The Feminist Life Plan

Remember Susan Patton?

Mother of two male Princeton undergraduates Patton had the temerity to recommend that female Princeton undergraduates use their college years to find themselves suitable husbands.  Surely, it’s better than hooking up?

You may recall, these remarks produced a feminist freak out. Beginning with the Jezebelles and the estimable writers at Slate’s DoubleX blog, feminists denounced Patton for trying to consign young women to premature domestic drudgery and to abort their chances at career fulfillment.

Obviously, the cultural pressure to adopt what I have called the feminist life plan continues to oppress young women. And yet, a large majority of young women of college age believe that they must establish themselves in careers before getting down and dirty with the business of mating. It counts as one of second-wave feminism’s most conspicuous and dubious successes.

It was accomplished without legislation or regulation. It was supported by certain legislative and regulatory initiatives, but the fundamental notion that marrying young was bad for women was purely a cultural change in mating strategy.

Of course, feminists believed, a la Betty Friedan, that career was more important for a woman because working outside the home, a la men, was the only true path to personal fulfillment and self-actualization.

That this was grossly insulting to millions, if not billions of women around the world… no one cared. Nor did anyone notice that feminists had cleverly duped young women into thinking that once they established themselves in careers they would be MORE attractive to men. Being independent, autonomous and solvent, they would not be dependent on men and would be loved for themselves alone.

What could be more appealing? Many young women bought it.

To which Susan Patton responded that biology did not necessarily follow the rules laid down by ideology. Say what you will about social constructs, rail all you want about how biology is not destiny, insist all  you will that there is no fundamental difference between men and women… the truth of the matter is that a woman’s fertility is a diminishing asset and that it diminishes faster than a man’s.

There are sound Darwinian reasons for this, but why belabor the obvious.

Among the consequences of following the feminist life plan… large numbers of women who wanted to have children could not do it, for having waited too long. Among others is the ascendance of reproductive endocrinology.

As for the logic behind the argument, one woman—I forget who—pointed out that if you follow the feminist life plan you will be the mother to toddlers at a time when your career is reaching its summit, during your late thirties and early forties.

Can it be done? Yes, it can.

Is it advisable? Probably not.

In this as in many other cases we want to hear what women have to say. In this case writer Jenny Bahn, a thirty-year old woman who wrote an article for xoJane, later reprinted in Time.

Bahn recounts the moment she discovered that, whereas a man’s career advancement makes him more attractive to women, a woman’s career advancement makes her less attractive to men.

Another minor detail, ignored by the feminists. To be fair, if you ask a Jezebelle about this gross disparity, she will surely tell you that it is a sign of rampant sexism.

The thirty-year-old Bahn recounts her breakup with her 38-year-old promising prospect. It isn’t quite fair to say that he was a boyfriend. They never got that far.

For the record, Bahn was formerly a fashion model. If you think that beauty matters, she certainly has it.

 

Here’s a link to some of her other modeling shots.

Anyway, Bahn explains:

At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.

Alex sees his stock rising. For a man, age brings success, wisdom and the Hollywood-approved wrinkles of Robert Redford. And, while I too find that my career is on the up, it doesn’t matter, because time, for a woman, is hardly as kind as it is to a man. My career successes, my triumphs as a human being, are trumped by the fact that my looks—and my ovaries—have a shelf life. Biology and Sociology 101.

Biology and sociology… who knew?

Bahn continues:

It’s this logic that has most of my 30-something guy friends dating girls fresh out of college. Girls who, in my experience, are less impressive, less striving, less volatile, less successful, less intimidating, less questioning, less pressing, less complex, less damaged, less opinionated, less powerful, less womanly. They are less, and, to a guy not ready for anything—like most of the guys I have dated in New York—less is more.

A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.

Through this you can hear Bahn asking: how come no one told me this? How come I was led to believe that being older, wiser, more solvent, more substantial and more opinionated would make me a more desirable mate?

