I’m so excited to be sending in my first question!  I look forward to reading your response.

To provide a brief preface for this question, I am a (single-and never been un-single) guy who is close friends with Girl and Guy. Last year, Girl started liking Guy and asked me how to get through to Guy (they only knew each other through mutual friends). I clearly told her that I would not play match maker and would not interfere. Girl understood and she eventually made the first move but Guy always moved very slowly with dating stuff and didn’t really respond to her move even though he was interested in Girl. Eventually, Girl was getting so anxious that I pushed Guy to make a move and Girl and Guy have now been dating about half a year.

Recently, Girl and I got into an argument about how I should not feel uncomfortable at all about the 3 of us hanging out together. She had proposed bringing Guy to a plan that we had made together and I said no. Another time, I was there with Girl and Guy and their moderate touchiness made me feel pretty awkward and uncomfortable. If I was not single, this probably wouldn’t be too much of an issue for me. I simply feel very uncomfortable with being third wheel and the fact that I have two friends dating each other doesn’t make third wheel any better.

Clearly my preface was not brief but at least my question is:

How do you ask a couple – both of whom you are close friends with – to not act so couple-y or simply to become more understanding of the in-the-middle position that you are in?

Monkey in the Middle

Dear Monk,

I have to admit that I’m a bit confused by your question.  You wrote to me as though asking how to broach the subject, but it seems like you’ve already had arguments about it — and are no closer to a solution.  I can’t tell if you’re asking me to provide you with better arguments, so you can persuade your friends to change their behavior, or actually questioning your own approach.

Either way, I think the best place to start is the fight you just had.  And the first step is to figure out why your friend reacted the way she did.

I don’t know the full story, so I may be wrong, but I have a hunch.

The way you describe your role in the development of this relationship doesn’t sound encouraging to me.  Even though you care about both of them, you refused to help them get together, at least at first.  And when she proposed that the three of you hang out, you turned her down flat-out before explaining to her that their behavior makes you uncomfortable.

As you’ve probably learned, you’re walking on thin ice already when you a member of the opposite gender on a subject related to sex.  She may have felt like you were passing judgment on her for being in an intimate relationship at all, even if you didn’t say anything explicit to make her feel that way.  In her position, regardless of what you were saying, I would have interpreted your approach — refusing to hang out with her if she invited her boyfriend — to mean that you might even have been repressing anger about her behavior the last time the three of you hung out, not just discomfort.

Think hard about it.  Were you judging her?  Did you use a tone, or a vocabulary, which somehow conveyed repulsion, disapproval, or distaste?  If so, I can understand your friend’s reaction, even though your request itself may have been reasonable.  If you want to broach the subject again, try doing it in a way that makes clear that you respect her choices.  Phrase it in a way that allows you to take responsibility for your discomfort yourself: tell her it’s a character flaw of yours, that it’s probably because you’ve never been in a relationship, and that you wish you didn’t feel that way, and that you’re asking them to accommodate this weakness of yours as friends, not because they have an obligation to do so.  Make sure she really gets the point, because your earlier argument is probably fresh in her mind.  You don’t have to believe all of it; it’s just a token way of showing her that this isn’t about her moral character, but about your own comfort, and that at the end of the day you’re trying to preserve your friendship, not strain it.

Another thing I can’t figure out is how reasonable your request really is.  You describe these guys as shy and say that their relationship has developed slowly, and you say that it was their “moderate touchiness” that made you uncomfortable.  What kind of touchiness are we talking about?  Making out, or holding hands?

The reason I ask is that Dan Savage got a great question a few years ago from a dom-and-sub couple who thought their families were being unaccepting when they refused to allow the pair to attend thanksgiving dinner while connected by a collar and leash.  His answer to their (decidedly more extreme) question was that as open-minded people asking for acceptance ourselves, we’re obligated to accept everyone else’s sexual preferences — but we’re not obligated to participate in them.  Taking a sex act out of the bedroom, even if your clothes are on, is an imposition on others, who may feel uncomfortable with what they’re seeing.  Most PDA isn’t too much of an imposition, because we can just turn away; but it’s still a minor sexual event if you get caught off-guard, as much as looking at a pornographic pop-up or catching someone readjusting their pants.

As a New Yorker, I’ve come to approach PDA the way I think about busking on the subways.  Even though it can be pretty unappealing at times, I’ve learned that you have to tolerate your share of what’s distasteful to you in exchange for occasional enjoyable experiences.  And on a wider scale — personal gains aside — I do it because I’ve come to understand that New Yorkers’ shared ability to overlook the occasional offputting couple or act is what ultimately makes the city the romantic, musical place that it is, a place where anything can happen.  It’s a social contract, and I vote in its favor by living here and going along with it.

When you’re at a dinner table, however, and you’re facing a couple, and they keep swapping spit like the ship’s going down, it’s not like a democratic (subway) platform; you’re stuck watching them, with no means of escape and nowhere else to look.  It’s inconsiderate and unfair of them to put you in that position.

That’s why I need to know if their behavior is really sexual in order to give you solid advice.  They’re comfortable with each other’s bodies, and they’re closer to each other than they are to you, so it makes sense that they like to touch to communicate affection and reassurance; but are we talking about non-sexual touching — anything from eating off of each other’s plates to sitting on each other’s laps: behavior siblings might share — or sexual touching — the gamut between a peck on the lips and a squeeze of the ass?  Everyone has friends whom they wouldn’t want to see naked, no matter how much we like them, and they ought to have the courtesy not to make you imagine it, if that’s what they’re doing.  But if they’re just expressing emotional intimacy, then what you’re really asking them to do is stop being a couple when you’re with them — which is asking for the impossible.

I don’t know the whole story, of course, but from where I’m standing, the fact that you didn’t help the two of them get together until this girl came to you on the brink of despair suggests to me that you really don’t want them to date at all.  Most people will seize almost any opportunity to “play matchmaker” with their friends; instead, you seem to have been hoping it wouldn’t work out.

If that’s the case, you have my sympathies.  There’s no one who hates being single as much as I do, and I know it can be hard to watch happy couples when you’re lonely.

