GirlTip: learn to walk in dress shoes.

This is apropos of a situation I’ve been dealing with on an ongoing basis for quite a while.

Women, please learn to walk in dress shoes.

There is little that signifies an off-putting lack of femininity more than a woman’s clomping around in dress shoes, each step a thunderous thud that shakes the earth as her body bobs up and down, pitched forward at the waist to keep balance.  When a woman walks in heels (and, for that matter, in general), she should not bring to mind a hiker with an imaginary backpack trudging up a trail, or a floppy rag doll filled with sand.

Whether the heel is one or four inches, the back should be straight, the shoulders back, and the steps light.  The neck through the waist should be as one, sustained in the core, never breaking, like a pillar balanced over the hips.  Arms should swing naturally at the side.  Movement from Point A to Point B should resemble a smoothly flowing stream, not a piston chugging in a factory.

An awkward, galumphing walk can undo all of the good of:

• a pretty dress
• a manicure
• perfectly styled hair
• pristine makeup
• a good personality

Okay, maybe not all of the good, but it will severely weaken the effect of all of the above, assuming you have any of those to begin with.  (If you have none or few of the above, you will ensure with a poor walk that no men will approach you with any romantic interest, and you will also damage your standing in a career setting.  No one will send someone who walks like Sasquatch to charm the clients.)

If you have a bad walk, practice until you have a better one.  YouTube has a bunch of tutorials on how to walk in heels.  I would also suggest trying ballet, yoga, or pilates:  these will help you develop the kind of carriage that is more conducive to walking in heels.

Virtue alone is not enough.

One of the dirty little secrets that no one tells you growing up in church is that virtue alone is not enough to attract a mate.  Keeping your pants on, never telling lies, and praying and reading the Bible are all fine and good and important, but if this is all you bring to the table, it’s going to be very difficult to interest someone.  This is because nobody wants to be with someone who is bland.

But – you sputter – how can virtue be bland?  It’s VIRTUE.  It’s what we should aspire to!  God calls us to be virtuous!

Yes, but…how can I put it?  A perfectly serviceable couch is more appealing to a buyer if it’s presented in a showroom that complements and enhances it, as opposed to, say, sitting on the side of the street.  In other words, in the moments when you’re not telling lies and not having sex and not reading the Bible or praying, you still need to be interesting and socially adept.  A man who refuses to tell lies and can also tell interesting stories and play the guitar is going to be more interesting and attractive than a man who refuses to tell lies and rarely engages with other people and has no particular interests.

Additionally, I think there is also a tendency for the bland virtuous to start becoming resentful of others for not being attracted to virtue.  This undoes all of the good of being virtuous in the first place…and suggests that maybe you’re not as virtuous as you think you are, if you’re going to get all bent out of shape at others for not prizing your virtue.

In short:  if the main good character trait you can use to describe yourself is “I’m a virgin!” (or “at least I don’t do X and Y like everybody else”), you’re probably not going to get too far with the opposite sex.

Eat lots of pasta, Pray…sort of, Love yourself more than anyone else in the world.

On Sunday night two of my friends wanted to see Eat Pray Love, the new Julia Roberts movie based on the memoir of the same name by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Having glanced through the book at Borders a while back and therefore knowing what the movie would be about, plus not being a terribly big Julia fan, I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it.  However, I played the good sport and went with them.

Here is a good logline for the film:

After divorcing her husband because he doesn’t fulfill all of her wildest dreams and make her feel “alive” every minute of the day, a selfish, self-centered woman embarks on a fling with a younger actor and when he doesn’t fulfill all of her wildest dreams either, she takes a year to stuff her face with pasta in Italy for four months, then try to meditate in India for four months, then study with a guru in Bali, where she meets a swarthy Brazilian divorcé and falls in love and doesn’t spend all that much time with the guru anymore because she’s too busy having sex.

