AV Flox's Open Salon Blog

What's In A Name? How Domains Define Blogs

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:10:04 -0400

In September, I did an interview with Greg Cryns, who caters to a large group of work-from-home moms in his newsletter. Afterward, he e-mailed asking how he should introduce me and mused whether it was a good idea to explain my domain name in his piece.

"I don't want to scare them off," he said.

It's easy to forget that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the acronym OMG (often translated from web lingo to mean, "oh my G-d") is basically a direct violation of the third commandment and that the F in OMFG, the last acronym, is largely considered to stand for an expletive.

I find it interesting that in the race to save time, internet culture has largely rid itself of many unsavory words and phrases by abbreviating them and that these abbreviations have taken a life of their own. Today, I hear as many people in regular conversation saying "oh em gee," as I hear them saying "oh my G-d," or "oh my gosh."

Still, for many, abbreviation or not, OMG still means "oh my G-d," and runs counter to their belief systems and notions of propriety.

IT'S NOT YOU, HONEY, IT'S YOUR BLOG

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try something new in terms of advertising on my site and applied to join the BlogHer Ad Network.

Their guidelines clearly state that any blog that is submitted must be "without profanity in the title and/or URL." I'd read these before submitting but thought nothing of it--after all, I wasn't actually cussing. Or was I?

---------- Original message ----------
From: Jenny Lauck
To: AVF
Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 4:45PM
Subject: Your BlogHerAds application
Hi, AV!

I’m so sorry for the long delay in reviewing your application. We’ve got a policy that prevents us from accepting blogs that use swear words, the names of deities or abbreviated forms of phrases that include either – I’ve been hounding our co-founders to change this policy so that we can accept wonderful blogs like yours, and I am really sorry to say that they cannot change the policy at this time – however, should they change their minds, I will e-mail you right away.

Wishing you all the best,

Jenny

Not only was the abbreviation not enough to get by--apparently the mention of a deity was also inappropriate!

A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

An ex in a fit of rage once told me that my drama should be a franchise. "If drama was a natural resource, you'd outperform the Middle East and Russia combined in terms of exports."

It's a mean thing to say, though not entirely untrue, as I do, admittedly, have an amazing tendency to get myself into the most ridiculous situations. One of my dearest friends likes to joke that if she ever received a phone call from me that didn't kick off with "O-M-G. O! M! G! OMFG!" she'd know I'd been sequestered and that she was speaking with an impostor.

As a joke, I looked up the domain name OMGOMGOMFG.com. At the time, I didn't think I would ever have a self-hosted blog--but in a world where domains are the new real estate, why not own it?

Later, when I did decide to launch my own blog, I wondered about whether I should get a blog with my regular username online. I remember thinking, "what's easier to convey and remember: avflox.com or OMGOMGOMFG.com?" It's partly about recognition, but it's also about who you are. I don't take myself so seriously--I write because I know no other way to be. Writing is the only way I know to process ideas about topics that matter to me, yes, but mostly, I do it because it's fun.

And if you can give your host a laugh with your domain name, well, that's something, too.

KING OF THE DOMAIN

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is one of the best resources for anyone wishing to get started making money by publishing online. At the end of the summer, he ran an article titled 8 Reasons Why Your Blog Might Not Be Accepted Into an Ad Network that had some helpful information for people trying to get into ad networks like BlogHer.

Rowse listed the most important elements of a blog when being considered, among them: design (does it look good?), content (is the content well-written, informed, original, focused, etc.?), focus (is it personal or does it fit a niche?), hosting (is it self-hosted?), and traffic.

"Each network also has its own standards on adult content, use of language (swearing) and other topics that they may or may not cover," Rowse added.

His book Problogger: Secrets For Blogging Your Way To A Six-Figure Income, co-authored with Chris Garrett, lays the ground rules and topics worth considering for those wishing to start income-generating blogs. Chapter 3 deals with the set-up, including choosing a domain name:

For a start, if you want to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog, a domain name can help. Similarly, a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding and memorability of a product, service business, or even person... Many discussions on domain name decisions talk about a choice between choosing a domain name with keywords in it to domain names that are more brandable or generic. It's worth stating up front that it is possible to achieve both, but I would prioritize memorability and branding over keywords.

At the beginning of the year, Rowse expanded a little on this topic at Problogger.

"When choosing domain names do you get a keyword rich or more brandable name?" he asked.

