The Placeholder Girlfriend
parhelia.conorbarnes.com
parhelia.conorbarnes.com
My favorite line: "Before it had bothered me that I was low on both Ambition and Chill (6.0). But now I was at 10 for both. I was going to humiliate my evil girlfriend. But I was chill about it because I knew it would happen."
When she had sex with someone else, I don't really think it was cheating since their relationship was labeled "Temporary"
I'm not completely convinced. I don't agree with "every relationship starts out temporary"; to me a relationship should be part of a good-faith effort towards a permanent relationship unless agreed otherwise. (And if you take the position that the girlfriend didn't agree to a relationship at all, then by the same token she can't complain about it being nonexclusive). If you know someone's maintaining a relationship with you under deeply false pretenses (explicitly or implicitly), then I don't think you owe them or your relationship any loyalty.
I will say that I relate, because I once overreacted to a breakup going on a massive self-improvement binge. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I don't think it came from a place of sound mental health and self-esteem. On the other, a lot of good did come out of it, and I eventually found intrinsic motivation, rather than evaluating myself by how I thought my ex would think about me.
When he bench pressed, his mantra was "Breakups build body builders".
This seems like a pretty damaging belief to have about relationships. Better to have a significant other who is accepting of your imperfections.
or do you mean the undergrad spiraling?
And anyway I want my partner to understand my strengths and weaknesses. And to help me improve myself where possible with encouragement and constructive criticism, or to offset my weaknesses with their strengths. And vice versa.
"Accepting imperfections": depends on what it is and if it's an intrinsic attribute or a habit. A good partner helps the other become better where possible.
A spreadsheet may feel very shallow and icky, but we also are not privy to the girlfriend’s thoughts and motives in this story. It could just be a tool to help her process her feelings. We don’t know how much weight she assigns to a 2 in Wit. And most relationships start off as “temporary” status.
My spouse has kept a journal off and on over the years. While it may be a shock initially to read something unflattering about myself in there, it also wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me. And not that far removed from a spreadsheet in my opinion.
Maybe you're okay being led on or talked about but that's not universal. Plenty of human behavior is destructive, our social behavior is no exception.
It always surprises me that we can sometimes recognize someone's personality within 5 minutes of meeting them. We see faults they perhaps can't see or maybe choose to live with (even faults that harm themselves or those near them). And I know a few superskilled that can immediately recognise well-hidden dangers of others.
I'm a middle aged analytical guy. So I've had decades of seeing how difficult it is for us all to acquire wisdom.
We want to be better, but we just don't seem to know how to do it. There's a self-harm industry around self-help books. Pop-psych. A whole dogma and industry around words like trauma, mindfulness. One of of the least insightful people I know is a psychologist. Some of the people I most admire have low-status jobs and little formal education.
I know people that try to make a list of all the attributes they require in a partner. I multiplied out the percentages for one friend, and their chances of finding someone that met all the easy requirements lead to a 1 in 10 billion chance of their perfect partner existing. Even after dropping many other constraints!
[edit] removed naive para where I took it as an article rather than a story. Great writing!
You’ve got to be careful with this kind of naive statistical approach: many attributes are positively correlated.
That one in 10B chance is more like one in 10K or 100K because of this.
Moreover, people aren’t selecting partners from a random subset of the entire human population! They meet people in their own area, of their own age, etc…
Especially important is that people tend to meet partners at school or work, which very strongly selects for like-minded people.
Hence they don’t need to meet thousands or millions of potential partners: they’re meeting a good subset that is likely to be in that ideal group.
I mean, sure, if you had completely arbitrary and unrelated requirements and you were on a series of random blind dates selected via lottery from the global population, then things would look bleak. For most normal people wanting normal things, dating feels oddly lucky.
Most definitely. A relevant example here was income and good teeth.
Controlling for correlations is well beyond a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Even explaining correlations is university level stuff that is hard to explain.
I didn't add many other reasonable restrictions - in same city - finds them attractive - yadda yadda.
Their restrictions were unreasonable - the point of the exercise was to show just how unreasonable.
