We all know the fable of the conniving woman — call her the femme fertile — who schemes to “trap” a man by “accidentally” getting pregnant. This story at TheNation.com from BG’s alter ego, on an issue we’ve long been tracking here, turns that tale, and our understanding of “unwanted” pregnancy, on its head. It’s an important read for anyone interested in, or touched by, domestic violence or sexual abuse, especially when they — all too often — overlap.

Leyla W. couldn’t figure out where her birth control pills kept going. One day a few tablets would be missing; the next, the whole container. Her then-boyfriend shrugged and said he hadn’t seen them. She believed him—until she found them in his drawer. When she confronted him, he hit her. “That was his way of shutting me up,” says Leyla, who is in her mid-20s and living in Northern California. (For her safety, Leyla wishes to withhold her last name and hometown.) He also raped her and, most days, left her locked in a bedroom with a bit of food and water while he went to work. (A roommate took pity and let her out until he came home.) Thanks to the missed pills, she got pregnant twice, the second time deciding against abortion. (more…)

This, my friends, is what Tumblr was made for: Hot Guys Reading Books. (BG has a friend who had to break up with someone when he discovered the only books she read were her own dream journals.) Gotta say, when it comes to relationships, reading is fundamental.

Now how about Hot Guys Buying Cheese?

Ripped from the headlines! Turns out our True Confessions retrospective last week has a breaking-news counterpart: efforts to reprint a Massaponax, Virginia high school yearbook in order to remove anonymous R-rated secrets and confessions scattered throughout the pages (along with “quotable quotes,” sometimes [mis-?]attributed, often containing sexual innuendo). Such as:

“I have sex with people just to feel wanted.”
“I worry all the time my ex-boyfriend will use the naked picture I sent him to ruin my life.”
“I had an abortion and my mom doesn’t know.”
“I’m pregnant with my best friend’s boyfriend’s kid.”

Much of the ensuing uproar seems to have focused on the content as “inappropriate,” with parents scandalized and administrators rushing to defend the school as a place where a lot of “good” things happen, too. To be sure, stuff like “I smoked so much pot I woke up high” pretty much is inappropriate for the yearbook. But to me, this is not (just) about keeping “treasured high school memories” clean and pretty. It’s about listening to — to the degree the confessions are true; but why wouldn’t they be — what may constitute, in part, an end-of-year cry for help. If the grownups involved trade their whiffs of moral outrage for a bit more of this, from the principal — “If these things are going on, we want to be supportive and we want to help those students and provide them with appropriate resources” — then future Massaponax graduates might be more likely to succeed.

BG can’t believe it’s taken her this long to stumble across the incredibly useful, borrowed-from-techno concept of “relationship hacks.” (Then again, I’m one of those Luddites who hasn’t yet tweaked her iPhone to circumvent AT&T.) I’m not talking about hacky comics who are all, “Aren’t men and women different? FOLKS!” or hacking your way into your sigO’s Hotmail account, or their MIND, in order to access suspect correspondence, offshore account numbers, etc. I — along with a whole bunch of smarties who beat me to it — am using the basic metaphor of re-configuring a system to function in ways not part of the original design. A clever fix, a wise workaround. There is a Relationship Hacks website, but a livelier and more recent conversation seems to have gone on in this Ask Metafilter thread. To get the ball rolling, Wyzewoman poses this question:

A few times over the years, I’ve solved a relationship problem in a way that I was really proud of, because the solution met everybody’s needs when it looked like such a solution didn’t exist. I still turn back to these examples when I’m faced with a new difficulty, because I may be able to model a new solution out of the old ones.

An example of what I’m talking about: a roommate declared one day that he was no longer willing to share dishes with me: I didn’t wash them well enough for his liking, even after repeated reminders. Well, that sucked — it would be extra time, expense, and bother. But, we were able to talk about it calmly, and we worked out that really it was only the glasses that I drank milk out of which weren’t getting cleaned well. So I suggested that I get a set of milk-drinking-glasses, just for me, and that we continue to share the rest of the dishes. And it worked! We never fought about dishes again. The lesson I learned from that: try to whittle a problem down to its smallest core, and solve that. [Emphasis added by BG.]

It’s just a silly example — drinking glasses! — but I’ve remembered this incident for years, and modified the solution in various other issues of household maintenance. I’d love to have other examples to draw upon going forward. So, MeFites, when did you come up with a relationship solution that you were particularly proud of, and what lessons did you draw from it?

Responses include: Never use “but,” “should,” or fake “I’m fine”; the FailDance(tm); and my favorite, The Great Game of Moral High Ground. Read, learn, apply, and come back here to share your best hacks. (As above with the glasses, roommate — and family — relationships count, too.)

