The following is an excerpt from the book An Ocean of Air
by Gabrielle Walker
Published by Harcourt, Inc.; August 2007;$25.00US; 978-0-15-101124-7
Copyright © 2007 Gabrielle Walker

Chapter 1
The Ocean Above Us

Nearly four hundred years ago, in a patchwork of individual fiefdoms that we now call Italy, a revolution of ideas was struggling to take place. The traditional way to understand the workings of the world — through a combination of divine revelation and abstract reasoning — had begun to come under attack from a new breed. These people called themselves “natural philosophers,” because the word “scientist” had not yet been invented. To find out the way the world worked, they didn’t sit around and talk about it. They went out and looked. This was not an approach that was likely to find favor with the Church, home of received wisdom, or with its instruments — the whispering Inquisitors, with their hotline back to Rome. Now, a certain natural philosopher had fallen very foul of those Inquisitors and been forced to stop his investigations into the structure of the heavens. His name was Galileo Galilei, and our story begins with him.

Convent of Minerva, Rome
June 22, 1633

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors general against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic . . . have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies . . . and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me.

As the great Galileo rose from his knees at the end of this infamous, and forced, recantation, he is said to have muttered “Eppur si muove!” (“And yet it moves!”). He knew in his heart that Earth moves around the sun, in spite of what the Inquisitors had made him say. Still, devoutly religious as he was, he had no taste for defying his own church. Nor had he any desire to share the fate of the unfortunate monk Giordano Bruno, who a few decades earlier had been publicly burned for holding similar views. Galileo may have been the most famous philosopher in all Italy, but he knew that in itself wouldn’t save him from the fire.
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by Peter Pagnamenta, co-author of Sword and Blossom: A British Officer’s Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

In 1982 a retired Tokyo teacher was going through boxes in a storeroom, when she found a stash of old letters, still in their original thin white envelopes, with foreign stamps and sealing wax. They were bundled tightly together and there were over 800 of them. The letters inside were on rolled, thin, hand made “makigami” paper, and many of them contained pressed flowers which disintegrated, as they fell out. They were from a British officer who had been sent to Japan to learn English in 1904, written to his love, Masa Suzuki, and they spanned a period of nearly thirty years. The finder of the letters was a relative of Masa’s by marriage, and she had heard about the Englishman. But she had no idea of the full story.

Those letters are the principal source for our book, and we could only reconstruct the story by working through them, and finding the clues, and the chronology, which allowed the narrative of this relationship to emerge.

Momoko Williams and I were not the first to see this extraordinary cache — the Japanese writer Takako Inoue had looked at many of them and written a book published in Japan, but she had not been able to do any research in Britain, so her version was not complete. She helped set us on our way, but it was only when we got full access to the original letters that we realized what a daunting task we had taken on. They were difficult to decipher even for a Japanese, because the language and the ways of writing characters had changed so much, and Captain Hart Synnot’s language and syntax, specially at the start when he was learning, were not very good.

We spent nine months going through the letters, one by one, from 1905 to the 1930’s. We worked in real time, sitting at a table. Momoko would try and read them, and I would transcribe and type the contents in rough English as we went along, so we could pick up the references and ask each other questions. There were Japanese allusions that she could catch, or could ask others about, and there were English related references that I could understand. So there was a lot to do before we could get to what, for most books, would be regarded as square one.

One of the difficulties was that Arthur had helpfully (for Masa) rendered all the English names, of other officers, or places in Ireland, or family members, into phonetic Japanese. For example we were confronted with a cast of characters with strange sounding names — Blododo, Toku, Sarmondo, and had to check army lists and other sources until we found he meant General Broadwood, or Major Toke or Captain Salmon. He called her “Dare” and for a long time Momoko couldn’t work out what this meant, until she realized, from just one letter in which he used some English as well, that this was his Japanese spelling for “Dolly”. That was what he must always have called her.

