mengwong

The 12-bonk rule, first introduced to me by my sister, is explained here:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,22056158-23272,00.html

I have a complementary observation.

Many entrepreneurs go into business with their friends. But 90% of startups fail, and 90% of the time when they do, the friendship fails too.

Marrying the love of your life is like going into business with your best friend. One day you have kids, and suddenly it's not about the two of you: it's about the three of you, the four of you.

"We were doing just great before we had customers!"

Children are the customers; they can throw a whole business out of whack, but without them, you're not really a business, you're a research institute.

Of course, it ultimately depends on the person, but there are plenty of experienced entrepreneurs who prefer to keep friends as friends and go into business with partners.

"Bob and I grew up together. Great guy. Best man at my wedding. Great storyteller. Would I go into business with him? Not in a million years."

Some people might pick a life partner based on attributes like responsibility, executive ability, patience, parenting ability, and role modelling. It sounds so boring and old-fashioned, compared to sense of humour, excitement, intelligence, chemistry, great sex. But it just might be better for the kids.

"Oh, but when we got married, we weren't thinking about kids!"

That's like two inventors going into business together because they've built a great technology .... but they have no idea about the market.

Some women have a dating style that looks like one fun-loving teenage crush after another.

Other women have a dating style that looks like due diligence. They want an arranged marriage, as long as they arrange it.

Somewhere in the middle is the golden mean ....

I once fell in love with a girl because she was so darned curious.

Sure, she was smart: she could take two ideas, cross 'em, and come up with a third.

And she was pretty.

But most of all what turned me on was the way she would go look up things she didn't know.

In my day, they called that "research skills."

Nowadays they just call it "Google".

One of the unwritten rules of geek culture is this: never ask a human something that you could look up yourself. Geeks hate being interrupted. As a matter of etiquette, they avoid interrupting others except when absolutely necessary. Asynchronous media FTW!

A bunch of geeks hang out on an IRC channel I know. Between posting BoingBoing URLs and complaining about the mysteries of the opposite sex, bursts of highbrow chatter would sometimes occur.

One of the guys on the channel tended to slow things down. If someone used a word he didn't know, he'd plaintively ask, "what does ______ mean?" He'd expect it to be explained to him.

It eventually got too much for the others. One of them snapped and said, quite directly, "dude, is your google broken? wtf."

This girl that I was madly in love with, OTOH, would just go off quietly and look things up and come back, instantly educated by Wikipedia. She was delighted when I showed her the Googlepedia plugin.

Remember the scene in the Matrix where Neo needs to learn to fly a helicopter, fast? And Tank just downloads it into his brain? Learning new things fast is a superhero trait.

She was like that. She was like that about everything. She had an amazing appetite for ideas. So sexy.

Especially in today's world where knowing things is so darned useful, and learning things so darned easy, a lack of curiosity bespeaks a certain abjectness of spirit. I can think of only three reasons which might get in the way of someone going off to learn all about something that they're interested in.

A fear of appearing ignorant. Someone once mentioned that the difference between jocks and geeks is that geeks embrace curiosity whereas jocks defensively disdain it.

A lack of confidence in one's intellectual competence. If, over the years, you've acquired the conviction that your intuition or your reasoning is reliably faulty, you'll give up trying. I blame science education for this. The impulse behind scientific enquiry is to identify and explore every counterintuitive fact that nature presents. The impulse is admirable. But in school, it can appear inadvertently mean: "As with most materials, water expands when heated, and contracts when cooled," goes the physics teacher. "So if you took a beaker of water at 100C, and cooled it to 50C, it would become denser, right? And it would keep doing that through 40C and 30C and 20C, right? But guess what! At 4C it expands! And when it freezes, it expands even more! Ice floats! Gotcha!" A confident geek would say, "oh, that's interesting; I wonder why." But most people, after enough of those gotchas, get the message that the world is baffling and their intuition is no good.

Laziness. Some people just haven't got the capacity: they might lack the bandwidth, or the CPU, through no fault of their own. Okay, so maybe "laziness" is the wrong word. Maybe they didn't get enough iodine growing up. But maybe they just lack the motivation, because they've never experienced the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman might say. Maybe they have better things to do. But if watching TV is the better thing, maybe "laziness" is the right word after all.

