Celebrating January 26, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Is there some unwritten female rule about celebrating birthdays before they arrive if the actual birthdate falls on some funky weekday where the two people can’t get together?

— JR in IA

 
Dear JR,

Yes. And then we lie about our age. Go figure.

Love,
Breakup Girl

This is only the first installment of up-with-singles author* Bella DePaulo’s Q&A trifecta with author Jaclyn Geller, author of Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, and already I’ve got releases of hundreds of white doves mini-explosions of consciousness-raising going off in my head. To wit:

1. What’s up with all the wedding presents when — now that folks are marrying later — most spouses-to-be already have two of everything anyway? (Shouldn’t all-Freecycle weddings already be the wave of…right now?)

2. “Matrimaniacs” is the new “bridezillas.” Pass it on.

3. If we are going to reclaim the word “spinster” — Geller notes that it wasn’t always an insult — I vote for “noun: a female DJ.”

There’s much more: linguistics (“I don’t like the “single”/ “married” binary. It implies that any unmarried person is a fragmentary half-self awaiting completion in a spouse”), history (prehistoric prenups!), homosocial poetry!

Cliffhanger: In one of the next installments, Geller tells us what she writes on those medical forms that ask whether we’re single or married. (Perhaps she’ll also tell us how not to feel lame when it asks for “emergency contact” and we have to write in our parents?)

* See: Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

Anybody else game to test this out on their next blind (so to speak!) date? From a study covered in the London Telegraph:

“The longer a man’s gaze rests on a woman when they meet for the first time, the more interested he is. If it lasts just four seconds, he may not be all that impressed. But if it breaks the 8.2 second barrier, he could already be in love they say.”

Women were found to stare for equal lengths of time whether they were attracted to the guy or not. Why? Because, the article explains (“explains”), “… women are more wary of attracting unwanted attention because of the risks of unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood.”

[Charlie Brown confused headshake] Wuzzuh?

And I thought it was just me who mind-jumped ahead too fast on the first date.

“At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner seemed to have it all, a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job and apartment in NYC, and a handsome boyfriend. But this golden girl was hiding a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions, she fell in love with the wrong person…”

Watch the video trailer for Crazy Love here.

MyVeryWorstDate.com presents cringe-tastic stories of cookies tossed, drink minimums exceeded, and balloon bouquets burst, in a refreshingly mixed-gender (and occasionally mea culpa) format. It’s a nice reminder, too, that bad dates are better than bland dates. I mean, at least you get a story.

You’ve finished War and Peace, The Guns of August, and the complete works of your Facebook news feed. Now take up this trashtastic double-dog Dollanganger dare: Read — re-read — the entire V.C. Andrews oeuvre (or at least one per month), including but not limited to My Sweet Audrina.

Moral of the story: your love life can’t possibly be as bad as Cathy’s.

According to The Telegraph, Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer broke up because of his “Twitter obsession!”

The source added: “Jen was fuming. There he was, telling her he didn’t have time for her and yet his page was filled with Twitter updates. Every few hours, sometimes minutes, he’d update with some stupid line. And in her mind, she was like ‘He has time for all this Twittering, but he can’t send me a text, an email, make a call?’.”

Sounds easy enough, but you see, girls require more than 140 characters at a time.

Happy perfect birthday to FOBG Dale Hrabi’s hiiiii-larious The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, out today.

Here, just for a wee taste, are some perfect baby names to start considering prematurely on your next perfect date!

A judge has thrown a shoe the book at the Bush-era FDA’s restrictions on emergency contraception, ruling that the agency must scrap its policy of preventing young women under 18 from buying Plan B over the counter. He gave the administration 30 days to make the change, snarling — rightly — that the “political considerations, delays and implausible justifications” (not to mention whispers of teen sex cults!)  tripping up the approval process for Plan B in general had stinkety-stank to high heaven. Rawk.

As Ellen Goodman wrote in 2005 of the redonkulous restriction: “What no one dared suggest is that just maybe teenagers should have the easiest, not the hardest access to Plan B. Aren’t the youngest precisely those who should be most protected from pregnancy? Or do we still think that motherhood should be the punishment for sex?” And: “If teenagers also need Plan B it’s because Plan A — abstinence — fails more often than condoms. Too many teenagers end up pregnant, facing Plan C: abortion or motherhood. In the name of protection, we are leaving teenagers far too vulnerable.” Now, one hopes, no more.

BG’s pretend boyfriend Nick Andropolis Jason Segel speaks to NPR about real-life geekdom, bromance, respecting your ex, and the real-life Naked Breakup.