For those who are not engineers, this can serve as a handy guide to sniff out those of us around you. For those who are, but may be questioning your credentials or trying to play down your nerd card, this is your wake up call.

If you apply engineering principles to your regular life? I.e. the noisy channel model to dating, optimization methods to arranging your dishwasher, minimum entropy to your porn, you are likely a hardcore engineer.

Perhaps you solve “interesting” problems just to solve them, not for any possible benefit – grades, pay, extra credit, impress your boss/adviser – just to see if you can do it. If you regularly use up what is likely scant resources of your time and brainpower on problems that have a very low chance of actually paying you back something later, you are probably a hardcore engineer.

Or maybe you’ve having a conversation with a friend about something you’ve been working on and they ask for the “simple” explanation. And after you give them what is arguably the elementary school (in your head) explanation, they ask you to dumb it down some more. Until you end up saying, “well, pretty much I’m trying to *verb* *noun* much more {efficiently, cheaply, faster, simpler, to use less resources} and only then is when they nod and make that ‘aahhh’ noise that says “I still don’t understand but you’ve probably reached the limit that you mind will allow you to simplify this problem”, you are most likely a hardcore engineer.

Do you have boxes, parts, notebooks, and files on projects that you started in the past, where you were really excited about what you were going to do, but somehow never finished because you started on another project that had similar potential, but you never throw them away because one weekend, after you’ve caught up on the work you’re doing now, you’re going to go back and finish? You are definitely a hardcore engineer.

Did you read this and spend the whole time thinking, wow, this is all so familiar, but in actuality you spend your days teaching kids how to draw, or designing purses to be made out of eco-friendly fibers, or writing copy for a news article? If so, you are likely a hardcore engineer’s girlfriend.

Even if you hate Obama or don’t approve, endorse, or agree with anything he stands for, you actually have to wish, hope, pray, that he is successful in some degree.

Let us posit that you want Obama to fail. What does that mean? It means that you want his policies and programs to be so badly planned, managed, operated, funded, that it damages the nation. You are in essence actively campaigning for further damage to your country.

Now, if you find yourself saying “wait a minute, I don’t want to country to get worse than it is, just for Obama to do badly so that nobody wants to elect him again”, you are really hoping that Obama is just ineffectual.

So, again, what does that mean? Well, there are two options. One is that Obama maintains the status quo. Things remain as bad as they are. We don’t get better, but relatively speaking, things don’t get worse. Here is the problem with that – if things are the same in 2012 as they were in 2008, the incoming president will have an even deeper hole to dig himself or herself out of. It is not as if we are currently riding a wave of success and prosperity. So, maintaining the current economic conditions is a very very bad idea.

Thus, the only way you can get your wish, that Obama be ineffectual to the point of having no chance at a second term, and yet not have this country worse off is to have Obama be successful. To have him make positive change.

So, seeing as even for those who hate Obama, but love America, you actually need Obama to have some modicum of success, why don’t you just temporarily join hands with us who support him and make that happen. Then in 2012, you can have a go at voting him out of office.

Well, I’ve returned to singledom. After months of being in an exclusive relationship, I found that she was not for me. This is a pretty hard decision to make because we still care a lot about each other. Sure, there were arguments and fights from time to time, but nothing I’d especially consider bad warning signs. There was hardly any bringing up of past wrongs, so most fights were on new things.

But as much as I would want, it just wasn’t there. Perhaps it is something that I could grow into or perhaps not. I think maybe not, at least not with me the way I am now. I want something else, someone else, and I need to be able to answer myself whether this something else (that I can’t obviously put down in words) actually exists with someone else.

Of course, the danger is that I’m wrong, and then I’d have ended a relationship that was otherwise going well. In these situations, no amount of list making and rationalization can help. Gut feelings is where the solution lies and my gut says I’m doing the right thing.