Fortunately it seems that when we meet someone we like, we turn out to be flexible and our restrictions are weak when faced with reality.
unless those restrictions prevent you from liking someone in the first place. i think young people do tend to make this mistake. i certainly did.
I am slowly learning! I think the trick is actually to see the less obvious value in others: e.g. smart but uneducated. The hard part is that it is most hard to recognise ability in others in domains where I am relatively stupid.
Also I tend to try to have the less judgemental self-select towards me by giving myself traits that judgy plastic types (oooo ironic) don't like.
for seeking a partner there are further questions related to compatibility of character and also goals, but that often is not what you look at when you are a teenager.
Also details like cannot help but weep at the picture of a dead bird.
I also find the protagonists leveling up mockable (but not particularly funny). Personal growth in any characteristic takes time and major effort, but maybe that is part of the satire?
I find it hard to workout what is being played straight, and what is being mocked, tbh, I just don't care, or find it that funny.
The tropes seem strongly tied to the rationality and EA communities, so maybe if one is part of those communities there is more to the satire?
Rationality community is where you'd expect to find some spreadsheet people. So if this story is in any way related, it would be an unsuccessful attempt at mocking them.
Not my cup of tea.
I too found this work to feel a little weird, for the same reason as GP. It feels like a story told the way a man might experience it, but with a woman's voice and tone. Less believable still is the way it goes on and on, with the protagonist trying to turn herself into a perfectly scoring example. I get that sometimes it's okay because otherwise there would be no story, but I don't buy the motivation or the end result in combination and that really makes it hard for me to read.
I've actually heard of this particular thing (spreadsheets of dating partners) already and the way it was presented to me it seemed pretty reasonable. It's hard to know what you value in a person, so for your own benefit you might try listing a few scores and see which ones match up most strongly with how you feel about someone. Maybe you care deeply that someone knows how to cook, or maybe you think their music taste matching yours is of the utmost importance. It's kind of hard to figure out otherwise. I don't really feel it's quite like an attempt at a linear ordering / sorting of people as much as it is for one's own benefit.
All in all, I kind of wish the author had spent more time consulting women on how their relationships actually work, even if it means the story might never have been written.
Women sometimes viciously attack each other over petty things like wearing the same dress.
Just because women in your circle have restraint doesn't mean they don't have urges.
Meanwhile this character, with whom we are intended by the author to empathize with and who otherwise is portrayed as a normal (though exceedingly neurotic) human being, briefly has the urge to murder.
It just kind of feels like it doesn't follow, is all. Anyone can have urges but I'm not quite buying this character having that urge without a little more explanation.
(and to be clear: I reject this premise, because without the work making it clear that this specific woman feels this specific way, it feels like the work suggests that we should just accept that any woman might feel this way without serious provocation or a serious backstory and I don't)
There's a whole YouTube genre of documentaries and true-crime-vlogs dedicated to the topic of "women who kill". A woman I know likes watching these, which is how I got to overhear some of the things talked about, so believe me, women can kill for whole host of reasons, many of them far more absurd on the surface than being listed in a spreadsheet.
And so do men, by the way. It's not a gender thing.
And if you don't believe me, feel free to watch some of those videos, or read up on the investigations they cover on your own.
I think a lot of what men might consider "soft skills" in the bedroom (pun intended) would not only transfer to a lesbian context but have more salience there.
I read the story as the protagonist being vulnerable, insecure, and a bit unhinged:
> For one horrible second I contemplated killing her but that was wildly out of proportion and then I tried to pretend that I had only wished she was dead and then I just tried to forget about it.
The other (female, no less) characters in the story seem to agree:
> “Revenge?” She looked surprised. “I get something like… I don’t know, but revenge is a leap.”
Whereas you explained those same character traits by the author being a man, and thus sexist, and not knowing how women think. That line of thinking already contains two invalid generalizations, ie "this isn't how women think" and "therefore a man wrote this, because only men don't know how women think".
I guess this bothers me because it takes something I read as just about people being people and turns it into a gender/sexism issue, but the mere existence of the complaint itself reveals so much fractal sexism in the eye of the beholder that I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.
Have you considered that your POV is limited, and that a woman reading this story (and every other story) might have a different perspective than you?
> I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.
