Rhubarb Pie

How To Get Girls

Well, hmmmm.  We have another reader looking for some specific advice.  This one is a 25 year old fellow named S., who has never had a girlfriend, and has only mustered up the courage to ask women out a very few times, always with disappointing results.  What's the trick, he wonders. 

I used to write quite a lot about dating and my own theories about it. I wrote about how to decide whether to confess a crush, and how to tell whether you're undateable (in 3 parts!).  I wrote about chemistry, and how much that matters.  Since I've been with NBT these last three and a half years, I've stopped paying attention to all the signals you have to decode to figure out whether a romantic relationship is possible with someone, so I expect Megan will have better advice than me.  But ignorance has never stopped me before, so I'll charge in. 

There are three things that I used to ask myself when evaluating a guy. We'll take each of them in turn. 

1) Do I like, enjoy, and admire him as a human being?

2) Do I want to smooch him? Is he attractive/exciting?

3) Does he make me feel good about myself? 

Graceful Acquaintanceship

Dear Lovely and Discerning, 

I think Megan already hit on the relevant and insightful advice, which means I'm free to write tangential and speculative things instead.  The thing I agree with the most is that ambiguity signals unresolved conflict -- their vagueness or silence probably means they're conflicted about why they don't feel so great about you anymore.  Maybe not -- a lot of folks avoid negative or difficult conversations, so silence could signal clarity but unwillingness to have a hard talk.  I don't think so, though. 

Your letter made me think about friendship and how mysterious it can be.  It made me think about the people in my life who are or once were or rightfully should be "friends" but who actually make me uncomfortable.  There are some myths about friendship, I think, that aren't matched by the reality that I live.  The people who make me feel uneasy are the people where myth and reality stand in contrast. "Friends are forever," is the myth I think you're bumping into right now.   

The biggest myth about friendship is that it goes in one direction.  You start as strangers, you become acquaintances, you move into friendship, the friendship deepens, and that's friendship -- you stay close forever and ever.  The myth suggests that once you are friends, at a particular level of intimacy, anything that diminishes that closeness is a failure -- you're not really "friends."  Someone has done something wrong, there's something broken to fix.  I don't think that's actually true, but it is those situations where I feel awkward or lousy.  There are people in my life where the potential for friendship exists, and partial overtures have been made, we started down the path of friendship or we got all the way there, but present day life doesn't accommodate true closeness in the shape we both might have predicted at the beginning.  Those are the people I'm afraid to call up, because I don't know what we are.  I'd like to get coffee now and then, to hear how they're doing, and I wish them well, but I don't want to have them over for dinner or take trips with them or call them to borrow tools or go to their child's school play.  You're not allowed to say this, because it contradicts the myth about what friendship is.  You're not allowed to go from friends to graceful acquaintances.  We do it all the time, but we don't talk about it or admit that it's okay.  It's easier to sever ties completely, sometimes, or to say, we were never really "friends" than to say, we were friends once, but now there are other people I'd rather spend my time talking to. Or I've outgrown that stage of my life and the people who are still really into it make me feel conflicted and strange.  Or, I've realized that you always want to talk about something that isn't interesting enough for me to want to talk about as often as you would like, but telling you would be awkward and I don't care about you enough to try to puzzle through an awkward conversation.  Worse still: the more I got to know you I admired from afar, the more I realize we don't share the same values, and so I don't want to be around you as much as I thought I would from the outside.  

No copying, Sherry. You have to write your own.

I have all sorts of thoughts, some of which don't directly answer your question.   But I'll try them anyway.

First, I love the actual question you asked, "How do I re-frame what's going on so it doesn't feel like low level on-going rejection?".  That's the perfect question.  The situation sounds like it is stuck, but you are the boss of how you think about it (mostly), so lets get you a better angle on this.  I know full well that low-lying scripts can take away from your daily experience of life.  They nag and mutter and say mean things to you.  They pester you, barging into should-be glorious moments.  They're also unfounded and ridiculous, which is really obvious when your perfect brilliant gorgeous friend confesses some piece of self-loathing that makes you shake your head amazed that someone could be so wrong about himself.  Whatever pained framing you can't help but hear is equally pointless and wrong.