Still, much as I understand your position, I’m telling you: you have to get over that.  Because for every moment we’re happy and in love, most of us spend ten or more alone and struggling to hold onto hope.  Ultimately,  becoming embittered is the biggest risk we all run.  Once you’re at the point where love itself gets you down, nothing will be able to pick you up.  But if you adopt an attitude of wonder when you witness love, instead of taking it as a reminder of your own loneliness, you’ll be able to see it as an inspiration, a taste of the sweetness of finding what you’re looking for, and a testament to the fact that love does exist, however rarely — and as a result, you’ll be more prepared next time you have such an opportunity yourself.

I sincerely believe that where love is concerned, maintaining hope — getting over specific disappointments, but maintaining hope in the wider sense — is always, ultimately, the wisest thing to do.  Even if you’re wrong, and you never find love, at least you won’t have had to live in the dark shadow of the belief that it can’t happen.

For what it’s worth, I’m not exactly happily paired myself right now, so I’m not saying this lightly.  I know how hard it can be.  It fucking sucks sometimes.  But experience has taught me that being open-minded is a more enjoyable way to live.

The first time I really understood that was the summer before college, when I first read Great Expectations on the train to Merekesh (long story) and read the following passage in Chapter 46, in which Pip first visits his best friend Herbert Pocket and his new wife, Clara:

There was something so natural and winning in Clara’s resigned way of looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out; and something so confiding, loving, and innocent in her modest manner of yielding herself to Herbert’s embracing arm; and something so gentle in her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper Ropewalk, with Old Barley growling in the beam,—that I would not have undone the engagement between her and Herbert for all the money in the pocket-book I had never opened.

For all of its gendered saccharinity, for all Clara’s domesticity, and Herbert’s patronizing suburban tour-guiding, that passage still speaks to the essence of affection to me.  Pip is an orphan who’s never had so much as a kiss in his life, and whose heart has been mercilessly wrought and beaten by an octogenarian virgin hoarder for the bulk of his adulthood*; and yet somehow he finds redemption, not discouragement, in his love affairs of his humble friend.  He manages to be happy for the Pockets and take their marriage as evidence that things sometimes work out — as food for hope — instead of letting it serve as a reminder of his own troubles.  Pip’s childhood is so dark that he’s more than earned a right to be bitter; but what makes us love Pip, for all his failings, is that he overcomes it, and negates all the pain he’s experienced through his emotional generosity, instead of foisting it on others.

Writing this now, I realized for the first time that the reason that passage was so striking to me is that at the time, Dickens’ lifelong obsession with suffering-as-a-path-to-redemption was entirely new to me.  It’s not an idea that’s discussed much these days.  You see it most clearly in the original ending: when Pip runs into Estella in the ‘burbs a few decades later, he tells us, “I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”  (Emphasis mine.)*

Do you see what I mean?  The view implicit there is a far cry from how most contemporary writers characterize suffering; since Freud people seem to have concluded, probably correctly, that the result of suffering is trauma and bitterness, not increased empathy.

Still, I like Dickens’ version better, don’t you?

-VVM

—————————————————————————————————————————————————
* I’m sorry if I spoiled something for someone by reprinting this.  There’s another ending, anyway.  It’s a great book!  Go read it, if you haven’t!!

I am currently in a relationship with a cutie, but not particularly a smartie (relatively).  We are currently going strong on a six month relationship with little to no bumps on the road, except for this personal problem of mine.

Problem: I am unable to share my intellectual thoughts with my boyfriend.

My boyfriend attended community college and claims to have read less than 50 books in his life. I attended an ivy league college and consider reading a leisure activity.

My problem hasn’t really limited our relationship thus far since I feel that he is intelligent and because we share similar interest (watching foreign films, going to museums). However as we get to know each other better and hang out on a regular basis, I am more and more frequently the one to pick out movies to watch and museums to go to.

While I know that he is smart, I don’t think that he knows how to express his thoughts. As I mentioned, this isn’t a real problem as of yet, but I’m not sure that I can see us going long term if he we can’t hold an intellectual conversation. I’ve tried buying him books that I’ve read just so that we can talk about them, but whenever conversations start to get to deep he just agrees with me without any original input. I think that he might react this way because he’s a little intimidated and doesn’t want to share his thoughts out of fear that I might think he’s dumb. How do I get him to express himself intellectually to me? Also, am i unrealistic in wanting to have everything? This is really my ONLY problem in the relationship.

Thanks

Dear Thanks,

Before we look for an answer, let’s unpack your problem a little bit.  Although you yourself wrote that your problem is that “I am unable to share my intellectual thoughts with my boyfriend,” I suspect that that’s not quite it.  I have the feeling that if you knew, for instance, that you would never be able to share those thoughts with him, you’d end your relationship on the spot; but, on the other hand, if you were equally sure it was merely a matter of confidence, you probably wouldn’t be asking me if you were “unrealistic in wanting to have everything.”

Since you write that you’ve been going out for six months and are still quite happy, you may want to start by considering both how you define “intellectual” conversations, and how much they really matter to you.  Is an intellectual conversation just an educated, witty, literary conversation, or is it one which gets to the core of your personal beliefs?

If you mean the latter, then you might want to start by asking yourself whether your boyfriend really understands who you are and what you care about.  If the answer is “yes,” then no matter what vocabulary you’re using and what tools he has at his disposal, the two of you are having intellectual conversations.   If you’re not sure, then maybe that’s the best question to focus your attention on.

If what you mean by “intellectual” is “educated,” however, we’re left with a different set of questions.  How much does education matter to you, Thanks?  You wrote that reading is a “leisure activity” for you.  If that’s what it really is — a hobby — then I don’t think you’ll have a problem dating him.  Shared hobbies are nice, but I’ve never dated anyone who shared my interest in fashion, something I (embarrassingly, but incontestably) think about all the time, and it’s never been an obstacle in my relationships.  It’s a genuine interest, but it isn’t one that’s central to my sense of self.  By contrast, I don’t think I could really fall for a man who didn’t love opera once introduced to it, because I’d feel that someone who didn’t understand something I loved so much would never understand me, either — not because I have a “musical personality,” but because my own ideals have been shaped by operas; because when I’m having an operatic experience, I feel, for just an instant, that I know exactly what I want from life, what I’m living for, and even who I am.  It’s not unlike a sexual orientation: it’s not love itself, but it’s deeply related.

