Please refer back to December 3 I like the bartender!!!

I saw him last night.. I think he is so hot, personable, and outgoing. I asked him if he rigged the contest to make me win a cooler. He said yes!!! Someone pays him a compliment and he wanted to return the nice gesture. Here is the negative though
:( I feel there is a chance he might be gay. I asked why he didn't call? He said he thought I wasn't serious. Then my one friend said when is our first date? He said for all of us to leave our numbers and we will go outside sometime!!! Annoying... I'm the one hitting on you here!!! He is hot though! Whenever I'm there I can't stop looking at him. I just feel like he either has someone, or is gay.. Either way he should tell me. If he had someone though what is he doing stringing me along until he breaks up with his girlfriend? If he is gay just say it! Last night was my last night extremely hitting on him. After last night, I'll just be nice to him if I don't hear from him. I wrote him my number yesterday... He gave me a beer right away on the house... So WTF is that all about? I'm feeling confused.. How are you going out all the time when you a bartender??? Your bread and butter days are weekends!!! I hope he is either a student, or looking for a new job. I don't judge the job of a bartender, but my ex was one and he has a major drinking problem. Hmmmm... Bartender let me hear from you!!!!

<3 The Disbeliever Disbelieving 24/7

A ghost of what "might have been"

I was thinking today about the "what-ifs." You know, those things in life that you look back on and wonder what might have happened. Specifically, there is a guy out there in a far away city that I was friends with way back when we were kids. He moved away, and after a while we got re-connected when we were in college, and then later on Facebook. I saw him a couple of times, but mostly we just stayed in touch via the miracle of the internet. Since we grew up and got re-connected as adults, I always felt there was something there. There's a certain chemistry the few times we've been together, and there's even a certain chemistry when we communicate online. I get the feeling that we have similar souls--we look at life in similar ways.

I never thought much of it, until a mutual friend pointed this online chemistry out to me. The fact that she noticed it made me realize maybe it wasn't just in my head. I always thought that if I ever ended up in the same city as he was, I would ask him out. And sometimes I wonder what that would be like, and what might happen. And that makes me think about how life is a bitch. I wouldn't relocate myself just in the hopes of having a date. And maybe it seems unreasonable to go on a date with him next time I'm in town visiting just to "see what happens." But I wonder how much of life really is what we make of it and how much is just happenstance. How much should we leave up to "fate," or whatever, and how much should we go after? I've come to believe that love is not something I can push, because the more effort I make and the more I push it, the more nothing goes my way. So I gave up trying, and whatever happens, will happen.  It's a funny thing, though--love. And fate. And attempting to control our own lives.

Just pondering. You may return to your regularly scheduled lives now.

Trying to stay positive,
Skeptic

Hello, my name is Spinster

I may have seriously reached bitter spinster status.  I have unabashedly and without hesitation blocked the following people on Facebook:

• Two (2!) of my friends who named their first-born daughters the same name I told them I had picked out years ago for a girl I would like to have some day.  Bitches.
• My friend who constantly gushes about how great her husband is, and recently posted the following status verbatim: "Relationships are definitely the best thing about life."  Does that mean that those of us without one don't have lives worth living?

I control my own happiness and I choose not to put up with crap like that  which is hurtful to me.  Maybe it's extreme, but I don't feel at all bad about doing whatever I need to do to stay happy, and blocking out all things negative (to me) is included.  Adios.

Trying to stay positive,
Skeptic

Was Darwin Wrong about Dating?

Okay folks, I saw this opinion article today in the New York Times and immediately thought of the blog.  Normally I'd just link to it, but some people can't view articles from the Times, so I'll just paste the text here.  It's long, but an interesting read, and I'd love some discussion!

Trying to stay positive,
Skeptic

Darwin Was Wrong About Dating

By DAN SLATER

Published: January 12, 2013 

A COUPLE of evolutionary psychologists recently published a book about human sexual behavior in prehistory called “Sex at Dawn.” Upon hearing of the project, one colleague, dubious that a modern scholar could hope to know anything about that period, asked them, “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?”

Actually, it’s a little more involved. Evolutionary psychologists who study mating behavior often begin with a hypothesis about how modern humans mate: say, that men think about sex more than women do. Then they gather evidence — from studies, statistics and surveys — to support that assumption. Finally, and here’s where the leap occurs, they construct an evolutionary theory to explain why men think about sex more than women, where that gender difference came from, what adaptive purpose it served in antiquity, and why we’re stuck with the consequences today. 

Lately, however, a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence of the gender differences in sexual behavior that Darwinians have spent the past 40 years trying to explain and justify on evolutionary grounds. 

Of course, no fossilized record can really tell us how people behaved or thought back then, much less why they behaved or thought as they did. Nonetheless, something funny happens when social scientists claim that a behavior is rooted in our evolutionary past. Assumptions about that behavior take on the immutability of a physical trait — they come to seem as biologically rooted as opposable thumbs or ejaculation. 