For a long time, we have preached and promoted tolerance in civil relations. Tolerance for people of different races, different religions, different genders, different sexual orientations; pretty much, tolerance for those who differ from us.

The subtext of tolerance is that these different people possess some quality that not only is different, but also threatens or scares us in some way. Every random person is different from me. The ones that you tolerate are those that bother you for some reason.

Growing up, that’s what I heard and read. That’s what I saw leaders of the present and past urging and encouraging. And for a while, I thought it was the correct message. But I’m starting to think it is wrong. We don’t need a message of tolerance. In fact, a message of tolerance is bad.

Why? Because tolerance, tolerating someone is essentially a way of saying, “while I don’t like you or what you do, I will restrain myself from doing or saying anything ‘politically (and legally) incorrect’.

Tolerance doesn’t actually change the hatred within a person, it just hides it under a veneer of civility. Now, that would be fine if by hiding such, it doesn’t get passed on to the next generation. But I don’t think that is happening. I don’t think tolerance has been enough to keep the problems it hides from propagating through time.

Tolerance is what leads to people making statements like “We (meaning white people) gave you (meaning minorities) x, y, and z and you people (again, minorities) are still unsatisfied”.

I will say this over and over until I die. Nobody, white or otherwise, has the authority to give me the right to goto college, to live life treated with respect and equality.

But when idiots think they are just tolerating me, then inside they feel they are giving up something to me. That is not the case. I’m not taking anything from some guy tolerating me. I’m claiming what has always been mine. I don’t want his tolerance. I want his acceptance or his casual indifference.

So fuck tolerance. We should teach indifference.

Part of the reason the death panels and other nonsense around congressional legislation is able to flourish is because bills tend to be huge complicated documents written in legal terms that the average person has a hard time understanding from a casual read.

So, when someone else gives what sounds like an analysis after claiming THEY read the proposed legislation, it can be easy to believe. Especially when Republican elected officials who should know better do nothing to debunk any stupid myths floating out there.

Many are wondering why doesn’t Congress write these things quite simply (say, 10 pages or less) in easy to understand language. Well, they can’t. Though some of us think we know how the legislative process works, I don’t think most really know what legislation really needs to accomplish.

Some quick points. We cannot just pass a law that says everyone should have insurance. We have to detail who, when, where, and how. We need to explain who pays for it, who makes sure that everyone is ensured, how we actually educate people that they need to fill out forms to get insurance. We need to close loop holes that insurance companies use to deny coverage, write specific laws that protect teaching hospitals in NJ which can be quite different from legislation needed for teaching hospitals in WA.

Ensuring that everyone has affordable health insurance that is available WHEN they NEED it is not as simple as ensuring everyone has insurance. There are plenty of people who have insurance, pay premiums, then get diagnosed with cancer and discover their insurance doesn’t cover it.

Part of the issue is that our laws are interpreted by exactly what the writers intended, and not the spirit of the law. Even after abolition, blacks were still treated as second class citizens. Despite the fact that our founding documents recognize that all persons are created equally. And even if we allow that prior to the 13th amendment, US law did not recognize blacks as complete persons, from that point all, that technicality no longer existed. Yet, instead of obeying the spirit of the law (the constitution and bill of rights), it took (and is still taking) over 140 years of struggle for minorities to achieve some semblance of equality.

There are lots of other examples, did we really need a court case to establish miranda rights? Do we really need court cases to adapt copyright laws to the digital age? We shouldn’t unless we interpret laws strictly to apply in the manner that they were written, instead of recognizing they should adapt to our current times and reality.

The other thing is specificity. Our laws, as much as some would like to claim are based on the ten commandments. . . they are not the ten commandments. Thou shall not kill. Pretty simple right? No exclusions there. As far as I’m concerned, no matter how or why you kill someone, you are in violation of that commandment. Yet we have 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree murder. We have grand and petty larceny. I list those to illustrate that our laws are written to prohibit or enforce specific directives.