Curiosity is so important. Suppose your 4 month old baby got sick on a Friday evening, while you were out of town. What would you rather hear from your spouse:
- "the doctor's office is closed, I'll call them first thing Monday", or
- "I may not be a doctor, but I'm going to go online, do some research, and try to diagnose this"?

Curiosity killed the cat, but we aren't cats, eh?

Yesterday, over beer and wine at Boat Quay, a young lady and I compared notes about past relationships.

One of her favourite memories come from the bathroom; she was brushing her teeth and washing her face, and her young man was in there with her, showering, and it was all very domestic. She watched him in the mirror.

Usually the mirror is a single-user environment. When you look into the mirror and see yourself together with somebody else ... isn't that romantic? It's very special to talk to someone in the mirror. If you think about it, very few people fall into that category.

There is a photograph from 1995, never digitized, that captures that sentiment for me.

Anyway, I told the young lady: if I ever propose, I will say: "I want to share my mirrors with you for the rest of my life."

She said if somebody proposed to her like that, she would cry.

I am a big ball of cheesey goodness.

The newbies start with the high-school relationship, the immature relationship, the Hollywood fantasy, the dopamine crush.

Grown-ups have the adult romance, the mature relationship, the marriage-with-kids, the vasopressin commitment.

One easy litmus test to tell the difference:

Do the couple insist on sitting together at the dinner party?

Or do they follow Miss Manners's guidance, which is that couples should never be seated together; they should be fully capable of acting as independent social individuals for the duration of the party. And then they go home together.

Dependence, Independence, Interdependence.

Adults go into Phase III knowing their BATNA well: Phase II.

If you never have Phase II, if you've never been happily single, it's harder to be happily attached.

Wow. After reading this blogsite, I now have tremendous sympathy for twentysomething women.

http://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/drama-seekers-its-time-to-get-off-the-relationship-crack/

Personally, my feelings about relationships oscillate between the following positions:

A. Alex, Helen, Kabir's Mom, etc say that I'm just what sensible women want: I'm a dad, not a cad. All I have to do is put myself out there.

B. Women claim to want nice guys, but in reality, it's complicated: until they get over their own issues, they'll just keep enacting relationships that validate their insecurities. Solution: she must be thirty to play, or, alternatively, the well-adjusted product of an extraordinary upbringing ... in which case she's already in a serious relationship, not with you!

C. William Gibson was right all along. See The Belonging Kind, a few stories down in Burning Chrome.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and go with door A. The others don't go anywhere.

Even On Becoming A Woman says that it's normal for girls to go through a homosexual phase: it is a routine part of adolescent development to develop a mad crush on an older woman, then a girl your age, then an older man, then a boy your age; this was recognized in the 50s and 60s.

During the culture wars of the 70s and 80s we forgot this, and the gay movement has so thoroughly hegemonized this discourse that any assertion of "oh, it's just a phase, you'll grow out of it" is demonized. In a sad little expression of humankind's worst tendencies those who once campaigned for equality now find themselves interrogating: "which side are you on? Gay or straight?"

With sexual orientation so politicized, the New York Times deserves a big hand for daring to say: women are bisexual in a way that men are not.

It's like that joke that goes: "What are men's magazines full of? Pictures of beautiful women. What are women's magazines full of? Pictures of beautiful women."

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

How quirkyalone are you?

Your score was 109. Very quirkyalone:

Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!

I was talking to my hairdresser Courtney today about dating.

"I'm an engineer," I said, "so this is going to sound a little geeky."

"Go on," said Courtney. She had a comb in her left hand and a pair of scissors in her right, and they went snack, snack, snack behind my ears.

"It seems to me that there are a lot of lonely people out there. And being lonely, they're not very happy."

"Sure." Snip, snip, snip.

"Now, let's say your loneliness puts you at, say, minus five."

"Okay."

"So you go out, and you date, and you find a guy who is honestly not that great – he is, say, a minus three. But it's better than being alone. So you settle for the minus three. And compared to minus five, minus three is an improvement, and it feels good at first because you just went up two points."

"Uh huh." She put down the scissors, picked up the clipper. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

"But he's just a minus three. After a while, the two-point boost wears off, and you're like, damn, I'm still negative, I'm still unhappy, even with this guy."

"Right."

"But at that point, what can you do? If you break up with him, you go back to minus five. Frying pan into the fire."

"That makes sense."