As we went on we built up an index of names and places, and dates, and then started to do lateral research into army records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, wills, and land records in Japan, England and Ireland, to build up the picture. The newspapers of the time yielded vital information. We ploughed through yellowing copies of the small English language papers that had been published in Tokyo and Yokohama for the foreign community, and one of their staple ingredients were columns listing passengers arriving and departing by ship. In the “Japan Weekly Mail” for March 12th 1904 we were pleased to find: “per British steamer “Java” from London via the Chinese ports — Mr F.J. Abbott, Mrs F.J. Abbot, Miss Abbott and nurse, Mr H Fleming, Master Fleming, Mr G. Kingswell, Captain Hart Segnott” They had the name wrong, but it was good enough for our purposes. There were only three European style hotels that westerners used in Tokyo then, and the same papers published lists of guests who were staying. So we were able to place him at the Imperial in Tokyo on several occasions, or staying at Hakone, and for three or four years it was possible to track most of his comings and goings around the Far East, and check these dates against his own letters. The Japanese system for registering births and deaths was much more difficult to crack — the “Kosekki”.

Our greatest piece of luck was finding the diaries of two of the four other British language officers who were in Tokyo at the same time, because they described this world of foreign bachelors, the trips to the sumo wrestling, the tea houses, the picnics with the girlfriends at cherry blossom time, and Arthur and Masa flit in and out of them.

There was one major element we hoped to find, but never did — and that was the correspondence in the other direction, and Masa’s own letters to Arthur. We know where they were at various times, but they disappeared, probably during the Second World War.

© 2007 Peter Pagnamenta

Author
Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight-part BBC series Nippon, an archive and testimony history of Japan’s recovery after 1945, as well as Bubble Trouble, about Japan in the 1990’s. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth-century industrial history All Our Working Lives, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the twenty-six-part People’s Century. He is a former editor of the weekly current-affairs television program Panorama.

The following is an excerpt from the book The Peebles Principles
by R. Donahue Peebles with J.P. Faber
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; April 2007;$24.95US/ 29.99CAN; 978-0-470-09930-8
Copyright © 2007 R. Donahue Peebles

Prologue

I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I came from what most people would describe as a middle class home, an only child in a one-parent household. But by the time I was twenty-seven I was a multimillionaire, and by the time I was forty-five I was worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

This book is the story of how I created that wealth, beginning with nothing. It is also a book about how to get rich, following the principles I learned over more than two decades of building my personal fortune. It is the breakdown of the deals that created that fortune and how I won those deals. It is a handbook of tales and tactics for a twenty-first-century entrepreneur.

Perhaps not everybody wants to get rich, but I would say that this particular desire is somewhere close to the core of the American dream. I know that I wanted to be rich when I was young. I wanted to achieve a financial stability that would free me from the worries over money that I experienced growing up. I wanted to leave that field of gravity forever.

My dream came true with my first big deal, when I was twenty-seven, which turned me into a multimillionaire. I have since consummated deals that dwarf my first win, but I have never had that same feeling.

I remember that day vividly, when I signed a letter of intent with the city of Washington, DC, to develop an office building on Martin Luther King Avenue. The bricks and mortar were still to come, but that document meant I would own half of a multimillion-dollar project and would be receiving a mid-six-figure income annually for decades to come.

When I returned to my apartment, at about 8 o’clock, a group of my friends were there. To celebrate, my girlfriend had gotten a cake from the Watergate Bakery, a white chocolate mousse cake, and a few bottles of champagne. It was a moment worthy of celebration, a breakthrough moment, the biggest event of my business career to date. It meant that my financial future was set from that moment on. I could quit right there if I wanted to; making a half million a year was more than I’d ever envisioned as a kid, when I was a teenager living with my mother and helping her make ends meet.

