Tell Betty | July/August 2006

You’ve got yourself a date for Saturday night. Here you have a live person who will sit across from you at the table for a two-hour dinner and probably some coffee, drinks, and a dessert besides. Not only are they a real flesh and blood human being with the type of organs that float your boat, they’re also kinda cute. So, is the hard part over? Or has the hard part just begun?

As you finish up your last drink, you can feel the unspoken question start to flutter in the air like a twitchy little goodnight bat. Two words. Second date? If you decide to go forward, you will be treated to a repeat performance of this moment at the end of your second date about the possibility of a third date. And so on.

Why is it sometimes so hard to know if someone is worth more of your time? Daters are constantly called on to parse mass quantities of data about another person who they barely know (big eyes, likes dogs, left-handed, mispronounced the word nuclear). Your conclusions based on this preliminary data are generally pretty arbitrary to boot. After date #1 your pro and con list may look as follows:

PRO
Likes winter sports
Can speak Japanese
Let me have the seat that looks out the window

CON
Vegans are sort of weird
Mentioned ex four times
Squeaky giggle

You’d resort to flipping coins over happy hour before you could ever make sense of this mismatched list.

Your decision would be made a lot easier if the date was a complete bust (he pulled out a ukulele and began a five-song serenade), or complete magic (you can’t remember the last time you had so much fun). But that just isn’t the case a majority of the time.

Taking time to make the right choice is important, but it can be tiring. Daters are decision-making machines. Button the top button or no? Break it off before or after Valentine’s Day? Can good sex make up for a belief in intelligent design? Being bombarded with these sorts of low-stakes questions can make you want to turn your cell off and upgrade your pay-per-view options.

In a world where men tend to let good women go too quickly, women tend to hang on to unsuitable men too long, and gay men use up far too many minutes on their girlfriend’s phones, here are my strategies for making the right decision at the right time about whether to take it one step further with the person at hand. Resorting to less scientific methods of decision-making (tea leaves, dice-throwing, tarot cards, match.com) is just a waste of your two key commodities - time and energy.

(1) Own up to your real non-negotiables. Remember that everyone has different standards for what comprises normal dating behavior. You and your date have had to deal with very different people and very different dating situations. While you thought the dozen roses were overkill, I can almost guarantee you that the last woman broke up with him for not bringing flowers. Everyone’s trying to navigate the game, which can be both good and bad.

So focus on the factors that really matter. Weed out sticking points related to this particular evening from those that would continue to be an issue after you’ve gotten past the fifth date. Your need to share political persuasions, your matching libido levels, or finding someone who’ll agree to raise the kids Rastafarian are all factors that trump him drinking a sex-on-the-beach or her bizarre taste in shoes.

(2) Use a sliding scale for the first few dates. The first date should be at a 60/40 ratio of good to bad for you to go for seconds. This ratio should hold steady or improve after each subsequent date. That being said, if you find you’re never getting past 60/40, it’s time to take stock of the situation. After all, when there’s a 40% chance of rain we tend to walk around with an umbrella, waiting for the other shoe to fall.

As you apply the ratio, be careful not to hone in on one bad thing (20%) but overlook the 80% of the date that really went great. At the same time, try not to ignore the items on your list of cons just because you think your date is really hot. Cuteness may tempt you to brush aside his constant references to mommy or her frequent excuses to ‘powder her nose.’ If all you’re looking at is a pretty face then have a one night stand and be done with it.

(3) Practice makes perfect. Use your past to arm your perspective. Comb through your behavior in previous situations -- when you broke it off, why you stayed too long, moments that you would see as tipping points now but overlooked at the time. Also see if you have any Golidilocks moments when everything was just right. This decision making thing is a little bit art and a little bit science; every experience will help develop your technique.

(4) Avoid flaccid things at all costs, or at least deduct major percentage points. Chemistry is your most elusive, yet most telling clue. While I won’t be unlocking this Da Vinci code for you today, I will say that the above rules won’t do shit for you if you don’t feel a spark for the person around the date three marker if not sooner. Sex and sexiness are big deals. If you could go either way on having them in bed, show them the way to the door.