Next, who knows what happened, but I can tell you one thing.  They're conflicted about why they shut you out.  That's what the silence means.  If they weren't conflicted, it would be easy to tell you.  They would say "Because you robbed a bank and shot three people, that's why!".  Instead, they're keeping quiet because they don't know or don't like their own reasons.  They have rationalizations, but they know the real reason is that maybe you were careless or they were overoffended or it didn't feel the same and they can't face their own insecurities.  They aren't proud of what they did, or they would tell you straight out why.

To your actual question, on how to re-frame:  Here I have to give you the only truth I've come to after all these years of dating, with rejection going both ways.  It is profoundly unsatisfying, but I have finally settled on the vague and underdetermined "fit".  Sometimes people fit and sometimes people don't fit, and there is no reason for it.  There is no reason in the good direction; why should Ali and I click so very much when we are such different people in such different life stages.  There is no reason in the bad direction; why can't I fall for that sweet bright good man?   Looking for reasons will only make you nuts.

My guess from reading your email is that you grew some, and the fit wasn't good any more.  If they were old beloved pants, you would know because they'd get too short and tight.  But they aren't pants, they're people, so instead of being too snug around the waist, they start to scritch and squirm and close out this person who shows them that they haven't changed.  That's my first guess at the reason, but my underlying guess is that there is no good reason except that people have shortcomings and don't live up to who they want to be.  That's hopelessly vague, but sometimes vague is all you get.

Finally, you sound like you're on exactly the right track, but I wanted to reinforce what you're doing.  The only thing you really get to do in these nebulous friend situations is live your own life really well.  Seriously.  They lost something fantastic and precious when you left the situation; they lost your voice and ideas and spark.  Now you make your own life good, so that your voice and ideas and spark are that much stronger.  Treat yourself well and be bolder and deeper, so that you develop even more.  It isn't to spite them.  They may never know (although, word does get around), but that isn't the point.  The point is that you are growing into new friends, and they will be as good as you are.  You are trading up, and you earn better friends by being more of your best self.  You are great; your life and friends will be great.

Things I have marveled at this week.

Thunderstorms!  Weather!  We had weather!  In JUNE!  Weather came to visit us, in the shape of a several hour thunderstorm last night.  This is so rare for us.  Years go by between thunderstorms out here, which is very sad.  This one was loud, sending boom after boom for a few hours.  There's a radio tower across the street from me; I assume the thunderclaps that sound like the world is splitting are from lightning hitting such a close tower.  Those don't rumble at all.  They sound like car bombs or something.

Confessions.  I got to talking to a guy at a bar and it happened again.  Yet another guy whom I think was trying to impress me spent a good long time telling me about his dramatic faults and unfortunate situation.  Why?  Why? Why do they do this?  Why do they tell me extraordinary and unflattering things about themselves at length?  Why doesn't their sense of self-awareness kick in?   I am listening intently and asking questions, but dudes.  I some point it switches over and really I'm just feeding out rope.

Friendlessness.  I'm watching friends divorce and realizing that one of them had stopped developing friends once they were married.  They're divorcing now and she's finding out how few friends she has left.  I envy couples because they have someone to keep them company in the default, but man alive, relying on only one person like that looks terribly vulnerable to me.  Perhaps I'm unusual in this sense, but I actively think about maintaining my stable of friends.  I consider whether I have kept close enough with old friends or if it is time for a round of phone calls, gauge whether I'm keeping current friendships balanced for invites and acceptances, and decide whether my circle of acquaintances is large enough to provide me with new friends a year from now.  That is probably unusual, but I have been ostracized all the way down to zero friends.  I don't want it to be like that again.  I've seen it before but I get surprised every time someone whom I know to be bright and charming lets her friend situation get so precarious.

My great good luck.  My gym has been an especially fun place to be this week.  I am so very lucky that other people set up this amazing scene and I get to be part of it and work out.  It doesn't always happen that way.

I like 'Yes and'.

Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod.  Have we talked about this before?  I wrote about it before, a long time ago.  Following and escalating a silly concept is my favorite humor.  (Maybe my only humor?  Slapstick breaks my heart and puns come from Satan.  I must like other types of humor, but I'm not thinking of them.)  Chris and Anand and my sister are so good at it.  My lifting group is good at it.  Yesterday we started cheering for the baby warm-up lifts like they were the most serious intense attempts ever.  That was very funny, um, at the time amongst the few of us. 

