Glass Slipper

I'm guessing the super-couple is a pretty staple thing in most high schools - that couple that seems so good together, and you know that they're going to get married, buy a house and have kids together. For me, it was Huey and Jamie. They would hang out a lot together after school and on weekends, I was told that they spent hours on the phone together, and while there was some drama every now and again, they were really stable. The first few years after we left high school, things sounded like they were going really well.

The wonders of Facebook mean that I get to find out whether they did have that happily ever after, and the answer is no. A post came up in my feed with her saying she is so happy to be with this other guy, and that's when I realised they had broken up. It was so shattering to me. This was Huey and Jamie of the "Huey & Jamie 4 eva". It seemed like nothing was going to break them apart. Hollywood lied to me. The girl gets the guy, but can she keep him for ever and ever? When he puts the glass slipper on her foot and tells her she's the one, does he really mean "the one.... for now"?

I'm a really neurotic person. The kind of person who worries about leaving the stove on, and if I did any ironing, I'd probably fret over the iron being on, too. One of the things that I constantly worry about is MrMan5.5's safety. Maybe he got hit by a car, mugged, or fell down into a hole with no phone reception, and nobody around to hear him. Then I get hit with this panicked feeling of what I'd do without him, and my brain just shuts down. Does not want to process. (I should probably see someone about this....)

In light of all the break-ups I see around me, and the fact that my co-workers fairly regularly complain about their wives, I can't help but wonder how long until MrMan5.5 sees the light and moves on. I was trying to help one of my friends get over his break-up, and said that sometimes people change, and they no longer have the feelings they had previously. He asked what the point was, if the person that you emotionally invest yourself in can just up and leave? I think maybe I waffled on about taking risks, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and that kind of rubbish, but I'm actually starting to think he has a point. I want to be the person that MrMan5.5 stays with for the rest of his life, but the person that he is now isn't the same person that he will be in 5 years.

Julian says that women get away with a lot, and that men are usually willing to put up with a lot of crap in order to have stable sex. I also know that it does become a problem for a lot of couples later in their marriage, as the wife usually loses the desire for sex. I have seen it in myself. I have a theory that sex was a kind of procrastination for me. When I was a uni student, I thought about it a lot, probably because I had a lot of spare time, and a lot of things that I wanted to put off doing. Contrast to now, where I feel like I have very little spare time, due to work, and the list of things I want/need to do during that spare time is fairly long. I'm usually thinking about work, what I want to eat (this actually takes up a huge amount of my mental capacity - I spend a lot of time thinking about food), exercise, Dota 2, what I plan to do during the rest of the week. There is very little room in my mind for sex these days, which has the unfortunate side-effect of me just not feeling like it.

Char says this is really bad, and that I need to work on it, which I am. I don't know how she does it, as she is also working full time, yet still has a healthy libido. I'm making a conscious effort to think about it more, but I assume that as life goes on, and you introduce kids, and more and more difficult work, it'll slowly die out. Is this why some couples find that their sex life dies after marriage? When I was at uni, I was so sure that I wasn't going to be one of those wives who gets into bed, turns the light off, and passes out, but now I'm not so sure.

A woman made a post on a forum asking why she wasn't able to attract men with a certain salary range, and one man who claimed to be in that salary range basically said that she was a bad investment as his assets would increase in value, and hers (looks) would decrease. If the only thing she was contributing was an attractive face and body, and the sex that goes with it, then it would only make sense to rent and not buy, as you can just trade in for a newer model every few years. Not that MrMan5.5 is in it for my body and face, but thinking about my assets (my wonderful wit and ability to check for danger in a first aid situation), those will also naturally dry up as I get older, too. I guess unlike the "brainless beauty" stereotype, I am also in a profession that is capable of making money well after I get saggy boobs, but to be honest, it's not particularly one I relish in, and so I don't know how long it's viable for me to chalk that up as an "asset".

Rationally, MrMan5.5 would be better renting than buying, yet he still proposed and we do intend to get married some day. I thought maybe he was just pot committed - he had invested so much in this relationship that it'd be a waste to just toss it out. Yet there are people who have been married for 20+ years who get divorced, so there is nothing to say that won't happen to me. It's just my risk averse nature that makes me want to avert the possibility of that happening as much as I can, and a part of it is saying, "Well, if you never get on the horse, you can't fall off." Which is a bit ridiculous, because if you never take that risk, and you are interested in finding someone to share your life with, then you'll never be able to truly commit to someone as you have one foot out the door ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do have a solution, and that's the baby trap, as I know MrMan5.5's sense of duty would mean that he would want to raise that child as best as he could, but I would be so sad if I knew that the only reason he stayed with me was because of our child(ren).

So I don't know, how can you ever know whether someone will really be with you happily ever after? I'm going through a phase at the moment where I am trying to improve myself to increase my value to MrMan5.5, but what if I'm dumping all of my stats in X when I should really be working on Y? I don't know what Future MrMan5.5 will want. I guess all I can really do is try my best, it'll hurt if I fail, but I did the best that I could. I think I'm also fortunate that when we have had problems in the past, he has been willing to at least try to work it out, so hopefully I won't just wake up to an empty bed and a note on the kitchen counter some day.