In brief, the theme of her column should be: Biology may not be destiny, but it is real. Why did they lie to me?

Why Bother With Counterfactuals?

In certain precincts it’s an article of faith that the American invasion of Iraq was a complete and total mistake.

And yet, how does anyone know what Saddam Hussein would have done and what Iraq would look like if we had not invaded.

Then again, do we know, to a certainty, what Iraq would look like today if, say John McCain had won the 2008 presidential election?

Speculations of this order are not, strictly speaking, historical research. History is what happened. These counterfactual speculations are about what might have happened.

Some historians have made a career out of conjuring counterfactuals. Other historians find it all to be an exercise in futility.

At the least, they point out, the number of variables make it nearly impossible to know what would have happened, for example, if Theodore Roosevelt had won the 1912 presidential election.

Counterfactual history is based on a philosophical premise. It assumes that human actions direct or influence the outcome of historical events. It militates against the notion of historical inevitability.

Recently, some wags have been saying that ISIS will implode because of its own internal contradictions or because people cannot long stand to be oppressed by tyrants.

If you, like them, believe in an inevitable outcome you will advise the president against doing anything to counter the ISIS insurgency in Syria and Iraq. Why waste resources on a situation that will eventually resolve itself in our favor?

Then again, even if ISIS will inevitably fail, how many people will be raped and murdered in the meantime?

Some of its defenders consider counterfactual history an antidote to the Hegelian and Marxist view of the inevitability of history. Hegel and Marx believed that human history was an unfolding narrative whose main events and even conclusions were inevitable.

Theirs was a narrative driven theory of history. They saw history following a script and they believed that the script would determine the one true outcome.

If, however, you believe that history is like a game, then the outcome is not predetermined. Different moves by different people change the game and change thee outcome.

Moreover, the players in the game are endowed, as I and others have put it, with free will. For my views, see my book: The Last Psychoanalyst.

Reviewing a book on the subject by one Richard Evans, Cass Sunstein summarizes both sides of the argument:

In Evans’s telling, many of the contemporary counterfactualists seek to respond to Marxist historians, to suggest that impersonal forces are 
overrated, and to demonstrate the importance of human agency and free will. Indeed, Ferguson saw his collection as a “necessary antidote” to historical determinism, which was his particular target. In Ferguson’s words, the “reality of history ... is that the end is unknown at the beginning of the journey: there are no rails leading predictably into the future, no timetables with 
destinations set out in black and white.” Ferguson seemed to suggest that once we reject determinism, and see that decisions were contingent and might have produced counterfactuals, we can better illuminate the past. 

Of course, once we are talking about possibilities, we cannot limit ourselves to what might have happened in the past. We are also interested in what might happen in the future.

If you are formulating policy you do well to consider the different possible outcomes of different policy proposals. Such work does require some imagination, but the materials that imagination will be configuring are facts about the game, the players and the moving parts.

Sunstein notes that such a method applies to some scientific experiments. Even if experiments are not always very useful or very practical when making policy, sometimes they are.

He explains:

They might hypothesize, for example, that if people have to pay a small tax for plastic bags at convenience stores, they will use fewer plastic bags. To test hypotheses, social scientists usually like to conduct randomized controlled trials, allowing them to isolate the effects of the tax. Such trials create parallel worlds and hence alternative histories—one with the tax and one without it. Historians cannot conduct randomized controlled trials, because history is run only once. Yet they nonetheless develop hypotheses, and they attempt to evaluate them by reference to the evidence. 

Of course, these experiments, especially in social science, often fail to include all the data. If people use fewer plastic shopping bags they will likely use more burlap or hemp bags. As it happens, reusable shopping bags breed bacteria that cause ill health and thus drive up the cost of medical care… etc. You will have saved the earth and nature, but at the cost of more disease. Bacteria are part of nature, too.

This does not discredit the enterprise. It says that in some circumstances, especially policy making, one needs to be skeptical about the results of narrowly focused experiments. Most especially, in the social sciences. One should be even more skeptical of those who want to make government policy based on test results that are anything but absolutely true.