I’m sorry to meander.  Do you see the distinction I’m trying to make?  If the issue at hand is just your boyfriend’s education, not his values, then you may want to examine the way you view your own education, and how central it is to your own sense of identity.

Another thing you may want to think about is how he thinks about intellectual life.  If he’s just shy, as you theorized, but also cares about philosophical questions in his own way, you’re on solid ground.  However, we live in a largely anti-intellectual society, and I’ve noticed that people who are made to feel unintelligent from an early age often develop aversions to intellectual life that are deeply ingrained in their personalities — sometimes just an “I’m not that kind of guy” attitude, but often something more hostile.  If your boyfriend is just humoring you, but has no real interest, when you’re talking about the things that matter most to you, then even though you may be right — even though it is, at heart, an insecurity thing — getting him to your level in terms of confidence and open-mindedness is going to be difficult, maybe impossible.  Over the years, his insecurity will have become a part of the way he perceives himself, of his identity.  If he were just a friend of yours, I’d encourage you to support him anyway, and help him deal with those anxieties; but as your boyfriend, I think it’s a lost cause.  You can’t found a relationship on the basis of what you think someone could be.  You have to found it on admiration for who he already is.  Otherwise you’ll come to hate each other.

One way to figure out how he thinks about intellectual life might be to focus on the artistic experiences you share — these museum trips and movie dates.  You say that he enjoys them, but that you always pick the movies and museums.  Is that a matter of preference, or of exposure?  Is it just because you’ve already visited all the museums he knows of, and he lacks the resources or experience to find more cool things to do?  Or is it because he doesn’t really enjoy that kind of stimulation as much as you do?

Look, Thanks, all of this analysis is really just another way of asking you to figure out what your needs are and whether he can meet them — and you don’t actually have to articulate either of those things to get an answer.  Needs are needs, and we’re stuck with them, even if they are unrealistic.  If you feel like he understands the things you love about yourself and loves them too, if you feel like it’s always interesting to talk to him, if you feel like sometimes, at rare, perfect moments, things are beautiful with him,  then you’ll know he’s meeting your needs — even if you yourself can’t define them.  But if you feel trapped, if you feel like some core part of yourself isn’t being expressed in your relationship, if you feel like you’re not really living when you’re together, then listen to your instincts and let it go.

-VVM

I’m a recent graduate from college, and I’ve tried out long term relationships, casual hookups, and the gamut in between. I absolutely prefer a committed and loving relationship to more casual ones. However whenever I’ve gotten myself involved in a really intimate and meaningful relationship it has inevitably ended, leaving me (as well as my partner) with so much fallout and bad feelings that the duration of the relationship can feel almost not worth it.

The casual relationships don’t mean that much, and they aren’t as exciting, but on the other hand nobody gets hurt.

My question is at this point in my life, where I know that I will not be marrying, and will not be spending the rest of my life with anyone, is it worth it to invest completely in another person?

Love is wonderful, but it’s also can lead to pain and confusion. Should I just wait it out until I get to a “marrying age,” or should I allow myself to continue to invest in relationships that will, when they end, totally destroy the happiness of myself and the person I’m with?

Thanks so much,

-W

Dear W,

I’m glad you asked that, because it’s a subject that I feel is often discussed by rarely addressed.  Most conversations I’ve had about these matters tend to end with the conclusion that you can’t mix love and logic — a conclusion which strikes me as vaguely anti-intellectual and deeply unsatisfactory.  For me, love is defined by its amenability to reason; love should be the place where you’re (finally!) no longer forced to choose between being happy and thinking too clearly, an intellectual resource that can’t be exhausted and which bears endless scrutiny.  But then, I’m a philosophy major, and my ideas about love are probably not like most people’s.

The short answer to your question is “No.”  You should not “continue to invest in relationships that will, when they end, totally destroy the happiness of [you] and the person [you're] with.”  Partly because it wouldn’t do you any good, but also because the people you’re with, if they were aware of the ending you considered “inevitable,” probably wouldn’t accept those terms, either.

If I may submit a guess, I suspect that part of the reason the ends of your relationships are so painful may be your partners’ discovery that from day one you believed the end of your relationship was “inevitable.”  That’s probably a surprise to your partners, because most people in your age group don’t begin relationships thinking about “when they end,” or “know” in advance that they “will not be marrying, and will not be spending the rest of [their] life[-s] with anyone.”  You say you’ve been “invest[ing] completely” in these relationships, but it sounds to me like, as much as you’ve been investing, you’ve also been holding back.  You write that “love is wonderful,” but the approach you describe doesn’t sound like love to me.  Love is, of course, difficult to define, but I think most people would agree that love means wanting it to last forever, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve been feeling that way lately.

It’s okay not to be in love.  I don’t mean to make you feel bad about that.  Even the most romantic-minded people aren’t in love most of the time; like you, they’re often just searching for something they can’t describe, something they’re not fully sure exists.  But it’s a real shame, to my mind, to give up that search, to infer that because you’re not in love now, you won’t be in the future — that because you haven’t yet met someone you could earnestly commit to, you’ll have to settle for whoever is around when you hit “marrying age.”

At the very least, in the future, I think you have an obligation to let the people you’re dating know that you’ve determined that you don’t want to with them forever — particularly because, at your age, if you don’t say anything, they’re likely to make the opposite assumption. The average American man marries at 27, and the average woman marries at 25.  If you don’t say anything, I think your dates will infer that you haven’t outruled the possibility of marriage or an equivalent level of commitment.

Honestly, though?  I think you should rethink your approach.  I’m not sure why you believe that you “will not be marrying” until a certain time — especially since you claim to prefer “committed and loving relationships” and don’t seem to be making the classic argument that you need to do a certain amount of sexual adventuring before settling down — but I think you’re selling yourself short by committing the Humean fallacy (assuming that the future will be like the past).  Nobody’s forcing your hand, W — there’s no risk here.  You’re not going to get married until you decide to.  It makes sense not to get your folks’ hopes up, of course; but it doesn’t make sense not to allow for the possibility that a person and an experience could change your mind and change your plans.  If you keep dating people whom you know you don’t want to be with in the long-term, you’re depriving yourself of that opportunity.

