Enabling Supporting the time-honored marketing scheme theory that everything is OK if it results in shopping, UK department store empire Debenham’s has introduced a kicky new concept in retail therapy: the divorce registry!

Another nail in the coffin of the sanctity of marriage? Liberating new trend? Stupid marketing gimmick? What do you think?

Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon.com’s Broadsheet calls out the New York Times for misrepresenting statistics in the title of their article, “Living Together First Doesn’t Make Marriage Last, Study Finds.” Clark-Flory examines the statistics of said study and looks to other sources to sum up with her title “Living in sin not so bad after all”.

Now, a little something from revelations…for those living in sin, marriage isn’t always the end goal. Whoa. SHOCKER. How do I know this? Live in an overpriced metropolis where rent-controlled apartments are as hard to come by as the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant and you find a lot of people shacking up for reasons other than a trial run for a walk down the aisle. Some of these reasons include freedom from rooommates, convenience, mobility, economics, and well, just plain old lust. So, what’s important in moving from “living in sin” to making an “honest man/woman/etc. out of someone/yourself”?

Having co-habitated a time or two, experience has taught me that what makes or breaks your relationship isn’t decided from the day to day stuff of living in each other’s space. It’s about sharing basic values and goals as a couple. It’s also about knowing why you moved in together and realizing that can change for both people. The day to day stuff just exacerbates an eventually doomed union. Really, even if someone keeps a clean house and finds your keys, it’s not going to fix your fear of commitment or the fact that you hate their work ethic. However, if a relationship is already working on the inner levels, leaving the cap off the toothpaste or drinking out of the orange juice carton isn’t such a big deal. Whether or not a couple lives together isn’t going to break them so much as reinforce what they already know – good and bad. As Clark-Flory notes “you’re better off following your own heart than any supposed make-or-break marital rules.”

The couples who do end up married after first living together most likely would have gotten married anyways – whether they both saw marriage as a possible end goal or they were the type to ignore doubt and just push forward. I am actually curious to know how many couples move in together and break up before the point of marriage. If living in sin is bad for anyone, it’s most likely divorce lawyers.

Just don’t forget the pre-prenup!

Okay. While we were all watching Apollo Ohno and rooting for the Canucks (depending), strange things have been going on in England. Maybe you’re heard of soccer, which those crazy kids call “football?” And the World Cup, which happens this summer in South Africa? Very big deal. VERY big deal. And the English team looks like it’s destined to punk out because of a post-breakup fol-de-rol that seems like something that’d happen only in a BG comic.

Try to keep up, now: Wayne Bridge is a member of the English national football team. A couple years ago, the serial modelist hooked up with a French model named Vanessa Perroncel. They had a kid. Then they broke up.

Repeat: THEY BROKE UP.

After the breakup (repeat: AFTER THE BREAKUP), Vanessa apparently availed herself of some revenge sex with Bridge’s best mate, John Terry.

Bee eff dee, right? Professional athletes having sex with various pretty ladies. I mean, we’ve all seen Footballers’ Wives, right? (P.S. It is awesome. — BG) Except no. First, Bridge threw a wobbly. Then, Terry was stripped of his role as captain of the English national team. There were various overwrought events in between — a handshake refused, yadda yadda. Then, this week, Bridge resigned from the team completely.

I hate to keep repeating myself, but: He resigned. From a World Cup team. Because his friend had sex with his ex-girlfriend.

There’s more sordidness to be had if you like that sort of thing: a reported pregnancy, a cuckolded Mrs. Terry packing up her kids and her mom and running off to Dubai, a furious Perroncel demanding an apology for being dragged into the whole mess. Saddest mostest, some say Bridge’s star is fading and this was probably his last shot at World Cup glory.

We know not what to say about this. They were broken up. It’s the World Cup. And they’re professional athletes. Not to perpetuate a stereotype, but COME ON. Groupie tush is not in short supply, and this isn’t Helen of Troy. When will this nasty love triangle stop making England cry?