"Happiness Can Never Buy Money"

On one front of the culture wars, the counterculture has achieved great success.

Its attack on the Protestant Work Ethic has made “work” a four letter word. We have been taught that the meaning of life, and therefore real living lies in vacation, fun, recreation, leisure. We believe, almost instinctively, that work and life are directly opposed.

It follows logically that if living is the opposite of working, then working must be akin to dying.

We heard it in the agonized attacks against the Tiger Mom. How dare she work her children so hard? How will her daughters ever learn, Bill O'Reilly complained, how to have fun?

For a classical and Freudian attack on the work ethic, see Norman O. Brown’s book, Life Against Death.

This being the case, when we look at Elisa Doucette’s article, in Forbes-- of all places-- we knowingly nod assent at her title: “Are You Using Work as an Excuse to Avoid Life?”

Think about it. If this means anything, it means that when you are working you are not living. Or better, you are not really, really living.

When you are on the job you are not enjoying the thrill of lying around the swimming pool inhaling chlorine fumes and working on your skin cancer. When you are fulfilling a task that will provide you with a livelihood you are avoiding a walk in the park, a trip to the zoo, an afternoon at the theatre, a sultry Sunday morning with your beloved… you name it. All of those activities count as life, but work, the kind that allows you to enjoy those activities, is the opposite of living.

But, simply speaking, aren’t you alive, thinking and breathing when you are fulfilling a task or an obligation? Isn’t your mind functioning at its optimal form when you are writing the report, interviewing job candidates, overseeing the manufacturing operation or negotiating a deal?

Do you really believe that all of those activities deaden your soul?

Besides, as everyone knows, retiring from the world of work, thrusting oneself full time into the world of golf and tennis and walks on the beach is not only bad for your health. The research suggests that it is likely to kill you.

The enemies of the Protestant Work Ethic will not like it, but staying on the job will give you more years of productive LIFE.

Which brings us to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After running the city for a dozen years Bloomberg surely deserved to slow down and smell the petunias. He earned the right to some productive leisure, some real living.

He could even have done some charity work.

He tried it, but he did not like it. He did not like staying at home, even with his partner Diana Taylor.

Yesterday he explained that he was going back to work at his eponymous company. In a phrase that will surely be denounced as grossly insensitive, to say nothing of sexist, he said:

… the alternative, in my case, is staying home and talking to Diana about feelings.

If that doesn't get you back to work, I don't know what would!

Of course, it was tongue-in-cheek. Yet, it shows that Bloomberg does not owe his extraordinary business success to therapy. In fact, it suggests that therapy will undermine your success.

But then, Bloomberg offered a piece of wisdom:

Just remember, happiness can never buy money.

Speaking of Pubes

In the past, and perhaps even in the present, men have tried to shut women up. Thus, feminists have insisted that women’s voices be heard.

If the first is true, the second follows.

Yet, when it comes to women’s issues, the feminist position seems to be that men should shut up. A man who does not echo the feminist party line will quickly be accused of sexism. His opinions will not merely be wrong, but, as Andrew Sullivan said, but will be taken as a sign of a mental disease or defect.

You might consider it a bluff. As posted yesterday, Sullivan has called it. Others need to do the same.

Also, when women express anger and rage about the way society treats them, we are expected to accept their overwrought condition as a just reaction to social injustice.

When men express anger and rage today about the radical changes feminism has introduced into the culture, they are told to shut up and mind their own business.