You seem to be upset that someone had a different perspective. You might want to learn some emotional control techniques if you are this upset over an observation someone made.
Are you seriously asking 'stavros if he considered that other people may have sexist views and therefore his non-sexist view take is wrong?
I am asking Stavros to consider that Women readers may be hyper-aware of bad male writing due to its ubiquity. Stavros does not have this view and is upset that someone made him aware of their perspective. I am not a woman so I am not as aware of bad female writing, but when I consume media around women they are able to pick up on things that I would never have noticed.
Stavros' inability to understand something this basic means he either has a hard time understanding that people have different POVs, or is so entrenched in anti-gender politics that he can't even fathom a woman's perspective of being forced to read bad writing without getting upset about... (something??? I am not sure what).
This unconscious bias is mostly invisible to men, but very visible to women. Women realize acutely that they are being treated differently in social interactions or in portrayals in fiction. They have to experience it every single day so it becomes really obvious.
Now some examples of "Bad Writing" could be creating a Mary Sue, or having too much exposition. Neither of these have anything to do with gender.
"Bad Male Writing" would be a phenomenon that comes about as a result of subconscious bias that a man learns from growing up in a patriarchical society. Some examples of "Bad Male Writing" would be not characterizing women enough, spending a lot of time on their appearances, etc.
It sounds like what tipped OP off to the author being male was the irrationality of one of the female characters. To steal from another comment in this thread:
> I am blaming the author for producing a work that is just shallow in a gendered feeling way. Were the author a woman, they might have realized that women don't just do things randomly but instead, drawing on her past experience being a woman, that they usually have a backstory where these things originate from.
> How does gender add anything here?
It adds something to the analysis because men and women have different experiences and that informs their worldview.
The whole internet meme of men thinking about the roman empire is relevant here.
When men think about the Roman empire they think about the conquest, the logistics, the infrastructure, the engineering, the military tactics, etc.
When women think about the Roman empire they usually think about how horrible it must have been to live under it as a woman. Men (mostly) don't consider the difficulty of menstruation in a city without a sewer system. Or the danger of childbirth in a world without germ theory and basic hygiene.
There is an entire dimension to the roman empire that the male fantasy overlooks.
These aren't insane or radical concepts, most of this is "pop culture" feminism I have learned literally just by talking to women.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
The story was written by Conor Barnes. From his LinkedIn, well, see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-barnes-b49833206/
Sure, there are women who keep spreadsheets like this, and sure, there are women who have outsized reactions. But none of the surrounding context feels reasonable or meaningful. It misses the reason why people keep spreadsheets like this (more to get a better understanding of themselves than to linearly rank their partners) and why someone might react so extremely or try and get revenge (they had already been through some atypical situation that made them this way or otherwise, for example; nearly any explanation would do but we're not given one).
It's not just that the author is male. It's that the author is male and is making contrivances that don't feel realistic, that could feel more realistic after some sort of consultation with either a more experienced writer or just like a woman or whatever. The characters are just cardboard cutouts that move a story forward and that doesn't make for a good read.
And is it really sexist to point out (especially in combination with the above) that the author is a man when the whole story is intended to be a relationship between two women, a kind of experience that the author is unlikely to have personally had?
I took the story as satire, with the over-the-top reactions of both the spreadsheet-maker and the spreadsheet-reader. I don't know why the spreadsheet-maker made the spreadsheet, but I also don't know why Romeo and Juliet fell in love, beyond "otherwise there would be no story". Your points are reasonable, it's just that I enjoyed the story as satire even with these elements.
> And is it really sexist to point out (especially in combination with the above) that the author is a man when the whole story is intended to be a relationship between two women, a kind of experience that the author is unlikely to have personally had?
I'll reuse the same example, do we need Shakespeare to have attempted suicide with his 13-year-old lover before he could write the play?
Romeo and Juliet fall in love for some very grounded, realistic reasons. They are adolescents, which are known to be particularly susceptible to falling in love, and also doing it with someone your parents don't like is extra hot, and so on.
And the way the story plays out requires some suspension of disbelief (wait, how did they get married if the royals would forbid it?) but it is always explained in a way that at least feels like it logically follows (oh, the Friar believes secretly marrying the two might bring peace; funnily ironic that they then should die instead).