Think of these four pointers as social lubricant to glide you easily through second, third, fourth dates and decisions. Like a good scientist, you’ll stay more in tune with the big picture and get less bogged down by the friction and resistance of isolated details. Your hypothetical lab coat won’t keep you from making mistakes along the way, but it will put you on the fast track to a J-curve in terms of learning and success.

There’s always drama or some big issue they’re working out. Like last time, I asked him what was up because he really seemed upset. He brushed me off at first, then finally admitted she completely blew up when he said he didn’t like some checkered curtains she was considering. She said it showed that he wasn’t committed to a shared living space that met both their needs. Even worse (for me), she never wants him to go out without her. And on the few occasions when they both come out she whines and makes a fuss the entire time.

She has a bad personality. She’s not even pretty. Yet he continues to date this woman in the face of great unhappiness and a sex-life that’s scraping up the dregs of the barrel.

Being a man of action and a good friend, I want to know if I can tell him to break up with her. I feel like you’re not supposed to say stuff like that but desperate times call for desperate measures. She could quite possibly argue him into marrying her. Then there would be a whiney wedding, whiney demon children, and – best-case scenario – a whiney, expensive, drag-down knock-out divorce. He seriously needs of some sense knocked into him, like with a 2 x 4.

Even though our friends are right about these situations nine times out of ten, friends still can’t tell friends how to run their lives. That role is reserved for mothers, particularly the Jewish ones, and even then the child will or won’t listen pretty much as they please.

Besides, the root of this particular problem goes much deeper than simple bad taste. He’s probably with this woman because he confuses bad attention with good attention. He takes masochistic comfort in her always creating a stink because that way he knows that she’s always thinking of him. So, my sweet puppy, I don’t think you could find (a) enough stern words or (b) enough 2 x 4s to bring him to the light.

Friends, however, can plant seeds of help for a friend in distress, with no obligation for the future ways they might take root, blossom, and grow. A phrase like “I’m worried that you don’t seem very happy with Zilla” opens the door for some discussion. Pepper your conversation with provocative one-liners. Good standards include: “I’ve always felt that relationships should simply make you more happy than unhappy” or “Can you see it getting better in a reasonable amount of time?” Feel free to tell him that “in five years” and/or “when they have kids” do not qualify as reasonable answers. These ideas will get him thinking but are basic enough that you won’t seem to be riding a high horse.

Also, stop protecting him from the social consequences of dating a complete loser. If he and Zilla are a consistent buzz-kill, they don’t deserve gilded invitations all the latest events. While friends are not the people to dole out punishment and spankings, they don’t do their friends any favors by putting on fake smiles and making nice about a situation that impacts them, too.

Sorry if my answer probably sounds like baby steps towards the cause. Sadly, packing her in a box and shipping her to Abu Dhabi just isn’t an option. Try to find consolation in thinking back on a time when you had a Zilla of your very own and were making piss-poor, cloudy-headed decisions. I guarantee your friends knew the situation was a bust. Still, you figured it out yourself (I hope) and are the better for it.

We all live in the real world. A world filled with rules, obligations, conventions, and happenstance. Perhaps because of this, each one of us also has a fantasy world. A world that is not, or rarely, shared with others, one that is different and set aside from day to day life. Fantasies are the only place where we get to make the rules be whatever we want them to be. Constructed from deep dreams, bizarre desires, and funny thoughts, fantasies are fantastic because in them we dictate everything and anything.

For example – the woman next to you on the bus may fantasize about wild orgies of which she is the absolute center of attention. There, she is desired, pleasured, and sought after in a steamy jumble of limbs and people. Maybe it all goes down in the Oval Office or on American Idol to the shock and awe of millions. It changes and becomes more delicious as easily and quickly as it takes her to change her mind. Sounds like fun.