From a production standpoint, the film is very nice to look at.  The locations are real and lovingly photographed.  The movie also contains a lot of witty one-liners, thanks to co-writer/director Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee and Nip/Tuck.  And props to the cinematographer, hair, makeup, and wardrobe peeps for keeping Julia Roberts perfectly groomed and dressed throughout.  Sure, she looked way too glamorous to be believable in the settings her character was in, but that’s Hollywood for ya.  (Even more Hollywood for ya:  the amusing casting of the men in the movie.  The guy who played the supposed schlub loser husband:  Billy Crudup.  The guy who played the young, hot, loser actor:  James Franco.  So who do they get to play Liz’s one true love, since clearly we’re not supposed to believe either of Crudup or Franco is man enough for Liz?  Javier Bardem, one of the few actors today who can portray dangerous masculinity.)

For all the beauty of the movie, though, and all of the exhortations for us to believe that we’re watching Liz’s journey of awakening and self-discovery blah blah blah, I didn’t feel that the film was ever able to convince us (or at least me) that Liz did the right thing in ditching her husband and traveling around the world in search of ~feelings.  There is a brief scene in the movie where Liz and her lawyer meet with Crudup’s character.  He has decided to represent himself, because he believes that Liz is going through a phase and that she’ll eventually come to her senses and come back to him.  Liz tells him they are incompatible.  (Later in the movie she tells others that they got married too young and grew apart…which could possibly be believable, except that Julia Roberts is 42 and the characters were married for only 8 years.)  Crudup doesn’t believe it.  He loves her.  They took vows for life.  Exasperated that he’s not just rolling over and taking it, Liz tells him that he needs to choose a direction for his life.  Apparently he killed all the tingles by dabbling too much and not committing to a life path that made buko bucks.  Crudup cries, with all of the pain of a man whose love has been rejected, “YOU!  I choose YOU!”  To which Liz has nothing to say, because she knows she is doing a monstrous thing and wants desperately not to feel guilty about it.

That’s really what the movie boils down to:  Liz’s journey to find people to entertain her so she won’t have to do any work in a relationship.  She makes friends in Italy, but their relationships seem to be about constant eating and entertainment.  In India she is very bad at meditating, yet she finds a cantankerous (sexually unattractive) older man to hang around with who negs her all the time.  In Bali she is supposed to study with a guru, but then she meets a Brazilian who won’t leave her alone.  I think we’re supposed to believe that he opens her up to love again, but it just comes off as her finding someone who makes her feel a certain way and whom she doesn’t have to do anything for in return.  The really strange thing about this movie is that I thought the men were written and portrayed with deep, real honesty, while Liz was the selfish delusionoid.

The timeless appeal of the reformed rake.

The various talk on this blog about the appeal of reformed rakes got me thinking about a chapter in one of my favorite books of all time, Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery.  Anne of the Island is the third book in the “Anne of Green Gables” series and covers Anne’s college years.  As the most romance-oriented of the novels, it has a lot of interesting observations on the mating dance – principally Anne’s friendship with Gilbert (midway through the novel, she rejects his proposal and they spend two years estranged while they date other people, until – of course – Gilbert contracts a life-threatening illness that forces Anne to acknowledge her true feelings for him), but also the courtship of Anne’s best friend Diana with local farmboy Fred, and Anne’s beautiful and wealthy college roommate Philippa with a poor, ugly theology student, among other stories.

Anyhow, the chapter I am referring to is called “Averil’s Atonement” and is a recounting of Anne’s attempt to write a story for publication.  Anne, who has always been a whimsical dreamer, wants to write a sweeping romance and become a famous author.  Her heroine is a strong-willed young lady named Averil.  The hero is named Perceval Dalrymple.  Need I say more?

Anne spends a few weeks slaving over the story and finally reads it to Diana.  But instead of being enthralled, Diana seems disappointed.

“Why did you kill MAURICE LENNOX?” she asked reproachfully.

“He was the villain,” protested Anne. “He had to be punished.”

“I like him best of them all,” said unreasonable Diana.

“Well, he’s dead, and he’ll have to stay dead,” said Anne, rather resentfully. “If I had let him live he’d have gone on persecuting AVERIL and PERCEVAL.”