Using evolutionary psychology to back up these assumptions about men and women is nothing new. In “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Charles Darwin gathered evidence for the notion that, through competition for mates and sustenance, natural selection had encouraged man’s “more inventive genius” while nurturing woman’s “greater tenderness.” In this way, he suggested that the gender differences he saw around him — men sought power and made money; women stayed at home — weren’t simply the way things were in Victorian England. They were the way things had always been. 

A century later, a new batch of scientists began applying Darwinian doctrine to the conduct of mating, and specifically to three assumptions that endure to this day: men are less selective about whom they’ll sleep with; men like casual sex more than women; and men have more sexual partners over a lifetime. 

In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, a graduate student at Harvard, addressed that first assumption in one of evolutionary psychology’s landmark studies, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” He argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. Given the relative paucity of ova and plenitude of sperm, as well as the unequal feeding duties that fall to women, men invest less in children. Therefore, men should be expected to be less discriminating and more aggressive in competing for females. 

It was an elegant, powerful application of evolutionary theory to the mating game. The evolutionary psychologists of the 1980s and ’90s built on Mr. Trivers’s theory to explain a wide array of stereotypical gender differences in mating. 

In 1993, David M. Buss and David P. Schmitt used parental investment theory to explain why men should be expected to “devote a larger proportion of their total mating effort to short-term mating.” Because men invested less time and effort in their offspring, they evolved toward promiscuity, while women evolved away from it. Promiscuity, the researchers hypothesized, would have been more damaging to the female reputation than to the male reputation. If a man mated with a promiscuous woman, he would never be able to ensure his paternity. Men, on the other hand, could potentially enhance their status by pursuing a short-term mating strategy. (Think Kennedy, Clinton, Spitzer, Letterman and so forth. My space is limited.) 

One of the earliest critics of this kind of thinking was Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote in 1997 that parental investment theory “will not explain the full panoply of supposed sexual differences so dear to pop psychology.” Mr. Gould felt that the field had become overrun with “ultra-Darwinians,” and that evolutionary psychology would be a more fruitful science if it didn’t limit itself “to the blinkered view” that evolutionary explanations accounted for every difference. 

But if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam.

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0). 

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. In speed dating, as in life, the social norm instructs women to sit in one place, waiting to be approached, while the men rotate tables. But in one study of speed-dating behavior, the evolutionary psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick switched the “rotator” role. The men remained seated and the women rotated. By manipulating this component of the gender script, the researchers discovered that women became less selective — they behaved more like stereotypical men — while men were more selective and behaved more like stereotypical women. The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner, they argued, engendered more favorable assessments of that person. 

Recently, a third pillar appeared to fall. To back up the assumption that an enormous gap exists between men’s and women’s attitudes toward casual sex, evolutionary psychologists typically cite a classic study published in 1989. Men and women on a college campus were approached in public and propositioned with offers of casual sex by “confederates” who worked for the study. The confederate would say: “I have been noticing you around campus and I find you to be very attractive.” The confederate would then ask one of three questions: (1) “Would you go out with me tonight?” (2) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or (3) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

Roughly equal numbers of men and women agreed to the date. But women were much less likely to agree to go to the confederate’s apartment. As for going to bed with the confederate, zero women said yes, while about 70 percent of males agreed. 

Those results seemed definitive — until a few years ago, when Terri D. Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, set out to re-examine what she calls “one of the largest documented sexuality gender differences,” that men have a greater interest in casual sex than women. 

Ms. Conley found the methodology of the 1989 paper to be less than ideal. “No one really comes up to you in the middle of the quad and asks, ‘Will you have sex with me?’ ” she told me recently. “So there needs to be a context for it. If you ask people what they would do in a specific situation, that’s a far more accurate way of getting responses.” In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero. 

In light of this new research, will Darwinians consider revising their theories to reflect the possibility that our mating behavior is less hard-wired than they had believed? 

Probably not. In an article responding to the new studies last year, Mr. Schmitt, a leading voice among hard-line Darwinians, ceded no ground. Addressing Ms. Conley’s finding that women were more likely to agree to casual sex with a celebrity, Mr. Schmitt argued that this resulted from “women’s (but not men’s) short-term mating psychology being specially designed to obtain good genes from physically attractive short-term partners.” He continued: “When women’s short-term-mating aim is activated (perhaps, temporarily, because of, e.g., high-fertility ovulatory status or desire for an extramarital affair, or more chronically, because of , e.g., a female-biased local sex ratio or a history of insecure parent-child attachment), they appear to express relatively focused desires for genetic traits in ‘sexy men’ that would biologically benefit women when short-term mating.”

In other words: Nothing new here, it’s all evolution. 

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and popular author, also backs the Darwinians, whom he says still have the weight of evidence on their side. “A study which shows you can push some phenomenon around a bit at the margins,” he wrote to me in an e-mail, “is of dubious relevance to whether the phenomenon exists.” 

But the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve pushed these theories too far. How many stereotypical racial and ethnic differences, once declared evolutionarily determined under the banner of science, have been revealed instead as vestiges of power dynamics from earlier societies?