Keyword-based domains use words about topics you're discussing in them. Rowse listed TheMovieBlog.com and SimsGamer.com as examples.

"Firstly it communicates something to your readers very quickly with regards to what your blog is about," Rowse wrote about these keyword-based domain names. "The other positive is that search engines take a good look at the words in your domain name when deciding what your blog is about and how to rank it."

Brandable domains, on the other hand, may relate to the topic, but they're largely about creating a brand identity.

"These blogs would be suited ideally to developing a blog that is aiming to build a community of loyal readers," Rowse said. "Of course these blogs can also do very well in search engines but this is usually for other reasons (keywords in URLs are just one of many factors). Blogs that have these types of domains include Boing Boing, Gizmodo and Dooce. In fact if you look at Technorati’s Top 100 blogs, you’ll see that most of them have brandable names and not keyword-based ones."

Problogger.net is an excellent example of a keyword-based and brandable domain name.

"It’s not always possible to get both," Rowse wrote, adding, "in fact, it’s getting harder and harder and many bloggers are faced with the choice of one or the other."

SANITIZING THE OVERSHARE

"Remember when putting ads on your blog was a travesty?" I asked my friend Atherton Bartelby during our usual midday coffee break. "Now I go to blogs and go out of my way to scan ads after reading posts in order to see if there is anything I want to click to help support the bloggers I like."

"Oh! I do that, too," Atherton replied, laughing. "A blogger has to eat, right?"

"Absolutely," I responded. "Though it's very interesting to see what monetization is doing to a lot of blogs as well. Very few ad networks want put up with a lot of the content that defines a lot of blogs."

"Totally," Atherton agreed. "It's like, hey, I would write a piece about this tonight but my BLOG AD NETWORK wants me to rewrite Hansel and Gretel!"

"Except in my version," I said going along with him, "the ad network doesn't want me to talk about the witch being cooked alive. I can either have the children scare her away with a broomstick or convince her to go vegan because that's better for her health, the common good and the environment anyway. They're pushing for the latter!"

We burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. At the same time, though, I couldn't stop thinking about how much blogging was suddenly starting to feel like working in a newsroom. Sure newspapers keep their advertising departments out of the newsroom, but anyone who's been in one knows how that works sometimes. You just don't bite the hand that feeds you.

WHAT WE WISH WE KNEW

There are two kinds of bloggers: the ones who rush in and the ones who plan every minute detail.

"A number of people regret spending too much time thinking about blogging and not actually blogging," Rowse wrote in a reflection on a series at Problogger about all the things successful bloggers today wish they'd known when they started blogging.

Of course, "some regretted that they didn’t put a little more thought into their blogging before they started. Too much planning can kill a blog (or at least can kill the opportunity for your blog to become established as first and can kill your passion for a topic) while not enough planning can lead to a blog that doesn’t reach its potential because its foundations are shaky."

It's a careful balance we're striking between profitability and continued growth and self-expression.

"The domain name and platform you choose are just two elements of many that go into making a blog successful," Rowse says in the What We Wish We Knew series. "They are important--but if you get it wrong you are not dead in the water."

SECOND THOUGHTS?

"I'm sorry you didn't get into BlogHer," Atherton told me later in the day. "Are you having second thoughts about your domain name?"

"Not in the slightest."

It's true. The internet and the culture developing herein is a wild new world and if that's not enough to make you go "OMG!", I don't know what is.

AV Flox is a freelance writer who splits her time between California and Arizona. She and her husband have no children or pets, only properties and neuroses. You can read more on her blog OMG. OMG! OMFG!

Splitting The World: The Art in Oversharing

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:10:33 -0400

I write all of you at once, a convenience of modern technology, and in a sense it is like sitting and taking coffee by your side. What I want to share is very personal, but you know how I am—I’ve never lacked candor. Ready?
I have decided that a man’s libido must have an invisible umbilical cord that connects it to the New York Stock Exchange; I have no other way to account for the fact that I don’t recall the last time I was intimate with my husband…

The e-mail went on from there, running with the stocks theme and culminating in a full-frontal exposé of my impending sexual Great Depression.

Being a veteran of the internet world of oversharing, I haven’t felt morning-after-post shame in years. But the night after sending that missive to my mother and aunts, I have to admit that I had a moment of doubt. We are close, but they are, after all, a different generation and culture, one to which such disclosures are not only uncommon, but censured.

Had I gone too far?

NARRATIVE AS ART

Why is there such a divide between students of literature and students of journalism? Don’t we share the same curiosity? Don’t we share the same attention to detail? Don’t we share the same medium?

Book burning is a higher offense than flag burning. But we have no trouble tearing up newspapers to wrap things when we move, or to line the box of a new pet so it won’t piss on the floor. Books are the highest art and newsprint is a lesser art—if considered art at all.

I consider news writing art. It, like literature, has form, rhyme and reason. It, like literature, tells the human story. It, like literature, can unite us and divide us.

Where do blogs fit in all this?

My writer friends laugh at the idea of a blog as literature. I don’t. In the beginning, we carved hieroglyphs on the great walls of the Web. Now, we have more structure, we have codes, we see how those before us did it and build on what we learn from them. The blog has stopped being a repository of adolescent, underdeveloped feelings and has become a narrative, an exploration, and a journey.

This is a return to the great tradition of story-telling. Instead of sitting around the glowing fire and listening to the great stories of those who came before unfold, we now sit in front of glowing boxes and share our own narratives.

“Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul’s journey. Art I not just for oneself, not just a marker of one’s own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us,” Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in her classic work Women Who Run With The Wolves. “Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”

FROM FEELING TO FORM

When Emily Gould coined the phrase “overshare” at Gawker, she gave a name to something we were all doing but as of yet had no real name for.

According to Technorati's State of the Blogophere 2008 report, 79 percent of bloggers are personal bloggers, meaning that they blog about topics of personal interest not associated with a blogger's work. This is fertile ground for overshares.

While Technorati says that “confessional” blogging is not a priority among the top blogs they surveyed, their sample is limited to a thousand bloggers. The tag “life” beat “business” by 2,392 occurrences, and “technology by 17,349 occurrences in the month of June.

There’s a difference, you say, picking out any one of the 133 million blog records indexed by Technorati. Not all of it is art. It can’t be.

“The best work speaks intimately to you even though it has been consciously made to speak intimately to thousands of others,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her essay Sexual Semiotics. “The bad writer believes that sincerity of feeling will be enough, and pins her faith on the power of experience. The true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people.”

As personal narrative began to take shape, the blog stopped being a repository of endless rants and started to become a place where we shared self and experience. Bloggers began to connect. In many personal blogs today, we are riding the current of experience, but we see the power of form and embrace it.

I can’t define art, but I know that art stimulates consciousness. Stories do.

Blogs are life stories.

FABULOUS, DARLING!

There is a part in Curtis Sittenfeld’s book American Wife that haunts me. Alice has escaped from her alcoholic husband with her daughter and sought refuge at her mother’s house. One night, when they’re alone, Alice asks her mother if she and her father ever quarreled while he was alive.

“But you and Dad never had serious fights, did you? Where you considered ending the marriage?”
“That was much more unusual then.” My mother was threading the needle, not looking at me, and her tone remained even. Still, I’m sure she understood exactly what we were talking about.

“It’s not so uncommon to get a divorce now, but years ago, I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. I suppose the Conners were the first couple I knew—do you remember Hazel and William? People said he had a gambling problem. She was a nice lady though.”

My mother turned the canvas over, peering at a particular stitch.

“There were times when your father made me mad, but I can’t say the thought of leaving him ever crossed my mind. I suppose I made a decision—” She paused. “There was a good deal of conflict in my family growing up, and it wasn’t very pleasant to be around. It only causes more of the same—once people work themselves up, it hardly matters what the disagreement was about, does it? After I married, I decided if ever your father and I had a cross word, I’d meet him with kindness. I decided, if I think he’s wrong or if I think he’s right, I won’t try to prove it. I’ll remind him that I care for him in the hope it reminds him that he cares for me, too. I was fortunate because your father had a gentle nature.”

She looked up, offering a willfully bland smile. “Not every man does.”

I’m not encouraging to divorce Charlie, but if you do, I’ll understand—wasn’t that what she was saying more or less?

She had turned the canvas over again, she was stitching steadily, and I leaned in to look at it more closely. I said, “That’s going to be a beautiful pillow.”

How familiar that is to me! My family is like this—not my parents, thankfully, but everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s the end of the world, if you ask any of them how they’re doing, the answer is invariably, “fabulous, darling!” Topics like grief, failure and dissatisfaction are not welcome—they're to be quickly derailed and navigated into more pleasant subjects.