“Yes — unless you had reformed him.”

“That wouldn’t have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too long.”

“Well, anyway, it’s a perfectly elegant story, Anne, and will make you famous, of that I’m sure. Have you got a title for it?”

For the record, Anne of the Island was published in 1915, and the timeframe within the book is probably late 1800s.  Reformed rakes never go out of style – because they have always been in style.  (Also note that Diana dutifully tells Anne what she wants to hear in order to preserve the friendship – even though Anne’s story went against what Diana saw as reality.)

The chapter continues with Anne showing her story to her neighbor, the blunt Mr. Harrison.  Mr. Harrison, being a man, doesn’t mince any words and tells her the dialogue is too flowery and the setting unrealistic.  Says he:

“But your folks ain’t like real folks anywhere. They talk too much and use too high-flown language. There’s one place where that DALRYMPLE chap talks even on for two pages, and never lets the girl get a word in edgewise. If he’d done that in real life she’d have pitched him.”

Unless he was a Boundless blogger!

Anne, of course, disagrees:

“I don’t believe it,” said Anne flatly. In her secret soul she thought that the beautiful, poetical things said to AVERIL would win any girl’s heart completely. Besides, it was gruesome to hear of AVERIL, the stately, queen-like AVERIL, “pitching” any one. AVERIL “declined her suitors.”

Mr. Harrison then adds the worst insult:  he agrees with Diana about Maurice Lennox!

“Anyhow,” resumed the merciless Mr. Harrison, “I don’t see why MAURICE LENNOX didn’t get her. He was twice the man the other is. He did bad things, but he did them. Perceval hadn’t time for anything but mooning.”

“Mooning.” That was even worse than “pitching!”

“MAURICE LENNOX was the villain,” said Anne indignantly. “I don’t see why every one likes him better than PERCEVAL.”

“Perceval is too good. He’s aggravating. Next time you write about a hero put a little spice of human nature in him.”

“AVERIL couldn’t have married MAURICE. He was bad.”

“She’d have reformed him. You can reform a man; you can’t reform a jelly-fish, of course. Your story isn’t bad — it’s kind of interesting, I’ll admit. But you’re too young to write a story that would be worth while. Wait ten years.”

Mr. Harrison isn’t really advocating for criminality or acting like a jerk; he’s advocating for the hero showing some alpha characteristics.  Anne wrote a story about a placid beta and got nowhere with two disparate audiences.  Of course, what Mr. Harrison says about the possibility of reforming a rake is questionable advice, at least according to certain definitions of alpha….

(The dénouement to this story occurs three chapters later, when Anne receives a check for $25 in the mail from the Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Co., with a congratulatory letter saying that “Averil’s Atonement” will be published in several prominent newspapers and in pamphlet form for Rollings Reliable patrons.  Anne is confused and then horrified when Diana reveals that she secretly submitted the story – with one small addition:

“You know the scene where Averil makes the cake? Well, I just stated that she used the Rollings Reliable in it, and that was why it turned out so well; and then, in the last paragraph, where PERCEVAL clasps AVERIL in his arms and says, `Sweetheart, the beautiful coming years will bring us the fulfilment of our home of dreams,’ I added, `in which we will never use any baking powder except Rollings Reliable.'”

)

You get what you pay for.

The dating advice thread strikes again.

Situation: Woman (I’m assuming late 20s-mid 30s; let’s call her Emmy) dates man for two years, during which time she regularly, loudly, proclaims to all who will listen that she deserves better than what he is giving her.

She breaks up with him.

But apparently is allowing him to live at her place while his apartment is being renovated.

He tells her that she deserves better than what he could give her.

She is privately devastated to hear this, and writes that hearing it was no vindication, that she felt no euphoria, pride, or triumph.  Instead, she felt only sadness as she asked herself repeatedly why she had spent two years in the relationship.

