Jezebel recently mocked one of those interminable articles by "pick-up artists," this one published by Ask Men, that instruct their seething, resentful audience in the art of picking up women to fill out points on your imaginary score card. This particular article stuck with me because it had unusually high levels of blunt misogyny in a genre that specializes in blunt misogyny, with advice like this: "Imagine that you're just approaching this woman to have a conversation, not to bang her." But for those men who find it impossible even to imagine talking to a woman because you enjoy it, the Washington Post has a trend piece about companies that men can hire that will do all their online dating for them. All they have to do is show up on the date and cash in on someone else's ability to imagine enjoying an online conversation with a woman that leads up to a real date.

Hiring someone to pretend to be you, feigning interest in looking up and chatting with women through a dating Web site, isn't cheap, of course. The customers of this service largely seem to be privileged but busy men, which only adds to the creepy sense that they see dating as a form of shopping, and shopping as a chore that can be delegated to the help. It's unclear if those hiring this service spend more of their own time and attention picking out the clothes they wear on dates than the dates themselves, and it's quite possible that they do. After all, if you're indifferent to that je nais se quoi of attraction, you can tell a dating service that you only want women who are under a certain height and weight and have a certain hair color to generate some hits, but clothes you often have to try on to know that they fit.

One can hear the usual defenses from men who find it simply too painful to go through the process of treating women like they're interesting, discrete individuals in order to get access to the vagina. It's too hard; women are too mean—and don't you know that women are basically all one undifferentiated mass of irrational demands to be treated like they're not an undifferentiated mass? Or maybe just claims that they're too busy. But if you're too busy to go through profiles on a dating Web site, I have to believe you're way too busy to spend time getting to know someone once the service has done its duty of pretending that you're interested in getting to know someone for you.

Of course, someone probably wouldn't grow broke offering a service that does the dating for you, if they could just figure out a way to get the ladies to accept the handover from the company representative at the client's bedroom door after the dinner and a movie. Or you could just spend 99 cents for an iPhone application that pretends to be a submissive girlfriend from a former Communist nation, if that would be easier.

Photograph of money changing hands by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Tags: online dating, pick up artists

—As the rest of the industrialized world gets fatter, Japanese women bully each other into getting skinnier. [Washington Post]

—How do we build better teachers? [NYT Magazine]

—A study in Britain reveals that 73 percent of young people believe frank discussion of sexual disease is key to a long relationship. [BBC News]

—Students, parents, and educators in California protest cuts in the state education budget. [New York Times]

—Americans know nothing about birth control. [Feministe]

—Utah lawmakers remove “reckless” terminology from new abortion bill. [Salon]

Photograph of woman by Junko Kimura/Getty Images News.

Tags: abortion, anorexia, birth control, california, education, Japan, relationships, sex, utah, weight

Our discussion yesterday on password sharing touched on just how prevalent the practice is. In the past, you had to actively look for information about an ex by semi-stalking his or her friends. But if you've shared your information with each other, scorned lovers can take things a step further: They can search their exes' G-mail accounts or peruse their Facebook messages without anyone ever knowing about it. Even when your password sharing starts out as seemingly innocuous, lazy behavior (I don’t know how many times I’ve asked my boyfriend to check my e-mail for me), it can lead to a tedious and painful transition post break-up.

In a continuation of our awkward and wrong series of Internet mishaps, we’re looking for unfortunate experiences caused by sharing passwords. Did you find out your partner was cheating because of a rogue Gchat? Did you search his Twitter personal messages and find out what your ex really thought of you? Send us your uncomfortable stories.

Tags: awkward and wrong, email, Facebook, oversharing, password sharing, passwords, relationships, secrets & lies

The New York Times published an article yesterday on how social media complicate relationships when a couple shares passwords. To share or not to share has been a point of contention in relationships at least since the '90s, when Seinfeld's George Costanza is bullied into giving up his ATM password to a girlfriend (it's Bosco). Now that everyone needs a password for her phone, her e-mail, her Netflix account, her Facebook, and her Twitter, the pressure to share passwords is even more intense. How do we redefine dating etiquette in the digital era? DoubleX contributors debate:

Jessica Grose: My fiance knows my various passwords and I know his. I would never, ever, ever, even if I suspected he was cheating, go into his e-mail, search his chats, read his facebook messages, etc., and I know that he would give me the same courtesy. I would not share such things with someone I wasn't getting married to, but I have no desire to know what he says about me to his friends, even if it's complimentary. It's like reading someone's diary—always better not to. I wouldn't even want to know what my exes said about me to friends! It's so masochistic.