I wonder sometimes whether my parents were ever like this, too, whether they changed only because we moved. There are no secrets on the islands. If something goes wrong with anyone, you’ll know all about it—and pitch in however you can. Micronesia is a world that welcomes all comers regardless of heritage. The overhare is a social currency.

My grandparents undoubtedly think my sister and I were uncivilized by natives.

They should see me shimmy up a coconut tree.

HUSH

As with everything, detractors have risen across the blogosphere mocking those who dare to share in the same way that polite society once shunned those who dared to speak their truths, simple and complex.

But we have our voices and we’ve found courage in those who told their deeply personal stories before us. We’ve found kindred spirits who share our trials and we have opened our eyes to the realities that others are living.

THE GREAT SILENCE

In a Sex and the City world, we don’t seem to have a lot of trouble talking about their significant others. I know my friends and I never did. But I’ve noticed something funny in suburbia.

Silence.

The rare spouse who mentions a quarrel or the slightest shred of displeasure at parenthood more often than not finds his words swept away as others wax poetic about how much they just adore their spouses and offspring.

I think it’s reckless to perpetuate the notion of a happily ever after. I hold silence responsible for much of the marriage malaise.

So when people ask me how marriage is, I say it’s a pain in the neck. It’s like taking care of a giant, ancient machine that can help you accomplish a lot of tasks in the emotional fulfillment department, but which constantly needs maintenance and calibration.

The question that preempted my overshare to my aunts was: “how’s the perfect marriage?”

My response was that it was anything but.

I thought perhaps I had crossed a line.

Then, in a few days’ time, the responses began to arrive. The things I found were startling. Truths and secrets began to come out. My willingness to expose my not-so-perfect marriage enabled some of the women I loved and respected the most to share in their own stories.

All of a sudden, we weren’t so alone.

SPLITTING THE WORLD

Every time we blog, we take a risk like the one I took in calling a congress of people together and lying yourself open for them. It’s risky and largely indecorous by normal societal standards, not to mention that it leaves you vulnerable to anyone who cares to cast a stone as they walk by, but what is art if not an expression of self, and what is an expression of self, if not risk?

If for every twenty stones cast, someone silenced can feel they’ve been given a voice or are at least not alone, then throw those stones. It’s why I once decided to embrace the thankless career of the journalist and why I blog today.

“In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself,” says Clive Thompson in closing to his New York Times Magazine piece about ambient awareness. But it’s much more than a personal journey because it’s not kept hidden under your mattress. It’s a generational journey, all of us making it together as more and more of us link to one another online.

I think Muriel Rukeyser was right when she wrote the following lines of Käthe Kollwitz: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”

Women and men are splitting the world with their truths, one word at a time.

Disconnected in the Age of Ambient Awareness

Sat, 4 Oct 2008 21:10:46 -0400

Steven Porricelli has never thrown his wife’s laptop out the window, but he’s wanted to.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.

CRACK IS WHACK

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.

AMBIENT AWARENESS--AN AGGREGATE PHENOMENON

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.” “It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world?

The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.

THE IRL DISCONNECT

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”

HARD DRIVE OVER SEX DRIVE

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others.

Social networking may enable us to hook up easily and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships. And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too.

In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”

REPAIR LOCAL AREA CONNECTION?

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.”

But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

Is Infidelity A Gender Issue?

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:09:33 -0400

In August, architecture critic and author Philip Nobel wrote a piece for Elle about his affair with his twenty-something research assistant and subsequent divorce from his wife of ten years.

The response online, particularly from women, was huge. Run a search for “Philip Nobel” and you’ll find freelance journalist Lindsay Beyerstein’s “Worst Person On Earth” treatise among the top three.

Worst person on earth. I could expect that sort of reaction from Nobel’s ex-wife in a moment of rightful rage, but from someone unrelated to the situation? The consensus at Jezebel, Gawker Media’s excellent women’s pop culture blog, which covered the story over the course of August, is that Nobel is an entitled creep who is trying to excuse his behavior and somehow prove he has come a long way thanks to his recklessness (and cheap comparisons to his twenty-something former mistress, whose naïveté now is evident to him in his new-found maturity).

“Nobel said that his piece in Elle was about ‘the burden of being a lightning rod for the fears of women and the resentments of burdened men,’” writes Jezebel editorial assistant Jessica Grose. “The implication there is that all married men, even the ones who are happily married, are burdened by the responsibility placed on them by their nagging harpy wives.”

“Lots of women are afraid of getting dumped for a younger model,” Anna N. concedes, “and when someone does this, we’re not exactly going to be thrilled.” She has more to say in another piece:

What Nobel did may not be ‘contagious,’ but it happens often enough to make a lot of women worry. We worry that a man will do grown-up things with us, like marry and have kids, or just fall in love and make us feel safe, and then he'll announce that he never really grew up at all and that he needs to go back to his twenties, with a twenty-something girlfriend to match.… Of course, none of this is solely Nobel’s fault. It’s the fault of a culture that trumpets the sanctity of marriage while painting male fidelity as lame. And that casts older women as unsexy and unsexual. The solution to this problem isn't to force people like Nobel to stay in unhappy marriages—it’s to understand the sexual double standard that makes women feel so vulnerable, and to set about changing it.

Funny, until I read it in Jezebel, I didn’t think of this as a gender issue at all.

BETWEEN THE BLISS AND THE BLITZKRIEG

I found marriage difficult from the beginning. Not unpleasantly so, but enough that when my friends ask me, “how’s married life treating you?” the reply never changes: “it’s somewhere between the bliss and the blitzkrieg.”

Like Nobel, I married someone very different. I’m an insatiably curious information monger, ready to go where the story takes me without so much as an itinerary. My husband is the practical type. He doesn’t retain data he doesn’t need and everything he does is carefully orchestrated.

We have different breeds of intelligence. “If we get stranded in the Mojave, I’m glad to know that someone will have thought to pack some water while I’ve been too busy wondering about the impact of Pluto’s demotion on my astrological chart,” I joked when we got married.

I know men who are more like me than my husband—I’ve dated quite a few of them. There’s a reason I didn’t marry them. But I know what Nobel is talking about, too, when he talks about adjusting his diction and editing out the allusions he thought would fly over his wife's head. And so does my husband.

He still confuses Schrödinger with Smirnoff and I still have no idea what a 1003 is or what to do with it. And that’s fine—I never believed my spouse should be everything to me.

But every once in a while, I know we both wish we could talk about those things that inspire us and see the same gleam of excitement in each other’s eyes.

THE STRAY-AT-HOME MOM

“Are you a stray-at-home mom?” KTLA’s Leila Feinstein asked, leading in to a new story as I vegetated in bed next to Richard one warm May night. “According to a survey conducted by Cookie Magazine and AOL, one in three stay-at-home mothers have cheated on their husbands. The reason? They don’t feel they’re getting it enough.”

One in three women have cheated on their husbands? I immediately jumped on the web and looked up the details of the Sex and the American Mom survey and was surprised to find, according to The Huffington Post, that the sample was an impressive 30,000 stay-at-home moms.

The following month, Details had a piece about the new breed of men trying to nail the missus (among them the understanding boss, the yoga instructor, the stay-at-home-dad with whom she hangs out at play dates, etc.).

“I see more women who cheat than men,” says Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and the author of The Commuter Marriage: Keep Your Relationship Close While You’re Far Apart. [Author Susan Shapiro] Barash estimates that close to 60 percent of married women have had extramarital sex.

“With men’s affairs, it tends to be not enough sex—with women it tends to be not enough attention or interaction,” Tessina says. According to Barash, most women feel an “unrelenting need for romance and excitement.” And they’re not getting it in the half hour they spend flipping through magazines while you watch The Daily Show every night after the kids go to bed.

The reasons given for women's cheating may be inconsistent, but the statistics provided remain like an offensive stain. Really?

BECAUSE I CAN

During a dinner at the home of a renown politico, someone congratulated Isabel Allende for a satirical article she’d published and asked whether she ever planned to write “something serious.” Embarrassed, the then-young writer responded “yes, I’d like to interview a woman who is unfaithful.”

“A heavy silence descended on the table and the conversation turned to the food,” she recalls. “But when the time for coffee came, the mistress of the house--thirty-eight, svelte, the executive in a government office in a Chanel suit--took me aside and told me that if I swore I would keep her identity secret, she would accept the interview.”

At her office the next day, the executive confessed she was unfaithful for the following reasons: she had ample free time after lunch, sex was good for one’s spirit, one’s health, and one’s self-esteem and because men were not so bad after all.