Not all loving couples (or threesomes or whatever) share a mutual belief that they’re going to be together forever, but I would venture to assert that they share a lack of belief that they aren’t.  That’s what it means, I think, to “invest” in a relationship — to make yourself open to the possibility of its success.  (For more on letting others change your mind, see my “vintage” column about dating with deadlines and my more recent column about whether atheists can date the religious.)

I’m not telling you to get used to the idea of getting married younger than you’d hoped to; I’m telling you that you’ll be happier if you don’t exclude it just yet.  There is no “marrying age,” and there are no rules; all there is are people and experiences, some of which may inspire us, or even change our lives irrevocably.  If I were you, I would stop fooling around with people you know you’re not serious about, and try to stay open-minded, to retain the ability to make yourself vulnerable, no matter how many bad experiences you have — so that if someone shows up whom you could really commit to, you’ll recognize him or her and be ready.  Even if it never happens, I think it’s worthwhile to refuse to settle, to keep looking for the real thing — because in the end, even if you fail, you’ll be happier knowing that you did what you could to find love, than if you give up before you give yourself a chance.

You’re going to be fine, W.  I just know it.  Hang in there!

-VVM

I’m a recent graduate from college, and I’ve tried out long term relationships, casual hookups, and the gamut in between. I absolutely prefer a committed and loving relationship to more casual ones. However whenever I’ve gotten myself involved in a really intimate and meaningful relationship it has inevitably ended, leaving me (as well as my partner) with so much fallout and bad feelings that the duration of the relationship can feel almost not worth it.

The casual relationships don’t mean that much, and they aren’t as exciting, but on the other hand nobody gets hurt.

My question is at this point in my life, where I know that I will not be marrying, and will not be spending the rest of my life with anyone, is it worth it to invest completely in another person?

Love is wonderful, but it’s also can lead to pain and confusion. Should I just wait it out until I get to a “marrying age,” or should I allow myself to continue to invest in relationships that will, when they end, totally destroy the happiness of myself and the person I’m with?

Thanks so much,

-W

Dear W,

I’m glad you asked that, because it’s a subject that I feel is often discussed by rarely addressed.  Most conversations I’ve had about these matters tend to end with the conclusion that you can’t mix love and logic — a conclusion which strikes me as vaguely anti-intellectual and deeply unsatisfactory.  For me, love is defined by its amenability to reason; love should be the place where you’re (finally!) no longer forced to choose between being happy and thinking too clearly, an intellectual resource that can’t be exhausted and which bears endless scrutiny.  But then, I’m a philosophy major, and my ideas about love are probably not like most people’s.

The short answer to your question is “No.”  You should not “continue to invest in relationships that will, when they end, totally destroy the happiness of [you] and the person [you're] with.”  Partly because it wouldn’t do you any good, but also because the people you’re with, if they were aware of the ending you considered “inevitable,” probably wouldn’t accept those terms, either.

The thing is, W, most people don’t begin relationships thinking about “when they end.”  They don’t necessarily set out to get married before they know a person, but they don’t usually “know that [they] will not be marrying, and will not be spending the rest of [their] life[-s] with anyone.”  I hate to be blunt, but I suspect that the pain you associate with the end of relationships is partly a result of your partners’ discovery that you never really believed it would work out with them, and that from day one you believed the end of your relationship was “inevitable.”  You say you’ve been “invest[ing] completely” in these relationships, but it sounds like your partners are the ones doing the investing — and getting hurt.  You write that “love is wonderful,” but the approach you describe doesn’t sound like love to me.  Love is, of course, difficult to define, but I think most people would agree that love means wanting it to last forever, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve been feeling that way.

At the very least, in the future, I think you have an obligation to let the people you’re dating know if you’ve determined that you can’t be with them forever — particularly because, at your age, they might make the opposite assumption. The average American man marries at 27, and the average woman marries at 25.  If you don’t say anything, I think your dates will infer that you haven’t outruled the possibility of marriage or an equivalent level of commitment.

Honestly, though?  I think you should rethink your approach.  I’m not sure why you believe that you “will not be marrying” — especially since you claim to prefer “loving relationships” and don’t seem to be making the classic argument that you need to do a certain amount of sexual adventuring before settling down — but I think you’re selling yourself short by assuming that the way you feel now (i.e., not in love) is the way you’ll continue to feel.  Nobody’s forcing your hand, W — there’s no risk here.  You’re not going to get married until you decide to.  It makes sense not to get your folks’ hopes up, of course; but it doesn’t make sense not to allow for the possibility that a person and an experience could change your mind and change your plans.  If you keep dating people know you don’t want to be with in the long-term, you’re depriving yourself of that opportunity.

Not all good couples (or threesomes or whatever) share a mutual belief that they’re going to be together forever, but I would venture to assert that they share a lack of belief that they aren’t.  That’s what it means, to my mind, to “invest” in a relationship — to make yourself open to the possibility of its success.  (For more on letting others change your mind, see my “vintage” column about dating with deadlines and my more recent column about whether atheists can date the religious.)

I’m not telling you to get used to the idea of getting married in the next few years; I’m telling you that you’ll be happier if you don’t exclude it just yet.  There is no “marrying age,” and there are no rules; there are, however, people and experiences that inspire us and change our lives irrevocably.  Stop fooling around with people you know you’re not serious about, and try to stay open-minded, no matter how many bad experiences you have — so that if someone shows up whom you could really commit to, you’ll recognize him or her and be ready.

-VVM

I’m a sophomore at a huge magnet state college in a particularly competitive field: mathematics.  I was taking the accelerated one-year intro sequence, but decided that even though I was doing okay at it, the speed at which the courses were progressing was making it hard for me to really learn and internalize the material.  So I switched “down” a level to the calculus series.  Since I switched, everything has gotten a lot better — I’m learning a lot more, if more slowly, and I find that having taken Accelerated for a while gave me a temporary advantage over the other students, which is nice.