I understood it better when I learned about the improv concepts of offer and acceptance.  The imaginary what-if is an offer that the person is holding out to you.  She's trying to give you this present, of an idea and a chance to play.  I don't actually like when it goes unremarked, because then the person I'm talking to just turned down the offer.  In improv they call it denial or blocking.  I call people who do that "fun-sucks".  They suck the fun out of the air, act like dampeners on the whole room1.  So, no.  I don't really click with them.

I've never thought about whether I like to talk about the real or the imaginary.  I should watch for that.  Mostly I like to assert the imaginary as real and then wait for it to come true.  When you move here, we will grill veggies on the porch all summer long.

I'm working on a new plan.

Hey shug. How was your New Year's? Did you have a good evening? I usually find New Years to be a letdown, not 'cause I have a bad time, but just because it feels like welcoming in a new year should be more fun than it is. Then, there's sortof the pressure of setting the tone for the new year and then it all seems very fraught. This year, I was pretty mellow. Perhaps I have set my expectations at the right level, because I didn't do anything amazing and I wasn't disappointed either. Actually, I was pretty entertained.

We went to the first ever Sacramento ball drop.  It was so fitting and Sacramentan. It wasn't an actual ball, it was a cluster of LED lights. It wasn't on a tall building, it was on a second story. It didn't drop or anything, it just turned off after midnight. For some reason, this delights me. I love Sacramento very much, but there is no denying that it is a second-tier city with some potential. And this was just such a cheesy second-tier ball drop. So, you know. We went to go see the first ever Sacramento New Years Turning Off the LED Lights.

What surprised me a fair amount was mingling with the crowd. I live in the older, hipster part of town, so I forget. Sacramento is pretty ghetto. Lots of different types of people who aspire to be thugs, se Asian-Am, black, latino, and in a special callback to our Central Valley heritage, methed-out white trash. Lot of short skirts and big puffy jackets and harsh blond hair. Oh yeah. Now I remember. Just because I hang out with doe-eyed Millennials who ride bikes everywhere doesn't mean that's most of who lives in my city.

I was oddly reassured as I surveyed the crowd. Yes, it isn't just me. I am not crazy and I am not making up this effect. There were no other little pockets of people like us, with the same Stuff White People Like sensibilities. When I wonder why I'm not meeting men, my question is answered by looking at that crowd. Yes it is half men, but they are Not Like Us and I am not remotely like the women they are looking for. I suppose that should worry me and send me back to Oakland, where men wear homeknit scarves on BART, but I no longer have the heart or energy to hope I'll meet a guy. Instead, I am just relieved. People give advice about eye contact and chatting up men and being out in public and always ready to meet a good man, and this makes me think I've gone crazy. What men (of my age and social class)? It isn’t that I'm shy or unwilling. I'd hit on someone if I liked the looks of him. But I literally never see likely men in bars or cafes. The crowd at New Years reassured me that I am right. I don't meet men because lots of the men around here are thugged out ethnic types, some are suburban conspicuous consumption types, and I already played Ultimate with the rest of them.

Appropriately, the excitement of the evening was not when the LED lights up on the second story turned off. The excitement was the fight between two groups of women right next to us. Four or five white women fighting with three or four black women, and I have no idea what started it. I found out that I do not have an instinctive urge to action, like my friend Roxie does. But I can move if I remind myself that I do not need a grant of authority. There is only doing. So after the big guy separated the two standing raging women, I pried two white women off the black woman on the ground and helped her stand. Her face was pouring blood. I didn’t do anything effective or anything and after we stood there for a few seconds she asked, low and collected and exasperated, "Did I just get jumped?" Dunno, lady, but looking at you, I'd say so. The awful part was that the black family had a little girl with them, ten or eleven and sobbing in terror. That part was bad. They grabbed hands and left fast, missing the first annual Sacramento ball drop. Well, LED Lights Turning Off. I bet that's not the part of the evening they regret.