But it probably wouldn’t be too much fun in the real world. Though detailing and expanding her fantasy makes the bus ride go a lot faster, she might cringe at these things actually happening to her in real time. The propositions get less enticing when you take the Adonises/Aphrodites of her imagining and replace them with fellow bus-mates “Señor Combover” and “woman talking to herself.” And I’m pretty sure the secret service would nab you before any orgy in the Oval Office started getting good.

The real world and our fantasy world sit side by side. The real world gives us a palette. The fantasy world makes things more interesting. The real world offers a place to return when the solitary pleasures of mental free reign wear thin or get too intense. The two spheres inform each other yet are separate, distinct things.

Part of the real world that we all share is the worldwide pandemic of AIDS. I bring this up not just because it is perennially important, but because this year has marked the 25th anniversary of the first documented case of AIDS. Since that first case, 30 million people have died. 70 million people are currently infected and another 40 million are expected to be infected over the next 10 years. 140 million lives lost to AIDS in 35 years*. That’s the same as the entire populations of London, Mumbai, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago combined and doubled. It’s a bad sign when tsunamis and hurricanes start looking sort of insignificant.

Okay, okay, enough with the scary statistics. But as much as we wish things were different, AIDS is part of the fabric of life on planet Earth for the citizens of the 21st century. Some of you out there may think that this doesn’t apply to you and I feel that way too sometimes. And then my alarm clock starts ringing and I have to wake up and brush my teeth.

The reality about AIDS is that education is the #1 key to prevention. Therefore, I find it surprising that current world leaders insist on handling the cornerstone of stopping a fatal pandemic with rules that we all know apply only to a fantasy world.

Abstinence-only prevention programs force the entire real world into an insane fantasy where every single person on the planet only ever has sex with one person in their entire life. In their version of how the human race should be there are no mistakes. There is no spontaneity. There is no love. There is no cruelty.

Of the $15 billion the Bush administration has allocated to AIDS worldwide, 2 of every 3 dollars spent on prevention goes to abstinence-only programs*. None of the money can be spent on strategies that are proven to be effective, such as needle exchange and education programs for sex workers*. Apparently, in this fantasy world no one does drugs, cheats on their wife, or gets sold into sex slavery, either.

Prevention and educational organizations throughout the world have the choice to either never talk about safe sex to the people they serve or get their funding taken away. It speaks volumes that many of these frontline organizations have decided to do without the money. This includes the entire country of Brazil*.

These fantasy world rules also apply within the US, including in all public schools**. Even though teenagers represent nearly half of all new HIV infections in the US, teachers have been fired for answering questions about safe sex***. Like Brazil and others worldwide, the states of Rhode Island, Maine, California, and Pennsylvania have told the federal government to keep its money****.

It makes you want to throw yourself out the window, right? Swiftly followed by the impulse to throw up your hands and then throw in the towel? What can any one person really hope to accomplish against a situation so daunting? In the real world, most of us can’t just up and quit our jobs to join a humanitarian mission, education campaigns, or lobby Capitol Hill. As a result, we have developed a coping mechanism that would be rather comical if so much weren’t at stake: we stick our heads in the sand like ostriches and act like AIDS can’t see us if we don’t see it. (“He’s a nice guy from a good family. Why wouldn’t his penis be clean?”)

So much drama, and yet our personal contribution to ending AIDS is so decidedly simple: Educate yourself. Use condoms.

Realize that if proper information is not going to come from the powers that be then we’re just going to have to do it ourselves. Become someone who talks about safe sex comfortably, openly, and asks questions. Inspire others with the normalcy of these conversations and your confidence as to their importance. AIDS shrinks as we demonstrate the courage to speak of it as a real world issue with pertinence to our own lives and health. The cure to AIDS lies with us speaking up and staying safe.

AIDS is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. Let's cure the epidemic before its midlife crisis (because no one wants to see AIDS driving around in a sports car with a blonde trophy wife).