I’m not a very grade-driven person, but I work hard and I like to think that my efforts are reflected in my grades.  However, although I’m performing much better now that I switched to the easier sequence, I find that I’m doing worse than the other students in the class.  Everyone’s getting A’s on all the homework!  The weird thing is, when I study with them, I understand the material a lot better, and I end up doing better on the tests.  After a while, a senior who took this class two years ago clued me in: there’s a website that you can access if you pay five dollars a month, and it has all the answers to the homework questions in the book.  It even has step-by-step explanations, so you can “show your work” and study from them if you need to.  Homework scores are half of our final grade, and I find myself frustrated now because I’m losing points for adding incorrectly even when I know how to do the problems, and kids who don’t have any idea how to do the problems are getting better scores than me because they always have the answers.

I guess I never thought that much about cheating or how I feel about it because test scores don’t matter that much to me (I’m a very unusual math major, I know!), and I’m conflicted about how to handle this.  If no one were cheating, I’d never consider it, but since everyone is, I feel that I’m suffering for my principles — and I’m not even sure if I really believe it’s morally wrong to cheat when everyone else is dong it.  On the other hand, the professors definitely don’t want us to do it.  On the other-other hand, I actually find the problems themselves kind of fun, and would probably just use the website to check my work anyway.  What should I do?

- keep me anonymous please

Dear Anonymous,

I guess the time has come to consider your views on cheating, huh?  My eighth-grade biology teacher once asked us a set of questions not unrelated to yours: if you had the money to genetically alter your kids to make them smarter and more attractive, but it was so expensive that only a handful of people in the world could do it, would you go for it? What about if half of the kids in their school had been modified — would that change your views?  What about if the number were as high as ninety percent?  Would you disadvantage your kids by refusing them the treatment?

What he was getting at is that the argument most people make against genetic modification — and also against cheating — is that it gives one person an unfair, and unearned, advantage over others.  But that criticism doesn’t apply here, because in your case, not cheating gives you a disadvantage.

You also allude to your professor’s point: you’ll learn less if you cheat; you’re really just cheating your self by allowing yourself to be lazy.  That point, too, has merit.  However, if you end up with one of the class’s lowest grades as a result, you’ll also be cheating yourself of the recognition you deserve.  I think your plan to check your answers with the website, but do the work yourself, is a happy medium.  Just make sure to be disciplined about it.

You might want to consider alerting the professor to the site, however — maybe anonymously, maybe once you’ve finished the course.  Because ultimately, even if you have the discipline and stamina to make sure you’re learning while using the site, other future students may not, and you’ll be doing them a favor in the long term if you take away the crutch that allows them to cheat themselves.  Perhaps more importantly, you’ll also be helping future students like yourself — students who learn about the site late in the semester, or students who may find it hard to choose between cheating and being handicapped academically.

Good luck!  I admire you for pursuing math — you’re braver than I am.

-VVM

For free advice from Veronica, submit your questions anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.

I have a problem that’s so big that I don’t know if you can help me, but I’d appreciate whatever you can say.  I’m at the end of my rope.  I’m a single straight guy, 29, 5’9″, 242lbs.  I live in Brooklyn.  I have a decent job with good hours, and I have a nice, clean apartment.  I’m educated (hold an MFA from an ivy), have nice friends, and have a great life in almost every respect.  I’m not a cocky asshole, but I’m an outgoing, generally confident guy, and people usually like me.  I don’t like to brag, but it’s important that you understand that self-esteem isn’t my biggest issue right now.

My problem, as you may have guessed, is sexual.  Or romantic, rather.  Or… both.  I weigh almost 250 pounds.  This makes me unattractive to women.  In college, I weighed a lot less (160), and had decent luck with girls.  I still fantasize about some of the women I’ve been with.  But women like that wouldn’t go near me now, because I’m just not that desirable.

I’ve tried dating women who’re “in my league,” i.e. women of similar proportions to me, but I have to admit that I’m just not all that attracted to them.  I find it hard not to flirt with their thinner friends at parties.  It makes me disgusted with myself.  I’d hate to have anyone I was dating think that way about me.  (Who knows, maybe they already do.)  I have to fantasize about other women to enjoy sex with these girls.  And I’m not even all that picky.  A woman doesn’t have to have a particular complexion to turn me on, and I’m not into heroin-chic or a anything like that.  I just need to be able to see a waist, you know?

I’m not even sure if I need that or just desire it.  There was a girl I fell hard for a few years ago who was pretty heavy-set, but I was so crazy about her that I still found her really sexy.  However, she was in better shape than most of the women I’d dated when we met, and a few months into our relationship she started dieting and lost a bunch of weight.  And dumped me.  I still miss her.

I’m a big Dan Savage fan, and his advice always seems to be: if the sexual aspect of a relationship isn’t working, then leave.  But he never seems to take into account the question of whether the person he’s writing to can do better or not.  Some of the women I’ve been with are undoubtedly better people than I am: smarter, funnier, sweeter, happier.  I respect them deeply and want to earn their respect in turn.  But I find it hard to have romantic feelings that aren’t related to sexual ones, and I’m still, idiotically, attracted to large breasts and small waists and dimples and all of that.  Should I just accept that some of my desires are never going to be fulfilled?  Am I a terrible person because I can’t accept in others what I ask them to overlook in me?

- Fat And Troubled

Dear FAT,

The first thing I think you need to do is accept your sexuality as it is — accept your preferences and accept that they’re not going to change.  Or at least, that they’re not going to change so radically that your problem will resolve itself.  You’re an adult.  Your sexuality has already been “formed” in the synaptic connections in your brain.  It’s like speaking a language.  You can learn other languages, but you’ll always think and dream in the language(s) you grew up with.  Similarly, you can develop the nuances of your sexuality, acquire new turn-ons and try new things, but you can’t change its foundational framework.

Once you accept that your desires and preferences constitute your orientation, and there’s not much you can do about that, I think you’ll realize that it doesn’t make sense to be ashamed of them.  The first step for you now is to stop feeling badly about wanting what you want.  As long as you make the distinction between what you want personally and what has value (i.e., as long as you treat women equally respectfully regardless of their weight — something you seem to be doing fine at), you have nothing to apologize for.