Young Laurie Penny feels great compassion for the men who are losing out, for males who are angry because they are no longer in charge. And yet, these same men might be angry because their views are being disrespected by triumphal feminists like Laurie Penny:

But I have infinite compassion for people who genuinely want to learn, people who have even the tiniest scrap of awareness of what needs to change in society and their own place in it. The weight of male pain and male rage out there is astonishing. It’s fascinating.  The world is changing incredibly fast. They’re dealing with not inheriting the world of privilege — a lot of which has nothing to do with women, but women are easy targets to blame. Confronting toxic masculinity and confronting gender privilege and sexual violence and social prejudice involves a sacrifice of social status and personal security which is not nothing. That doesn’t mean that people who don’t do it can be excused. You don’t get special cookies for doing this, but maybe some understanding. There’s incredible distress amongst men online, and it comes from a place of pain. I think a lot of people have the ability to understand that without condoning the behavior. Your right to swing your fists around stops at the end of my nose.

It is difficult to tell whether feminists really hate men. To do so would require that we look into the hearts and minds of feminists to discover how they really feel. The process itself feels intrusive and invasive… thus, to be avoided as unseemly.

And yet, feminists have garnered the reputation for being man-haters, so one imagines that the women who have rejected feminism on that ground are not merely suffering from a collective illusion.

In truth, Penny herself, in the passage quoted, drips contempt for men. She demeans and diminishes them, describes them as losers… and calls for them to get with the program, that is, with her version of jejune revolutionary activism.

And you were wondering why feminists are reputed to be at war with men... taken to be their born and sworn enemies?

One appreciates that young people thrill to the prospect of revolution. I have not read Penny’s book—extra points for me—but I suspect that she has given no thought to what utopian political revolutions did to the world and its peoples during the twentieth century.

Anyway, what many feminists really want to know about Laurie Penny is the state of her  … pubic hair. In her colloquy with a reporter from New York Magazine, Penny explains what really interests her editors:

You would not believe the amount of times — still — various magazines ask me to write pubic hair. Do you shave or not? Should you shave or not? For a long time, my decision not to write about pubic hair was a feminist position in itself. It matters to me a bit. We can have an interesting conversation it. But this endless collapse of the political into the personal … As somebody who cares about this issue but also cares about a lot of other things, too, it’s been a fight to carve out a position where gender and power are important and they stand in conversation with every other aspect of politics. 

Do you think for a minute that the editors of these magazines are male? Do you imagine that these editors are anything but true-believing feminists? Would any male editor ever imagine asking a female journalist to write about pubic hair? (OK, I grant that he might do so if he is a hard core feminist.)

Let’s understand that in the bad old days, when men were men and aspired to be gentlemen, such a conversation would never have taken place. Perhaps today’s modern men, their minds addled by feminist cant, happily ask women whether they shave “down there” but I hardly think that such disrespect, such an effort to diminish and demean women should be applauded.

Like it or not, the national conversation about the female body, the call for increased discussion about female bodily functions has been a staple of second-wave feminism.

Exposing the female genitalia to public view, writing and speaking about intimate matters, going to war against feminine modesty… these were not imposed by the patriarchy. They came from feminists themselves. The same radicals ought at least to take responsibility for what they have wrought.

On this score Penny’s instinct is correct. But she has also revealed one of the fundamental contradictions in second-wave feminism. People will not respect your mind or your intelligence, your professional accomplishments when you insist on filling the media with conversations about “The Vagina Monologues,” thigh gaps and pubic hair.

One suspects that the urge to expose the female genitalia derives from an anxiety over being recognized as female. But, then again, being a male... what do I know?

Is Arab Civilization Dying Out?

David Goldman, aka Spengler has been arguing this for some time now. A few days ago Hisham Melhem added his voice to the chorus: Arab civilization is dying.

Wars in the Middle East and terrorism are symptoms of civilizational decline.

Writing in Politico, he explains:

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

He continues:

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.

Melhem sees a dance to the death between Arab nationalism and Islamism:

At their core, both political currents—Arab nationalism and Islamism—are driven by atavistic impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a mostly mythologized past. Many Islamists, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (the wellspring of such groups)—whether they say it explicitly or hint at it—are still on a ceaseless quest to resurrect the old Ottoman Caliphate. Still more radical types—the Salafists—yearn for a return to the puritanical days of Prophet Muhammad and his companions. For most Islamists, democracy means only majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia law, which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.

