Cohabitation

Rob Barnum, who heads up Cyan’s West Coast office, arrives in town early early early tomorrow morning via JetBlue red-eye, with his fiance Sophie in tow.

On past such trips, with both of us decidedly more single, and with our company equally bastardly cheap, Rob opted out of hotel booking, instead taking over my living room’s fold-out couch.

So, out of old habit, we didn’t book him somewhere to stay at the time he booked his flight for this trip, about a month or so back. We thought nothing of it, until late last week, when we realized that wedging a nearly-married couple along with me into my Manhattan-size apartment would, in short, be remarkably, awkwardly cramped.

So, for the balance of the week, I’m essentially gifting my home to those two crazy kids, and invading Jess’ instead. It will be, by far, the longest contiguous stretch of nights she’s had to put up with me; I give it four nights, tops, before my insisting on alternative pronunciations of words like ‘equinox’ leads her to punch me in the face.

Update: Jess texted to say she wouldn’t punch me in the face. She’d kick me instead.

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GF

As I haven’t blogged about it for several weeks, a handful of readers have written in to ask if I was still seeing The Girl, who I’ll henceforth call Jess, mainly because that’s her name.

And, in short, yes I absolutely still am. In fact, for her birthday last Friday, I gave her a small, metal Eiffel Tower, redeemable for a long weekend trip to Paris. So, yes, still dating, and, yes, still serious. But, at the same time, and contrary to my brother’s strongly held belief, I absolutely, positively, 100% will not be proposing while in Paris, or at any point in the near future. A long-standingly commitment-phobic tiger can only move so fast in changing his stripes.

Also for her birthday, I gave her a cake. About two weeks before the day, she told me that she didn’t really like birthdays, and didn’t really want any presents. The next day, she pointed out that perhaps she’d like a cake. The day after, it was a cake from Carvel. Then a vanilla ice cream Carvel cake. Then, day by successive day, one with some chocolate ice cream at the bottom, and a layer of oreo crunchies, a round cake, one with a ring of blue frosting and rainbow sprinkles and “Happy Birthday Jess!!” in pink icing on top.

On the morning of her birthday, I went to pick up the pre-ordered, pre-specified cake, and discovered that, while almost perfect, it was instead emblazoned with “Happy Birthday Jeff!!” in pink curlique. And though, in the end, I had them fix it, lest her friends think I was a total moron, I was sorely tempted to keep it Jeff-ed, as I was rightly sure she’d think it was uproariously funny.

Which is, in short, why she’s exactly my type.

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Logistics

As long-standing readers of this site know, I’ve done more than my share of dating since moving to NYC five years back. And, in that time, I’ve even had a slew of several-month stretches of exclusivity. But, in each case, the exclusive girl and I would still dutifully obey a tacit 72-hour rule – seeing each other, say, twice a week, tops, and never even considering multiple consecutive nights together.

So it is with some confusion and little practical experience that I now face liking this girl enough that I kind of want to see her all the time. Fortunately, it seems she’s both equally happy to see me, and equally out of her depth, leaving us, in turns, thrilled and totally freaked out by it all.

How much time should I spend with her? How do we do this without derailing each of our overbooked calendars? How often can I call before crossing the fine line between sweet and creepy? How does this all work?

In short, I have absolutely no idea. But, day by angsty day, I’m slogging ahead, as I think she might be worth trying to figure it out.

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Taken

I’ve been getting emails of late asking for more blog posts about disastrous dates. And, sadly, I don’t really have any to share.

It’s not that I haven’t been going on dates. I have. They’ve just been good. And all with the same girl.

Which, I realize, is somewhat out of character. I haven’t blogged about it, ostensibly because I didn’t want to freak her out, but, really, because I didn’t want to freak myself out. Once it’s on paper (or, more accurately, screen), there’s no denying – even to myself – that I actually really like this girl.

But, after having spent the weekend with her in Boston, and having totally not been sick of her by the end, which is weird, because I get sick of everybody and usually need far more time to myself, I’m biting the bullet, and coming clean.

I think I have a girlfriend.

Until I get yelled at for putting this online and then figure out how much I should really be sharing or not, the only description you get is one emailed along, strangely enough, by her mom: smart and intuitive and maybe sometimes a little weird.

Which, basically, is exactly my type. Fingers crossed.

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Bediquette

First, there’s the issue of side. Which, if I’m sleeping alone, is the left. But I’m flexible on that one. Either side of the bed works well enough for me, making the choice an easy first concession.