"So it's pretty obvious, right? If you find yourself at minus five, the last thing you should do is date. Dating when you're lonely is like buying groceries when you're hungry." I had switched unconsciously into professor mode: I was now lecturing. To my hairdresser.

"You need to get yourself up to at least zero, so you're not unhappy when you're alone. You gotta cure the loneliness. Of course, the funny thing is that once you've cured the loneliness, you don't really need a guy any more."

"Yeah," Courtney agreed. She moved around and started working on my bangs. I closed my eyes and continued.

"But that opens up a whole new world: you can cut out all the minuses, the guys whose job is basically just to keep you company. You can start looking for the pluses. Guys who have something to offer. Guys with whom you can pro-actively synergize."

Okay, I didn't actually say that last line, but I thought it. May the good Lord have mercy on my soul.

"Maybe you'd always thought those guys were out of your league. And maybe there's a kernel of truth there. Why would a good guy want to date crazy unhappy lonely girls? They have a radar for that kind of thing. They don't want girls with too much baggage. It's like at the airport, you know? The signs that say BAGGAGE LIMITED TO ONE CARRY-ON AND ONE PERSONAL ITEM."

"Yeah, heh."

"It's kind of the opposite of résumés. When you see gaps in a résumé, it's a red flag. You want to see an uninterrupted string of jobs. But if she's had an uninterrupted string of boyfriends, going all the way back to when she was fourteen, it looks like she's never been single. That's a red flag. Maybe it means she doesn't know how to stand on her own two feet. If you're constantly in a relationship with someone, when do you find the time to thine own self be true?"

"Hmm," Courtney admitted.

"But anyway. Once you're not in the minuses any more, the good guys can can see you've gotten over your issues. You're not desperate. You can take it or leave it. You can have a win-win relationship, rather than two lonely people being lonely together. If you're going to get into a long-term relationship you want to start from a position of strength, not weakness. Wouldn't you rather be a +5 dating another +5 than a –5 dating a –3?"

Done with my bangs, Courtney moved back. I opened my eyes to find her looking at me in the mirror, head cocked to one side. Her lips were pursed in thought.

"It's hard, though," I said. "Bootstrapping from minus five to zero isn't easy. Getting your act together, getting over your issues, figuring out your boundaries, really becoming a person. It's hard work, and it takes time. I don't know. What do you think?"

"You're probably right. That's an interesting way to look at it. Is it okay in the front, or do you want me to shorten it?"

"A little bit shorter, I think. I don't like it touching my skin."

"Okay." She picked up the scissors again.

"Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much of this is true, but I guess I could go blog about it and see what people think."

"Yeah, you could blog about it. Let me know how it goes!"

"Thanks! I will!"

Please bring to mind Ye Olde Three-Dimensional Diagramme. The axes are:

History

Positive Example: Brad and Dina have known each other since age 13. They grew up together. They have a lot of history. They share the same values, the same references. When Dina says, "hey, that guy reminds me of that Chem teacher we had in high school" Brad knows exactly what she means.

Negative Example: Meng is from Southeast Asia, did a CS degree in Philadelphia and an MBA in Singapore, speaks English and Perl, adores Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is a dot-com entrepreneur. The six-foot blonde model waitress is from Belarus, went to university in Minsk, speaks Russian and French, looks exactly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is a waitress.

Definition: shared values, shared background, shared social class, shared media, shared religion, shared language.

Chemistry

Positive Example: Angelina Jolie meets Billy Bob Thornton. They proceed to have wild happy sex (until the inevitable breakup).

Negative Example: You meet a random girl on the Internet. You go out on a date. It goes terribly. At the end, she tells you she doesn't want to see you again because, well, you just weren't clicking.

Definition: Attraction, simpatico, love at first sight. Maybe he just smells good. Her genes want his genes. Her body wants his body. Her subconscious mind, her intuition, tells her that he's the one.

Synergy

Positive Example: My mom meets my dad. They start a hospital together. He does the doctoring, she does the managing. Over the next three decades they earn several million dollars.

Negative Example: Anna Nicole Smith, 26, marries J. Howard Marshall, 89. A year later, he dies.

Definition: What the two of you can do together that you can't do alone.

How do you rate?

The strength of a relationship can be measured by this simple formula:

Relationship = Chemistry * History * Synergy

Imagine a plane that connects the points. The volume under the plane represents your relationship.

If you score strongly on all three axes, marry.

If you don't, keep on dating.