Friday, January 9, 2009

The demographic game

A close friend from college just broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years, her first long relationship. She's a slightly aimless grad student, cute but could be more confident. He's cute, dresses well, and has a tenure-track job at a good school. It seems so transparent.

Relationships are such a demographic game. When you get involved in college or right after you don't know who is going to be successful and who not, so it's easier to pair off by personality. As success becomes more clear, people seem more and more conscious of their "worth" in the marketplace.

It's not my relationship, and I wasn't even sure I thought it was the best relationship, but for some reason this depresses me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This sounds like an over-generalisation to me, but of course I don't know all the facts that you have in the back of you mind...Instead of "as success becomes clear" one can say "as time goes by" and this changes things a lot. For instance, you know people better. You know yourself better. You know things that can go wrong, and that becomes more important than things that can go right. You have more to loose and less time to experiment.
And, sure, know your value better.

Anonymous said...

Do you mean he broke up with her and that's why it's transparent? If she broke up with him, then it is less transparent to me...:)

JZ said...

Yes, he broke up with her. They dated for 10 years and I would say that they knew each other pretty well after say 5 years! :-)