We don’t enforce a thou shall not kill or thou shall not steal directive. Arguably, we can’t. Certainly, we live in a world where these things are not simply black or white, there is a lot of gray involved. So we write laws. Laws that define what is black, and levels of punishment depending on gray level.

Similarly, like it or not, health care bills are written this way. We cannot really enforce a law that says, “you cannot cheat your customer”, one could always argue that is too vague or what you did isn’t really cheating? Remember the smart ass in school who would try and talk the teacher out of why what he did really wasn’t wrong but right? Our system works with laws that criminalize specific -very specific behavior. And as such, our congresspeople, in order to ensure that their goals are met, must write legislation that is complete and includes all of these minutia.

The final things is that crafting such legislation is akin to having to specify the complete design of a car. Not only the design and all supporting safety and other documentation, but you must also specify where the car will be built, where the parts come from, how it will be paid for, how it will be marketed.

You can imagine if we had public debate on design specifications, someone could cause trouble by claiming some subsection included a provision that allows honda to forcibly restrain your baby in the back seat of a car which could kill them if the car got too hot. Ridiculous statements that can be taken out of context or flat out lied about if the general public is unable to parse the language the specifications are written and thus must rely on someone else who they trust to explain it to them.

Let’s be careful.

I’m tired of this “best in the world” framing of political issues by the right. We have the “best healthcare in the world”. We are the “best place in the world for persons of African descent”. Yada yada.

Let me tell you something, America was the best in the world 200 years ago. In 1809, should that have been an acceptable excuse for maintaining the status quo?

Just because we are the best in the world doesn’t mean what we are doing is just or right? Just because I beat my wife less than everyone else on my block doesn’t mean I am a good husband. Conservatives need to get off that bullshit. Everytime I hear it, I cringe internally knowing that I’m about hear some thoughtless argument come out of the speaker’s mouth.

Telling me that my life could be worse somewhere else doesn’t make me feel better. What, I’m supposed to be grateful for a shitty life in America because it could be truely crappy somewhere else? GTFOH! That because things are better here, I should not want to improve it? GTFOH!

What’s worse is that the whole “best in the world” meme is not even always true. As soon as someone brings up things like mortality rates due to some disease and other metric that reasonable people would think should factor into the “best in the world” measurement (with respect to healthcare), the response becomes “well, the American people aren’t so much worried about the quality that they’re getting as much as the cost”.

Again, let me cry with a LOUD VOICE, BULLSHIT. Cost and quality are not independent. I am willing to pay more for higher quality. If the quality of my medical care sucks, you can be sure that I’d be concerned about the cost. If anything, American’s concern with cost shows that they feel they are not getting as much bang for their buck. And you want to know some technical terms for “bang for your buck”, they include:

1. Quality
2. Features
3. Benefits
4. Coverage

Bang for my buck means not waiting in long lines, it means getting access to professionals with long years of experience, it means getting things right the first time, it means not having to deal with a lot of paperwork, it means once I pay for something, I don’t get follow up attempts to nickel and dime me.

Best in the world? Yeah, best in the world at fucking you over while smiling right in your face.

These words have dogged Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor for a long time. Even in her testimony before congress, she still didn’t quite address this to her detractors satisfaction. Instead, they argue that she sidestepped the question. Part of the reason she has been unable to answer this properly and too her defenders, is that simply to her and her defenders, the charge of racism makes no sense. In fact, I think that most people are simply just deliberately misinterpreting her statement for political reasons.

For the few that are truely confuddled, here is what is going on. In conversation, we sometimes use terms that reinforce our identity. For example, someone might hear me say “I’m a strong black man”. Furthermore, I might make a statement (which you’ll see is quite similar to Sotomayor’s) such as “I would hope as a strong black man, I’d be fully capable of lifting that gigantic boulder”. Does that mean that I feel only black men could lift that boulder? No.