Surely, it needs to be stated again, and by someone who has a true understanding of Islam. The Muslim faith is not compatible with democracy.

In Melhem’s words:

And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan under the Taliban to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there is no Islamist entity that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner of good governance. The short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under the presidency of Mohamed Morsi was no exception. The Brotherhood tried to monopolize power, hound and intimidate the opposition and was driving the country toward a dangerous impasse before a violent military coup ended the brief experimentation with Islamist rule.

In this context one should also ask whether Islam is compatible with free enterprise. After all, we know that you can institute free market reforms without introducing liberal democracy.

Melhem holds out some hope for the future, but reform seems increasingly to be a vanishing hope:

The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime.

Andrew Sullivan Attacks Radical Ideologues

Andrew Sullivan calls it “illiberal liberalism,”  and I find the phrase well chosen. In fact, I have posted about illiberal liberalism on a few occasions. Link here.

Of course, illiberal liberalism is really radical politics. You know it as political correctness. It’s form of indoctrination.

It tells people not to argue, not to dispute, not to debate with opposing ideas.

It prefers to condemn and discredit the messenger.

Sullivan writes:

Writers are not just condemned any more for being wrong or dumb or rigid. They are condemned as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah – almost as a reflex in trying to discredit their work. That’s particularly true when it comes to fascinating issues like race or gender or sexual orientation, where liberalism today seems to insist that there are absolutely no aggregate differences between genders, races, ethnicities, or sexual orientations, except those created by oppression and discrimination and bigotry. Anyone even daring to bring up these topics is subjected to intense pressure, profound disapproval and ostracism. This illiberal liberalism is not new, of course. But it’s still depressingly common.

The enemy of political correctness is scientific fact and objective reality.

Writing about Sam Harris, Sullivan explains that Harris:

 … assumes that there are some essential biological and psychological differences between men and women, and for a certain kind of leftist, this is an intolerable heresy. If that truth cannot be suppressed or rebutted in a free society, its adherents must be stigmatized as bigots. 

The marketplace of ideas, Sullivan continues, does not always function to please ideologues:

The free flow of ideas will often lead to different audiences for different authors. That some books by white Americans are read disproportionately by whites doesn’t mean they’re racist. And, yes, style of writing – especially the combative, testosteroned debates that occur online or typify the slash-and-burn atheist conversation – can lead to a disproportionately male-skewed audience for that kind of thing. But all that is a function of free choice in a free market of ideas – not some kind of institutional sexism – let alone personal sexism. Why we cannot revel in these differences and embrace them as part of what makes being human so fascinating and variable is beyond me. But clearly it threatens people. Reality can.

Why do people practice illiberal liberalism?

Since they cannot win an argument based on facts, and since they cannot persuade anyone of the rational validity of their own ideas, they try to enforce them through threat and intimidation.

Sullivan says:

The point is the enforcement of an ideology by the weapon of stigma and social ostracism.

Elizabeth Wurtzel Is Getting Married

Elizabeth Wurtzel, poster girl for the therapy culture, is getting married. We all wish her all the best… we seriously do.

Like her or not, she’s an excellent writer. For me, that counts a lot. Besides, when someone has suffered so much by following the ministrations of the therapy culture-- and has shared far too much of-- she does deserve a happy ending.

Wurtzel has accumulated a considerable amount of wisdom living a therapeutically correct life. Most therapists would not cop to promoting it, but she has been in full touch with her feelings; she has expressed them openly and honestly; she has overcome shame, decorum and civility; she has downed God knows how much psychotropic medication.

The wisdom she earned is hers to do with as she pleases.

One wishes that it had taken her a bit less time to figure it all out, but, as the saying goes, better late than never.

Now, she has written a swan song to therapeutically correct singlehood for The New York Times.