Everyone except Tiger Woods knows marriage is a commitment. But moving in together? That’s just supposed to be funzy, right? Well sure, in the beginning — but if things go south, things can get nasty. Specifically, things. She didn’t realize she was supposed to pay half the rent; he thought sharing a space meant he now owns her antique rugs. So we like this Salon article about the mini-boom, at least in New York, where real estate is crazytown, of pre-prenups. Unromantic, maybe, but hey, so is sharing a bathroom. It’s not so crazy to demystify the process and go into a shacking-up sitch with a clear idea of what you both want out of it — both short- and long-term. Maybe you won’t opt for a legal agreement, but guides and workbooks abound. It’s nothing but smart to take advantage.

Update/addendum: Can you think of a time when you wished you had a pre-pre-nup? Like, even an imaginary one, so you could have worked out beforehand who gets the DVDs vs. who “gets” the  bagel place?

Plus: More on getting your stuff back here.

What we learned from watching the Super Bowl: women are frigid, scoldy bitches, unless you drink beer. What we learn from most media analysis of studies of women’s (waning?) libido is often — if less uncreative and nasty — equally reductive.

How refreshing, then, to read, in yesterday’s Washington Post, about Daphne Miller, M.D.’s thoughtful consideration — and successful treatment — of her 47-year-old patient’s complaint of waning desire. Her point, however, is not her success; it’s that when it comes to finding a “cure” for stalled libido (exercise? counseling? drugs?) one woman’s mrrrrrrow! is another’s meh. Dr. Miller writes: “A woman’s sexual experience depends on a complex interplay of her neuroendocrine system, her multiple sex organs and any number of social circumstances, and it stands to reason that there might be many places where the process can go awry.” In other words: women are complex! Also, a unicorn! Brava.

Bonus quote from Rosemary Basson, director of the Sexual Medicine Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “Look,” she explained to Miller, “if there was a drug that was so potent that it could overcome all misgivings we have about ourselves, our sexual image, our uncertainty about our sexual partners, the kids banging at our bedroom door, you could not make it legal. It would be slipped into drinks. What are people looking for?”

Thank goodness! FOBG Mary Beth Williams at Broadsheet explains this article from yesterday’s New York Times, which struck me as just so strange that even someone with a Breakup U. education couldn’t figure it out. Now, I wasn’t a math major, but all I could think was, I understand that 45 percent is less than 55 percent, but do still-nearly-half-male campuses really, REALLY, make all institutions of higher learning feel “women’s colleges”? And, more to the point, does this EMERGENCY!!!! man-shortage really drive smart co-eds to make foolish choices?

We think not. From Williams’s awesome fight song:

According to yet another of those scare tactics stories that makes my weekend coffee seem just a little more bitter, when women outnumber men in colleges, they’d better lower their uppity-ass standards, stat!

Take, for example, the heartache unfolding at the University of North Carolina. On yet another “tiresome” evening out, writer Alex Williams explains, the girls are forced to “slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another,” because as one future spinster bemoans, “there are no guys.” “With a student body that is nearly 60 percent female,” it’s “just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges.” And at the University of Vermont, where it’s 55 percent female, locals “sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as ‘Girlington.'” I’m sorry, I’m just a set of knockers who can’t do math, but a 45 percent male enrollment makes for a no-man’s land?

Sure, Williams throws us the bone that all this education “is hardly the worst news for women” (no, it’s your withering love box that’s the bad news). But all that fancy book learning comes with a price – “it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.” And that’s an inevitable tragedy that shouldn’t have to happen until you’re at least 35.

But no, women barely above drinking age are hooking up for desperate one-night stands.  “A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” explains one desperate little hussy. You read right, New York Times readers: College women! Having easy sex! Because they are lonely and sad. And if they’re lucky enough to land one of those precious boy thingies, they’d better be wiling to put up with his shit: Cheating is described as “a thing that girls let slide, because you have to.”

Well, what do they expect, really? This is what happens when a university is “obligated to admit the most qualified applicants, regardless of gender.” Paraphrasing W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the unnaturally 57 percent female University of Georgia, the Times explains, “Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them.”

