Saturday, January 28, 2006

On dating ...

Never heard of n+1 mag before. But, they're linked from AL DAILY.(Infinitely better than Al Jazeera, lemme tell ya :)). Why aren't they on my links? Hmm.) Can't be all that bad.

And what they write about? Sheesh. So true. No wonder Josh Harris kissed dating goodbye. Besides, I think other parts of the world might not be so crazy to arrange marriages and stuff, ya know. Some of my best friends have done it. And seem to be doing swimmingly.
With how many people did people used to sleep? It’s hard to tell. Language changes, and there’s the problem of bragging. Take the French. Stendhal in his treatise on love is expansive on the seduction strategies of his friends (hide under the bed; announce yourself so late in the night that kicking you out would already be a scandal), but in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel sleeps with exactly two women—and for this they cut off his head!
[snip]
Twenty years later, there was Greenwich Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay, riding back and forth all night on the ferry, was the most promiscuous literary woman of her time. But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were “well-known homosexuals.” So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break.
[snip]
Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You’re Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand.
Hmm. Maybe other cultures, and that bossy mama, Holy Mother Church, might be onto something? :-)

[Neat find, this site. Two very interesting Rome diaries.]

No comments: