94 Reasons the Man I’m Dating Isn’t Right For Me
(I’m trying to get to 100. PLEASE CHIME IN!)
He’s too young
He’s too old
He’s too bulky
He doesn’t have enough hair
He has a ponytail
He doesn’t care about music
He doesn’t have finesse
His car doesn’t have air conditioning
His apartment is filthy
He doesn’t make enough money
He’s too close with his mother
He’s too close with his ex-wife
He’s not in touch with his family
He doesn’t like to talk Continue reading »
What Would You Do with a Husband for a Day?
MUT’A or temporary marriages were designed to allow sexual outlets for men and women under certain circumstances, without subjecting them to the otherwise harsh penalties of nonmarital sex. MUT’A was condemned by Sunni Muslims, but accepted by Shiites and by Babylonian Jews, who allowed a sage entering a new town to request a “wife for a day.” —from “Marriage, a History” by Stephanie Coontz
A New Recipe from Debby Maugans, author of Small Batch Baking
I began dreaming about small batches of rich desserts when I was in college. Baking soothes me, so I often relieved myself of stress by whipping something up. The completion of that task – baking fudgy brownies or an old-fashioned Southern layer cake with coconut frosting– was a welcome distraction from what I really should have been doing – studying, for example. But I was not happy when that over-indulgence was there to tempt me in the morning. Continue reading »
Surprising Notions about Marriage
Here are a few nuggets from Marriage, a History, the wonderfully written and encyclopedic book by Stephanie Coontz.
Among the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo, a couple is considered married if they have lived together for two seasons.
In small scale societies, if a man and a woman are seen eating together alone, they are considered married.
The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a project of 1950s marital norms onto the past. The male/female pair was a good way to organize sexual companionship, share child rearing, and divide daily work. A man who was a skilled hunter might have been an attractive mate, as would have been a woman who was skilled at foraging or making cooking implements, but marrying a good hunter was not the main way that a woman and her child got access to food and protection.
Says, historian John Modell of the 1950s, “the ‘sorting’ of women into the marriageable and the future spinsters occurred early and vigorously.” The small, and suspect, minority of women who did not marry at the same age as their peers had less chance of ever getting married than their counterparts a hundred years earlier. They were what the Japanese called Christmas cake, likely to stay on the shelf after the twenty-fifth.
Can Friendship Save your Life?
Last week, I met with an astrologer. What a relief to learn that on the day I was born, Venus was in retrograde in my seventh house, the one governing marriage and partnership. Continue reading »
The Pleasure of Ice Cream on a Hot Night
I made these ice cream sandwiches last night. And I don’t mean to be glib, but sometimes sugar and chocolate ARE enough.
10 Things I Can Do Myself
- Cook a sumptuous meal, which I often do, even when it’s just for me
- Survive my mother’s death
- New Year’s Eve, 2007
- Run a business
- Select the perfect paint color for my walls
- Fight and WIN a fierce and long-winded battle against Blue Cross
- Move to Los Angeles after years in San Francisco and build new friendships and community, though it took awhile
- Buy a bathing suit
- Be small minded and judgmental (I need to work on this one)
- Figure out Garageband
Things I Can’t Do Myself
(Hint: It’s not drinking a martini. That, I can do well.) Continue reading »
Marriage, Eudora Welty said, “Never Came Up.”
(“Sunday Morning,” photograph by Eudora Welty)
Before her literary career took off, Eudora Welty, one of the great writers of the 20th century, used to snap photos. She had a job as a junior publicity agent for the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration, started by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, to jump start the economy) and traveled through rural Mississippi, taking pictures of people coping with the Depression. Continue reading »
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FIRST PERSON SINGULAR is a guide to surviving, thriving and sometimes just getting through a single day. Created by Wendy Braitman (more…)
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