Of all the reasons that early marriage is less successful than later marriage, it seems to me that options are about the least viable reason. There are big differences in marriage success rates when one partner is 18 and rates when one partner is 21, and it's not likely that options decreased so drastically between those years. The general belief among social scientists is that later marriage means more mature partners with more financial stability.

What happened to the fun everyone was having dissing the purity balls?

As others have discussed, when you're only writing or phoning, you are free to imagine how the F2F encounter is going to go. When the time comes, however, it may not go the way you hoped and not because anyone is at fault. It just doesn't work.

The same degree of "directness" he complains about would thrill some other man. It doesn't exactly make sense in this case: the man flirts, he comes for a weekend in A STUDIO APARTMENT so the LW is entirely justified in thinking there would be a more sexual connection. My guess is that the dynamic just wasn't there for him once he go there. It's no one's fault. It's one of those things.

I think moving on is good advice but how many women wear dresses with buttons? Settle for unzipping.

"If she ends up getting pregnant out of wedlock, short of a rape, she's on her own. Sorry. You aren't entitled to unconditional support no matter what you do in this world. Ain't how it works."

And suppose your wife (the girl's mother) objects to this plan?

Here are her problems:

She tried too hard

She didn't try hard enough

She was too direct

She wasn't direct enough

She doesn't really like the guy

The guy really doesn't like her

The guy likes her, but "not like that"

The guy likes her but is scared

The guy is not scared, he's confused,

I am so glad I'm married......

I think a better question BS would be "do female professors get in trouble if they demand sex from male students?" and I would undoubtably be out on my ass if I tried it and was found out. No discrimination there. I'm not sure if the male or the female student would be more likely to complain.

IF the LW wants to resurrect the friendship for the sake of friendship, that's worth a try. The other stuff is none of his business, especially since he is not in contact with the couple and doesn't know their relationship. It seems likely that the wife knows plenty.

If the friend blew the LW off because he knew too much, I can't imagine that the friend is going to take any unsolicited advice from LW about the marriage.

Some of you might be interested in this:

In 2002, NPR reported on a virtual reality program that shows non-schizophrenic people what schizophrenia is like. Schizophrenics in remission helped to develop it, but at least one person won't actually sit through a whole episode because it's too real.

I've tried to link to that episode...click on the virtual reality link. You need Real Player for it to work.

If the link below doesn't work you can cut and paste

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/aug/schizophrenia/

It's pretty amazing. I show it to my students every semester.

I understand that boys discuss girls, often very explicitly, and my friends and I discussed boys likewise. It has never been otherwise, I suspect.

BUT...this is a written document, from the original description apparently a widely circulated hard copy, with the girls' names and photos along with the explicit descriptions. That's a long way from a locker room conversation. In addition, to refer to a Hispanic girl as needing to "keep the taco smell off her" and to refer to an unattractive girl as having "a maggot-filled pussy" (I hate that I typed that) is way, way, way beyond a little T&A discussion in the locker room. Furthermore, when I read the article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was clear that the fathers were the ones leading the charge against the school...obviously one group of men weren't shrugging this off as boys being boys.

I don't know what legal recourse would be appropriate here, but I would like to think that the boys responsible are pretty damned ashamed of themselves.

Then don't have them. But have a little mercy on us that do have them and have to balance work and taking care of them. Remember: If you don't have children, other people's children are going to be the politicians, the health-care providers, the educators and so on; all services that you will need or from which you will benefit.

In other words: be kind to other people's children as they will be running your nursing home.

"In my experience, there is only one near-universal constant that women are looking for; women may like jocks, or alpha males, or funny sensitive guys, or hot male models, or rich men, but in pretty much all cases women prefer men with self-confidence. "

That is the honest truth. Women may be drawn to any number of types, but they don't stay drawn to a man who lacks self-confidence. Being a little insecure is charming enough once there is a real relationship.

I was smitten by my husband at first sight, partly because he was approaching baldness and had his remaining hair cut short...basically saying "I'm losing my hair and so what?". Beats the comb-over look hands down a few times over.