I think Emmy’s original problem was that she dated a downtrodden beta so she could have a relationship but, after the initial “I have a boyfriend!” euphoria wore off, never felt that he was higher value than she was.  Believing a man to be higher value than her probably would have offended her feminist principles.  (I am assuming she is a feminist because the majority of posters on the board are college-educated, non-religious, politically liberal women.)  Anyhow, she figuratively emasculated him to all who would listen, probably thinking herself clever, and then, after destroying the remaining dregs of attraction she had for him, finally broke it off.

But being a woman, her hindbrain (as Roissy might say) is not allowing her to make a clean, emotion-free break like an alpha male.  Instead, she is upset that he wouldn’t alpha up in the face of her colossal shit test of putting him down publicly, and is trying to give him a final chance to assert himself by allowing him to live with her for as flimsy a reason as his apartment being renovated.  (Seriously, does the man have no other friends?!  Women, never date men with no friends.)  When he parroted back to her the exact things she said to him during their dating relationship, she felt overwhelming despair because she realized she had allowed herself to have sex with an unfit man for two years.  Yet she can’t at all see what role she played in the demise of their relationship.

A smattering of advice from the regulars:

• Aww.  Let’s hang out and drink until you forget him.
• Sometimes you wish you had the chutzpah to shout that you could do better than his tiny penis.
• You’re the better person for allowing him to stay with you.
• Don’t worry, everyone has made this mistake.

Really, just where have all the good men gone?

The reason that men need to be strong with women is because women cannot be strong with other women.  A woman is socially obligated to tell her friend whatever it is the friend wants to hear, even if it completely contradicts reality.  A woman who goes around telling unwanted truths to her female friends will probably not remain friends with those women for long.  So, men, if you want better women, you need to be a better man first.  If you take control, women will follow.  Maybe not every woman, but a lot will.  If you tell a woman the truth, she will take it to heart if she has any respect for you at all, even if she throws a fit.

I once knew a young guy who was from a very small, very conservative town.  He was the type who had sisters with rarely-cut, long, wavy hair whose idea of nice clothes were long, cotton-knit dresses with tiny flowers on them.  His upbringing was so conservative that he had been taught to stand up whenever a woman entered the room.  It was only when he came to the “big city” (population 100,000) to go to school that he discovered that this was the kind of behavior that made people stare in a bad way.  So he stopped doing it, which he semi-regretted.  One day he mentioned that he constantly had women throwing themselves at him – young, old, it didn’t matter.  They would actually tell him how attractive they found him and how much they wanted to date him.  Looking back, I can now see that this all stemmed from his impeccable masculine frame.  It’s rare to meet a man with that kind of frame, much less a very young one.  He wasn’t built.  He wasn’t particularly good-looking.  He wasn’t a snazzy dresser.  But he was so sure of himself in a quietly powerful way that women were falling at his feet.

This young guy was also a Christian, so he wasn’t having sex.  Strictly comparing him to the ex-boyfriend from the dating advice thread, he comes out inferior on paper, sex-wise.  After all, the ex-boyfriend not only got to have sex with Emmy for two years, he has now been able to convince her to house him for an indefinite length of time, and I am quite certain that if he wanted to resume having sex with Emmy, he could make it happen.  He’s about one wine bottle and a candle away from boom shaka-laka time.  But he really isn’t the more successful man, is he?

P.S.  I am not trying to say that women are not responsible for the choices they make.  Emmy got exactly what she paid for out of the relationship.  But because women are uniquely programmed to follow strong men, it behooves good men to take the lead and guide women into making good choices they might not have made on their own.

The perfect storm (stealth date follow-up).

In my last post, I discussed a Boundless post by Tom Neven about his daughter Hannah, who had gone on a stealth date with a male friend who she knew was interested in her.  Naturally, the readers, good Christians that they are, piled on in the comments on everyone involved — so much so that Hannah felt compelled to write a defense of herself.  Oh, Hannah.  This is something that I would never recommend doing except in a case of libel where it is imperative to your legal or job security that you right the record.  First of all, nothing on the internet is as important as people on the internet think it is.  It’s very easy to get into an internet echo chamber where every voice has an exponential effect on the noise, and before you know it, you’re swimming in the din over something as trivial as which objectively attractive actress is a 9 and which is a 10.  Second, who cares?!  Why get ruffled over what a bunch of keyboard critics whom you’ll never meet think of you, your beta boy, your dad, your approach to dating, or anything else?  Nine times out of ten, a person who takes to the internet to defend his or her opinion is only going to dig the hole deeper and give opponents more grist for the mill.  Let your opinion speak for itself.  If other people don’t like it, they can fight about it amongst themselves while you go out and do something constructive with your time.  Besides, most people are bad at putting out their own fires, hence the existence of the PR industry.