Ellen Tarlin: I wouldn't go so far as to say sharing passwords is laziness for my husband and me—not that we are not the laziest people on the planet—but it is expeditious. Like if I get something in my e-mail that he needs to access for whatever reason (and I neglected to send it to him for whatever reason), or he needs me to look something up for him in his while he's at work, or I order from his Amazon account because he has free shipping or whatever, or we are doing something together but only one of us is sitting at the keyboard. It was not a decision for us. It just happened. Fortunately, I don't think our dog knows any of our passwords.

Dahlia Lithwick: My husband and I know each others' passwords. More worrisome, I think our son knows all our passwords, too.

Victoria Bosch: When I was a 'tween in the pre-Facebook days of yore, my "two best friends" and I knew each other's passwords and sometimes snuck a peek at the others' e-mail. It actually caused drama once when I logged into the girl's account and found out she was "secretly dating" someone and mentioned not telling me. I've never looked at anyone's e-mail since. I learned my lesson as a 14-year-old!

Ellen Tarlin: I read my sister's diary once when I was a teen or preteen. It said there were four kinds of kisses: corn, wheat, sprouts, alfalfa. It took me decades to figure out what the hell that meant. It plagued me! So, really, don't do it!

Claire Gordon: My friend shared her Netflix account with a long-distance boyfriend and started to reconsider the relationship (and her boyfriend as a human being) when she saw that his most recently watched films had some recurring, unsavory themes. Even in the most innocuous examples of online intimacy, there can be inadvertant over-sharing ... but maybe that was definitely for the best.

Vanessa Gezari: I think the context makes a difference. In the NYT story, the anecdote is about a woman who had a relationship (doesn't say how serious) in which she and her boyfriend not only shared their passwords, but she had no problem going breezily into his e-mail account one day and reading a message he'd sent to his mom about why he was no longer in love with his girlfriend (the very woman who now found herself "stung" by his e-mail). The next graf says:

A new dating order has emerged in the era of social media. Couples who used to see each other’s friends only at parties now enjoy 24-hour access to their beloved’s confidants thanks to Facebook. Sharing passwords to e-mail accounts, bank accounts and photo-sharing sites is the new currency of intimacy." (Italics are mine.)

WTF??? The "new currency of intimacy"? I hope not. Maybe this is what I'm reacting to more than the bare fact of sharing passwords. What this means to me is that if I really like someone I've been dating for a few months, and I want to show that, I'm going to share my passwords with him. Not so. So not so. I think that reading other people's mail is a bad idea under any circumstances. I'd hit the roof if someone—even the person closest to me—read mine without permission. One thing I wonder is: Although it's great when you're with someone or married and things are going well and you need to check their Hulu account, what happens if you break up and it's ugly? Well, I guess you can change your passwords then. In the end, I guess what bothers me most is the breeziness with which some people apparently go from dating to oversharing to reading other people's mail, which may have more to do with my sense of privacy than with living at the apex of the Internet age.

Jessica Lambertson: What interested me so much (as someone who has been on both sides of the inappropriate e-mail sharing) is that it's not so easy to break as you would think. When my long-term boyfriend and I broke it off a few years ago, I used to sign into his e-mail account obsessively. It was sort of my way of hanging on while also trying to rationalize it was over (reading hurtful Gchat convos about all my faults as well as convos with his new lady).

On the other side of the coin, I found out my current boyfriend used to check my Gmail and was FURIOUS. It's hard to separate yourself from what you do that is a breach of privacy and what you expect for yourself. When you share passwords (which always inevitably happens to me), you share a new piece of information that didn't exist before. It means new problems!

Photograph of couple at laptop by Jack Hollingsworth/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: email, Facebook, oversharing, passwords, relationships, secrets & lies

Thank you, everyone, who wrote in with submissions over the weekend. We had a great response to the question, ‘How has marriage changed you?’ I’ll be running one or two pieces a week for the next few weeks starting today, so there’s still time to write if you haven’t already. E-mail me at emma@thecomebackbook.com.

The first entry is from Sanya Thomas Weathers, a writer and video game consultant in the Baltimore area.

When I think about how marriage has changed me, the day I quit smoking comes to mind.

