Here’s another study for you: the latest research suggests that people who are in love with their partners are less attracted to other people. Where was that data collected, University of the Obvious? Published in the academic journal Duh?

Well, from a broad psychological standpoint, this conclusion is apparently not that obvious. Because our default setting, as humans, is “instant gratification.” Nationally, constitutionally, and gubernatorially, we are not champions of self-restraint. So why should lust, even in the context of presumed monogamy, be any different? Or, as The Raw Story put it: “Why do people in stable relationships so often pass up the chance for a little sexual gratification on the side, even if they can get away with it?”

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And I don’t just mean they finish building the loft first. I mean that according to a Harvard study published in the new issue of the journal Nature, among 100 college students asked to play about 8000 rounds of game-theory-gasmic “prisoners’ dilemma,” using dimes, those who less often meted out “punishment” came out ahead. Those who “punished” the most wound up with the least money; to the the “co-operators” went the spoils.

This is impressive to me, given that having to play 8000 rounds of prisoner’s dilemma with only dimes at stake would make me want to punish someone. Of course, it was Yahoo, and not Harvard, who concluded from this data — despite the fact that study subjects were male and female — that “Nice Guys Finish First,” but hey. We like nice; thought you might like to know!

One of BG’s favorite metaphors for partnership, offered by “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” in this letter, is: having someone in your life who can “share the driving.” One shortcoming: the metaphor doesn’t really work for women in Saudi Arabia who, since the establishment of the state in 1932, have not been permitted to get behind the wheel.That, finally — noreallythistimewemeanit — may be changing. The Saudi legislature has formally recommended lifting the ban on female drivers. But, as my alter ego at Broadsheet reports:”There’s just one caveat. No, wait. There’s like 17. According to a source in the legislature, the Shura Council’s recommendation also includes the following stipulations:

The woman driver must be under 30.

The woman’s driving is conditional upon the permission of a relative [father, husband, brother or son]. [Son! “Can I have the car keys, son? C’mon, pleeeeeeeeease?!”]

The woman driver must be modestly dressed.

The woman driver will be permitted to drive alone in the cities, but outside the cities she must be accompanied by a relative.

The woman driver will be permitted to drive Saturday through Wednesday between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.

The woman driver must be able to prove that P=NP and have the power of telekinesis.”

Well, it’s a start. Perhaps someday soon (during a lunar eclipse?) they’ll be able to carpool over for a girls’ weekend at the new women-run, women-only Luthan Hotel & Spa, prompting vexing lesbian rumors! More on that at Jezebel.

Now that Eliot Spitzer has resigned, we can put this sex business behind us and get back to BUSINESSbusiness.

Oh, wait.

First we find out that a former aide to former New Jersey governor James McGreevey has come forward, classily, to allege that he was the third wheel, as it were, in a series of three-way “sex romps” with Mr. McGreevy and his ex-wife-to-be, Diana Matos McGreevey. (Or, more to the point, that she was the third wheel.) My first reaction to this revelation (which the missus has denied, by the way) was a resounding “TMI!”

Then we hear about the Patersons. We hear a LOT about the Patersons. Boils down to this: things got rocky. He had affairs. So did she. They dealt.

Then I realized: this is more than a matter of TMI. The universe, my friends, is trying to tell us something. That we should focus as much as possible on the prurient details of politicians’ private utterly human failings — failings that are not at odds with their ability to govern or gain public trust — instead of on ending poverty and war? No, the other thing: remember how easy it was to judge Silda Spitzer? With these new revelations (regardless of their veracity) we are reminded: you never, ever know.

Now can we please get back to work ?

Via BG’s alter ego at Broadsheet:

Hey, kids, how’s that abstinence-only sex ed going for you? The answer, if you ask the grown-ups, often has to do with how many teens simply don’t abstain and how many get pregnant (PDF) as a result. But the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remind us that there are other consequences to sexual cluelessness, and right now, they’re pretty darn dire. That is, the first study of its kind on this demographic has revealed that one in four American girls has a sexually transmitted infection. At least one STI, actually. Mostly HPV (which can cause cervical cancer), then chlamydia (linked to infertility), plus herpes simplex and trichomoniasis. Nearly half the black teens surveyed had an STI, compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens.

Man. Be careful, you guys! Don’t think you can’t get something because it’s your first time, or because you used a condom (HPV can be wilier than that), or because you just, like, think you can’t. I’m certainly not trying to perpetuate the ridiculous — but still deeply hurtful — stigma associated with STIs. But these things can harsh your mellow, cramp your dating style, and, in some cases, compromise your health down the road. Get checked (some STIs are asymptomatic), take precautions (less than 100 percent effective in certain cases is way better than nothing, which is ZERO percent effective), and while you’re at it, lobby for your state to join the 17 others that have refused funding for abstinence-only education (which, you see, has also been less than 100 percent effective).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: With every breaking political sex scandal — and the ensuing awkward press conference/photo opp — it becomes more and more tempting to imagine little thought balloons over the heads of the apparently stoic, forbearing wives. (“Well, this explains a lot.” “Game face game face game face.” “Dude. Diapers?”)

And man, is it easy to judge. The wives, not the husbands. (Well, them too.) What are they doing at the press conference at all? What sort of public display of solidarity do they possibly owe these guys? Can they really be such doormats? Why aren’t they home changing the locks?