What Hannah wrote is not all that interesting, anyway.  Anyone with a clue about college-age church girls could have written a nearly identical blast (“blah blah blah, I am not shallow or vain, we don’t have any chemistry, why is everyone hating on me? I’m innocent and he needs to man up!”).  What is actually interesting is the variety of opinions expressed in the comments.  Boundless is only occasionally useful for advice, but it is eminently useful for taking the temperature of young evangelical thought.  Here is a smattering of “advice” from the Boundless commentariat (my paraphrases):

• The reason you don’t feel any sparks is because you didn’t start praying about it the minute he started giving you attention!  Elisabeth Elliot prayed when her third husband first started paying attention to her.
• You’re just an alpha chaser who is going to get her heart broken!
• OMG Hannah ur so wise and it was so totally not a date! U GO GURL!!11!
• Tom Neven, you’re a bad dad who humiliated poor Beta!
• Women should never initiate a DTR until they are asked out!
• We need to be more like Jesus!
• I am GRIEVED that I hurt you with my comments!  I am so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry!
• Women shouldn’t turn down any dates because they will get a reputation for saying no and then no one will ask them out!
• Don’t give up on chemistry, Hannah!  My own personal experience proves that chemistry is important!
• Hannah, I know you are a woman of substance because I have gone through the same circumstance!
• Hannah has the right to date only men with whom she feels chemistry!
• Men need to stop bringing their hurtful baggage to these discussions so things can stop being so tense around here!
• OMG WHY IS EVERYONE SO MEAN HERE? JESUS WOULD NOT APPROVE.

Sometimes when I read comments like these, I wonder if there is any hope for harmony between the sexes in Churchland.  I suppose the most salient point is that Betas now have even more motivation to “man up,” because of the fear that their target’s dad might take to a widely read blog to advertise their beta-ness.

Possibly the worst comment of all, more for its substance than its attitude, was that of a young woman who had dated a man for an entire year while not being at all physically attracted to him.  She writes:

A few years ago I had my first boyfriend whom I dated for about a little over a year. He was a great Christian guy, a true gentleman, always paid for me, and even remembered the exact calendar day of when we first started talking and our first date. The problem: I wasn’t physically attracted to him. We held hands once but I never wanted to do it again. I never let him kiss me either. Sure, he would have made a great husband and if I never broke it up, we would probably be planning our wedding right now.  The point is that I believe attraction and spark should be among one of the top priorities in a potential spouse. [AH:  my emphasis in bold]

OH MY GOODNESS.  I CAN’T EVEN WRAP MY HEAD AROUND THIS.  IS SHE A ROBOT?!?!?!  (…IS HE A ROBOT?!?!?!)

The stealth date and the tease.

stealth date: when a male friend asks a female friend for a one-on-one outing, during which he tries to exert date-like behavior such as paying for the food/activity, going somewhere non-casual, or making exceptional plans for the outing, all the while never specifying that he wants it to be a date.

Over at Boundless in an article entitled “Help, I’m on a Date and I Can’t Get Out!”, blogger Tom Neven writes that his teenage daughter Hannah recently went on a stealth date with a beta male friend.  Hannah and beta male friend were talking about getting frozen yogurt, which turned into a trip to get said frozen yogurt.  Neven says that Hannah had a paralyzing moment of indecision as she ordered, suddenly realizing that she might be on a stealth date.  Which she was, as Beta Male Friend offered to pay for her as “his treat” before Hannah could pull out her wallet.  Neven writes with fatherly amusement that Hannah now faces the “not-fun task of letting him down — easily.”  Poor beta male.  He played it safe, and now it’s going to blow up in his face.  At least he will have the memory of one blissful afternoon of paying for Hannah’s Fro-Yo to sustain him during the inevitable darkness.

