this is why, in love more than in friendship, we look for people who like us. this is a huge personality flaw of mine; i make no attempts to dissuade people from being in love with me if they're female, regardless of how interested i am in them. (this is not the case for males and friendship, as far as i can tell.) it's selfish, but i understand where it comes from: it's because that's more important since love is designed to achieve stability.
i hope i'm getting my point across; i'm really not sure what the right words to do so are. i've thought about this off and on throughout my life, as friends of mine stay in relationships with people who i don't think are good enough for them. but only recently did i come to the realization that with love in particular, what the other person thinks of you is really, really important. because love is undertaken with an eye towards stability. and so if you find someone who is really devoted to you and who you think isn't going to reject you, it makes sense to stay in that relationship -- at least more sense than you might think from a strictly rational happiness perspective -- because that stability itself is worth something.
nowadays, with low rates of infant mortality, the balance is even more skewed. the risk that you won't find anyone is huge compared to the modest additional success of finding someone slightly better, evolutionarily speaking, since your kids are going to survive and propagate (and to a lesser extent so are your ideals, which you can much more easily transmit vertically) regardless of who's responsible for the other half of their genes and thoughts. (even better, if you marry someone submissive and quiet with few ideas, you can take over more than half of the thought-space of your children.) so we trend towards stability.
as i write this, i keep one eye on my own situation. it's no secret that i've become disenchanted and cynical over the past two years (more on that later), but i think i'm past the jilted stage. i don't feel jilted by the world or depressed; a slight wistfulness that it's not as resplendent as i thought, but that's it. i feel outside of the streams of life that i comment on -- transcendent, if i may be a bit blasphemous.
"But now I know what it is, and it's me. I changed. It's when I'm out there; when I'm going around and I see a woman I'm interested in, I'm not interested anymore. That used to be everything to me, but it changed and I didn't even know it. I must be giving off a new signal too, because they know I'm not a player. I'm dead to them." (The Brothers, Frederick Barthelme)
the more on disenchanted and cynical. they're words, they're the right words, but it's not as bleak as those words express. i'm going to wax solipsistic for a moment here because i think it's generally applicable. what i missed about college was just hanging out. nowadays, yeah, i hang out with people, but it's like there always has to be an issue. something to get it started. like, hey, come over for some games, or hey, let's go to a concert, or hey, let's carpool to dinner at this restaurant with these people.
in college, it wasn't like that. in a sense because there were fewer things to do we were more imaginative, in the way that a child with four blank cardboard boxes will have as much fun as one with a prefab puppet theatre. i got addicted to that: i loved hanging out. part of this is because i had, practically speaking, more people to choose from, so i could find the ones i had enough rapport with to just hang out. i know i'm idealizing -- i know i didn't hang out that much, and that the peak time was really those summers at hampshire college -- but it has a grain of truth.
but now? i have a smaller set of people to choose from. i really dislike some of the people i come into contact with on a semi-regular basis, and most of them don't really intrigue me. i certainly don't think i'd be capable of just hanging out with them. (i don't mean to badmouth anyone in particular. if you think i'm not talking about you, you're definitely correct, and if you think i am talking about you, you might be wrong.) in the real world, when you encounter someone for the first time it is almost invariably doing an activity. in college, i encountered people for the first time in more nebulous situations.
one of my fondest memories of college is gathering in straus common room with nick and chris and other people who can be interpolated from them and frolicking. it was the night that chris and i got together, and the first time i'd really had a chance to talk to her, and i remember the rest of that night vividly as well. but the important thing is that we weren't really doing anything. we were just all in the same place throwing words and ideas around.
in the real world, with scheduling, it's simply not efficient to do things like that without a plan. often it will be boring, and then you've journeyed an hour through traffic or devoted a block in your mental calendar to it, and there's no good way out. for that evening in straus there were five other situations where things didn't gel, but i escaped from those quickly. like the proctor group parties, and the interminable incidents with a person whom half of you can identify and whom the other half should be glad they've never met. maybe five-sixths of things fizzle, but they represent maybe one-third of the time; a good ratio. now, it's closer to five-sixths of the time, which is unacceptable.
so we always have activities. that's what i really miss about college; just hanging out. no, it didn't happen that often, but it never happens at all any more, and i miss the pure nature of that, the freedom of not having external impositions on the conversation.
this strikes me as an entry that will look false when i write it, but hopefully you've enjoyed it. my point with this whole thing is not to ingratiate myself to others, but to bring some small token of happiness. if i make one person think and 19 people (i have around 20 readers, i think) despise me, that's success, especially if those 19 people don't get driven away and can be the one later.