However, if you can’t change what you “accept” in others, you’re going to have to change “what [you] ask them to overlook in [you].”  That’s the one possibility you don’t consider in your letter.  Of all the obstacles that could obstruct your love life, weight is a lucky one, in a way, because you can change it, with effort.  It’s better than having oedipal issues, or a scat fetish, or an ugly face, for instance.  You liked your body in college, so you know you’re not saddled with genes that prevent you from having the kind of body you want.  Hire a nutritionist and a personal trainer and for six months, don’t cut yourself any slack.  Get into hiking, canoeing, biking, rock climbing, anything.  Reward yourself periodically with nice, simple clothes that fit your new shape.  Get healthy.  Get to the point where you feel that the women you’re attracted to could plausibly be attracted to you, too.

I don’t mean to imply by this advice that thinner is always better.  There are health risks to obesity, but there are a wide spectrum of healthy body types.  However, we live in a society that prizes thinness (especially you, FAT — Brooklyn practically has a fetish for it), and the result is that most of us find, when we grow up, that those ideas about what’s attractive have seeped into our sexual subconscious and irrevocably influenced our desires.  We can make an effort not to impose those views on the next generation, but for most of us, it’s too late.

There are always exceptions, of course.  There are thin women who prefer heavier men and thin men who prefer heavier women (and the reverse, I’m sure).  But I wouldn’t advise you to go looking for women who’re into “big guys.”  I’ve had friends who’ve had relationships of that type, and they’ve invariably gone badly — because it’s not good for a relationship when one partner is aware of being considered radically more desirable than the other.  It’s not impossible to surmount those issues, but it’s difficult.  And there’s always the chance that you’ll end up with someone who manipulates you because she knows her prospects, if you break up, are better than yours.

There’s also the chance that you could meet someone “in your league” who’s attractive to you.  It happens.  It almost happened to you once already.  But again, the odds are low.  Anyway, you can’t plan for that kind of thing.  Wait for the right one — wait for love — but be smart about it.   Maximize your odds.  Make yourself the kind of person that the kind of woman you’d admire would admire in return — both intellectually and physically.

You’re young.  You’ve accomplished a lot already.  Tackle this last hurdle.  It’ll be worth it.

- VVM

Send your questions about college life anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.

Dear Veronica,

I’m a straight guy in New York, which is supposed to be easy, but I haven’t had much luck meeting women lately, mostly because I work really long hours.  (At least I hope that’s the reason!)  I recently started dating online using OKCupid, and I think it’s been going okay.  I had a few dud dates, but the last girl I went out with was awesome, gorgeous, sweet, and laughed at pretty much everything I said — it was great!  Or at least, I thought it was great.  I thought she thought so too.  We spent more time together than planned and when we said goodbye, she said “I’ll see you soon,” which I thought was a shy way of encouraging me to pursue her.  (She seems a little shy, and she’s only had a few OKCupid dates before this one, which she hinted didn’t go well.)

I was all set to ask her out again, but then she texted me the next day, so I texted her back, and we got into a little text conversation.  The thing is, every time I texted her, it took her 5-1o hours to text me back.  At first, I responded quickly, but after a while I started to think that was too aggressive and started trying to match her pace.  My friends told me not to seem too enthusiastic if I can’t tell how she’s feeling.  However, given that we met on the internet, I can’t help but feel that if she weren’t into me, she’d just ignore my messages — right?  Or is she just too nice for that?

I guess my question is really: is there any truth to the “playing hard to get” platitude?  I’d like to think that there isn’t, and I certainly like it when girls like me, but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that despite having genuine interest in her, I think the anxiety she’s provoked just by being so unavailable has made me a little more interested.  I can’t tell how much because I don’t know how I’d feel if she were really enthusiastic.

I really don’t think of myself as a “playing games” guy; I have no idea what women’s “signals” mean (I mean, I think I do, but then I’m usually wrong) and I don’t like guessing or waiting.  But I know it can be hard for women — for anyone — to “put themselves out there,” and I don’t mind learning the language if that’s what they need.

Is that what it takes?  Should I learn how to play hard to get?  Should I show up with roses?  Should I just stay single forever?

- aidez-moi s’il vous plait!

Dear Aid,

I’m not sure there’s a global answer to your question, but I think there are partial answers.  I think, for instance, that being too distant can be off-putting — there’s no point in trying to force a relationship with someone whom you don’t think really likes you.  It’s a wasted effort.

On the other hand, being overeager when you don’t know someone too well can be off-putting as well — especially in New York, where everyone’s constantly afraid that everyone else is crazy.  Especially straight women, because the risk of rape is so much higher for us (to put it bluntly).

I once went out with a guy who had an odd tic.  He kept referencing the “relationship” we were going to have, over and over again, on our first date, telling me he “liked everything about me” and had been “waiting for someone like you my whole life.”  I begged off when he asked for another date — I felt obligated to send him a candid breakup letter, even though I’d only seen him once — and I found out later that he’d taken the same approach with a friend of mine the same week.  I guess the guy’s strategy was to “canvas” manhattan magazine parties (where we’d met — all three of us) and imagine as many relationships as possible, in the hope that one of them would eventually realize itself.

The thing about extreme approaches, to my mind, is that even when they don’t scream “insane,” they always whisper “insincere.”  No guy who’s just met you can really be that crazy about you, no matter how great you are; it wouldn’t make sense.  He could be optimistic, of course, and enthusiastic — but when you get to “adoring,” you’ve gone too far.  (Maybe avoid the French at first, too, aidez-moi.)  Same with the guy who seems interested when you meet him, but makes sure to show up fifteen minutes late every time you meet, or ignores your texts.

So I guess my advice is to avoid these extremes — and do a little check-in if you find yourself inclined to cross them naturally — but to shoot for sincerity above all.  If you want to call and ask her out, go for it.  Prepare what you want to say, so you won’t be nervous, and then call her up.  Say it straight: “Listen, Shirley, I had a great time with you last week and I’d love to go out again some time.  I heard about this awesome lazer tag arcade in queens.  Would you be into that?”