A literal reading of that statement would imply that not only would you have to be black, but also strong, and a man to lift the boulder. Clearly though, a boulder is an object that any person, regardless of race or gender, can lift, so long as they are strong. Yes weaklings, suck on it.

So, similarly, arriving at the correct judgement is something that anyone, regardless of race or gender, is capable of doing, so long as their life experiences have been such that they can be considered to be a wise person.

When Sotomayor says “wise latina woman”, she is emphasizing that her achievements are open to other latina women. That becoming a well known and respected jurist is something within reach of a latina women. Her purpose is so transparent (to other minorities at least) that none of us even have to think twice about what she means or why she chose the words she did.

That white males have a problem with this highlights a theme which is common in any of my politically driven posts, that there exists white (conservative – at least, they are the ones most vocal) men who either refuse to accept or deliberately ignore that minorities still struggle in this country. That young black, asian, latina men and women grossly lack solid role models. One man or woman is not enough. Even now, people attempt to marginalize the achievements of Obama at the same time that they cry that his presidency is proof that we are beyond race.

No. Not at all. A handful of minorities in positions of national power and influence is not enough. We must have minorities richly permeating all aspects of society. If we had a gathering of all living presidents and vice presidents of the united states, how much do you think Obama would stand out?

This sounds strange, but until we have a society where a minority president, senator, mayor, CEO does not stand out by simply entering a gathering of his or her peers, we are not “post-racial”. Furthermore, there is not reason that we should. Differing cultures bring different, sometimes unique perspectives on this exact same life. There is no reason we should be in a hurry to squash our diversity and hide it under a rug.

There are those who look at her nomination as just another case of affirmative action. Well, you are right. But I have a question, if you feel that “anyone” should be able to judge, that anyone, regardless of background has the capacity to become a capable jurist – why should it be a problem that we want a supreme court that better reflects the diversity of culture, gender, and background that is our country?

Furthermore, by a lot of objective standards, Sotomayor is the most qualified person to ever be nominated to the Supreme Court. Even if you disagreed with that, you nobody disputes that she is highly qualified. So, why is there a big issue that she was chosen, instead of a white male (given the dominance of said demographic of supreme court appointments).

Seriously, any arguments on the sake of qualifications presuppose that the nomination should go to the person most objectively qualified for the job. Here is the thing though. If we actually had an fully objective way to measure judicial quality, we wouldn’t need to nominate Supreme Court jurists. We would just pick whoever was the current top of the list. The fact that we nominate people to a position implies that the person doing the nomination has the leeway to consider issues beyond a purely objective “can he/she do this job”.

What world do these people live in?  Like it or not, if we want to be a post-racism society (not post-racial), then we must be prepared to have minorities experience what it means to be our presidents, our supreme court justices, our senators, and our CEOs. And guess what, attempting to justify NOT appointing Sotomayor on the basis of having the Supreme Court reflect the exact racial distribution of our country is not being post-racism. If you can only tolerate minority control and ownership up to the point that it matches their percentage of the population, we still have a problem.

Ponder this – why should it feel normal to see one or two black faces in a group of 30 other white ones, but not the reverse?

That’s right people. I am an armchair genius. I sit in front of my tablet, read the news or watch it, read blogs or online magazines, and think about how much smarter, how much more self control, how much more morally consistent I am than everyone else. It is not hard to believe, after all, the world revolves around me. And as such, I’m glad you’ve humbled yourself today to catch even a small nugget of my intellect.

Yesterday I read about the Stanford Prison study. There have been other psychological experiments which yielded similar results but the conclusions drawn here were applied to an article discussing torture and Abu Grahib and the kind of situation that can make otherwise “good” people go “bad”. I will state now that in my infinite wisdom, I have already determined that “good” and “bad” are very subjective. That good and bad are not fundamental qualities of a person, but just a general consensus of how we (and they) view the results of their actions and motivations.