Normally I would put 99% of the blame on Beta Male Friend for not making his intentions clear at the outset, but Neven, after telling this story, then blithely reveals that Hannah knew that Beta Male Friend had a crush on her.  This changes EVERYTHING.

Ladies, do NOT go on one-on-one outings with male friends who you know have crushes on you.  This is usually called “leading him on” or “being a tease.”

I will cut Hannah some slack because she is a teenager and therefore probably doesn’t know better, but did she really think that she could go out one-on-one with a male friend who had already expressed interest in her, and not give him hope or the wrong impression?  It’s clear from Neven’s post that Hannah had not previously made it clear to Beta Male that she had no romantic interest in him.  She knew, yet continued to buddy around with him and voluntarily went somewhere alone with him and allowed him to pay for her.  What do you think was going through Beta Male’s head?  Yay, I love being platonic friends!  She will so appreciate my paying for her!  Tonight I will finish reading Wild at Heart and tomorrow I will think of doing something manly that will actually make her like me! Hardly.

But even if Hannah HAD said “No, there are 500 guys in line ahead of you that I’d rather date/marry/have sex with,” she still went out with this guy on an outing that had every appearance of a date, all the while knowing that he was romantically interested in her.  How is that not textbook teasing (albeit of the chaste, church teen variety)?

Yet Neven does not even acknowledge this.  Instead, he treats the situation as a rite of passage, an unavoidable bump on the road to maturity, and commiserates with guys who have had the LJBF talk.  Nowhere does Hannah receive any blame for what happened.  In Neven’s mind, this whole ordeal appears to be just a little adolescent misunderstanding, tee hee.

But this just demonstrates how deeply embedded secular dating values and feminism have become in the church.  On the one hand, we have a poor little beta male who can’t muster the courage to ask a girl out directly.  And on the other, we have a girl who leads on her interested male friend with nary a reprimand from her Christian father.  And people think that what churches need are a hip worship band and more social outreach projects.

Field Report: Clapping on Command edition.

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to attend a taping of the upcoming syndicated version of Don’t Forget the Lyrics.  It was an all-day affair during which we powered through eight shows, three of which featured cheerleaders from professional sports teams (none of whom should quit her day job…ugh, my ears) and one a celebrity singer.  In between shows, the ADs would shuffle around the audience so it wouldn’t look like the exact same people were there for an entire week of tapings (and wearing the exact same outfits).  That’s the magic of television right there.

If you are a sociable person, tapings are a good opportunity to meet new people.  There is usually a good amount of down time, and since nobody usually knows anybody else, people tend to be more open to talking to strangers than otherwise if you just act friendly.  I hadn’t brought any books or magazines with me, either, so talking to other people was about the only way to save myself from downtime boredom.

In the morning, while we were lined up waiting to have our attendance taken and go through the gate, I ended up standing near two young guys who were hired audience.  They were both tall and pretty well-built in a standard-for-an-aspiring-actor sort of way.  One was a little more attractive than the other and gave off the impression that he was aware of his genetic blessing.  I tried to strike up some conversation with them, starting off with some little quips about waiting in line, but neither guy really bit.  The better-looking guy actually seemed a little irritated.  Fine, dude, sorry I’m not a 10 and you’re as interesting as a stick in the mud.  So much for that.

The rest of the morning was pretty non-descript.  I sat between various teenage girls for the tapings and conserved my energy.

After lunch was when things started to get interesting again.  I was seated next to a young white guy, tall, pleasantly average-looking, on one side and a stocky, pleasant, early 20s-ish Latino guy on the other side.  I found out from Latin Luis that he was with the group of volleyball players that was at the taping.  I was able to make him smile, like when I asked if he was a volleyball groupie, but he was shy and only spoke to me when I directly addressed him.  Definitely one of those guys who has a daily word limit of around 1000 words, so pressing any sort of conversation would have been fruitless.