“That is to say, the very same reasons that so many husbands are unfaithful, possibly her own among them,” Allende concludes. “She was not in love, did not suffer any guilt, and maintained a discrete garçonière that she shared only with friends as liberated as she.”

CUM YE UNFAITHFUL

“Of course people are surprised by the study,” my friend Joan told me when I decided to reproduce Allende’s interview of the unfaithful woman. “Women have always cheated as much as men. We just don’t get caught. Not because we’re smarter, but because we don’t want to. Men in this country seek everything in the same place, have you noticed? When they cheat, they’re usually looking for a replacement. Women are more realistic and know how to multitask. We look for supplements.”

Susan Shapiro Barash, author of A Passion For More: Wives Reveal Affairs That Make Or Break Their Marriages, agrees: “Women having affair aren’t looking to replicate the feelings in their marriage. They’re looking for what they can’t get in a marriage.”

MARRIAGE WITHOUT FRILLS

In their book The Mirages of Marriage, William Lederer and Don Jackson analyzed the marital relationship in terms of the systems concept, providing a no-nonsense manual for how to undertake a functional marriage.

The book is so devoid of frills that if read prior to marriage, it could make even the most enamored have second thoughts—which may explain why I think it’s the best engagement gift one could ever give, yet one I’ll probably never dare give.

On their wedding day, a young man and a young woman, standing before the priest, minister, or justice of the peace, usually have a high opinion of one another. They overflow with joyous thoughts. Each has a firm intention of pleasing and nourishing the cherished person who is about to become a partner for life.

Some years later, (the highest incidence of divorce, excluding teenagers, is after ten or so years) the same two people may be living in a chronic situation of hate, fear, and confusion. Each spouse in such a marriage may blame the other and defensively emphasize how he^* tried to be loving, tried to make the marriage a success, and tried to keep the other from sabotaging the effort.

What causes such frightful changes? What brings about such startling emotional and behavioral metamorphoses?

The most easily apparent causes are the failure to pick a suitable mate, and the failure—once a mate has been chosen—to work out relationship rules that will be durable and equitable.

^*To avoid the awkward repetition of “he or she,” the terms “he,” “him,” and “his” have been employed throughout the book to refer to either spouse—husband or wife.

I DO?

“Marriage is like a newspaper,” the author Raymond Chandler once said. “It has to be made fresh every damned day of every damned year.”

It’s true. Anyone who has any experience with marriage will not hesitate to tell you that marriage is hard work. As early as 1968, when The Mirage of Marriage was written, its authors were cautioning about the institution: “American thinking patterns and traditional American values concerning marriage rusty, broken-down, obsolete.”

Philip Nobel happens to agree. In an interview with Anna N. of Jezebel, he went as far as to suggest that Jezebel should enforce a marriage strike until the institution is fixed, saying that “maybe there’s something wrong at the structural level with the whole idea of state-sanctioned monogamy.”

Unfortunately, neither Nobel nor the writers at Jezebel know how it can be fixed. Which makes me wonder: If marriage is essentially a challenge few of us can pass without half killing a vital part of ourselves, why do we keep doing it? Why are we so ready and willing to deny our needs and give up things we may want so much, that we'll go insane and end up doing everything in our power to get them later, consequences be damned?

My friend John put it best: “from birth, 30 percent of your being is normally consumed by the pain of loneliness. Being in a relationship solves the vital, killer problem of loneliness. But what no one tells you is that once you solve that problem by being in a real relationship, that 30 percent pain is replaced by about 29.8 percent frustration and anger about other, new issues.”

Are we just afraid to die alone (our corpses eaten by our beloved pets, to borrow one of the comic elements in Nobel's piece)?

LIVE AND LEARN, LOVE AND BLOG

“All human beings perform unilateral and selfish acts,” Lederer and Jackson write in The Mirages of Marriage. “To do so is not always bad; it sometimes can be wholesome if the individual knows what is happening. But under no circumstances can these acts be regarded as loving, and the first requirement for a workable marriage is to live and relate on the basis of reality, not of myths, obsolete and meaningless traditions, and self-deceit.”

Philip Nobel is not the worst person on earth. He's is a symptom of our mess. The construct of matrimony as we know it no longer fits: we’re more individualistic, more isolated, more mobile, more ADD, more demanding in terms of instant gratification than we were 40 years ago when Lederer and Jackson first pointed out that the institution was obsolete.

If we can see further, it’s not so much that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but that we’re standing on the wreckage of the marriages that have crumbled before us.