For example, the issue of torture. I’m sure there are many who believe what they were doing is right. That their methods were justified by their results, whatever that may actually have been. That by “keeping us safe”, they should have a get out of jail free card. But on my end, I just see torture. And as with anything that does not directly affect me, I feel that our laws should be immediately and impartially applied to them.

However, there are those that passionately feel the opposite. It is tempting to think they are idiots, immoral, unethical, lacking of humanity. But mayhaps they are not. I used to believe that ignorance played a major role in such things. It certainly can neatly explain why racism still exists and how many conservatives act like it doesnt. It neatly explains how they can earnestly decry any responsibility for what minorities have gone through and continue to experience in this country. It is how they can make statements like “What other country do you people have this level of rights and standard of living” without seeming to realize that until things are equal, truely equal, I would rather work to make America the place where minorities are treated and regarded as equals and not a place where it’s the best we can expect to have in the world. The best shithole amongst shitholes is still a shithole. Seems simple enough to me.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I thought, given that I have wisdom and knowledge and understand these things and they don’t, it is clearly an issue of ignorance. They just don’t know what I know. But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe they do know what I know. Yet their life story has crafted such a widely divergent viewpoint, their current situation presents such a different outlook, I fear that no amount of knowledge can bridge the gap.

My thoughts turned to relationships. I was in a long term (3+ years) relationship a few years ago. One that my parents very much objected to when they found out about it. At the time, I wondered why they didn’t understand, why they didn’t support me, but now that it is over and time has passed, I’ve come to see some (but definitely not all) of their rationale (one does not become an armchair genius overnight you know). My being involved, no matter how pragmatic and impartial I think I can make my self, irrevocably changes they way I view things.

One conclusion of the study is that in situations like the prison experiment, our mind attempts to deal with two conflicting ideas and what wins out is that of conformity, the decision that is in line with those around us, those with whom we have a very close relationship, those with whom are in authority over us. I’m not saying that other people on the outside are always right, but providing a framework for this logical leap – which is that relationships can be the same way. We can at times deal with conflicting emotions, desires, and thoughts. But we stay because of inertia. Things have been moving in a certain direction, other people expect things of us, we have obligations, we want to do what seems “right”, so we suppress those contrary feelings and move on.

It can be easy for me to then say, the things that I allow myself to do should be those, for better or worse, that don’t generate internal conflict. My current academic/career choice and direction has been largely internal conflict free. My relationships, not so much. Buying my car, conflict free. Buying a ring, not so much. The problem is, I recognize that certain things in life, by their very nature, cannot be completely removed from conflict. Or perhaps, the reason is by my very nature, I cannot experience them without internal conflict.

My personal views about long term relationships have undergone a drastic shift in the past couple years. In 2007/2008, while I was single, all I wanted was an end to that status. To have a relationship with someone that I care about, respect, enjoy spending time with, and wanted to grow with and allow them to help me grow. In many ways, I’m a very private person. I dislike sharing information about myself and tend not to make what I feel are unneccesary conversations. So, when I am with someone who I can open up to, it means I’m in a very vulnerable state, and as such, that person must be special.

Now that I’m with such a person, my mind wanders at time. Damn the greener grass syndrome. I wonder if I just need time to get it out of my system. A friend of mine had his girlfriend recently leave him because she wanted to be single to discover who she really was. She’s been in one relationship after another almost continuously for the past 6+ years. Is this possible? Can one ever truely satisfy that kind of thirst? I don’t know. I’ve always said that commitment isn’t a feeling as much as it is a decision.

I hate second guessing my decisions. I fear that I can make wrong ones.

By the way, I actually am a good writer. However, my thoughts themselves (at least when not concerned with robotics) tend not to be organized. What allows me to pass english classes is an ability to turn jumbled messes into works of art. Unfortunately for those who came to see art, I feel no such compuction with this blog to clean it up beyond what flows from my mind (and any sanitization to protect my vanity).