Getting involved on March 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Here’s my situation. One of my friends is seeing this guy who I think is a really big jerk. In fact, I think he is extremely manipulative and emotionally abusive. Here’s a little sampling of his behavior: He constantly accuses her of having affairs with other people, even when he must know it isn’t true. He is always grilling her about her activities, trying to insinuate that she is doing something wrong — meanwhile, he can do anything he wants, including seeing his ex-girlfriend for a few drinks if he wants to. He insults her about her appearance, calls her in the middle of the night to check on her, tells her all of her friends are stupid and unworthy of hanging out with him, etc., etc. He has also had temper tantrums where he has thrown things at her, ripped up her photographs … you get the idea. I know that this is classic abusive behavior, and that the next step could be physical violence. I don’t know if it is going to go that far.

(more…)

Have you ever wanted to rewrite your relationship as a 1950s 3D movie? No? Well, you’ll forgive BG that labored (non)sequitur when you see this*:

* An aside from our tipster: “It’s another good reminder just how fully Lucas paid homage to the genre.”

Via FOBG Ben Winters, author of (among many other things) Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters:

We all know that Facebook offers up-to-the-minute tracking of your (and everyone’s) relationship status. But could Facebook actually predict your breakup (and etc.) before it happens? It’s not psychic; nor, as science goes, is it rocket: remember, Facebook knows how and with whom you spend (or don’t spend) your virtual time. As the blog AllFacebook reports:

It’s an inside half-truth that many friends of Mark Zuckerberg have told me over the years: Facebook knows when a relationship is about to end. My response was to always ask more questions as it actually sounded like a legitimate possibility. In David Kirkpatrick’s soon to be released book, “The Facebook Effect“, Kirkpatrick confirms that relationship patterns were something that Mark Zuckerberg often toyed with.

In the book, Kirkpatrick writes:

As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.

Are you busy chatting with another girl instead of your girlfriend? Are you being tagged in a lot of photos with the same person? Facebook has a lot of information about who you are viewing regularly (or lusting over) as well as what your communication patterns are. While the company is not actively charting most users’ communication patterns for determining the future of your relationship, they are actively monitoring your behavior on the site to determine what should be displayed in the feed.

Of course, 33 percent, while impressive, is not scary accurate. And there’s a wide margin of error. Depending on how you use Facebook, for example, your lovah’s profile might be the one you look at least, given that you, you know, see them. (In fact, at least one expert says partners shouldn’t be “friends” in the first place. (“It’s a terrible idea for spouses to be Facebook friends with each other,” says Ian Kerner, Ph.D., co-author, with Heidi Raykeil, of [best self-help title EVER!] Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents’ Guide to Getting It On Again. “Relationships are already filled with enough banality. I want to preserve what little mystery there is, which means I don’t need to see my wife’s latest check-in with her third-grade pals on her Superwall.”)

That said — though BG eschews unexamined anti-FB or “technology is eeevil” pile-on — we do know that, given its endless started-out-innocent opps for flirting and reconnecting with the one(s) who got away, Facebook can also = Homewreck. So it’s not like Facebook would need to uncrumple the receipts on your dresser to know what’s up.

And so, AllFacebook wonders, could there be an app for this?

Could you imagine using the site and then receiving a notification that the system has automatically determined that your relationship could be on thin ice? While it may provide useful to know, it would be extremely creepy to find out. For now, I wouldn’t expect to see any “relationship strength tool” integrated into the site, but it’s definitely interesting to know that it’s potentially something Facebook could project. Would you want to know how strong your relationship is based on your own Facebook behavior?

But here’s the real question:

Don’t you probably already know how strong it is without Facebook telling you?

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 responds to Hoping It Works, a fellow who’s online relationship is ready to go IRL, only he’s left out certain information about himself. No, it’s not that he’s gained 20 pounds since his profile pic shot on Spring Break ’96 — it’s that he is has a disability.

I don’t know how to bring this up into casual conversation because we have not had that many online conversations. I’m concerned about saying too much or having too many rules that will turn her off, but if I don’t say enough it could cause a situation that’s dangerous for me.

What to say and when to say it? Read the full letter at Happen for Lynn’s take, then add your own in the comments or experiences below!

We just spotted this few-weeks-old-but-still-compelling post from LemonDrop: it’s a lovely meditation on designing a wedding that reflects the authentic values of an adult relationship, rather than trotting out cliches that may no longer be age- or couple-appropriate.

One of the traditions this smart bride (writer Virginia Sole-Smith) eschews is the whole “walk me down the aisle and give me away like I’m chattel” business. She’s not the first, only, or last to do this, of course, but  she’s especially eloquent about this and other decisions. Congratulations on your equal marriage, Ms. Sole-Smith!