A zombie, a cocaine-snorting rock star and a middle-aged cop walk into a bar…. Which one captures love columnist Emilia Millicent’s attention? In her last column for The Local, she explains how she has devised the ultimate test of romantic compatibility. … Read More
Iceland app prevents accidental incest
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I used to love the bride
Ellie looked stunning in her white strapless dress, yellow sash hugging her waist, which was her small rebellion against the traditional wedding gown. “Dance with me,” she said, her face radiating a hue that can only be described as pure joy. As she held me in the silky glow of the lodge where she’d recently said, “I do,” all I could think was: This was supposed to be our wedding.I’d proposed to Ellie in 2009 in the town where Sappho was born. At sunset, we climbed a hill overlooking the ocean and in a very ineloquent fashion, I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me. Despite the grand romantic gesture of a proposal, when we got home from Greece, we hardly told a soul about our engagement. Partially it was because we were in a new city and nobody knew us. Partially it was because gay marriage isn’t legal in California, so announcing our engagement felt a little like playing pretend. We wanted legitimacy, and not in the form of Facebook comments. But we couldn’t have it, so we accepted our new life as betrotheds without fuss or fanfare.Continue Reading… … Read More
Love in the Future
Bruce Sterling’s new novel
Love Is Strange (40k) is indeed strange. The latest
from the founding father of cyberpunk, known in the biz as Chairman
Bruce, invokes Brazilian voodoo, Italian fascism, Seattle royalty,
time travel, and technology conferences as the backdrop for the
confused and confusing courtship of two dashing and astonishingly
self-absorbed romantic leads. The main characters spend a great
deal of time in transit, looking for themselves and each other, all
the while holding forth in quasi-Randian style about their
ideologies, which center around the exciting, accelerating
technological future. ;
While the novel isn’t an effective primer on futurism— either
the early 20th century Italian movement or the 21st century version
Sterling seems keen to promote—it does portray the more
fashionable, romantic side of a philosophical and technological
universe that often seems to be the domain of emotionless geeks and
their digital devices. —Katherine Mangu-Ward … Read More
High school dorks need not despair
As someone who didn’t have, ahem, a wealth of opportunity to explore the high school dating scene, my interactions with female classmates came primarily in the form of AOL instant messages and orchestra bus trips. By senior year, I’d received the “let’s just be friends” talk so often that I knew it by heart.Was it any coincidence that I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol till my freshman year of college, and underlined my English texts with colored pencils and a ruler? According to a six-year longitudinal study that looks at teenagers’ dating patterns, partying habits, and study skills, the simple answer is: no.The study, published online last week by the Journal of Research on Adolescence, followed 620 students—half male, half female—from sixth grade through their senior year of high school. Once a year, researchers from the University of Georgia’s School of Public Health interviewed the students, asking them about their romantic lives, as well as their drug and alcohol use. From teachers, researchers collected academic evaluations — how organized and hard-working was the student? How often did they turn in their homework and complete the assigned reading?Continue Reading… … Read More
My inappropriate relationship
Over the years, I have called it an “inappropriate relationship.” I have called it “an incident with an older man.” Most frequently, I have called it “the thing that happened that summer.” As in — remember the thing that happened that summer?I never called it sexual abuse, because it felt like an overly dramatic Oprah-ization of what happened. The word “abuse” seems to imply victimization and has always made me uncomfortable in this instance. Until now, I have been far too politicized to admit the chief reason I never called it sexual abuse in spite of the fact that it would be considered as much from both a criminal and a clinical perspective. The real reason is because I believed I asked for it.The summer I turned 12, I went to sleepaway camp. I shaved my legs for the first time, dumped Sun-In in my hair and tanned with baby oil. I had my first boyfriend — a skinny, freckly arrogant kid a year my senior who took me for two paddle boat rides and then broke up with me, declaring me a prude and, I was sure, ruining my romantic life forever.Continue Reading… … Read More
Rewind: Celebrating the brilliance of “Moonlighting”
“Moonlighting,” the wonderful romantic comedy co-starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd as bantering, codependent private detectives, aired on Tuesday nights on ABC from 1985 to 1989. Unlike many of its contemporaries, “Moonlighting” remains a cultural touchstone — also airing on Tuesdays during those years, “The A-Team” and “Matlock”! — in large part because of the long shadow it has cast on TV romances: You know, the “Moonlighting” curse. But the focus on the curse has unfairly narrowed “Moonlighting’s” legacy. It means that when we talk about “Moonlighting,” we’re usually talking about what “Moonlighting” got wrong, and that, as David Addison might say, makes about as much sense as zebras speaking Martian. “Moonlighting” is and was stunningly modern, hilarious and energetic in a still breathtaking way, meta before meta was standard, a social media series before there was social media. (The first show to talk about the “Moonlighting” curse was basically “Moonlighting.”) So, forthwith, a consideration of “Moonlighting” that has nothing to do with romance at all.Continue Reading… … Read More