So, April 15th was the big national day for tea parties around the country. The average American protesting the unjust tax policies of the Obama administration. There was also some (likely confused and misdirected) unrest towards Wall street. Well, actually, the tea parties weren’t all about that (or I can argue, taxes were the least of the issues that the tea parties were concerned with, but for arguments sake, I will only address the financial angle organizers and participants extolled).

First, let’s address tax. The argument is that it is unfair for Obama to take MY money and give it to some no good lazy slob who can’t afford to take care of themselves or even has the gumption to work three jobs like he should. Of course, I only have to work one job because I got a good education, connections, or something. Here’s the problem with that argument. Obama’s actually LOWERING taxes for over 90% of Americans. Those who do see a tax increase, only see their taxes grow to what they were under Clinton.

So, what exactly is the argument here? That Obama should actually tax me MORE? Perhaps the argument is that it’s unfair to raise taxes on the rich, that we should all pay taxes equally. That the rich are the ones who stimulate the economy? Hmm. Here is the problem with that argument. Let’s take two people. Person A rents an apartment, works 40-50 hours a week to barely make ends meet. He lives month to month. Person B is paying a mortgage on his house. Has a job that pays him pretty well so that he can contribute to savings, retirement accounts, etc. Now, if I were to hand $1000 to both of these men, where would it go?

Person A would likely spend it on food, rent, clothes, transportation, something – this something stimulates the economy. Person B could likely spend it on similar things, but he is also likely just to put it in savings. Let me bring up another situation. Person A is at the poverty line, let’s say 12k/yr for some state. Person B makes 100k a year. While having a flat tax seems to be equal and fair to all, think about what a flat tax of say 20% does to Person A versus Person B. That $2400 could mean someone goes hungry one week a month, gets substandard clothing, food. That could mean a child doesn’t get health insurance, access to good nutrition or after school programs – things which AFFECT school performance and deliquency. On the other hand, $20k to the other person may mean they can’t afford to buy a new car this year, or take the entire family to Europe on vacation.

The point of these exercises is to demonstrate that a fixed amount of money or fixed tax rate has different implications when you are poor, when you are doing ok, and when you are wealthy. What’s even more insidious though is the prevailing mindset that “if I can work hard and make it, so can you”. NO. THAT IS NOT THE CASE. Growing up without one parent can make a huge differnce when there aren’t other family members who can fill that void. Growing up malnourished, seeing your parents spend most of their waking hours working to never advance in their lives, growing up where crime is a way of life, all of that affects a person. Their outlook, their decisions. But even more devastating, the opportunities available to them and their ability to take advantage of them.

So, while there is that aspect, there’s then the “anger” over those homeowners who got bad mortgages. This problem is very complex and I’m not going to attempt to fully deconstruct it now. Instead, I will just make many points, and hope you start to get the gist of what’s going on:

• It is the “American Dream” to own a home.
• The whole point of a mortage is to amortize the actual cost of the house. While amortize tends to mean “spread the cost out”, it’s real meaning is “hide”. Seriously, unless you’re getting the best rates, you could end up over the life of your mortgage paying 1.5 or more the value of your home. Nobody wants that. That’s partly why we lull oursevles with monthly payments that look very similar to what we’ve been paying in rent.
• Bankers SOLD people they KNEW could not afford the ACTUAL terms of the mortage those mortages.
• Many people were finessed into buying more home than they could afford.
• We live in a debt driving society. Look at the savings rate up through 2007. I believe by 2007, the average was NEGATIVE. That means our society has gotten to the point where on average, we spend more money than we save.
• We are bailing out the banks and other financial institutions because if they fail, they take everything down with them and then we’re truely fucked. Think about it this way. You’ve  had a steady job, gotten several credit cards and nearly maxed them out, but able to make the payments. Suddenly, you find out that your job is shipped overseas and you have to work for less. You have major bills due. You can pay rent and food, but that means missing a payment on a couple credit cards. What happens if after a couple months of missing a payment here and there while you attempt to fix your life, your credit card company decides to just close your account and ask you to pay in full? Let us assume you pay them in full – now you’re fucked. Because now, instead of being behind on one or two cards, you’re now behind on ALL. And you owe rent, need to buy food, pay for car insurance, all with money you no longer have. That’s where our financial industry pretty much got to be, only on a much bigger scale. They owed each other money, and at some point found out that cushy mortgage they were holding was no longer so great. With their source of income cut off, other creditors feeling the crunch of having their income cut off and calling in their debts in full instead of letting things ride, our economy took a turn for the worse.
• Just how ethically or morally bankrupt is it to be angry at other people for getting screwed for engaging in pretty much the same behavior that we were? Their only problem, for some reason, they got the bad end of the stick

