This is funny

A guy named Dan Ariely, whom I know nothing about, has had some good fun with Google. Google, as most readers will know, helpfully finishes search requests as we are typing them out. This autofill is based on the most common requests. Anyway, he typed in these two partial sentences

1. How can I get my boyfriend to ...
2. How can I get my girlfriend to ...

and then recorded the most likely conclusions to those sentences as determined by Google. The responses he found are at the link below and they are funny.

But, before going there, I'd make the following (typical of me) observation: if seeing which questions are the most common dismays you, angers you or confirms your worst suspicions about others, you probably aren't going to be very happy in life. And, as far as this may seem from Jane Austen, the amiable person shouldn't be bothered by this information.

Here is the link.

Amiability

Amiability necessarily comes into the mix when we start talking about beauty.

Beauty here meaning not a natural gift such as Ava Gardner had but something that can be achieved by practicing certain virtues. Austen would insist that these virtues are feminine; meaning by this that the best place to see these virtues in action is among women and not that men aren't capable of them.

And she would insist that amiability is part of the story. Readers of Burke will know that he connected the beautiful with love; the beautiful is the thing that makes us love.

But let's ask a rude question, are there girls who are not capable of being pretty? Catherine Morland comes off initially as a borderline case:

“Catherine grows quite a good–looking girl — she is almost pretty today,” were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

But surely there are people who are incapable of even this.

Here I think Austen requires virtue from both ends. It is not just an achievement to be beautiful, it is an achievement to see it as well. And thus it is a moral failing in Darcy that he cannot see the beauty of the other girls at the first ball in Pride and Prejudice. We have to be amiable enough to see good in human beings generally.

To put it another way, if you walk into a room full of men and women and can find only one of them to be passably attractive, then you are a moral failure.

Marital assymetry

This is a term that I found in some Austen criticism. It refers to a number of marriages Austen portrays in which one partner is clearly deficient. Mr. Collins is a good example. Another, and the one that this critic I am reading (John Dussinger) singles out is:

[Mrs. Allen] was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. Northanger Abbey

Nowadays, these people tend to be divorced. When I think of the single and divorced people I know and like I have to say I am not terribly surprised that most of them are. Most people I know are married but there are friends and relations who have made it into their late thirties or forties without getting married or, more frequently, without getting remarried.

They're good enough people. I like them all and dearly love some of them. But I don't sit around wondering why they just can't seem to meet someone because it's pretty obvious why they cannot. I keep hoping they will find someone to be happy with but I suspect that no one in their right mind would marry one of them. Nor does anyone other than themselves spend a lot of time wondering why their marriages didn't work out.

The thing about Austen is that she unhesitatingly blames Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Collins for their respective predicaments. She sees all three as having failed as human beings. We might nod politely and change the subject when our divorced friends bemoan their fates but we don't, even to ourselves, hold them morally responsible. We don't think, "If you had spent your time developing a more amiable character you wouldn't be in this fix."

Perhaps we should.