No, it’s OK. Go bust your ass on the SATs and take out loans you’ll be paying until well into your 40s, as long as you don’t mind paying the price and being victimized and all. Happy now, girls? HAPPY NOW? No you are not, that’s the answer. And “the loneliness can be made all the more bitter by the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way,” Williams writes, sadly citing a girl who tells of her roommate’s parents, who met (siiiiiiiigh) in college. Dammit, why did they have to ruin everything with stupid learning? Now they’ll never have babies!

But brace yourselves: Not all young women are looking for serious boyfriends. Psssst…. not all young women are into boys, period. (Note to the Times: it’s pronounced lez-be-in.) Never mind that drinking and hooking up and heartache and occasional insensitive behavior are part and parcel of the human experience. Never mind that the number of men in colleges is actually holding pretty steady. Nope, outnumbering the menfolk, even slightly, is a romantic death sentence. And if you can’t trust the people who helped sell us the Iraq war to get it right, who can you believe?

The brainiacs over at OKCupid — a dating site incubated by a bunch of Harvard math geeks in ’04; also where I met my music-nerd future-hub in ’09 after being a member for all of a 48 hours — recently crunched a few numbers to analyze the effectiveness of users’ profile pics. (Effectiveness = how many contacts were received monthly.)

What they found, which they’ve published in a lengthy, graph-dense screed, blew them away: “In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.”

Specifically:

* It is not better to flash a pearly grin; instead, keep lips sealed and upturn your mouth corners coyly-yet-half-assedly. Females should do this while making “flirty eyes” at the lens; males should do this while gazing off-camera.

* By all means, do use a self-shot pic taken on a cell or webcam; what you forsake in high-pixel polish you’ll recoup with “an approachable, casual vibe that makes you feel already close to the subject.”

* Chicks especially can cash in big-time with the cell/webcam pic’s stylized subset: the  “MySpace shot,” which even OKC can only put into words as “taken by holding your camera above your head and being just so darn coy.” Like porn — which, c’mon, that’s what the MySpace shot is, right? First cousin to an American Apparel ad? — it’s hard to define a MySpace shot, but you know it when you see it. And when dudes see it, “the MySpace shot is the single most effective photo type for women,” annihilating the second most effective (in bed) by about 3-to-2. (And it’s not just because of the shot’s down-the-shirt angle, according to OKC’s stats.)

* Males fare better not wearing a shirt than wearing one… gah, hard to read much past this without short-circuiting my keyboard with the tears I weep for the future. The second half of the article talks about how old dogs (i.e., me, 35yo) should not learn these new tricks, as the backfire ratio swoops skyward the older you get.

AKA, OKCupid is not OK for “cougars.” Unless (and yes, I unfortunately do speak from experience here*) you do not mind being bombarded with IM requests from Fordham sophomores (and UPenn juniors and NJIT frosh…) to come see their dorm rooms tonight, because they’ve slept with tons of older women and they know just how to push your buttons and maybe they can show you how to use a webcam since when you were born phones actually had dial tones.

* Actually, it was pretty entertaining chatting with them.

Author (and FOBG) Lori Gottlieb appeared on the Today Show this morning to discuss her — to me, bizarrely — inflammatory book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which basically urges women to be picky about the important stuff (kindness) and not picky about the not-important stuff (height), and which Lemondrop summarizes rather equitably here. What it’s left in its wake is a lot of women feeling very rankled and defensive about being told they should “settle,” which is not really what Lori is saying. That said, I understand the defensiveness. Women, rightly, do not like to hear, which they often do, over and over, that they are “too picky.” (Yes, picky. About the person you are going to spend your life with. Urr?) Not that there aren’t women (and men) who are indeed “too picky.” But to be told that, or to get that message from our culture, which single women do, over and over, can be insulting, dismissive, unsympathetic. For one thing among many, it puts the dating onus squarely and only on the woman, whereas it’s not like every still-single woman is surrounded by terrific uncomplicated men on bended knee, just waiting for her to get over her thing about bowties or “no lawyers” or whatever. Women who have gone on a million dates with and given a million chances to a million perfectly nice guys who for whatever legitimate reason leave them lukewarm do not want to hear that they are “just being picky.” They are tired. They are trying. Go away.  That’s part of my theory, anyway, for why Lori’s message, fairly or not, has left so many women so totally steamed.

