Blink THIS.

As a male who has experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic fallow period in mate selection, I was less than optimistic about my recent foray into online dating after reading various selections from Malcolm Gladwell's Darwinian anti-God screed "Blink". So THIS explains it. Women decide within 8 seconds whether or not they are going to sleep with a man, and all the cognitive processes in the world are hopeless against this intuition. This, of course, negates such hypothesizer's as Harville Henry, whose book "Getting the love you want" theorizes that men and women are all looking for their mommy and daddy's. Or what about John Bradshaw and his inner child work, not to mention all of the twelve step recovery work being done every single day for years to reprogram the core beliefs in ones fundamental unworthiness. At the end of the day, its all about pheromones, height and age.

Granted, my experience strongly supports much of these contentions, and not merely because I have been "unlucky in love". One simply need look at the state of the world, of the monstrous crimes committed against children, to see that this may in fact not be such a good thing. In Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy", there is an opening tableau of the imbeciles of our time coupling and dropping babies out like turds. As one of my old and long gone "lovers" once told me, any mule can make a child. Is it possible, then, that our snapshot selections may, in fact, be a bad thing, in spite of such proclivities within male and female attraction. Just because we shit doesn't mean we should go around making a habit of it.

Or, is it possible, that in God's "infinite wisdom" (he says) these are EXACTLY the couples he wants to mate in order to bring Billy and Little Tommy into the world? As Allan Watts says about himself, "I was the gleam in my father's eyes when he meet my mother. I was desire". To submit to a theory that depersonalizes the depth of love to abject biological imperative lacks persuasion and is arrogant at best. Of course, this says far more about my romantic idealism and hope that our souls have a stronger say in the matter than our sweat glands. I wonder what odors Mr. Gladwell believes causes divorce.