That night, lying in bed, I thought about it all. I thought back to how I was so impressed in high school when I learned that Walt Frazier was making $300,000 a year playing basketball. I’d wished that one day I could do that, and here I was, on my way to making more than that. It was just such a sense of relief. I was done. I didn’t have to do another thing except make sure the construction company actually built the building. What a great moment.
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The following is an excerpt from the book What You Don’t Know Can Kill You
by Dr. Laura Nathanson
Published by Collins; May 2007;$15.95US/$19.95CAN; 978-0-06-114582-7
Copyright © 2007 Laura Nathanson

Red Flags in Radiology Reports:
An Added Crucial Step

The only radiologist who double-checks a radiology report is the radiologist who wrote it. There is nobody in charge of reviewing reports for completeness, much less for accuracy and clarity of expression. One exception: there are institutions that have installed special software with templates that require the radiologist to fill in every item recommended by the guidelines of the American College of Radiology. If one stays blank, the report can’t be signed out or billed for.

But, you might say, the clinical physician who ordered the report and receives the interpretation must review it for clarity and completeness. Right? Isn’t there a double-check on the report?

Alas, nobody checks that the clinical physician actually does read the report. Every time there is a communication between doctor and doctor, about anything, there is a new opportunity for error. So you, Vigilant One, need to keep a special eye on data reports of all kinds, including radiology reports. Here’s how:

First, once again, you preshrink the report:

* Substitute every medical jargon word with “thing,” “thingy,” etc.
* Search for scary words and uncertain terms.
* See if there is a scary diagnosis that has not been excluded.
* Look for any signs of fuzzy logic.

Then — and this is new — you go on to an additional set of red flags reserved for data reports.

First, the clinical physician has ordered a study to answer a specific question: What’s that metallic thing up the kid’s nose? Is this wrist fractured? Does this woman have pneumonia? A red flag is indicated by a report’s failure to include any of the following:

* The data doctor must make clear that he understands the question — the reason for the test.
* The data doctor must describe his findings clearly enough so that the clinical physician can judge the reasonableness of the data doctor’s diagnosis.
* The data doctor also ought to give either a specific diagnosis (”Mason lapel pin high in left nostril”) or a differential diagnosis (”Foreign body, metallic, high in left nostril? Barbie slipper charm? earring? part of dog collar?”)
* Finally, if the data doctor feels it is appropriate, he should suggest further study or action. (”Recommend prompt removal of foreign body in nose due to danger of aspiration during sniffing.”)

The clinical physician and data doctor should be engaged in an active written dialogue where each listens to and queries the other with attention and respect. This means that the clinical physician should review each data report critically to make sure that the most important question has been understood and answered.

The second step in checking a data report is to make sure that its import actually got through to the clinical physician. If a serious error or omission in such a report goes unnoticed by the clinical physician, there can be dire results.
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The following is an excerpt from the book Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women
Edited by Paula Goldman
Published by New World Library; March 2006; $26.95US; 1-57731-524-3
Copyright © 2006 by the International Museum of Women

JOLIVETTE MECENAS • USA

After working as a photo editor, a PR lackey for Big Oil, and a pixel pusher during that historical capitalist romp known as the dot-com boom, Jolivette Mecenas has accepted — happily — a life of teaching and writing. She is teaching at the University of Hawaii while pursuing her PhD in English, after which she plans to return to her native land, California.

One Is Not the Loneliest Number
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf

There are several life skills my mother taught me before I set off into the world: how to properly separate my laundry; how to balance my checkbook; how to prepare red meat in an assortment of quick-and-easy ways. Other skills I picked up as a sink-or-swim necessity: how to negotiate rent; how to negotiate salary increases; how to negotiate failed relationships, hopeless heartache, the metaphysical realization that we die; and how to negotiate reasonable rates with the psychotherapist. There are certain skills, however, that are often left out of public discourse, usually owing to our general squeamishness about anxiety-arousing issues such as mental illness, poverty, sexual dysfunction, and — what I would like to expound upon in this essay — being single. Or more specifically, being a single diner.

