This week in Sunday Life I discuss The Notebook

If you ever find yourself in the laundry at a party skewered against the tub of stubbies by some eye-glazing, go-nowhere conversation, try this tactic. Ask everyone’s thoughts on The Notebook. In my experience everyone has a take on this 1996 novel, turned into a film in 2006. And it’s always pleasantly diverting.

I mean, most of us admit to only having half-watched the movie, and only to witness Ryan Gosling work his magic. Right? Blokes will say their wife made them do it. But in the next breath they’ll confess it made them cry. I know an ex-world number one light heavyweight boxer who’s watched it 14 times and a burly fireman who’s seen it nine. Both cried every time. Which is a phenomenon in itself.

But what I find interesting when I spike party small talk with such a conver-bomb is that invariably women say they love the film because the female protagonist Allie – who’s faced with choosing between first love Noah and her posh, sweater-n-chinos fiancé – eventually goes with her heart. Chicks love this.

Blokes, however, say they get all prickly-eyed because the dude who sticks to his belief that he’d found his girl (and built a house in readiness for her return) wins the day. The nobleness entailed in this and the fact he stands by Allie through all kinds of calamities hits a waterworks nerve for men. Chicks also love this.

Choosing to go with your heart, and determined, stoic nobleness – it’s fundamental Venus vs Mars stuff. But at the core of both takes is the same principle, I think. A “good” decision was made. And committed to. Simple! Phew!

Since seeing the film myself, I’ve always wanted to know author Nicholas Sparks’ take on love. Is he a romantic? A cynic? This week I got my opportunity during his visit promoting his seventeenth novel The Best of Me.

This is a doozie of an article that I just read in The Atlantic. We all like chatting about this stuff: the disconnect between men and women today and the peculiar place both single men and women in their 30s are in. It’s such a HUGE issue and we all try to grapple with the reasons, the ways forwards etc. Wondered why it’s such a barbeque stopper? Read on…

Image by Tierney Gearon

I’ve written about this stuff many times before, how women give away their feminine power and some other discussions here and here on the current relationship biso.

The Atlantic article by Kate Bolick is worth a read in full, but I thought I’d pull out some points that sparked debates in my own head. Take a deep breath:

What’s happening now on the relationship landscape is monumental, just to be sure:

“The transformation is momentous—immensely liberating and immensely scary. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down.”

Bolick outlines in great detail how women’s wages are increasing more than men’s (in the US), are more educated etc than men, and cites the various reports on “the end of men” (which is a bigger issue in the US where the GFC hit male professions mostly):

If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction.

Or to quote Gloria Steinham: “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry.” I see this everywhere. But I don’t know that it’s doing us any favours – it’s defeminising women and emasculating men and confusing the whole equation. But Bolick provides this:

Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens termed the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction.

Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?

One would think so, but….Behold “the new scarcity”:

American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever.

Today. This. Dedicated to Pete.

I saw Gotye play live a few months back. The most sublime experience. He played about six or seven instruments during the gig, dancing between each one. It was a dance, I tell you! More than six million people have viewed this on Youtube, so apologies if you already viewed it. But I reckon it’s special. It’s my soundtrack to today.

This song is drenched in the kind of sadness we all know. Rejection. With a double coat of (feigned) apathy.

The sadness of when the other person looks like they’ve “won” in the hurt game, because they seem to just not care – sending a friend to get the records, treating you like a stranger. You don’t see it as their hurt playing out. You see it as them moving on without you. You lost. They won because you were nothing. We never see it clearly in the moment.

Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember

Definitely an ache I still remember…we convince ourselves of all kinds of things when we don’t want to be left behind in love. This spoken as someone whose experience flies in the face of the “it’s takes half the length of a relationship to get over a deep love”. I take double.

What do you think? Is the pain of being “somebody they they used to know” about feeling like you lost? And because they won, they somehow know more than you about life and love and everything, and always did, and so now you’re left without their “knowingness” on TOP OF IT ALL…on your own?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit. In part to understand what I’m seeking. In part to understand my friends’ relationships…some of which I don’t fully…get.

Pic by Javier Lovera

I used to believe there was a One.

I now believe arranged marriages can often produce better relationships than when we’re left to our devices. We create our love, once we decide. For a VERY interesting discussion of this see Sheena Iyengar’s book The Art of Choosing (she compares different relationships and finds the arranged ones are far happier 20 years down the track. It’s a terrific read.) I’ve put her TED.com talk below…as a sideline.

So the point is…we choose love. We choose to make the relationship work.

I used to believe relating was about facing each other and seeing each other in each other’s eyes.

I now believe relating is about travelling side by side, looking in the same direction. Every now and then we look across at each other and prod each other on with a kind smile.

I used to believe we found our match.

Today I simply share this. A poem by Oriah. I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of love I seek in my life. And then someone recited this to me.

I found it interesting to read the poem as a message to myself, rather than as something I impose on to an “other”. It’s always better to do this when you stumble across something that strikes a chord….

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

On Tuesday I posted about how and why pursuing career puts women on the back foot when it comes to love and partnering. Ergo stacks of “successful” women are single.

I made all kind of generalisations about male-female behaviour – which I don’t back away from. Many of you made a lot of great comments. The topic will always fire up debate. It’s juicy and real and we don’t really have answers. So we speculate and dig around.

Darren Saunders on Twitter alerted me to this Slate article – The Eligible Bachelor Paradox – which adds another crusty layer to the debate. It answers a few of the point some of you raised. It uses game theory to explain why there are more hot single smart women in their 30s than hot single smart men. As the writer says….

The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn’t there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?

He concludes, no. Here’s why:

He explains it in terms of auction bargaining power – “Consider the classic version of the marriage proposal: A woman makes it known that she is open to a proposal, the man proposes, and the woman chooses to say yes or no. The structure of the proposal is not, “I choose you.” It is, “Will you choose me?” A woman chooses to receive the question and chooses again once the question is asked…

You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so. In game-theory terms, you would call the first group “strong bidders” and the second “weak bidders.” Your first thought might be that the “strong bidders”—women who (whether because of looks, social ability, or any other reason) are conventionally deemed more of a catch—would consistently win this kind of auction.