Then there’s pillow selection, which I’ll also happily give up, for the good karma, and the illusion of being accommodating.

The trouble sets in with sleep position. Left to my own devices, I’m largely a stomach sleeper, with occasional side forays. Most girls, however, seem to covet the shoulder/neck nook as pillow, which necessitates back-sleeping. Or, rather, back-not-sleeping. Because, as comfortable as the position actually turns out to be, I can’t really sleep in it. Spooning’s a bit better, though I’m never quite sure where to keep my bottom arm.

Sooner or later, it’s some slightly separated yet leg-intertwined position. Which works well for the most part. Except that a surprisingly large percentage of girls seem to kick involuntarily while deep in REM. Some, the former soccer or field-hockey players the worst amongst them, kick hard. All deny it once awake.

And, of course, all girls steal the blankets, somnolently bunching comforters with reckless disregard for their co-coveree.

A large percentage, too, are total insomniacs. Or, perhaps, just a large percentage of the ones I like, given my prodigious ability to develop crushes on smart yet totally neurotic girls. They can’t fall asleep. They toss and turn. They wake up in the middle of the night, then wake me up to announce that they’re awake. Or they steal my computer and respond to their work emails from three until four in the morning. Or they do both. The same girl, night to night, is utterly unpredictable.

Or, at least, seems so at first. But, inevitably, there’s (some) method to the madness. Which is what bed-sharing – and, perhaps, relationships in general – is really all about: spending enough time with someone to figure out their idiosyncrasies, to determine how those line up with your own, then compromising, practicing. All in the name of somehow finding that comfortable, sustainable, “I could sleep like this for the long-haul” groove.

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Correlation, Causation

A large survey conducted by Esquire magazine, on “the state of the American male”, determined that liberals have 60% more sex than conservatives (3.9 hours a week versus 2.4), and that atheists and agnostics have 20% more sex partners than those who believe in God (10.7 versus 8.8).

Most people would likely assume that’s because agnostic liberals like myself have lower moral standards, and therefore more sex.

I, however, contend that causation runs the opposite direction: there’s nothing like dating / sleeping with a lot of women to shake your belief in God, or to cause you to support your right to marry men.

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The Looking Glass

`Cheshire Puss,’ she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it’s pleased so far,’ thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

`I don’t much care where–‘ said Alice.

`Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I’ve long been fascinated by the neurobiology of attention – the interactions of parts of our brains like the hypothalamus and the reticular activation system. Each day, all day, we’re bombarded by sensations; yet, somehow, we filter out the vast majority, letting through a select few. Reading a book, we lose ourselves in the pages, blocking out completely the world around us. Or, talking at a cocktail party, we tune down others’ conversations, focusing in on just the words of our conversational companions.

I’m reminded of that particularly when I buy something new. I remember, in college, purchasing a Toyota Celica, and suddenly finding myself passing hundreds of other Celicas on the highways and streets. Not because, of course, people had suddenly rushed out to lease similar cars; but, rather, because my brain decided the ones that had always been out there were, for the first time, interesting enough to pass through to my conscious mind.

All of which is to say that I believe the brain is largely cybernetic. Not in the computerized sense of the word, but closer to it’s Greek root, ‘kybernetes’, which means something akin to ‘steersman’. It begins with an end in mind, then focuses us on and readjusts us towards those things that bring us closer and closer to that goal.

Which leaves us floundering, then, when the target isn’t clearly locked; without somewhere we want to end up, like Alice, it doesn’t much matter which way we go.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, mainly in the context of dating, of big city romance. With so many potential partners – an embarrassment of riches – we urban singles are weighed down by the tyranny of choice. There are so many people who might be right, and so many more who might be just a bit righter still than whomever we’re currently with.

But most of us, at a very basic level, don’t have any idea of what ‘right’ looks or feels like in the first place. We drink our way from date to date, trying to guess, hoping our hearts or guts or friends or mothers, or even the Cheshire Cat, will somehow jump in to tell us when we’ve found it.

So, for weeks, I’ve been brainstorming my way through my own sense of ‘right’, my own list of qualities I think I’m looking for. I’ve been quietly analyzing the long happily married couples I know, squaring that with my own experience, adding ideas, crossing off items, and boiling things down to the bare essentials: things I can look for that, alongside the requisite lightning bolt, would leave me happily ever after. In short, a target, an end in mind that my subconscious might, day by day, guide me towards.