To walk into a restaurant by yourself on a Friday night, request a table for one, savor a full-course meal complete with wine, and linger over your espresso while surrounded by tables of raucous friends or (even worse) affectionate lovers spooning gelato into each other’s mouths — to dine alone in supreme grace and dignity is a life skill akin to high art. Your mother never taught you this. Probably because she never spelled it out for you that at certain points of your life, you will be alone. If you are not now or have not already been alone, you will be one day. And if you already are, welcome. The purpose of this essay is to reclaim the state of dining alone and to overthrow cultural assumptions that cow us into spending another desolate evening eating microwaved burritos while watching The Jeffersons on TV.

I admit, there are few things I enjoy more than sharing a meal with friends, either at home or at a restaurant; the conversation and laughter flow, we reminisce about old times, the palates are soothed and happy. Dining with a lover is usually a notch higher on the Richter scale of pleasant evenings, adding the element of being pampered and serviced by the wait staff, leaving us to concentrate on l’affaire d’amour in between bites of mu shu pork. But there are times in my life when I find myself far away from friends and even further away from having a lover. At these moments, I stubbornly refuse to give up the one epicurean pleasure I can truly satisfy by myself: eating. Why not go to a restaurant by myself? I don’t remember the first time I did, but I have many times since, and my experiences lead me to believe that the lone diner strikes an assortment of anxious emotions within people’s hearts. Whether it is fear (“Will I be her one day?”) or pity (“That poor girl!”) or relief (“Thank God I’m engaged to Bobby!”), most people would rather the single young woman dine alone in the privacy of her home, and not in public. However, I refuse to compromise my life to soothe the anxieties of others. In order to subvert the subtle discrimination against solo diners, we must first learn to identify it.

To begin, there are certain recurring reactions that happen whenever I dine alone, designed, I’m sure, to discourage the act. Most of these reactions fall under what I term single-phobia, or the irrational fear of independent people engaging in social activities by themselves. A dining experience in which I am harassed by single-phobia usually unfolds in the following manner:

Host: Table for . . . ?
Me: One, please.
Host: (Arching a skeptical eyebrow) Okaaay . . . this way, please.
(The host then leads me past bright empty booths at the front of the restaurant to a shaky miniscule table in a dark corner next to the kitchen.)
Me: Couldn’t I have one of those front tables? I’d rather not sit in the dark.
Host: I’m sorry, but those tables are reserved for parties of two or more. (What he really means to say is that the front tables are reserved for people with friends and social lives, and that people dine at restaurants to have a good time in the company of others. To maintain the festive atmosphere, they relegate me to the dark corner.)
Me: Fine.
(I am seated. The waiter takes my order nearly twenty minutes later. He only returns twice more, to bring food and to bring my check. He easily ignores my frantic hand gestures for more water, my polite yet assertive yelps of “Excuse me!” and focuses on any other place in the room when hustling past my table in and out of the kitchen. I know what he’s thinking, having been in the restaurant business myself: single diner equals small tip.)

Why does single-phobia permeate our culture? Perhaps we can blame the usual suspects: magazines, MTV, Top 40 boy-bands crooning their everlasting love to pubescent girls, urban bar culture (straight and gay), romantic comedies with trite endings, advertisements with ludicrous claims. But whatever the reasons, the object of the game is to not be alone. People spend lots of cash to be in a couple. Couples spend lots of cash being in couples. Call it a capitalist theory of modern love or just call me bitter, but whatever the explanation, this cultural phenomenon of anti-aloneness prevails wherever I attempt to enjoy a meal in a restaurant by myself.

For example, once when I was in New York City, I spent one homeless week in the Lucky Wagon, a pit passing for a hotel on the Chinatown–Little Italy border. At that point, I had only a hulking backpack of possessions, a pseudoglamorous magazine job paying subsistence wages, and a crazed determinism to keep me from ending up in the East River. My five-by-ten whitewashed room had no TV set to quell the voices in my head demanding of me, “How did you end up at this all-time low?” I tried to soothe my worries with dinner on Mulberry Street, the vivacious tourist trap of Italian eateries, where I chose a noisy, crowded little trattoria because it served my favorite dish, penne all’arrabiata — “angry pasta” for an angry girl.