Citing the speed-dating study, Mr. Pinker added, “The only reason this flawed paper was published was that it challenged an evolutionary hypothesis ... in particular a sex difference — as the Larry Summers incident shows, claims about sex differences are still politically inflammatory in the academy.” Here, he was referring to the much criticized 2005 comments Mr. Summers made when he was Harvard’s president suggesting that women’s underrepresentation in science and engineering was attributable not to socialization but to “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” 

Perhaps these phenomena exist. Perhaps men do, over all, pursue more short-term mating. But given new research, continued rigid reliance on evolution as an explanation seems to risk elevating a limited guide to teleological status — a way of thinking that scientists should abhor. 

“Some sexual features are deeply rooted in evolutionary heritage, such as the sex response and how quickly it takes men and women to become aroused,” said Paul Eastwick, a co-author of the speed-dating study. “However, if you’re looking at features such as how men and women regulate themselves in society to achieve specific goals, I believe those features are unlikely to have evolved sex differences. I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. But many evolutionary psychologists don’t think this way. They think these features are getting shaped and honed by natural selection all the time.” How far does Darwin go in explaining human behavior?

The wrong one for you! How to spot a loser in a crowd filled of possibility

Sharing a good article I read straight from stepping out magazine.

There are certain telltale signs to look for when scoping out a hottie. We have all seen them, why that amazing creature you can't take your eyes off of is not the right one for you. All stars are unfortunates that I have encountered!

*Avoid anyone who is constantly the CENTER of attention
Wish I would have learned this at 20. I would have saved myself a lot of heartache. The ones who know how attractive they are typically won't ever love you as much as you love them. Save yourself an evening of torment and admire then move on.

Avoid anyone who has just been though a break-up
People on the rebound are looking for great sex. It would seem like a perfect set up, right? Wrong! people that just had their hearts broken have no clue what they want. People who have been this wronged can be clingy.

Avoid anyone with a revolving door of friends
You never see them with the same set of friends twice. They always seem to have a new best friend.  People like this are constantly having a fight with someone who has done them wrong. If friends are sooo easily replaced, how do you think they will behave with significant others?

Avoid people who have no opinion
The person who agrees with whatever the last person said in a discussion. If the person you are talking to can not form a soild answer move on! You do not need a relationship that will become an endless guessing game with no communication. That gets old really fast!

Avoid people with low self-esteem
Self esteem comes from within. You can be the encouraging friend, but don't try to be this person's one and only.

*Avoid anyone who's self-obessed
Only so many things can fit in the center of one's person's universe. If that spot is already filled, move on. It is easier to find someone who will worship the ground you walk on than it is to try chasing the one whose ego has never met gravity.

Avoid anyone who gets too personal
Typical first conversation includes weather, food, jokes, movies, work, ambitions, passion, and goals. Anyone who bares their soul to you on a first date has the makings of someone who could really become attached too quickly. The last thing you need is a marriage with no ring!

Most of these qualities you can notice seconds within meeting someone. Some take longer. Why spend extra time pursuing relationships that won't get us there?

<3 The Disbeliever Disbelieving 24/7

The Drunk Santa Strikes Again~

So I did confront the Drunk Santa as to why I was defriended on facebook..

Me: Defriended? Shorty Ain't got time for that...

Drunk Santa: Hi! I decided to clean my fb up a bi over xmas break. Nothing personal. You're still my friend in real life. Shorty is hot!

Me: Shorty is hot? HaHa that doesn't make any sense, but whatever....

How does that make sense? You are still my friend in REAL life, but not facebook. Did he get a BOYFRIEND finally? Hmmmm

<3 The Disbeliever Disbelieving 24/7

Twice in one week!

I had friends wondering how soon is too soon for sexual relations as in the full on boink. What do you guys think?

I personally feel anything before three dates is too soon. You must put your work in for this body. Plus I think it is better to have some type of relationship. No one night standing here!

<3 The Disbeliever Disbelieving 24/7

My friend needs to go on a date with this wide receiver

Haha he tries to link with her every time he is out!!! Link with him already!
At least for the sake of a good story!!!

<3 The Disbeliever Disbelieving 24/7

New Year, Clean Slate

Happy New Year!

Well, it appears that I have a clean slate in many ways--including with my blog stories.

Teddy Bear MAY already have a girlfriend.  I'm not sure about this, but there are an awful lot of pictures of him on Facebook getting cozy with a girl, usually with a caption such as "best friends."  It's not clear whether it's the "friends since we were kids and it's never going to be more than that" type, or the "you're the best thing ever and I want to marry you" type.  I'll probably still flirt with the guy, but it does keep my expectations in check.

It also appears that things are done with Drunk Santa.  I'm not really sure what happened there, but he was texting me several times while I was out of town for Christmas asking me when I'd be back, and we found out that we might be in similar types of work, which is cool (hey, maybe he could be a good networking contact).  But once I got back, I saw that he had de-friended me on Facebook.  I sent him a text to tell him I was back and we should set something up, but haven't heard anything in several days.  It's not a big loss, since I'd never even met the guy and could kind of care less.  But wtf is with this guy?

Oh, well.  Onward and upward.

Trying to stay positive,
Skeptic