What A Marvelous Difference We Have

Hi friend.  I'm rushed, but I'm struck by how different we've grown to be, and how this one difference, this sense of identity with respect to other people, strangers, ripples in our lives.  Do we care what other people think of us? 

I think you're lying, and if I weren't rushed I would say it more gently.  Please imagine all the loving admiration in my voice.  I know you care DEEPLY about what other people think of you: you don't complain, you take care not to be boring, you track the needs of other people and how to keep them happy and content with the intensity and excellence of that big brain of yours.  You notice moods and you worry about hurting or giving offense.  You care A LOT about what some people think of you, more than me, I'm sure.  In your small and intimate circle I don't think I know anyone as sensitive to others as you.  I accept that there are worlds of people about whom you don't care, but even there, too, we have a small tug of war going.  It is stupid for people who don't know you to judge you by your clothing, but we're both smart enough to know they will and we are also both smart enough to know that persuasion and public support have meaning in our little worlds, so I believe you should win that game.

As for me, I'm not so concerned about the moods of my friends -- I don't take that on.  But I like to win over strangers: not for sport, although that was once true, and I'm ashamed of that phase.  Now I do it to help, if I can.  It's my job to learn more about other people and to teach them what they need to do to be happily and fully expressed at work.  I need to mind-read and persuade and influence and inspire, so I'm really focused on how that happens, and I love the study of it.  It's part of what I read about so hungrily.    

For all this focus on other people and what they think, I think I've left behind my vulnerability to judgment.  I am loved enough in my private life; I'm happy with who I am.  Facebook and its long lost faces reminds me not of people who were mean, but of a time when I was vulnerable, when I looked to certain specific people and hoped desperately that I measured up.  I don't think I do that any more, but those faces remind me of that sad time and it's not a completely cheerful reunion with those long lost friends.  I am sad for the part of me that didn't know how to be easy. 

Life is long and gentle and we get to choose our way.

I was terribly ostracized in sixth grade, completely isolated. I took the whole thing fairly stoically. I read a lot and stopped trying to make eye contact or exchange words with anyone. Some kids were mean. Most just ignored me. Several months after we graduated, one of the moms, I think it was Ms. Kahane, saw me at the park. Her son had been popular. She recognized me and said hi, and somehow got around to asking me if I missed sixth grade and everyone I'd gone to elementary school with for years. If I remember right, I told her “No. It was horrible and everyone was mean to me. I don’t miss anything about it.”* (I didn't tell her that her son had been a full participant in my shunning.) So yeah. I do understand not wanting to go back. Back wasn’t all good.

See, now, this story and your post make me want to go in two different directions.

Let's try the first direction:

The stuff you say, where you worry about people's perception of you. I don’t get that. This stuff:

“a sense that who I really was inside was uncool and unambitious and unworthy according to the rules of the [law school] world”

“My ambivalence about this question is now officially Odd.”

I really don’t understand that worry. I think it was burned out of me in sixth grade. I do not give a fuck what people think of me. I don't care on the downside and I don't care on the upside. I don't care. It wouldn't occur to me to wonder what people in my class in law school thought of my goals. They aren't me, so I don't care. If they went as far as telling me that my goals are wrong, I would care enough to tell them to suck me. But I would never actually entertain doubt based on that. Other people having opinions about my preferences for having children?** Shockingly irrelevant. The names of distant stars are more important to me. I don't care. They aren't me and their lives aren’t changed by my choices in having children. It is unlikely that I'd notice, but if it got through to me, I'd forget it by the time I wondered whether we have enough arugula in the garden for a salad tonight. I just don't care.

This shows up other ways. I don't care what clothing I wear because I don't care what impression I make because I don't care what strangers think. I have finally honed my wardrobe into entirely bland, but that's out of an intellectual decision, not because I care in my heart. I also don't notice praise. It never sinks in. I'm stunned when I realize that people have been paying attention to me and pay heed in meetings, because I didn't care enough to notice that was building. It made me a resilient blogger, because I laughed when people hated me and I ignored when people fawned on me. I don’t care about either. (I hated when my message got twisted. I care a lot about information transfer. But I don't care about strangers' opinion of me. (This fades some at the extreme ends and I do care what friends think of me. But it holds for most of the middle ground of blogging.)) I think this blind spot, held deep and strong, came from giving up in sixth grade. I knew everyone's opinion of me and it sucked. It wasn't going to get better, so my only option was to stop caring.