I started at 15. I should have known better, too. My grandmother died of emphysema when I was 5. Back then you could smoke in hospitals, and she would, too, right up until she could no longer sit up.

So I don't know why I started, exactly. But I kept smoking because I liked it. It's terribly gauche these days to say that, but I did. I loved the tactile pleasures of tapping a single cigarette to settle the tobacco, and the way it felt in my fingers in between drags. I loved watching the smoke curl in lazy blue eddies. And I loved how smokers are instantly part of a secret club, one you can always turn to for a light or a drag.

But mostly I loved the nicotine buzz, the smell, and the taste. I never tried to quit, because I didn't want to quit.

When I started dating a non-smoker, we both tried to be very considerate. I went through gallons of toothpaste and truckloads of mints. He never gave me pamphlets or lectures, because he figured at 27 years old I already knew about the hazards. When I moved to a new apartment, I declared it a non-smoking home, banishing my habit to the patio. He helped me get the smell out of the furniture.

A year went by and I realized I'd fallen in love. I came down with a cold to celebrate one year of dating, and he celebrated the big day by bringing me a basket of tea, honey, butterscotch drops, Nyquil, and juice. He came into my apartment, and spotted my pack on the table. It was almost new, with just one cigarette missing.

"You're not smoking when you're this sick, are you?"

What happened next I can only attribute to three days of alternately chugging NyQuil and DayQuil, and watching daytime television. "Doh. Ob course not. Dobody smokes whed they're this sick. Id fact, they say dicotine is odly id your system for sebedty two hours, and I'b already god thirty six. Cakewalk. I'll just quit. I quit. You hab my word."

He didn't pause for even a second. Leaving the basket of goodies on the table and the door wide open, he snatched my pack and ran for the dumpster on the corner.

I didn't get over the cold for another three days, and I was so sick I never felt a single withdrawal pang. The next three weeks were hell, though, not because of the drug but because of the habit. Smoke breaks to relax, a cigarette to help me control my temper, something to keep my hands busy, all of it impossibly hard and me impossible to live with.

But I've never had so much as a single puff since, because I don't want to look in his big brown eyes and admit that I failed him, that cigarettes were more important than keeping my word to him.

Now I've been a smoker for twelve years, a quitter for seven, and married for five. He says he wants to be together for all the years of a good, long life. Probably longer now, thanks to him.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: marriage, relationships, smoking

A guest post from Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett:

I've never been in a relationship with two people at the same time, but I've spent the last two months talking about it constantly. Not because I'm obsessed with the idea—though, um, increasingly I am—but because I was writing a piece for Newsweek about one particular multi-partner family. Terisa and Scott have been together for 12 years, and live in a lakeside neighborhood of Seattle, where they share a vegetable garden and three dogs. For 10 years, Terisa has also been dating Larry, who on the side is dating Vera, who is married to Matt. Now Terisa is dating Matt, too. It’s like a real life Big Love, without the Mormonism: they’re “polyamorists”—a term used to describe people who believe in loving, consensual, multi-partner relationships. And while it’s easy to brush off anything with the word “poly” as some kind of frat-house fantasy gone wild, polyamory has a decidedly feminist bent.

The key to poly relationships is gender equality, and women have been central to the creation of the practice. The word "polyamory" itself was coined by two women, in the early ’90s, and the first five books on the topic were all female-authored. Over the past year, writers like Jenny Block and Tristan Taormino, the sex columnist, have written on the topic, while celebrities Tilda Swinton (who called herself a “freak” in an interview with Double X) and Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, have spoken out in favor of open relationships. “Multiple-partner relationships have always gone on, but they have rarely had the gender equity characteristic of poly relationships,” says sociologist Elisabeth Sheff, one of the few researchers to study polyamory.

The way these families make their relationships work is perhaps the most feminine of all of this: by good old-fashioned talking. (Terisa, Matt, and the rest of the clan describe how they make their polyamorous relationship work in this video segment.) Imagine having the problems you have with one partner with three. It requires constant communication—so much that polyamorists joke they have no time to actually have sex, because, well, they're so damn busy talking. “I like to call it polyagony,” one of my sources joked. “It works for some, and for others, it’s a f--king nightmare.”

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: big love, newsweek, polyamory, relationships

“My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love. Balkrishna also chronicles her now-twice divorced parent’s emotional recovery: “My mother is back in her house and currently renovating all traces of him away.”