Looking back, with some regret, but no anger, she writes:

I would love to say that I don’t know why I never got around to this [to marriage] until now, but that would be a big fat lie. I never got married because who would want to? I was the worst girlfriend ever. And yes, I am the crazy ex-girlfriend you hear about. I had no regard for time of day or time of year or time at all. Perhaps I just had no regard. It’s not like I called boyfriends at 2 a.m. because something was wrong: I did it because I liked to talk in the dark when there was nothing good to watch on TV anymore.

I also called when something was wrong, and something was always wrong, because I could work my way into serious bother about something said in passing between the appetizer and the entree the night before, and that would turn into obsessive thoughts and long, intense conversations that would stretch across business hours and interrupt meetings all the next day. I needed — always absolutely needed — to get things resolved when it was not at all convenient. I called so repeatedly that I was impossible to ignore.

When technology enabled me to be demanding in many formats, my long voice mail messages became longer text messages and the longest emails. I was often hysterically upset or ragingly angry about nothing at all, and entire relationships became about failed communication and no more. I would swallow half a bottle of tranquilizers over a misunderstanding. And I would do this on New Year’s Eve.

I did this to everybody: I held rooms full of people hostage to my foul moods. I was an emotional wreck, and I did not know how not to be. I made men I loved scared of me.

A perfectly independent and autonomous individual, Wurtzel showed no regard for other people, for their time, for their space, for their sensitivities. The therapy culture does not put it quite that way but it touts the virtues of open, honest and shameless self-expression and promotes self-actualization ahead of tact and consideration. If you take its nostrums seriously you act as Wurtzel used to act.

Wurtzel’s relationships contained far more drama than most bad relationships, but she was using them as material for her books and articles. Boring and tedious bad relationships don’t sell. Nevertheless, she was hardly alone.

Ours is not merely an era of bad relationships, but it’s an era of obsessing about bad relationships.

She notes, sagely:

If television, movies, novels, songs, blogs and all other available media are to be believed, my behavior was not unusual and my love life not untypical. Our culture is animated by bad relationships and the conversations women have about them while drinking vodka cocktails flavored with lychee and pomegranate. The brainpower necessary to solve the troubles in Iraq and Palestine is instead deployed in the tender analysis of destructive dating behavior. It does not matter that it is obvious we are wasting our time.

It is well worth underscoring. Wurtzel explains that getting married is easy. Nearly everyone does it. So, why do we have generations of people who are obsessed with bad relationships, who spend far too much of their time and brain power deconstructing their failed relationships, and who imagine that knowing why it went wrong will teach them how to get it right?

For my part I would say that these people have overdosed on therapy. What else do most people do in therapy but deconstruct failed relationships. Which is one of the things that’s wrong with therapy.

Presumably, therapists know how the mind works. Thus they ignore reality and hone in on feelings. It may not be true in all cases, but it happens far too often.

And yet, what do most people talk about in therapy? Do they talk about the marketplace? Do they talk about managing businesses? Do they talk about career management? Do they talk about whether to buy or sell real estate?

I suspect that good therapists, therapists who have considerable experience know enough to discuss these topics. Most therapists, I believe, spend most of their session time discussing feelings and relationships.

It’s a serious mistake.

If you spend all your time talking about relationships and if your therapist believes in constructing narratives, you will need a constant flow of material to make your sessions interesting. You might not make a career out of writing about them, but the obsessive interest in self, the intense focus on what is going on inside, the need to produce more dramatic material will produce, if you follow it to its logical terminus, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s previous life.

Wurtzel explains that her problem was her own bad behavior and the bad choices she was making:

I cried profuse tears when my relationships failed, which was all the time. I wanted to love and be loved, but I behaved badly, and I had terrible taste. All the people who say they want to be married, but are not, are doing the same thing. All the statistics about how hard it is to find someone to love in this world — in this world of seven billion — do not account for the choices we make. We are the sum of our decisions: It’s not that luck has nothing to do with it, but rather, there is no such thing.

As I say, I wish her the best in her new marriage.