The waiter sat me at a corner table, of course, me being the only single diner in a room full of birthday parties and groups of Japanese tourists. He was a handsome, young Italian American, his name may have been Anthony, and he laughed and joked with me for a bit. Then, broadcasting over the entire room in a booming voice, he asked me, “What are you doing eating alone?” Flushed from embarrassment and the wine, I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s Saturday night and you’re alone? What’s the matter, your boyfriend doesn’t take you out???” I started to explain that I didn’t have a boyfriend to take me out, that I didn’t even have any friends in New York, that I really was alone, but I realized he wouldn’t believe me. That’s when I began to understand how deeply entrenched in American culture the fear of the single diner is. It didn’t even cross Anthony’s mind that I was an independent, free being, eating dinner by myself.

Don’t be mistaken, I’m not some kind of gourmand misanthrope advocating antisocial behavior. I recognize the basic human need to feel love and affection. But I also believe that a young woman would do well for herself to recognize her relationship to the world and the conditions in the world that cause her to experience what our modernist friends the Existentialists called angst, or the feeling of despair and anguish. Night after night of frozen burritos and TV sitcom reruns is this city-dwelling gal’s version of despair and anguish. But then an epiphany: the realization that in any life of substance during which risks and leaps of faith are taken, there are inevitably moments when there is only me, and that is a good thing, and I will celebrate by taking myself out as my favorite guest to a lovely dinner.

With all self-affirmations out of the way, I’d like to proceed with tips and techniques for interested parties on how to dine alone gracefully and enjoyably.

* First of all, the meal you are eating determines whether or not you may bring reading material to entertain yourself. I’m of the opinion that any brunch or lunch is a good time to bring the paper, a good book, a magazine, et cetera. If you forget to bring something, under no circumstances should you begin to shuffle through your Day Runner organizer, pretending to write notes in the mini-calendar section; it is a telltale sign that you are extremely uncomfortable dining alone and are desperate to look busy. Instead, calmly finish your meal and occupy yourself by staring blankly at people and eavesdropping blatantly on conversations. It’s entertaining, and you’ll seem intriguing, I guarantee.
* If you are eating at a more stylish restaurant, you might consider more sophisticated modes of self-entertainment, like drinking copiously. In restaurants with outdoor seating, I like to smoke. Be careful, though, not to drink or smoke too much before your meal is served, as you may make yourself ill, and that can get messy.
* One game I like to play every now and then when I’m dining at a finer eating establishment is “Food Critic”: Dress to the nines for your meal. At several key points during the meal (after swirling the first taste of wine around in your glass and after the first bite of each dish), pull out a notebook and pen and jot down notes. Make several calls on your cell phone to your answering machine at home, pretending you are making after-dinner plans, and drop the names of chic bars and media personalities whenever possible. If I do a good job, I can usually weasel a free dessert and free alcohol. It’s fun!

Before I conclude, I’d like to point out one very important thing to remember at all times: you are not really alone. Sure, the setting is for one and there is only a fake floral arrangement in a vase to greet you across the table. But who says you can’t converse with the floral arrangement? People talk to their plants and pets all the time — why is it so strange to speak with inanimate objects? A short conversation I had with my dinner last night went something like this:

Me: Hello, Mr. Pizza! I must eat you now!

A rather flat conversation, I admit, but thoroughly spontaneous and enjoyable nonetheless. Or if you like, solo dinners are good opportunities to resurrect imaginary childhood friends and catch up on old times with them. During my solo meals, I like to replay past arguments I’ve lost to friends or ex-lovers, perfecting the flawless retort I wish I had thought of at the time. However, I have to be careful not to argue out loud, as I tend to get carried away and alarm people at nearby tables. My point is, when dining alone, never underestimate the pleasure of your own company, and enjoy it with pride. And when all else fails, there are always the voices in your head . . .

