She’s Just Not That Into You

He’s Just Not That Into You was a 2009 romantic comedy that explored why relationships fail or succeed, and why a romantic pairing that appears to have “worked” for years suddenly stops working for one of the partners, whether it’s the man “falling out of love” with the woman or vice versa.

In the various couple-scenarios trotted out by the movie’s producers, it apparently never once occurred to them to introduce one in which the woman was on hormone-based birth control when she first became attracted to her future life partner, then stopped using the pill once they had committed to each other.

Maybe research into all “the pill’s” many side effects wasn’t quite there in 2009.

The Commentariat Speaks (29)

Doug Wilson gets the best letters from readers. This week, an anonymous twenty-something man is hunting for sound advice about a prospective girlfriend with baggage from her teen years. He figured Doug was a better choice than Dear Abby, whose daughter Jeanne writes her column these days. (I wondered how she was still going after all these years; I used to read her when I was about ten.) The new Abby’s readers have just as many problems as Doug’s (more and worse, actually), but Abby can’t give you a biblical take on your issues.

In this case, Doug’s answer is more than adequate. I quote: “If you are going to behave that way, then do her a big favor and break up now.” Now THAT’s telling it like it is.

Anonymous Asks (50)

“How do you get over a broken romantic relationship?”

How you feel when a relationship ends depends mostly on what you expected from it. If you are convinced that the guy or girl who just told you they don’t see you in their future is the only possible one for you, or that you will never find anyone else like them, or that they are somehow defying all common sense and maybe even the will of God by not appreciating your finer qualities, then you are bound to have a pretty hard time with breaking up.

More importantly, if you and the person who just dumped you have been heavily physically involved, breaking up will be ten times worse.

Too Hot to Handle: Anonymous Asks (0)

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: A few weeks back, I was sent a list of questions asked anonymously by a group of teenagers attending a Christian summer camp. This one sounds like it’s worth thinking about:

“Do you think that we should wait to date until we are more prepared to be married, i.e., financially responsible, able to cook and clean … OR date younger?”

There’s a hot potato, IC. I’m actually impressed that a younger person is open to considering the options, given that our society operates in a very predictable fashion today where young people are concerned. What do you think of the question?

Sophomores, Sophists and Solipsism

Solipsism is the theory that self is all that exists.

It’s kind of an oddball worldview first enunciated by the Greek sophist Gorgias of Leontini around 400 B.C. Gorgias argued that (i) nothing exists; (ii) even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and (iii) even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.

Now of course when we refer to someone as “solipsistic” today, we do not generally mean that they are a philosopher of the Gorgian school or that they really believe that everything they experience (including the external world and other people) occurs only in their heads and lacks independent existence. Most solipsists are not philosophers at all; in fact, they may never have even heard the word “solipsism”. They have no specific theories of existence and may never have contemplated reality in the abstract.

They just live and think as if self is all that exists.