The Third Person Must Be a Stranger

Nate: A threesome?
Dan: Oh yeah. Just me, Olivia (his gf), Vanessa (his best friend), two girls, four boobs, one Dan Humphrey.
Nate: Aw.
Dan: How awesome am I?
Nate: How stupid can you be?
Dan: What?
Nate: Buddy. Okay, I know things. I've been to Europe. Chuck Bass is my best friend. Alright, the third person is supposed to be a stranger.
Dan: The fact that it was Vanessa is what made it so fun.
Nate: Okay, the problem is that during a threesome there's always a twosome and a onesome going on.
Dan: You know what? The onesome was not so bad.
Nate: Okay, you may have enjoyed the show. But let's face it Vanessa is very vocal. It couldn't have been easy for Olivia to hear all that.
Dan: You know what, Olivia was fine. We talked the next morning. And so was Vanessa. I mean I haven't really seen her much, but I'm sure she is. Why are you being such a buzzkill?
Nate: Because you're lucky to have both of them in your life.
- Gossip Girl: The Last Days of Disco Stick

I was reading some old blog posts, and came across the saga of "That Guy", which I feel is one of the biggest mistakes I have made so far in my life. TL;DR: Wanted sex  one day and Charmeleon was unavailable, suggested meeting up for sex with one of my guildmates from WoW. We did. Then we did again. Then he wanted to, but I wanted to study, so I said no, but he kept insisting. So I decided I didn't want to see him anymore, and he said:

(sic) Alright, lol? okay.. see you like to make your insignificant life soo out there. and bitch to the open, i think in my defense i should only reply to your blog so others can read, alright. 

for starters I’ve only ever read ur blog twice, coz i know you love to bitch about people and life after certain events like all myspace/blog kiddies (100% predictable of course) 

Now. i’ve never called you. so why lie to make this much more of an issue to dramatize ur pathetic low life? i only messaged you twice to ask why u blocked me so i really dont understand why you make such bullshit up… So yes, i do regret even knowing you. even having sex with you on the first meetings i ever met you, well for me the experience was very daunting. you wondered why i couldn’t climax, that’s because it was like having sex with the grand canyon. 

Alright. soo now that we’ve established your a self righteous bitch unable to face a problem and a delusional moron with 0 life experiences as so expressed from her 1 of (I’m sure many, in her boring ramblings of her depressing thoughts aka “blogs”  ) shit analogies , and a shit root and a slut lol.. i think i will finally decide to not even initiate ur pathetic existence in this world and will forever regret knowing you. 

my 2cents.

So... Very harsh, but not entirely undeserved. Maybe I gave the impression that it was an ongoing thing, like I had with Charmeleon, and I wasn't entirely clear that I didn't want to see him again - which is highly likely, given how much I hated being direct back then (and still do). Thinking back, I realised it was a really risky thing to do. Although "That Guy" wasn't a complete stranger (he was a friend of a friend of one of my cousins), getting into a car, and then sleeping with someone you've never met before probably isn't a good idea!

In retrospect, that was one of the moments I would like to redo if I went back in time. I don't think it has affected me very much, but it was cruel of me to do that to someone as if they had no feelings. Sometimes it makes me feel pretty sick that I could do that.

Someone at work asked why I didn't just ask one of my male friends at uni? For one, it's a heap safer in the sense that I will have had some time to scope out whether they're an axe murderer or not (although with some people, you can't tell...). The thought had crossed my mind, but I decided against it for a few reasons.

At the time, I still lived with my family, and I didn't really think they'd be happy with me bringing a stranger to our house. My mum doesn't even like it when we invite over people we know really well! We could have done what I did with AG, was just do it in his car, or at his house - or, and I feel really bad about this one, at the house he was house-sitting (I really hope he washed the sheets afterwards =/). However, I barely knew anyone who had their own car, much less someone who had moved out of home. The people who did fill those criteria were mostly people who were already in a relationship, so they were definitely off-limits.

There was also the problem of my lack of confidence. I didn't think anybody would say yes. I asked someone at work who I also happened to go to uni with, and  he said he would have said no. I'm not even looking anymore, but even that felt a bit crushing - I don't think I could have handled a real rejection.

Most importantly, I had a great fear of ruining a friendship. It's kinda like snoring - how can you really know whether you snore or not?  How can you know if you're good in bed or not? You can ask your partner, but they have a huge motivation to lie to you, which is why you hear women saying, "He wasn't very big anyway" after a relationship has ended, but who don't complain during the course of the relationship itself. Sometimes it's just a spiteful insult, but I think sometimes it's true. For all I know, I could be the grandest of all canyons, but I can never find out as I will have nothing to compare with (and if I couldn't work up the courage to ask someone I knew to have sex with me, I would definitely not have enough courage to ask someone I know to have sex with me and then sex with lots of other girls to compare).