And while my list is still brewing, certainly not yet ready for public consumption, I did, earlier this week, find at least one item that seems sure to make the final cut. Dr. Dan Gottlieb, a quadriplegic psychologist and guest on NPR’s Fresh Air, related the story of a young woman who he’d seen in his practice. “I feel like my soul is a prism,” she told him. “But everybody sees just one color. Nobody sees the prism.”

As someone too long practiced at playing social chameleon, I find her concern hits particularly close to home. Which is why, among anything else, I can see the appeal, or perhaps the necessity, of ending up with someone with whom I could always be my full, garishly multi-colored self.

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Old School

Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly discovered that, in flirting with women, everything funny back in second grade is now funny again.

Thumb wrestling, rock-paper-scissors, faux magic tricks; phrases like ‘dillhole’ and ‘dickweed’; offering your hand to a girl apologetically after you make fun of her, then, when she takes it, slapping her on the wrist and laughing hysterically at her having fallen for it.

I was taught this last one by the chatty, articulate eight-year old girl who lives down the hall from me, a girl who, since my discovery of the power of second-grade-inspired pickups, has essentially become my personal Hitch.

Just last weekend, for example, she passed along a gem I successfully field-tested at bars throughout the week: mouse races.

Imagine three mice, she explained to me: a deaf mouse, a dumb mouse, and a blind mouse. A mouse race, then, involved me putting out my upturned palm, then letting her draw lines representing each mouse up along my arm, as far as I thought each mouse would go before it stopped.

She did the blind mouse first, and I let her draw about half-way across my hand before I stopped her. Then the dumb mouse, which I let get just past my palm and onto my wrist.

Finally, the deaf mouse. Stop, I said, when she was again just passing my wrist. But, of course, she kept plowing ahead, it taking me two more ignored ‘stops’ before I got the joke.

After which, my little neighbor dissolved into paroxysms of gasping laughter; as, in fact, have I, the two times I’ve since pulled this off on others.

But, the odd thing is, rather than being appalled at the stupidity of it all, women apparently find this fun and charming, even want you to write your phone number on their arms alongside the three lines.

Which, previously, I totally would have done. But, now, having increasingly reverted to my second grade self, seems like a rather dangerous idea; after all, those girls are probably covered with cooties.

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Dirty Booty Tricks: The High Bridge

[As I tend to write more regularly if I have a theme to blog around, I’m today setting out to help those looking to get an early jump on spring romance, with a series applying cheap psychological tricks to the world of sex and dating. Tactless, perhaps. But, as they say, all’s fair in love and war.]

I’ve been nervous all afternoon. And, after several hours of trying to figure out why, I finally pinpointed the cause: after several weeks off of morning coffee, today I downed two double espressos before noon.

Which makes sense in the context of work by 19th-century researchers William James and Carl Lange. The pair turned emotion theory on its head by suggesting that feelings are largely determined by attribution. Common sense dictates the opposite: feel nervous, and your heart pounds, your mouth goes dry. But James and Lange insisted things work the other way around: we get the palpitations and dry mouth first, then sub-consciously determine nervousness is the emotion that fits.

Over the years, a slew of psychologists have elegantly proved the theory, but my personal favorite – and the one most applicable to our lecherous cause – is Aron & Dutton’s classic High Bridge Study.

In it, an attractive female researcher asked male passersby to fill out a brief research survey about a nearby long, narrow footbridge spanning a deep ravine.

The survey, in fact, was meaningless. But the researcher also gave each male subject her phone number, in case they wanted to ‘follow up with any questions about the survey’. Half of the men got the survey (and phone number) just before the bridge, the other half just on the far side. And the real dependent variable was how many of the men actually called the researcher to ask her out.

The conclusion: about 15% of the pre-bridge interviewees called, while about 50% of the post-bridgers did. In other words, 35% of the men confused enough of their bridge-driven adrenaline with genuine attraction to tactlessly dial the dame.

Which, in short, explains the perennial effectiveness of the ordinarily disdained ‘gym pickup’, where potential dates are likely to confuse post-treadmill windedness with your having taken their breath away.

Of course, even having booked the date in less heart-pounding settings, you can still sneakily help your cause. Taxi rather than subway, as the requisite reckless speeding is sure to have her adrenaline pumping. And head to the scariest movie you can find, where your date won’t be sure herself if she’s grabbing your arm because an axe murderer just popped out from around the corner, or because, well, you’re hot enough to die for.

Up next time: for the love of a giant paper bag.

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