I also wonder this: to the degree that men are paying attention to this tempest in a coffee-date, how does this message make you feel? If I may render it in the shorthand of stereotype, it’s basically “give the short bald poor guy a chance.” Do you feel that Lori’s advice, for those who follow it, could spell triumph for the common man? Let us know in comments!

The New York Times reports that a study of middle-school students has “found for the first time that abstinence-only education helped to delay their sexual initiation.” Uh oh? The finding “is already beginning to shake up the longstanding debate over how best to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”

Okay okay! Nobody panic! Keep reading.

“[T]he abstinence-only classes in the Jemmott study…unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage. The classes also did not portray sex negatively or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. [This] abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.” [Emphasis added.]

Well, there you go. Look, the debate has never been about abstinence-only vs. “…and, for your homework, please have sex this afternoon.” It’s moralistic, inaccurate abstinence-only vs. comprehensive and realistic: please wait; if you don’t, please be responsible. Though there are those who will misrepresent this research as surely as they misrepresent the effectiveness of condoms, it’s actually yet another vote in our favor.

Update: This (PDF) just in from our heroes at Guttmacher: “While the evaluated program is the first abstinence-only intervention to demonstrate this positive impact in a randomized control trial, it was not a rigid ‘abstinence-only-until-marriage’ program of the type that, until this year, received significant federal funding. The evaluation, therefore, adds important new information to the question of “what works” in sex education, but it essentially leaves intact the significant body of evidence showing that abstinence-only- until-marriage programming that met previous federal guidelines is ineffective.”

Over the past few weeks, Milwaukee teens have seen and and heard promo after promo for the horror film 2028. There’s blood, screaming, creepy lighting, gravelly voice-over, the works. Over time, though, it became clear that these weren’t trailers for a movie, they were trailers for YOUR LIFE. Your life, that is, if you’re young and knocked up. While the first round of previews ended with “in theaters January,”  subsequent edits closed on the following message: “Get pregnant as a teen and the next 18 years could be the hardest of your life.” Then, a Web address flashes on screen: BabyCanWait.com. Oh, snap!

According to Broadsheet, this is just one of at least 15 anti-teen pregnancy campaigns presented by the United Way’s Healthy Girls program in Milwaukee. “Past print ads included images of teen boys with pregnant bellies and a baby diaper with a brown “scratch-‘n’-sniff” spot. The ads’ creator says the aim is to offer a contrast to high-profile young mothers like Jamie Lynn Spears and “deglamorize” teen pregnancy…and credits the decline in the state’s teen pregnancy rate in part to their “aggressive and provocative” approach.” Note: BabyCanWait.com provides information about contraception and STD’s. This is not an abstinence-only campaign.

But, as Broadsheet’s Tracy Clark-Flory asks, “Are these shock-and-awe tactics the best way to reach kids?” While I sympathize with the goal, and appreciate the clear and creative commitment to it, something about the trailer didn’t sit well with me.

For one thing, horror movies are “glamorous,” too. (Older) teens — and women — like Saw, say. Not saying it’s aspirational, but the genre itself is seen as a double-dog-dare lark, not a cautionary tale about (say) losing your virginity at summer ca — REE! REE! REE! You know? So there’s that.

There’s also something about it that contributes to an ugly stigma. Teen mothers as screaming bloody victims. The baby as some sort of evil spawn. Or something like that. Ick. Not helpful.

Finally, I don’t think kids are running around getting (people) pregnant because Bristol and Jamie Lynn made it look so, like, cute. Or even just because ADULTS ARE LYING TO THEM ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL, which they are. There are so many naive, misguided, melancholy, ironic reasons that teens want to get pregnant, be parents. They’ve seen their sisters and brothers and friends do it. And it’s hard hard hard. But — based on what’s become normal to them — it’s not a horrorshow. I’m not sure you can convince them it is in a one-minute trailer when the rest of their life says otherwise.

See for yourself. What do you think?