The young white guy, on the other hand, warmed up to me almost instantly.  I found out that he was a dancer who had been forced into ballet at age 11 by his mother but ended up loving it — and the perk of being the only straight guy in a classroom of girls.  In between the taping portions, we chatted about dancing and music, and the conversation flowed easily.  I tried to convince him to dance battle a black guy who was shakin’ it on the other side of the room, but he refused.  During the tapings, he clapped overly enthusiastically and would glance at me to make sure I saw that he was showing off being silly; I obliged him by elbowing him.  More than once I noticed that as we were sitting next to each other, his upper arm was pressed against mine.

Halfway through the afternoon, Dancer and I moved to a different row, still sitting next to each other, but on my other side was now a large stocky blond with glasses who was working as paid audience and wasn’t very happy about it.  He clapped tepidly and, when I encouraged him to do his job because it was his JOB be more enthusiastic, he complained that his hands hurt.  Herby-looking guy (yes, he was wearing Voldemort’s dreaded khakis) who whines?  I’m not sure he could have done more to DLV himself, but he couldn’t even be properly bitter, so I resigned him to the “mildly amusing” category.

When the taping was over, Dancer asked me and Blondie if he could catch a ride home with one of us.  It was already fairly late, so while I was mulling over the possibility of whether or not I wanted to take a detour to Hollywood, Blondie jumped and said he would take Dancer home.  I then remembered that I had parked in the neighborhood and wasn’t interested in walking back to my car by myself, so I asked if Dancer wouldn’t mind coming with me instead.  Blondie scoffed that the neighborhood wasn’t that bad, but after realizing that his car wasn’t parked too far from mine, decided with Dancer that they would both walk with me.

As we walked back to where I had parked, Blondie and Dancer got on the subject of dinosaurs and immediately began cracking increasingly more herby jokes about dinosaurs.  I walked ahead of them, at this point just wanting to get to the car and regretting that I had even asked for accompaniment.

At my car, Dancer said good-bye, and I gave him a half-second to ask for my number, but all he said was the generic “see you around” line.

At least it was late enough that there wasn’t too much traffic on the way home (by Los Angeles standards, anyway).

Young beta in love uses Facebook to speed the demise of his 2-week relationship.

I’m sure this is not an unusual occurrence, but for the love of Pete, people need to count to five hundred twenty before they post anything to Facebook.

I was skimming one of my regular message board haunts today and came across a thread entitled “Aw, young love.”  Thinking it was going to be about, say, someone’s junior high daughter having a crush on the most Justin Bieber-y boy in her class, I clicked.  What followed was this:

This guy I know who is about 21 and never had a real relationship just got a girlfriend. They have been dating two weeks and have already announced that they are engaged and both of their facebooks every day are full of grand sweeping poetic love declarations. The engagement isn’t a “real” one yet (like with a ring or date or real plans to move forward) but rather a “declaration of love and dedication to the emotions we feel in our hearts”

It is soooooooooooooooooo cute. I hope they survive the inevitable puppy love honeymoon stage crash. I don’t think people who have never been in a real relationship understand that not every day is going to be grand facebook declaration worthy

I’m not sure what is the worst part of this post to dissect first, because it is all bad.  The only thing that could make this story worse is if Beta in Love called up Delilah After Dark to dedicate “I’ll Be” by Edwin McCain or “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls to this girl.  Basically, men of all ages:  do not be this guy.  I’m sure Girlfriend is swimming in a sea of oxytocin at the moment and is therefore blind to this guy’s overwhwelming beta-ness, but eventually she is going to wake up and wonder who this drip is that she gave heart/soul/body parts to.  Also, an “engagement” with no real plans to move forward that is based on “the emotions we feel in our hearts” has approximately a 6-month expiration date, max.  I feel sorry for all the Facebook friends who will have to suffer through the inevitable crash.  Luckily for them, Facebook allows you to block people.