Is it wrong to date more than one person?
I’m an American living in London. I’ve started seeing a lovely British woman for dinners, drinks and sex. But there’s a woman in my office who I’d also like to invite for dinner. In New York, it’s OK to date more than one person before a formal commitment is made. In London it seems to be less so. As a visiting New Yorker, must I adopt a when-in-Rome rule?
Brits and Americans do many things differently and it’s not always easy to predict the potential cultural flashpoints. We say potato, you say potato; we say tomato, you say tomato—on paper it’s hard to see why there should be any cultural conflict here, but say the words out loud, in the two different accents, and you can see how they squeezed a whole song out of it. So try looking at it this way. A dinner date is like a job interview with food, with each party weighing up whether to proceed to the next round. By getting a reputation for juggling several women simultaneously, you are at risk of being eliminated by many potential partners at the “thanks for sending us your CV but we have no vacancies at present” stage. British women can regard a man who pursues a vigorous diet of try-before-you-buy dating as somewhere between an indecisive chancer and a glutton who hasn’t yet learned the size of his own stomach. Carry on the way you’re going and you may well be able to enjoy dinner with both your dates. Just don’t count on dessert.
To sit or not to sit
I got a late standing ticket to see Derek Jacobi in the sold-out Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear. As the lights dimmed, I slid into an empty seat—left vacant, I guessed, because snow that day had prevented its owner getting to the theatre. I felt guilty benefitting from another’s misfortune, and sitting among people who had paid full price. Should I have stayed standing?
It’s hard to see how your heightened enjoyment was bought at the price of anyone else’s unhappiness. Your joy at being able to sit down for three hours, and thus enjoy the play without the distraction of aching calves, does not deepen the misery of any theatregoers marooned at home by snow. As for your full-price-paying neighbours? They should be happy for Jacobi that he was able to bask in curtain-call acclaim for his performance that was all the greater for your not having grown weary as you watched. In any case, your neighbours enjoyed the reassurance of knowing that they owned guaranteed seats to the Lear-of-a-lifetime. To them, that would trump the gamble of trying to secure a last-minute standing ticket, and then praying that they might find an unoccupied seat to slip into. It’s the same peace of mind you get from paying full price for a sweater rather than waiting, fingers crossed, for the sales—only to discover that while the sweater you coveted has indeed been marked down, it is now still available only in a colour that stings your retina, or in sizes that would fit snugly only on either a squirrel or a telephone kiosk. You did not behave wickedly; which is more than can be said for most of the characters on stage.
The perils of advertising
A friend has asked my advice on a job in advertising she’s applying for. It’s a great position; much better than my own. My qualifications would make me a better candidate, and I think I would beat her to the job if I applied. Should I?
Do you believe advertising can persuade people to behave in ways they might not otherwise behave? Then presumably you acknowledge that you, too, are susceptible to its influence. So has it occurred to you that your friend may be every bit as disloyal as you are? While you are confident that you’re better qualified for this vacancy, who is to say your friend isn’t using her own advertising skills to nudge you into applying for this post with the aim of creating a vacancy for the job she truly covets, namely yours? Manipulative? Certainly. But isn’t that what effective advertising is supposed to be? Maybe your friend has slyly convinced you that the job on offer is better than your own, in the same way an advertiser can convince you that you’ll look ten years younger by using a new face cream containing aminopolytriglycerides, a chemical that looks less like it was created by scientists than by throwing a fistful of Scrabble letters into the air and seeing how they landed. Obviously there’s nothing to say that you couldn’t have spotted the job advert yourself. So, technically, you aren’t stealing work from under your friend’s nose. Still, it’s hard to dispel the suspicion that you might be the sort of person who will always be there for your friends when you need them.
I’m an American living in London. I’ve started seeing a lovely British woman for dinners, drinks and sex. But there’s a woman in my office who I’d also like to invite for dinner. In New York, it’s OK to date more than one person before a formal commitment is made. In London it seems to be less so. As a visiting New Yorker, must I adopt a when-in-Rome rule?
Brits and Americans do many things differently and it’s not always easy to predict the potential cultural flashpoints. We say potato, you say potato; we say tomato, you say tomato—on paper it’s hard to see why there should be any cultural conflict here, but say the words out loud, in the two different accents, and you can see how they squeezed a whole song out of it. So try looking at it this way. A dinner date is like a job interview with food, with each party weighing up whether to proceed to the next round. By getting a reputation for juggling several women simultaneously, you are at risk of being eliminated by many potential partners at the “thanks for sending us your CV but we have no vacancies at present” stage. British women can regard a man who pursues a vigorous diet of try-before-you-buy dating as somewhere between an indecisive chancer and a glutton who hasn’t yet learned the size of his own stomach. Carry on the way you’re going and you may well be able to enjoy dinner with both your dates. Just don’t count on dessert.
To sit or not to sit
I got a late standing ticket to see Derek Jacobi in the sold-out Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear. As the lights dimmed, I slid into an empty seat—left vacant, I guessed, because snow that day had prevented its owner getting to the theatre. I felt guilty benefitting from another’s misfortune, and sitting among people who had paid full price. Should I have stayed standing?
It’s hard to see how your heightened enjoyment was bought at the price of anyone else’s unhappiness. Your joy at being able to sit down for three hours, and thus enjoy the play without the distraction of aching calves, does not deepen the misery of any theatregoers marooned at home by snow. As for your full-price-paying neighbours? They should be happy for Jacobi that he was able to bask in curtain-call acclaim for his performance that was all the greater for your not having grown weary as you watched. In any case, your neighbours enjoyed the reassurance of knowing that they owned guaranteed seats to the Lear-of-a-lifetime. To them, that would trump the gamble of trying to secure a last-minute standing ticket, and then praying that they might find an unoccupied seat to slip into. It’s the same peace of mind you get from paying full price for a sweater rather than waiting, fingers crossed, for the sales—only to discover that while the sweater you coveted has indeed been marked down, it is now still available only in a colour that stings your retina, or in sizes that would fit snugly only on either a squirrel or a telephone kiosk. You did not behave wickedly; which is more than can be said for most of the characters on stage.
The perils of advertising
A friend has asked my advice on a job in advertising she’s applying for. It’s a great position; much better than my own. My qualifications would make me a better candidate, and I think I would beat her to the job if I applied. Should I?
Do you believe advertising can persuade people to behave in ways they might not otherwise behave? Then presumably you acknowledge that you, too, are susceptible to its influence. So has it occurred to you that your friend may be every bit as disloyal as you are? While you are confident that you’re better qualified for this vacancy, who is to say your friend isn’t using her own advertising skills to nudge you into applying for this post with the aim of creating a vacancy for the job she truly covets, namely yours? Manipulative? Certainly. But isn’t that what effective advertising is supposed to be? Maybe your friend has slyly convinced you that the job on offer is better than your own, in the same way an advertiser can convince you that you’ll look ten years younger by using a new face cream containing aminopolytriglycerides, a chemical that looks less like it was created by scientists than by throwing a fistful of Scrabble letters into the air and seeing how they landed. Obviously there’s nothing to say that you couldn’t have spotted the job advert yourself. So, technically, you aren’t stealing work from under your friend’s nose. Still, it’s hard to dispel the suspicion that you might be the sort of person who will always be there for your friends when you need them.
