Experiments in Life

Hello boys. I've been waiting for you. It seems as if your little club is about to crumble! For a little birdie has told me something about guys that you probably wish I didn't know ;-). Ok enough of the James Bond antics.

Time and time again I've seen girlfriends ask for commitment from a guy and his response is always something of the following: "No."; "Do we have to put a label on it?"; "I'm not ready for commitment."; "I'm not ready for a relationship."... the list goes on. The funny thing about this though is that this not only happens to girls that spring the question after the 2nd date with a self proclaimed "playa", but also happens to girls who ask a guy who isnt dating anyone else, who doesn't want to date anyone else, and who probably thinks the girl is the best thing that ever happened to him. Yet when the question pops up, "What are we?," as if it were an automatic reflex, a guy will thwart a girl's initial attempts to enter a committed relationship. Ridiculous!

I was talking to a guy friend about how guys view commitment. His response to my belief that acting commitmentphobic was a natural reflex for men was, "yeah. I'd be suprised if I saw a guy accept being committed after the first attempt. It's best to break them down over the course of two months." Ha! Wow. Thanks..

As a scientist at heart, my initial reaction is to conduct an experiment about men and commitment. Like any other valid investigation, there has to be a question, a hypothesis, a procedure including controls, and a conclusion validated by statistical analysis. Now I don't know if my experiment would be HIPAA approved since it does run the risk of screwing up boys heads, but their boys right? They'll get over it.

Question: Do most men (> 50%) reject initial suggestions of entering a committed relationship?

Hypothesis: Most men will thwart a woman's initial suggestion to enter a committed relationship (b/c they're retards)

Procedure:


Thwarting a woman's attempt to enter a committed relationship may be dependent on timing of initial request, how much of a catch the man view's the woman to be, and/or a man's preconcieved notions of commitment. Therefore there will be different conditions set up to determine which, if any factor may influence a male's decision to balk at an initial request for commitment.

To control for timing a woman will date a subject (man) for 1 week, in another condition for a month, and a different subject for 3 months before asking for commitment.

To control for how much of a catch the man thinks the woman is, an attractive woman will date three different types of men: a man considered to be "hopeless" (i.e. unattractive with no social skills), average, and an attractive male.

To control for a male's preconcieved notions about commitment, through a questionnare men will be placed in three categories: "Looking for marriage"; "Looking for a companion"; "Looking for a bunch of hos."

Each of these test conditions will be tested against each other and a regression analysis will be performed to find underlying correlations.

This test will have to be conducted on the level of thousands of subjects to yield any significance in statistical testing.

Thanks for listening HIPAA, do you approve?

How will subjects be compensated? Hm at the end of the testing period men will be compensated by free gift certificates to local strip clubs.

I conclude (without real data) that even men considered hopeless, looking for marriage, and dating a woman for 3 months would STILL reject a woman's initial request to be monogamous if she is the first one to bring it up. Why do I believe this? B/c men are hilarious. And that there is a hilarious situation to me. :-)

Clearly there are a lot of holes in the experiment, but hey, its just a draft.