From this perspective, your awareness of other people's opinions seems like a big burden. You spend bandwidth and energy on it? It adds a constraint to your decisionmaking? That looks tiring. Is there a way to take that load off you? My opinion of you and whatever you choose is that it is brilliant and perfect. If you must consider an outside opinion, couldn't you just use that one? I wish you could just not care, but the only way I know to achieve that is a year of ostracism, That trade-off isn't worth it.

Now, back to the fork in the road and the other direction:

Strangely, for all that I don't want to re-connect with my past or join Facebook, I really do track the persons from my life as closely as public internet allows. I google old classmates every few months. I keep track if I can. I like getting news about marriages and babies. I have to say, I also like that Facebook and Twitter are taking some of that function away from blogging. I think people want very much to say how they're feeling in the moment and I think they want to relay their news. But that was never my favorite part of blogs. I've always liked blogs that add synthesis and tell truths that take more work to express. I like the blog access to arcane expertise.

We talked about what we wanted this blog to be, and one of the things we discussed was valuing the blog form of media. It is too easy for me to dismiss the essays I put up, the ones that show a small piece of what I know about how we move water. Whatever. It is just a blog post, without good citations or an institution backing it. But the aggregate of those posts is a body of work. It happens to be a format I'm good at, and I haven't taken to another as readily. So maybe instead of thinking that I'm not good at reporting or writing academic articles or whatever it is that blogs aren't quite as good as, I should instead value what a blog is and does.

One of those things is the longer stories and insights that you write so beautifully. I'm happy if we keep writing those here, on whatever schedule suits our urge to write. I think we're both over our first blogs and that greedy need for numbers. We can wait between posts until something moves you or me to tell a longer story, lingering in the details. I'm writing at the policy blog now, but I remember how I liked to go back and forth between policy and personal on my old blog. The pendulum will always swing and I will always want to write the other again. Perhaps from time to time, Tweeting will feel inadequate for the thoughts coalescing in your mind and you'll look around for a pink and red blog to write on. Perhaps I'll just want a place that I imagine is warmer and cozier and just friends talking about the worlds they love.

But really, this is up to us. Even more really, I'm not trying to win the blogs any more. There is no external prize, so we should do this in exactly the manner that makes it a gift. If it is a burden, we should stop.

Really. The East Coast is weird.

This is heavy on the generalizations, and I don't like talk about 'how the kids are', and it matches none of my experience in three excellent universities.  But perhaps a discussion about how Ivy League educations make their students narrow would interest you, Sherry.

Via Ezra.

OIL ON THE FIRE, BABY!

You thought I might use a soothing voice?  Me, the one who writes off whole classes of people based on three bad encounters?  You do see only the best in me.

Back when I wrote those posts, I'd always get comments (and emails) telling me that broad generalizations about whole classes of people make the baby Jesus cry and there is always a counterexample and besides their feelings are hurt.  I never understood those comments.  Dude, I don't come to these generalizations easily and I work pretty hard to mean what I write.  If you don't agree, don't go trying to change my mind.  Revise your opinion of me down and MOVE ALONG.  Move along without a Big Drama Announcement.  My blog will be fine without you, TV reporter.  So I don't object on those grounds of tarring the good and bad alike.  Whatever.  I write in the qualifications I mean and I believe in judicious application of condemnation. I also believe that you're accurately reporting what you've seen and that you give people some initial benefit of the doubt.  So I don't doubt that you're describing real professor behavior.

On my own, I don't think I'd have picked a fight with professors, who are some substantial subsection of our readers and write interesting popular blogs and are some of my good friends and, um, my mom*.  But if you're in a fight, I'm in a fight!  If I'm in a fight, I can't say I approve of this backing away from an initial strong assertion with detail but not enough cursing, and qualifying things so that people know whether you are talking about them, and requests for enlightenment and appreciation for other points of view.  When I'm in a fight, I like to scorch the earth in front of me and burn the bridges behind me!  So let's do this thing!  Back to your original question:  are professors really small-minded, mean, pigfucking assholes?