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Quick disclaimer, these three stages DON’T include engagement/marriage. However, there will be a slight discussion following that addresses why engagement and marriage should logically be considered one and the same stage.

So, relationships can be tricky to navigate these days. People progress at different rates. Sometimes one wonders “just where are we?” I mean, one is less likely to schedule whole blocks of time off or go through driving hours just to see someone who “is just talking”. I think typically, we either want the other person to be at the same stage that we’re in, or at least have the decency to let us know that they’re not quite that serious when we start talking about planning joint vacations.

This issue is further complicated by our general need to hold the upper hand and limit how vulnerable we can be. Relationship-wise, this generally means the topic of “where are we” is taboo, at least for the first few weeks or months (depending on just how often you’ve been “seeing” each other).

So, what are these stages and how can I recognize them in others (well, probably just your friends when they talk about those of the opposite sex in their lives who are not relatives, classmates, co-workers, or people who have already been turned down [there is NO such thing as platonic friendship])?

1. Hanging out. Also known as “just talking”, “seeing each other”. This is the stage where you’ve just met and are feeling each other out. There is mutual attraction and perhaps some interest. Certainly fun. But heck, I already have fun with my friends and likely don’t need more, so, the point of this is to see whether the other person captures our interest long enough for us to consider moving to the next phase:
2. Dating. For those who don’t know or are confused, dating is the stage where you evaluate long term (and for most, exclusive) relationship potential with a person. You are no longer “just talking”, a stage where either person can cancel without worry about anything because there is nothing invested. See, in stage 1, you spend time together when it is convenient. You both happen to be free, in the same place, etc. Dating requires allocating time to be together out of your regular schedule. Now, this evaluation is just for the next stage:
3. Boyfriend/girlfriend. Yes, that’s right. That long term exclusive relationship is NOT marriage. In this stage, you are now a couple. You meet friends, maybe parents. While you may “hang out” with many people or date a few, you tend to only be in this stage with one other person. The goal here (for some) is to evaluate the other for a permanent commitment – marriage. This is where you root out conflicts like number of children wanted, religion, financial plans for the future, career conflicts, etc.

Once you resolve these issues, you are then ready to move on to (what’s supposed to be) the final stage, marriage. Now, why do I lump engagement together with marriage. Logically, when you ask someone to marry you or agree to marry someone, you are in fact saying, “Yes, we can get married tomorrow”. The only reason that there’s even an engagement stage is to give you time to plan a wedding, setup a common home, finances, etc. If you think that engagement is a time for you to discover any last lingering issues, you have made a very bad mistake.

Alas, many fall into this trap because they don’t actually follow through on the previous stages. Yes, the further up you move, the harder it is to end a relationship, but if you are actually serious about the progression – if your end goal is to be married, then you need to use each stage for what it is. If your end goal is a bf/gf, and you suddenly find yourself accepting (or giving) a marriage proposal, something is wrong. You are not equipped to make a good decision on that front because up to then, that has not been your intention. You’ve not done the due diligence on that front.

Anyway, live and learn.