From the book Imagining Ourselves. Copyright © 2006 by The International Museum of Women. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com.

For more information, please visit www.imow.org

The following is an excerpt from the book Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single
by Jillian Straus
Published by Hyperion; February 2006; $21.95US/$29.95CAN; 1-4013-0132-0
Copyright © 2006 Jillian Straus

The First Date Interview

Those singles who can’t stand ambiguity from the very beginning develop a more direct dating approach. Meet, for instance, Steven Kaplan — as several of my girlfriends did. I was on yet another blind date — my third in the last two weeks. Here we go again, I thought, as I walked out my front door, and waved to the night doorman, Stan. Stan was my friend, and he had watched me return home forlorn from every date in the last month, except for one night when he happened to catch the end of a good-night kiss — albeit from a man who never called me again.

Like most of my friends, I had a careful semiotic clothing code that I had worked out for different kinds of dates. Tonight I was in full date battle mode: wearing my new fitted red V-neck sweater — the effort was to be attractive but not too slutty — paired with Diesel jeans, to give a “casual” impression. I had avoided my usual uniform of black cigarette pants, black top, and Gucci bag (on sale, but no one needed to know), because I did not want to convey that I was too high-maintenance. Hey, I am being honest here.

I was on my way to meet a friend-of-a-friend named Steven Kaplan. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was supposedly a good-looking, thirty-six-year-old Jewish oncologist — with a full head of hair. In my mother’s mind, of course, he was already fully qualified, sight unseen, to be my husband; in mine, he sounded like he could go any number of ways, but it was at least worth meeting him for dinner on a Tuesday night in the West Village.

I arrived at a cozy, unpretentious restaurant, Gradisca, and looked for someone fitting his description: “I’ll be wearing a green sweater and I have salt-and-pepper hair,” he’d told me during our short phone conversation. The first person I saw was a man wearing a green shirt — with the largest nose I had ever seen. As I walked toward this man with trepidation, trying to stay focused on the beauty of the soul, someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Hi, I’m Steven,” this man said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. He fit the description, and was actually better looking than I had anticipated: 6′2″, with thick, wavy salt-and-pepper hair and, thankfully, an entirely ordinary nose. We sat down right away. The restaurant was buzzing with beautiful people. We were seated at a quiet table in the corner, away from all the activity.

I was impressed by Steven’s sophistication: he perused the wine list and selected a full-bodied red wine; it was delicious, and we lingered over the bottle for about twenty minutes before ordering dinner. By then, I had a nice buzz, and I was beginning to feel chemistry between us. Steven looked particularly handsome with the shadow of the candle flame flickering on his face, turning his eyes into deep reflective pools. Hmm, I thought . . . He asked the usual first-date icebreaker questions: “Where are you from?” “What do you do in your free time?”

Who in New York has free time, anyway? I thought vaguely, as I admired his deep voice and silky lips. I was wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

Before we’d had a chance to order, however, the scene shifted from Last Tango in Paris to Nine to Five. My date had started to put me through a job interview:

“Do you want to stay in the city for the next couple of years?”

“Why did your last relationship end?”

“How many kids do you want?”

I was floored. I was thinking what it would be like to make out with him, and he wanted to figure out where we were sending our kids to school! When the waitress came and rescued me from his relentless battery of suitability questions, I was thrilled. The romantic mood had been extinguished the moment he seemed to scan my resume for the position of Mrs. Kaplan.

He sensed my unease, politely walked me home, and gave me an obligatory kiss on the cheek.

I wasn’t the only one of my circle, as it turned out, who’d had a date that ended up as a job interview. A few days later, I was having drinks with some girlfriends, and we were comparing our recent dates. I told them about Steven Kaplan. “He was really attractive and sophisticated, but he grilled me about my long-term life plan ten minutes into the date,” I complained. Rory, thirty-four, a blunt casting agent with baby-blue saucer eyes, explained my baffling evening to me in her own terms. Her clinical analysis of the different stages in which people approach courtship helped me to understand why so few of these dates we were all going on seemed romantic in the slightest: “He’s just trying to figure out what phase you are in. There is ‘Phase One’ and there is ‘Phase Two’ for people in the dating process,” she said. “Phase One involves buying some nice clothes and looking after yourself — for instance, taking care of your apartment, your job — and having lots of sex. I did that until I was about thirty, and I loved it.”