Shakespeare did not have to experience these situations in order to portray them. When they start to get over the top and imaginative we at least feel like we started from some sort of grounded position, so it isn't so hard to suspend our disbelief. The entire play is building up to this ultimate tragedy and it earns it.
This contrasts with the other work, which does not set up anything before attempting to claim a payoff. The characters just are the way they are, things just happen. They don't have to be explained or have reasons that follow, because it's just satire.
I am not blaming the author for taking creative license in the way that Shakespeare did in describing the suicide of a pair of romantically involved individuals. Nor am I blaming the author for being a man. I am blaming the author for producing a work that is just shallow in a gendered feeling way. Were the author a woman, they might have realized that women don't just do things randomly but instead, drawing on her past experience being a woman, that they usually have a backstory where these things originate from.
If you like stories like this, don't let me yuck your yum. But also it is good to take the time to more deeply think about a work and what it means, why the characters act the way they do, why the author produced it in the first place.
Basically, I can see why you find the writing bad, I'm just not sure I agree on whether it would be better if the characters were men.
However, I've also talked to people (to women!) on the subject of these dating spreadsheets, and found those discussions to be way more nuanced and interesting than the puppet show the original work's author put on. So disregard my POV (and theirs, and everyone else's) if you like, but I find discussing the actual experiences had by affected individuals to be way more interesting than whatever game the rest of y'all seem to be playing.
Also, man or otherwise, the original work fails in terms of like, plain literary merit. The fact that a man wrote it only comes up because a woman would have been unlikely to make so many mistakes and to have put up so many extraordinarily shallow characters if she were working with lived experience.
GF: She shrugged. “I like being real with myself about where I’m at. So I do those sheets. I’m sorry you saw it. (...)
Author: I told her I was sorry she needed that. Then I kissed her cheek like the moon kisses the sun at the end of an eclipse. Then I left. Then I was gone.
Me: Sucks being the girlfriend with ADHD and/or on the spectrum.
What's the moral here? All I can see is, "never ever let others learn of your coping mechanisms - they won't understand".
My honed-over-16-years org-mode config ensures that this would be unlikely, and someone who does figure out how to navigate my notes and journal entries probably wouldn’t judge too hard :)
Less glib, that is a really difficult topic to navigate. Post-diagnosis (at age 36) I tried to be pretty open with the people I love and care about and discovered that many of them were carrying around their own diagnoses in secret. Others didn’t know how to react. No one reacted particularly poorly.
I am blessed with a partner who is almost certainly somewhere on the neurodiverse spectrum in some way (never officially diagnosed) and both her and my families are chock full of various ADHD and Autism diagnoses. In a lot of ways I’m almost certain that that’s why our relationship worked out when past relationships hadn’t; things that I thought were perfectly normal behaviour were often deal-breakers to past partners.
Perhaps the moral of the story is "other people exist and have agency". Sure, you've got coping mechanisms, but if they're emotionally destructive to other people then you might need better coping mechanisms that aren't awful. Maybe you could use the spreadsheet for potential birthday presents and favourite foods instead of deciding to string your partner along but eventually leave.
Or perhaps it's "you're not always the centre of the story". Sometimes the story is about the other person being a complete weirdo. Your chill, or lack thereof, is less important than finding out your partner wants to leave you.
Or perhaps it's "self-improvement gets you out of bad situations". Through the process of getting to 10, the protagonist met her future girlfriend and learned to leave her current emotionally hurtful one in a kinder way.
But is it wrong for the girlfriend to have had those feeling? I don't think so. We don't get to know, as readers, whether their relationship was supposed to have been serious. So maybe the girlfriend was leading the narrator on, or maybe it was just casual.
I also don't think it was wrong for the girlfriend to keep an unfiltered journal, if the purpose of the sheet was just working through her thoughts.
On the other hand, the narrator encounters the document accidentally. She probably should have respected the girlfriend's privacy, but who among us wouldn't have read further? It's not wrong for her to feel devastated.