In situations like these, though, I think we’d do well to remember the wise words of Bridget Jones’s friend Magda. “No one from the outside ever really understands what makes them work.” Really, who knows what has gone on Chez Spitzer? Maybe she is cheating too. Maybe he promised her a quick and clean divorce if she’d do just this one thing. Maybe she is even acting out of savvy self-interest, as Anne Applebaum suggests at Slate: “I can see one clear advantage to this option: It’s all over quickly. And no one asks you for a follow-up interview. You appear once—and then you vanish forever, along with your husband’s career. If you’ve been clever about it, you’ve kept your maiden name and can thus return to your own career. Those who make other, more attention-getting choices will later be forced back into the limelight to explain themselves, which is gruesome.” That, or if you simply don’t appear at all, you can bet they’ll come after you.

I’m not saying she should or shouldn’t show up; I’m just saying that in a scandal such as this, her conduct, of all people’s, is not for us to judge. (I’m talking to YOU, lady I just heard on WNYC saying that this whole thing was Mrs. Spitzer’s fault in the first place because she didn’t kink things up enough.) The real thing to question is not each wife’s motive, or her backbone. The real thing to question, I think, is why these women are expected to show up in the first place. (And what will happen someday when the “stoic wife” is the husband.)

The truth is … coming soon to a theater near you! From the L.A. Times:

“They flew from Germany and England and Chicago to attend. They lined up at 5 a.m. outside the Moscone Center West in San Francisco fueled by contagious group excitement and caffeine. They sat through the boring ‘Shutter’ panel to make sure they got good seats. One attendee estimates that there were 5,000 people packed into the 4,000 capacity convention hall and that’s not including the spillover that ran down the various hallways.

But God, it was worth it!

Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny and ‘X-Files’ creator Chris Carter were at Wondercon last week…to promote the still-untitled new ‘X-Files’ film scheduled to come out July 25 and it was the first time the trio had appeared together at a convention since ‘X-Files’ first came on the air in 1993. The fans screamed throughout the whole 45 minutes.”

Who can blame them?

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Here at BreakupGirl.net, we talk a lot about the challenges of finding love when you are shy, when you have low self-esteem, when you don’t look like society’s ideal single, when you live in a small town, when you’re spinning your wheels in a romance rut. But what about finding — and keeping — love when you know that at some dreaded point, just when things were going so awesome, you’re going to have to say, “There’s something I have to tell you”?

At this point, the news that anyone has a sexually-transmitted infection (STI) should not be a shocker. STIs are, in fact, shockingly common. (At least half of sexually active men and women get HPV at some point in their lives, for example.) Yet matter how “out” people are these days about Asperger’s or therapy or whatever they take to help them sleep, the stigma against STIs — and the 19 million people who have them — remains as virulent and pervasive as the infections themselves. They are, after all, about sex — stereotypically, about casual, anonymous, unprotected sex; about (also stereotypically!) skeevy sores where the sun don’t shine. Just look at the vernacular: people who say they’ve tested negative for STIs commonly call themselves “clean.” Opposite: “dirty.” Carriers of STIs: they’re seen (WRONGLY, let’s be clear) as slutty, stupid, damaged goods. (This despite the facts: you can, of course, get infected from your first and only partner; condoms may not provide 100% protection.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place, a magical place, where people with STIs never had to have The Talk? Where they could make friends — even find lovers — knowing that no one would judge them, never mind dump them, over a stroke of bum luck and the occasional cold sore?

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Lynn will be taking part in a panel tonight (Feb. 27) not as Breakup Girl, but as the mild-mannered author of the satirical mystery novel Death By Chick Lit. If you have questions about “sleeping with the fishes” rather than sleeping with your boss, you’ll definitely want to head over to the Mid-Manhattan Library at 6:30 for New York Noir: Urban Crime. “Join a dynamic panel of New York City writers in a vibrant discussion about how they create a fresh depiction of life and crime in America’s most iconic city.” The panel is taking place on the 6th floor of the library which is at 40th Street & 5th Avenue in New York.

(At right is a panel from an upcoming Breakup Girl Noir tale! Still a few months off, but you can read it now on Lifetime Mobile.) 

That guy you’re chatting up online? He could be … that other guy. This just in from the Wall Street Journal:

“Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, evensignature poems. ‘Dude u like copied my whole myspace,’ posts one aggrieved victim. Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever. Hugh Gallagher, a 36-year-old writer in New York, is one of the copied. Match.com has more than 50 profiles with parts of Mr. Gallagher’s college entrance essay, which he penned nearly two decades ago and later appeared in Harper’s Magazine. ‘I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees’ and ‘I write award-winning operas’ are among Mr. Gallagher’s most popular lines.”

Read the whole piece for some entertaining anecdotes about people getting royally busted — dude, if you say you write award-winning operas, your date is going to ask about them! — or, on an upside, overhauling their profiles after seeing them cut and pasted onto someone else’s page (!) … and realizing they didn’t like what they’d said in the first place.

Yeah, it’s amusing, and there’s even a happy ending. And if it’s a phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon; report away. But still. BG remains weary of the seemingly endless out-churning of “Gotcha!” articles about online dating that, intentionally or not, perpetuate the misapprehension that the people you find on the Internet are probably lying, that they are NOT WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE. (Why, we revisited that chestnut just this week, in a letter from 1997.)

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