The worst that can happen is that she’ll say she’s busy.  If she’s “busy” more than once, then I’m afraid you’ve received the only signal you really need to learn: thanks-but-no-thanks.  It sucks, but at least you’ll know.  But if she likes you, I’m sure she’ll be impressed with your confidence.

One last word of advice, though: if you’re the kind of guy that has trouble interpreting women’s behavior, you might want to consider avoiding texting.  Texting is a really ambiguous form of communication and it can cause a lot of anxiety, even for pros (or so I’m told).  Phone calls are sexier, anyway.  Perfect the skill of asking girls leading questions and you’ll find yourself covering the same ground much more quickly.

Good luck!

-VVM

Submit your College Advice questions to Veronica anonymously by writing to veronicamittnacht@thefastertimes.com.

No offense, but I never thought I’d have to write to an advice columnists about my problems — I’m the kind of person who’s introspective to a fault and very cautious in my personal/romantic affairs.  Now, however, I think that’s working against me.  I found your column by (of all things!) googling my problems in search of advice.  It was your article on the difference between romance and friendship which lead me to think you might be able to help me (http://thefastertimes.com/collegeadvice/2009/11/23/college-advice-how-not-to-be-just-a-friend/).

In your article, you told the girl who wrote to you that she was founding her friendships the wrong way, and preventing men from considering her a romantic option.  Like that girl, I’m in a lonely and frustrating spot, and like her, I’m a socially/romantically viable, likeable, attractive woman.  However, in my case, I founded this friendship so long ago that sex, and even romance, weren’t part of my vocabulary.  I’m in love with my oldest friend.  My best friend.  And he’s single.  We both just graduated college, and he lives across the street from me.  I see him every day.  The thing is, I can’t just risk this friendship haphazardly, the way you suggest in your column; I need him in my life.  This friendship means everything to me.  I can’t explain it — I don’t have the words.  But I think you know what I mean.  The time we spend together is beautiful.  The thing is, I’ve spent almost a year doing nothing about it and I don’t know how much longer I can take it.  What do I do?  I think we’re past the point of  flirting and seeing what happens; I think I need to go all-or-nothing.  But I just can’t bring myself to do it.  I’d appreciate any advice you can give me.

Thanks,

- hate signoffs, sorry

Dear Thanks,

I’m going to be straight with you: I think you’re right that your choices are “all” and “nothing,” and I think you have to choose “all.”  Why?  Because you’re miserable right now, and you’ll only be more miserable if you keep doing this.  And although being miserable over someone you love is beautiful in its own way, misery is misery, and misery sucks.  If it doesn’t work out, it may take you years to get over it (and you’ll probably have to move); but that’s going to be the case whether you tell him or not, if you think about it.  You might as well get a head start.

Because you’re eventually going to fall in love again.  I promise.  I know you don’t believe me, but think about it: you’re so young that the fact that you’ve fallen in love once already almost guarantees that you’ll be able to do it again.  It’ll probably take a while — there are no shortcuts, unfortunately — but I have no doubt that it’ll happen for you.

The question, then, is how to approach this thing.  I agree that flirting isn’t going to do it.  However, if you’ve been in love for this long, and he knows you so well, I suspect that he understands your feelings, at least at a subconscious level.  What you need to do is “raise the subject” in a nonexplicit way: wear something flattering, something sexy, one night; have drinks another night and talk about the kind of love you believe in and what it would look like.  And then, after he’s had a week or two to think about all of that, make a move — physically.  He’ll either respond or rebuff you, and you’ll have your answer.  If he rejects you, you can talk about what it means later, or you can agree not to talk about it.  If he’s been feeling the way you have, he’ll be thrilled.  Who knows?  He may even make the first move, if you make yourself clear enough.  Either way, you’re on the path to happiness.

If he rejects you, I know you’re going to be tempted to pretend it never happened.  I think that’s a really bad idea.  I know that when you’re in love, it feels like just being around that person is enough; but the thing is, while you’re obsessed with him, you’re not going to be able to fall for anyone else, and you’ll only get more and more miserable.  At the end of the long day, you’ll be happier knowing that you did everything you could to find someone who could offer you the love that you needed — even if you fail — than realizing that you never gave yourself the chance.

The wonderful thing about human nature is that it changes.  We’re easily influenced, and our memories are terrible.  Right now, you probably feel like your love is so central to your identity that you wouldn’t be yourself without it.  And you’re probably right.  But after a while, your identity will change, and you won’t be yourself — your current self, anyway — any more.  And you’ll fall in love with someone who represents everything you now want to be.  The most important thing for you right now is to trust in your own ability to change and adapt, to find and create beauty in the future that’s greater than or equal to what you have now.  No matter how big the hole he leaves in your heart, I know you’ll find a way to fill it.

Best of luck.

-VVM

Send your questions about college life anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.

Both my girlfriend and I are freshmen.  We’re both heterosexual; we met in November at a party and hit it off immediately. Our relationship is going well, but we’ve both been drinking heavily, and we’ve both put on quite a bit of weight as a result. It’s getting to the point where I am noticeably (one can imagine how) less attracted to her, and I suspect she feels the same way toward me. And, as much as the loss of attraction bothers me, the self-consciousness she feels as a result is worse. Neither of us wants to break up, but at the same time, this is placing some unspoken strain on our relationship. Is there a healthy (non-dickish) way to deal with this?

-Beerbelly

Dear Beer,

You’re off to a good start in that you seem to see how complicated this situation is, if not what makes it that way.  However, you’re understandably finding the subject difficult to broach.  Let’s start by analyzing what the risks are, in the hope that once you’ve identified them, how to best avoid them may become clear.

Firstly, physical attractiveness is a very gendered issue.  While both men and women feel a lot of pressure, especially in college, to be attractive to the opposite sex, generally speaking I think that that pressure manifests itself differently for men and women.  Young men are expected to prove their worth through their accomplishments, and basically make do with the looks they were born with, while women are expected to cultivate their appearances as much as possible.  Although we’re still expected to cultivate our personalities,  I think young women often have the sense that while their accomplishments may impress men who are already interested in them, if they’re not physically attractive, men will never notice them.  Appearance becomes a sort of prerequisite for women, while men are subconsciously encouraged much more to believe that they can gain a woman’s attention through their achievements alone.

