Parents just don’t understand

In response to Charles M. Blow’s The Demise of Dating article in The New York Times, Michael Smerconish wrote a response opinion article in the Philadelphia Daily News. 

Smerconish gives us another “adult” perspective on the hooking-up phenomenon.  Unlike (I’m assuming here) the writer of the Salon.com article and myself, Blow and Smerconish are married adults and have very little understanding of hooking up.  To them it truly is a phenomenon, whereas to everyone I know, it’s a given.  Should we just file it under Will Smith’s line that “Parents just don’t understand”?

But one thing that was interesting to me in this article was when he writes:

“Who can forget the nervousness of initiating a date? Planning what to do. Rehearsing your rap. Then anxiously dialing the telephone to make the bid.  The concern for making small talk if one of her parents answers. (I actually made notes diagramming the possible outcomes and my plan of attack.)

Although I am in college and my prospective suitors don’t need to worry about making small talk with my parents, the nervousness of asking someone on a date is still present and perhaps the biggest obstacle thrown in good ol’fashioned dating’s face.  Because what it boils down to, is what a boy once told me.  ”It’s not like you can just ask the pretty girl in Astromony out on a date with you.”  When told this story, my friend Jenny looked straight at me and said, “Uh, but yes… yes, you can.”

into the mind of a teenage boy

A search of The New York Times archives allowed me to stumble upon this article called Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter provided a really interesting insight into the thoughts running through the hormone driven mind of a teenage boy. Researchers at the State University of New York at Oswego surveyed 105 tenth grade boys to determine the various “reasons why they asked girls out, dated and pursued physical relationships.” The most interesting outcomes were that 80% of the boys said that the primary reason for dating was not that they were physically attracted to someone but rather because “they really liked the person.”

The article also went on to ask the boys who had been sexually active what their reasons were and the answers ranged from”physical desire and wanting to know what sex feels like were among the top three reasons they pursued sex.” But what was particularly interesting was that the boys were “equally likely to say that they pursued sex because they loved their partner.”

I think that looking at this survey and article is great in the context of this blog. We spend a lot of time thinking about the thoughts of women and the effect of hook ups on them, but this survey is an indication that boys are not on a one track mind to sex and that there are certainly layers of emotions that we’re overlooking on the side of boys.

Someone call the doctor, we’ve got a case of the love bipolar

So the song that I’ll be obsessed with this week is Katy Perry’s Hot ‘N Cold. This, of course, is from the same artist as this summer’s hit “I Kissed a Girl.” Aside from it being a great song to run to, I think it’s a really fun anthem for any girl/guy who is having a rough patch in a relationship.  However, I think that once you delve into the song, it seems less empowering than it does on the outside.

Below are some of the lyrics:

The Surrender By Toni Bentley

After picking a mish-mosh of books from the College library on anything relating to women, I decided to dive into Toni Bentley’s The Surrender: An Exotic Memoir first.

Mainly, because of the picture on the bookcover:

But the book only got better once I opened the cover.

How old you would have to be?

I asked a friend the other day how old they would have to be before signing up for an online dating service and she responded with an “Oh, God, I hope I never have to.” I mean, it seems pretty obvious that no one hopes that they have to resort to an online service to find their soul mate. I secretly hope to find the right one in some magical fairytale moment, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t always happen that way. The growing acceptance of online sites such as match.com and eharmony.com, joining one of these programs seems like an pretty good idea. From what I know about these websites, people don’t join just to casually date. The point is to find your “match.” So we could reasonably deduce that a person would join a site when they see no options on the horizon and feel that they should be in a relationship or somewhere on the road to marriage. So when does this point come for you?

i LOVE venn diagrams

via stumbleupon via accordian guy via reddit?

We’ve talked about how much I love graphs, so I was thrilled to find this!

it’s kind of reminiscent of this scene from How I Met My Mother

Economics of Love

Win Ben Stein's Money

A couple of days ago I came upon this article by Ben Stein in the NYT. Ben Stein, lovingly known to my generation for “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and his various movie roles, is known to my parents as a prominent American lawyer and former speech writer for President Nixon. What really caught my eye about this article was that it involves two of my favorite things: love and economics. Strange, you may say, but it makes sense once you consider that I am an economics major who is obsessed with supply and demand curves and a product of Disney movies where young children were taught that true love was just a glass slipper away.

Stein poses a great opening sentence: “What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.” I thnk anyone you ask – from the Sunday morning girl on her walk of shame/no shame/glory home to the woman on eharmony.com to the newlywed bride – will agree to the scarcity of love.

So to sum up Stein’s points, he tells us:

might as well be a bullseye

My brother’s wedding is coming up on Saturday and that, in conjunction with a recent viewing of Wedding Crashers, made me think about the hook-up culture at weddings. As a pseudo-feminist, I know that I should reinforce the hook-up culture as a woman’s decision to liberate her sexuality and get what she wants without the commitment that she may not have time for or even want at all. But I can’t help but wonder about the other type of hook-up that we see in Wedding Crashers. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s character essential prey on vulnerable women at weddings.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

So there seem to be a lot of articles floating around about Richard Gere’s recent trouble with the law in India. It seems that at an AIDs awareness event, Gere was holding hands with and kissing the face of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. For his actions, effigies of Gere have been burned in India since showing affection and kissing in public is taboo in India. The situation has progressed so far that there’s even a warrant for Gere’s arrest in India since his actions “trangressed all limits of vulgarity.

Although Gere holding hands with Shetty is not the the point of today’s post,

the opposite

I guess in order to understand today’s hook-up culture, we also have to understand the monogamous relationships on the opposite spectrum of the one night stand hook up. On my college campus in particular, there is a good number of relationships that are pretty serious. While some couples may begin their relationship with a dinner and a movie, oftentimes it seems like the relationship stems from a friendship, hooking up, and then realizing the extent of their feelings for each other. Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of ways that relationships develop on this campus, but what I’m getting at is that as soon as they develop, they usually become very serious. What I’m really looking at is the phenomenon of the on-campus marriage. These are the couples that you can pick out in the dining hall having a leisurely lunch, doing work together in the media center, or walking home together after a Saturday night out.

Recent media puts a lot of focus on the hooking up culture (and clearly, I’m putting a lot of focus on it in this blog), but we rarely hear about this serious relationship culture.