If only everyone on Twitter followed Nerve’s Nine Essentials of Twitter Etiquette! (Twitiquette?) Hilarious and helpful. My favorite:

Ask yourself if you’re tweeting something out of love, or to be loved.

While you’re there, check out the cautionary Five Ways I’ve Sabotaged My Relationships With Technology. It rings skeerily familiar for a rampant, heretofore unrepentant texter/emailer/chatter like me. Yikes!

MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn” columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.

This week Lynn hears from Distracted Dan, who is worried about what his online date with think when she sees him in the flesh — but for a very specific reason:

The problem is I have not told her that 18 months ago I had gastric bypass surgery and lost 140 lbs. I still have a lot of loose skin left over (which is not very obvious once I am dressed).

How should Dan handle the situation, and more importantly, his own insecurity? Get the full picture at Happen, then let us know in the comments what you’d do!

Ah, springtime in the city. Birds are chirping, trees are blooming, squirrels are frolicking, and MATH is in the air? The Huffington Post’s “Why Dating in New York Sucks (With Mathematical Proof!) reminds me of another article in which a British economist employed Drake’s equation to figure out why he had no girlfriend. In the HuffPo iteration, Satoshi Kanazawa is presented with the question: “Is there mathematical proof that dating in New York is difficult?”

Kanazawa references a theorem proven by two dorks without dates (ahem…mathematicians in 1966). According to Kanazawa:

This applies to anything, dating, looking for a job candidate. If you have a pool of candidates that you haven’t seen and if your job is to pick the best candidate then it’s been mathematically proven that the best strategy to do is to reject the first 37% of the candidates regardless, so you just reject the first 37% of the candidates and then choose the next candidate that is better than all the candidates that you’ve seen before. So if you apply that to a dating situation that means that you have to reject the first 30% of all the people you date regardless and then you marry the one who is better than all the ones you’ve dated before.

Already, I am finding some holes in Kanazawa’s rationale. First off, if the mathematicians said your best strategy is to reject the first 37% of candidates when hiring someone for a job, then why would you reject only 30% of all the people you date? Isn’t a life partner supposed to be a little more important and hopefully permanent than your employee?

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The Predicament of the Week from March 23, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

There is this guy that I met while working. We were in different departments but on the same floor. He was always there to listen to me and give me advice and noticing when I wasn’t happy or having problems at work. There is no doubting if you are agreeable to somebody when they see you and break out into a gigantic smile, every time. At first I didn’t think of him as anything more than a cool guy. But one day I woke up and realized that I was attracted to him not because of what he looks like but because I felt comfortable around him (which you must understand for me is strange since I’ve had odd relationships up until now). We had a fall-out in which he said to me that he knew me very well, that I was an emotional person, that when I became emotional I was defensive and when I became defensive, that made him uncomfortable because he felt that he needed to justify himself to me. All true, but it seemed odd that two people that were just co-workers were sharing with each other.

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A new study at James Madison University (based on a limited sample) suggests that “more women than men continue to prefer dating whereas more men than women rate hooking up above dating.” At least that’s the way Science Daily describes it. And that’s not wrong in terms of the study, but how come it takes a whole bunch more paragraphs to get to this part? “Overall, both genders showed a preference for traditional dating over hooking up…On the whole, men and women agreed on the benefits and risks of dating and hooking up.* It’s not that gender differences are never interesting, or worthwhile to note. But maybe if we paid more attention to what we actually — demonstrably — have in common, there’d be, well, even more traditional dating.

Via i09: “Blockbuster DC Comics artist — and copublisher — [Jim Lee] gives a lesson on color, composition, and awesomeness with this step-by-step tutorial” on how he sketched Wonder Woman on his iPad.*

* Quoth our tipster: “Which begs the question: is there a basic app that turns an iPad into an Etch-a-Sketch? You could have have a shake-clear feature!”

Is it or isn’t it? In an article set to appear in the June 2010 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, researchers found that oral sex is … not.

Only about 20% of university students participating in a 2007 survey agreed that oral-genital contact constituted sex, yet the majority believed that penile-vaginal and penile-anal intercourse did (98% and 78%, respectively)…

While I agree that demoting oral sex to, say, just “fooling around”  doesn’t quite work either, I am most disturbed by:

a) The 2 % of university students who don’t believe penile-vaginal intercourse constitutes sex, and

b) The 22% of university students who don’t believe penile-anal intercourse also constitutes sex.

Um, then…what does? Sex obviously feels good — and is, arguably, essential — to many humans of all orientations, but if we want to get biological and scientific, it is essentially about reproduction, propagating the species and all that. Therefore, one would think, college kids, who have had at least high school biology — and social lives — would be 100% certain that penile-vaginal intercourse is mostly the way that happens. The fact that even 2% of them don’t know that makes me hope there is some margin of error with the study’s statistics or there are some smart gay students who are subversively protesting the common perception of vaginal penile sex as normal. Most likely, we seriously need to revamp sex education.

Apparently, the authors of the study also suggest that sex education may be to blame for this oral “sex” business as abstinence-only education as well as more comprehensive sex education programs focus on penile-vaginal intercourse. There is indeed danger — sexually transmitted and otherwise — in disassociating oral sex from “SEXsex.” Oral sex can spread disease more easily than, say, a back rub or a hi-five. So, why don’t we, as a society, recognize that education and making facts available to our young people is the best preventative medicine for both teen pregnancy and STDs? Oh wait: because — as at least the grownups known — addressing even the matter of oral sex is, yes, talking about SEX.

In honor of tax week, it seems apropos to blog this piece from Your Tango which asks the question “Is The Cost of Living Higher For Single Women?” Sure, we understand that single people don’t have some of the financial stresses that married folk do — especially those with children — but could there be economic discrimination against singles that balances it out? This article won’t make you propose or get divorced, but it’s an interesting read.

The curse of the friend-girl strikes March 23, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I’m sure you’ve probably heard this one before, but here goes. All of my better friends happen to be men. I don’t mind — love ’em to death, flaws and all. Besides, all of the best relationships start with the couple being friends, right? I figure with all these guy buds, you’d think the odds of that happening would be in my favor. In a word, wrong. If I hear myself referred to as “one of the guys” again, I’m going to puke. This isn’t exactly a recent development, either — one of my friends refers to my situation as “terminal buddy syndrome” and I’ve been afflicted since high school. (I’m 27 now.) Now, it’s not like I wax romantic over every single one of my friends, but I can think of a couple of them — both now married — that I would have been more than willing to take a shot at “jeopardizing our friendship” with, if you get my drift. It feels like it’s beyond me to get a man to think of me romantically. I know it’s not the “end-all, be-all,” but it’d be nice for a change. Suggestions?

— Everyone’s Kid Sister

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I’m fascinated by stories of my parents’ courtship, even though it was a bit pedestrian. Meeting in journalism class, the Under The Sea fraternity dance, my mom’s pixie cut. But now I’m fascinated by other people’s parents’ stories, thanks to an adorable piece by Peter Smith at nerve.com. While they were dating, his parents took a long walk — a really long walk, like from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin — and somewhere along this 1200 mile trek (Bucyrus, Ohio, actually) the two decided to get married.

How long had you known each other?

D: For three years. We were beginning to feel that we needed to make a decision of some kind. In fact, while walking, we did decide to get married.

M: Yeah, because we realized that we could do even something stressful – and it was stressful – like that and still want to be with each other most of the time, which is as good as it gets. We also got far enough away from home that it really felt like our decision. It didn’t feel like anybody’s parents peering over our shoulders.

Read the whole piece at nerve.com. Do you know your parents’ story? And have you ever used traveling together as a test of your relationship?