Rory continued, “Then there is Phase Two: This is when you want to put your money into building something for your future, you want to make your place a home in preparation for a partner and eventually a family, and most of all you want to share the life you’ve built with someone. For a woman in Phase Two, it can be challenging: you can try to put a Phase-One guy in a Phase-Two situation, but it rarely works,” she explained. Of course, the same applied to women, she said. That was clearly part of the disconnect between Dr. Kaplan and myself. But Rory felt she was now too often on the Phase-Two side of the equation, waiting for a Phase-One man to commit, and she was tired of it. I knew all too well what she was talking about, since I had spent much of my dating years chasing non-committal men.

But the interrogation on the first date is not particularly romantic. Besides, this tendency of young people to be either partying wildly or on a manic Google-like search for “the one and only” complicates the hope of simply falling in love; if we did not assign ourselves these rigid life categories, we would perhaps be more open to being persuaded to move, by the connection with another person, from Phase One to Phase Two — or even better, to simply want to be close to someone and intimate for its own sake, rather than for the fulfillment of an external timetable. But as long as we continue to approach our search for love this way, perhaps we’d be better off if we wore visible distinguishing signs: “NC” for non-committal or “R,” for ready.

I never saw or spoke to Steven Kaplan after that. I heard he got engaged to someone six months later. I was not surprised. The first date interview was an obvious, but unsubtle, way to weed out those who were not in the same place in their lives. Many of the people I heard from talked about the tormenting challenge of trying to find someone with whom you “connect” — that central word again — who is “ready” for the same things you are. On the whole, more women than men whom I interviewed had this complaint, but there were plenty of men who were pining after women who were “not ready.” The “readiness factor” was usually a sense of one’s own place in one’s life, rather than a reaction to the pull of the relationship itself. Steven Kaplan was ready, and he wasn’t going to waste any time trying to figure out whether I really was — or, for that matter, whom I really was.

On more than a dozen occasions, I had lent an ear to tortured friends who had waited and waited for a commitment, constantly hoping for clues, signs that their potential mate was coming around. I told the Steven Kaplan story to one of my ex-boyfriends, a semi-reformed non-committer who had broken my heart over ten years earlier. Years after the breakup, he had said, “Jillian, it wouldn’t have mattered if you were Cindy Crawford — I just wasn’t ready.” Here we were now, friends, and he explained my date with the doctor this way: Most guys don’t necessarily end up with the woman they love the most. “It’s like a game of musical chairs; you sit down in one chair, then you sit in another, and when the music stops, whatever chair you are sitting in is the chair you end up in.” It was the most unromantic thing I had ever heard and I thought I would never be able to buy that line of thinking. While this approach provided a shortcut to finding a mate in an ambiguous dating culture, I doubted that in the long run it resulted in many happy, permanent matches.

Gen-Xers are accustomed to figure-it-out-as-you-go-along dating and seem to resist any early pressure in a relationship, no matter what phase of dating they might be in. The Gen-X approach gives men and women the ability to get in and out of their relationships as easily as they change their jobs or apartments. The lack of formal romantic cues give this generation freedom, but with that freedom often comes a price: the inability to decisively commit.

Excerpted from Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single by Jillian Straus. Published by Hyperion. Copyright © 2006 Jillian Straus. All rights reserved. Available wherever books are sold.

Author
Jillian Straus spent eight years producing programs for The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she interviewed hundreds of men and women about their lives and their relationships. Prior to that, she worked for ABC News. She received a B.A. and an M.A. at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Straus is currently a fellow of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, training young women in communications. She lives in New York City.

For more information, please visit www.unhookedgeneration.com.