I feel great sympathy for both the mother and the daughter in this story and admire my young colleague’s efforts to examine the painful semi-estrangement she describes. (“We have reached a stalemate, sometimes respectful, sometimes not.”)

It is the nature of families to know details and maintain strongly held perspectives on other member’s most personal foibles. Loving but dysfunctional relationships are practically the definition of family, and traditional roles shift as children become independent. I wrote about my son a year and a half ago in a personal essay that was published in Slate. Even though he read the final draft, and not only gave me permission to submit it, but suggested edits (sub in: “he thought his parents would disown him” for “... were going to kill him”), when it published, six pages of reader remarks, nearly universally negative (yes, I read them all), in Slate's "The Fray" suggested I had been offensively invasive of my college-age son’s privacy. I wondered if I had broken some unwritten rule of family discretion.

If there is such a commandment (thou shalt portray relatives only in the most favorable light), many essayists are guilty of breaking it. Emily B. wrote here about the fuzzy boundaries of the parent-child confidentiality rule. In the reaction to my article, one Fray poster suggested I was actually trying to send my young son a disciplinary message that I had been unable to convey more privately. I don’t agree but I admit it gave me pause. As for Anna, I hope she will able to get past whatever compelled her to write so disapprovingly about her lonely mother and can find her way to visit her for a heart-to-heart talk.

Tags: modern love column, prison, relationships

Via Fark—a 1933 "Test for Husbands" (in two parts) that offers points and demerits for various behaviors. How would your husband shape up?

Reads the newspaper at the table: 1 demerit
Reads newspaper, books, or magazines aloud to wife: 1 point
Talks of the efficiency of his stenographer or other women: 1 demerit
Gives wife real movie kisses, not dutiful "pecks" on the cheek: 1 point

Points off, too, for being too much of a bookworm, kissing your wife right after she's applied her makeup, and writing on the tablecloth. Luckily, a husband can win a whole 20 points—the most awarded in the entire quiz!—for being "ardent, considerate, and sensitive in relations" ... Does that mean what I think it means? Who knew married couples in the '30s were all about bumping connubial uglies?

Minneapolis journalist and veteran blogger James Lileks apparently found this retro gem in the offices of the Star Tribune; a test for wives and parents is promised in coming days.

Of course, the real question is: How would Obama fare on this point system?

Tags: marriage, retro, test for husbands

Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried to find friends who went to his college so they could show me his extended Facebook profile.

I see, though, that at some point we all reach the edge of our Internet comfort zone. For me, the awkward part is how to navigate everything that comes after the first date: Do I owe him a wall post to prove that I care? When do I change my relationship status? How do I explain to my mother or my bosses, who are also my Facebook friends, the cryptic status message I'd rather they not understand?

Double X wants to hear your awkward and wrong Google, Facebook, and Twitter stories—the times when things went awry in a relationship because of these tools (combined with your inexperience or lack of willpower or bad luck or whatever else). Send your tales to us, and we'll excerpt our favorites on the site.

Photograph of woman on computer from Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images

Tags: awkward, awkward and wrong, Facebook, google, modern love, relationships, twitter

One of America’s longest-running love triangles is about to come to an end: According to the official Archie Comics blog, Archie Andrews—hapless ginger kid and proto-Zack Morris—is getting married. (Via CNN.)

In the 65-year-old serial’s 600th issue—on sale in September—Archie and the gang have hurtled into the future. They’ve graduated from college, and Archie’s now preparing to take the marital plunge. According to Veronica’s blog—which, strangely, reads like it was written by a spammer from Singapore—it seems Archie has chosen her over sweet, loyal Betty:

I am so excited, I am getting Married to Archie. There is so much to do, so many plans to make. I wonder if Betty wants to be my Maid of Honor? I bet she is so happy for me!
(((Hugs)))
Ronnie

Betty, predictably, is sad. Jughead will be best man. And Reggie, that scamp, plans on scooping up Archie’s sloppy seconds.

Of course, you should never trust bloggers. With a little more than three months till pub date, we might see a Graduate-style switcheroo at the last minute.

I was always a Veronica girl myself—mostly because she had black hair, like me, but also because the girl knew how to Get. Things. Done. But I have a feeling she might not have nabbed him for long. Is it too much to hope for an eventual Archie-Moose pair-off?

Tags: Archie, Archie comics, Betty, marriage, Veronica