mocking way.
God knows I have done that many times, but the relationship I've referred to doesn't admit of it. I've had a virtually impossible time explaining this to people who want me to disempower that relationship, and thereby that man. Through mockery, or public humiliation. (We're in the same field, with mutual friends.)
No, nope. I'm not going to do or say all the things I might do or say with respect to him. I don't laugh about anything about what went on between us. Very privately, with a few friends, I'll make snarky remarks about specific things, but the rest, sorry, is private.
The idea of blogging about it in order to process it is very weird to me. On the other hand. I seem to be in the process of doing something just like that. Holy shit.
Parsimon, I think we're talking past each other. I wasn't saying that you should talk or laugh about anything, but that when people are talking about something that's not generally considered something so horrible that we don't speak of it lightly, but which is that horrible for you, you (one) typically simply absents oneself from the discussion, rather than saying "no joking about this." This is especially so online, where your discomfort needn't manifest in any detectable way. And I don't mean to pick on you for this; more taking the opportunity to note that the fact that something is painful for someone doesn't mean everyone else should stop joking about it (within certain limits, obviously).
And I don't think anyone would ever ask you to make light of your own situation; that's not where you're at. I was just saying it's my way, not that it should be anyone else's. It's kind of a Southern thing.
190:
Ogged, I understand.
I wasn't trying to shut anyone up. I realize I said something that sounded like that.
'nuff now.
I'm going to open a goth boutique here in Mpls. called "Endless Night," and then open an ice cream parlour next door called "Sweet Delight."
Hey, your hometown has its own network protocol!
Two, actually, if you count gopher.