When it's just a throwaway relationship that you haven't spent time building up, then there is no fear that the person you're sleeping with might not enjoy it, and so even if it is bad (from either person's point of view), you haven't really lost anything. However, if it is a friend, then there is the potential that the friendship will never be the same - especially if you are a coward like me and struggle to confront someone directly.

I've never been in a threesome, but for the reason above, I feel like I should stick closely to the Gossip Girl rule: The third person is supposed to be a stranger. We've talked about possibly asking people we know, and I think it was mostly decided that it would be weird. Nate's point from the quote, about it being a twosome and a onesome is another great one, as at the end of the day, we are going to cuddle together in bed and go to sleep, while whoever the other person is gets packed onto a train for a lonely trip home. Would anyone want to do that?

I guess ideally, to be fair, you'd have two couples, and one really strong bed, but then it's just partner swapping or in the worst case, you end up with a threesome and a onesome. Or a twosome and two onesomes. I wonder if that's how people get into cuckolding. Or bukakke.

The only other solution seems to be to pay someone to join you, but I'm really worried about diseases. I think they're meant to tell you whether they have something or not, but I don't know if you can ever really know for sure. Though the same is true for your friends. Do you all go and get tested together and open the results together? That seems like something that'd kill the mood pretty quickly. Plus, anyone can print out some paper and put it in an envelope. I've never actually been tested, do the results even come in an envelope? Maybe they just email it these days.

There must be an app for this kind of thing...

Dunbar

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. ... This number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. ... he proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. ... Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

To continue from my last post, the reason why I'm thinking about the value of friendships is because I am meeting a lot of new people through the various activities I am doing, and so I feel like I don't have the capacity to continue to maintain friendships, but I don't know of a good culling process. To be honest, my ideal would be to have a few friends that I see regularly (once a month or more), a large group of friends who I see sporadically (once a year or more, but less than once every few months), and to rarely see the rest of my friends (less than once a year).

I've mentioned this before, but I always wanted to have a best friend like in the movies, but I feel like in trying to maintain so many friendships, I am missing out on the chance to find that person and grow that friendship.

Another experiment from the Dan Ariely book. In this experiment, the participants could click on three different doors: red, blue, or green. Each click used up a click, of which they only had a hundred. Each door contributed a different amount of money, which the person got at the end. So in the first case, once the participants worked out which door had the highest payout, they just clicked that door until they ran out of clicks.

He changed the experiment so that if you clicked on a door, the other two doors would shrink each time you clicked it, and eventually disappear. But you could click on a shrunken door to grow it again (though at the expense of the other two doors shrinking a little). You would think that it wouldn't matter, same as last time, once they found out which door paid the most, they would keep clicking it. But that's not what happened in the experiment. He found that most of the participants would start clicking the shrinking doors to try and "save" them, even though they know that clicking them would pay less, and that their optimal strategy was to just spam the highest paying door.

In the next experiment, he added a "revive", where you could click a door that disappeared and it'd come back. So in this case, people shouldn't waste their clicks saving doors, as it only takes one click to bring it back. He did find that people were no longer saving the shrinking doors, but they were still "reviving" disappeared doors as soon as they disappeared, even though they weren't using them, and even though they could have revived them at any other time with no loss.

One of the things he wanted to illustrate with this experiment is the irrational nature of people to keep doors open, even at the expense of better things, and even when the doors aren't really closing. That was definitely the biggest lesson I learned in 440 - as we spent so much time trying to keep our options open, to avoid having to refactor later, that we never really committed to an implementation until far too late into the project.

So back to the culling thought.

On Friday, I went to a bar with some friends, including one who I consider a very good friend. A couple of drinks later, and I found myself pushing him into doing something that he wasn't very keen to do. Morning after, and much more sober, I suddenly got this horrible feeling in my gut that my actions the night before might have caused this friend to hate me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about it, and in the end I decided to email him and apologise. Luckily, he forgave me, but that horrible feeling really stuck to me. I felt like I had just narrowly avoided falling off a cliff.

Is that how you decide who is a friend that you want to keep? You try and picture how you would feel if they absolutely hated you and never wanted to have anything to do with you ever again.

In regards to the friendship debt point, Gerald pointed out that debt is perceived, and you might feel like you did someone a favour and that they owe you, but they might just see it as a regular thing that isn't a big deal. So as these debts are never formally documented, there can be a skewed perception of who owes who what.

In the case of this hypothetical hate method, how much I am willing to invest in this friendship should be related to how horrible I would feel if that person hated me. I think this way you are only as invested as you feel you should be, and you have no resentment that you are putting in more or less than the other person. It could be a self-regulating method assuming if the other party starts pulling away as they feel like they are not getting as much out of the friendship, this will cause you to feel non-hypothetically terrible, and so you will put more effort into the relationship - if that feeling of terribleness is enough to motivate you. If you put in too much effort, you will not feel so terrible at the idea of losing them, and so you can relax a bit.