The basic set up of the story is a conflict between two people, who both have taken understandable actions up to that point. It feels uncomfortable to us, because we want to be able to identify the good guy and bad guy here, but it's not so easy. This desire is deeply rooted in Western culture, or maybe even in our neurology as a species.
I think it's better to assume that most people mean well, but sometimes make suboptimal decisions based on their circumstances and the path dependent development of their personality. Sometimes those decisions can be quite heinous. But for most of us, it's the little ways we unintentionally undermine ourselves and our relationships.
To me, this story is about this exact thing. The narrator goes a bit off the rails as a result of an understandable emotional trigger. Until the end, the narrator barely, if ever, questions her self-righteousness.
It would kind of be cool for the author to write the story from the girlfriend's point of view. But then again, he kind of did. The narrator essentially accepts the worldview of the girlfriend, and reorganizes her life around it. But where did the girlfriend's worldview come from? Maybe we're meant to assume the girlfriend had a similar experience, which drove her to be so top tier, at least superficially.
I have a friend. He’s obsessed with self improvement. And he is good at it. He reads exhaustively about the most effective business people because he says it’s necessary to learn their habits. He gets up at 5:00am every day because sleeping in is wasting time you could spend improving yourself. His weekends are full of planning exercises for how he can most effectively use his week ahead.
He makes good money, is in great shape, has great social connections, etc. but he is deeply unhappy. Because to feel the constant need to improve means you also feel a constant sense of not being good enough.
I think in the context of this story, and really life in general, the only person whose acceptance matters is your own. To be happy with your life, with how you think and how you spend your time, with who you are and who you keep company with.
But 1-5 is often insufficient resolution (unless you do decimals, in which case it’s too much resolution), so the best scale is 0-10.
1 is worst, 5 is neutral, 9 is best and 10 is "personal favourite". This goes really well with the fact that not everything I really like is actually great so I can acknowledge that by giving it a spot to the side in its own category :)
> It’s all just numbers. It’s all just 1 to 10 (besides the 0 I got for math).
(Your attention to detail: 2.0. Protagonist's math rating, at that point, was clearly justified too.)
At that point you might as well use a 0-1 scale (0.65), or a percentage (65%).
Should rebrand as Hacker Thoughts for April Fools next year.
"What to Submit. On-topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What gives it away to you that it's a work of fiction?
1. Most stories about lesbians that aren't attributed to a definitely female author are written by males.
2. It seems unlikely someone so pedantic to keep full records of their partners would be careless enough to leave the file open for someone to find.
3. Keeping spreadsheets of data about your partners is not very usual to begin with (though not unheard of), but it's hard to imagine anyone would be so meticulous to rate a partner by now fewer than a hundred criteria. I don't think I could even formulate a 100 criteria worth caring about, let alone gather enough data about a person to assign concrete ratings in just a few months of dating.
You'd have to be well versed in lesbian literature to know this.
> 2. It seems unlikely someone so pedantic to keep full records of their partners would be careless enough to leave the file open for someone to find.
For sure but this is well into the story.
> 3. Keeping spreadsheets of data about your partners is not very usual to begin with (though not unheard of), but it's hard to imagine anyone would be so meticulous to rate a partner by now fewer than a hundred criteria. I don't think I could even formulate a 100 criteria worth caring about, let alone gather enough data about a person to assign concrete ratings in just a few months of dating.
The problem is HN is THE place for "not very usual (though not unheard of)" so there is a genuine disconnect going on. You can see the evidence in the comments here.
Also, I would say that this story isn't particularly intellectually gratifying.
https://maximumfun.org/images/mobytheory.pdf
This was on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. It contains deep truths which are generally not ok to say out loud.
Plus, a numerical rating from 0 to 10 is a reductionist way of understanding someone. What exactly does a low chill mean? It's probably situational, right? Numerically defining someone turns amorphous changing thoughts into a solid number and locks that perception in place, preventing you from learning more. Maybe you're putting her in situations where she's not chill? Maybe it's situational and you haven't learned what causes it? These complexities hide behind a single simplifying number.
I block Reddit at the router for similar dark patterns.
I can imagine this becoming a meme.
I'll give it a solid 8.
Edit: Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.