Whether these beliefs reflect reality is another question, of course; but in a sense, it barely matters, because the pressure is so real at that age.  So although you may not hold those expectations, and although you’re prepared to criticize yourself the same way you’re criticizing her, your girlfriend is still likely to be hurt and offended by your remarks if you don’t phrase them well.

The way I see it, you have two options.  The first and easiest is to present it as your problem rather than hers: tell her you’ve been feeling badly about yourself since gaining weight and ask her to be supportive while you try to lose it.  The fact that you’re in the same boat is a huge asset to you right now, because it gives you an avenue for empathy in a situation that would normally be very alienating.  Play it up.  Who knows — she may confess of her own accord that she’s felt the same way and would love to make it a joint effort.

This strategy has two major flaws, however: 1) she might conclude, immediately or eventually, that she can be supportive without actually losing any weight herself (it’s pretty hard to do!); and 2) she may see through it and decide that you’re a dick and a coward.  Call me bitter, but that’s what I’d be inclined to think.

The better option, I think, is to tell her the whole truth.  Tell her that before college, you vowed never to gain the notorious “freshman fifteen,” but that after you met her, you were having so much fun being with her (and vice-versa, presumably) that you’ve both begun living an unhealthy lifestyle, and that it’s starting to show in your figures.  Tell her that you already feel unattractive and that you don’t want her to feel as badly as you do.  Tell her that you care about her, and that you think it’d be better for your relationship to do something about the new weight than to let it go undiscussed any longer.

The biggest risk you’re running is that she might feel that you’re implicitly endorsing an unfair double-standard by complaining about her weight when she hasn’t complained about yours.  You can partially avoid that risk by treating yourselves as a unit, and focusing on the fact that you’re feeling unattractive yourself (and if it’s not true, I think this is a good time to lie a little).  But if you want to do it right, go ahead and tell her that you’re hesitant to bring it up because you realize how pernicious and pervasive the double-standard really is and don’t want her to think of you as another person who tacitly upholds it.

You sound like a nice guy whose heart is in the right place.  Choose your words carefully and you should be fine.  And let me know how it goes!

-VVM

Submit your questions about college life anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.

Valentine’s day approaches! While I can try to front an anti-capitalist “fuck Valentine’s Day whatever yo” attitude about it, the truth is I LOVE Valentine’s Day. What’s not to love? You get dressed up. You get chocolates. Hopefully you get laid. Granted, this is all contingent on whether or not I have a boyfriend at the time. And in fact, for the last 3 years, I’ve had the same boyfriend and I’m finding our Valentine’s Days a bit deflated. We usually go out to eat (not so so special, provided that we’re college students and rarely have time to cook at home anyhow), and then just kind of sit around at home until it’s time to do the dirty. I’ve tried to mix it up by getting some special lingerie or choosing a fancy new restaurant, but the effort feels so one-sided. I think he made a bit of an effort this year, but it ended up backfiring. Instead of planning a romantic treat, he e-mailed me a list of discounted date packages with the subject line “Any of these interest you?”

He’s such a sweetheart, and I know this is his way of showing affection. It’s just a little disappointing though. Is there any way I can get him to Fabio it up for just one day this year? Or am I being selfish and should just accept that the guy’s doing the best he can?

Thanks, girl!!

Cupid’s Conundrum

Dear CC,

I’m glad you asked this.  I’ve always been a bit divided about the question of Valentine’s Day.  On the one hand, a lot of the arguments I hear made against it sound just like the Grinchy arguments Scrooge-types trot out around Christmas and Chanukah, and part of me doesn’t see why people can’t celebrate a nondenominational holiday that’s supposed to be about love in a good-natured way.  Being single doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate the existence of love, celebrate non-romantic love, and throw great mixers for your other friends who don’t have dates, right?

However, the way that Valentine’s Day is marketed has always bothered me.  It’s always targeted exclusively at heterosexual people, as though that’s the only kind of love that’s healthy and worth celebrating — and the ideal of heterosexuality that it promotes is always disturbingly unbalanced.  Men are supposed to surprise women with expensive and largely unoriginal gifts, and women are supposed to express delight and gratitude, and never the reverse.  Is that really what we aspire to as a culture?

TFT columnist Meghan Pleticha wrote a great piece last week about why Valentine’s Day should be a blast for single people, and in it she argues convincingly that “Valentine’s Day has the same stress for couples that New Year’s Eve (or Halloween, or July 4th) has for everyone. There’s that pressure to do it right. But if you’re single, you can do whatever the hell you want!”  (She suggests going to bars.)

I think Meghan has hit on the most disturbing aspect of Valentine’s Day: the “princess fantasy” element.  For some reason, many people have come to see Valentine’s Day as an evening that has to be perfect, not unlike a wedding, and conclude that if it isn’t, something is wrong with their relationships, or even their lives — and the result is that a lot of people get stressed-out, disappointed, and histrionic about it, instead of feeling appreciated and appreciative.

What you’re talking about, however, isn’t one-sided.  You’ve been doing everything from private burlesque shows to  gourmandeering, and you’re just asking him to reciprocate.  More importantly, although your ideal Valentine’s Day has an element of fantasy to it, it’s one you’re aware of.  In fact, from your letter, I get the sense that you want something more like a romantic Halloween, where you play Cinderella and he plays Fabio and you have great sex afterwards.  And that sounds awesome.

I’d be willing to bet that your boyfriend’s apathy is targeted at the Valentine’s Day that’s been marketed to him since he was a kid, the one that seems like a recipe for stress, insincerity, and resentment.  But he probably gets into Halloween, Christmas/Kwanza/etc., Mother’s Day, and other holidays that are fundamentally about fun and appreciation.  I bet that if you presented it to him as a kind of foreplay, like an extended role-playing game, and showed him the nature of your enthusiasm, he’d catch the spirit — not the Hallmark one, but the fun, naughty, good-natured spirit you’re showing in your letter.

Have an wonderful day!

-VVM

Submit your questions anonymously by writing to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.