A Love Poem About Donkeys

March 4 was National Grammar Day in America, and someone I follow on Twitter was running a competition for grammar-themed haikus. I wrote one. It didn’t win. You can see the winners here. But in case you missed it, here is mine.

Donkeys donkeys love

Love donkeys donkeys donkeys

Donkeys love love love.

Put a ring on it

It’d be a shame if there was a common condition in which people thought incorrectly that they were going to want to continue doing something for the rest of their lives, because once the condition passed they’d feel sheepish. It would however be quite a ripping practical joke to create an institution whereby people were given the opportunity to place legal and financial obstacles in the way of their stopping doing the thing their condition made them think they were going to always want to do. Presumably many people would take this offer, especially if there were tax advantages thrown in, and when the condition passed they'd be trapped! How we'd laugh at them. But enough about practical jokes: the rest of this post will be about marriage.

I’m not married, and I’ve never really come very close, but I’m only twenty-six and it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the next few years it becomes a live option. I’ve been thinking about it for some time now though, and I’ve been unable to come up with a satisfactorily large class of situations in which getting married would be rational.

It’d certainly make marriage rational if there was an all-powerful deity who would strike me down or at least damn me either to Hell or a long stint in Purgatory if I had sex with someone to whom I wasn’t married. If there was a deity like that then married sex really would be the only safe sex, and marriage would be sensible for those to whom celibacy doesn’t appeal. But I’m convinced there isn’t a deity like that.

The other obvious reason is if I expect her to want us to split up one day when I don’t want to. It’s harder to divorce a spouse than dump a merely significant other, and being married would raise the amount she’d have to want to be apart rather than together before splitting up was worth the trouble. Unfortunately for the cake and flower industries, however, I don’t have the preference distribution which rationalises this line of thought. Ceteris paribus, I want to be with people conditional both on my being in love with them and their wanting to be with me. So if they want to split up with me then I want this to be as easy as possible for them. I know I might not feel like that at the time, but I think that would be due to a failure of rationality on my part, and it’s foolish to take steps to indulge predicted failures of rationality. Odysseus knew when he heard the sirens he’d want to swim over to them, but since he knew this would be a failure of rationality he had himself tied to the mast so as not to act on his predicted irrational preference set.

A better reason to get married may be analogous to Odysseus’s reasons for tying himself to the mast: if you expect to irrationally want to split up with them at some point, then making this difficult for yourself is a good idea. I can see how that works, but it seems an extreme measure when in the event that you do irrationally split up you’ll have the option of getting back together once you’ve calmed down, as long as you don’t say things you can’t take back. A quick anger-management course seems more appropriate.

Asking around various wiser people than myself, the closest I’ve come to a satisfactory rationalisation is related but importantly different. If you both know it’s difficult for the other person to dump you, rationally or otherwise, then you can both relax. You don’t have to worry so much about how you look, saying the right thing, remembering birthdays etc. It’s tough keeping a relationship together, and without the obstacles to splitting up that marriage gives it’d be exhausting to keep it together for decades. The crucial thing is that you benefit from this ability to relax even if neither of you ever wants to split up. Now this kind of relationship presumably doesn’t appeal to everyone, and if it doesn’t then you probably shouldn’t get married. But I think it probably appeals to some people, and I wish them a long and happy life together.

How should I make her feel?

Rihanna’s recently had a big hit with a song called “Only Girl (in the World)”, and I’m puzzled by the chorus. She sings:

“Want you to make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world

Like I’m the only one who you’ll ever love

Like I’m the only one who knows your heart...”

Fair enough, you’ll think. Rihanna wants me to pay attention to her, and not to any other girls. But the first line is an odd way of expressing it.

If I was in a romantic situation with Rihanna, this would be more meaningful for both of us if she wasn’t the only girl in the world. If she was, this would mean that I might well not be with her because I thought her pretty, talented or whatever, or even because we had some kind of extraordinary intellectual connection. I’d want to be with her anyway, because there’d be nobody else. We’d also both know that she was very keen on me indeed, because of all the men in the world who’d rather be with her than no girl at all, she’d picked me. This would give the relationship a most peculiar dynamic. On one hand, I’d have to work much more at the relationship because of the supply and demand situation, even though she’d probably be more into me than I was into her. Perhaps there are actual relationships like this: if X has more choice than Y you might expect, other things being equal, X to like Y more and Y to have to work harder to keep X. I realise other things aren’t equal, because people with more choice tend to be more likeable. But it’d surprise me if no actual relationships were like this. Maybe you’re in one. It doesn’t sound fun. But one would expect these kind of relationships to be the norm in a world with the kind of gender imbalance which Rihanna wants her beloved to make her feel obtains.

 

I’m also puzzled by the interaction between the first line and the next two. If she’s the only girl in the world then she will be the only girl in the world with each property she instantiates, in these cases the properties of being loved by me at some point and knowing my heart. So she could achieve the same effect by feeling like she was the only girl in the world, that I’d love her at some point and that she knew my heart. It’s possible that at least the second line can be made to say more than this by shifting the implicit quantifier from a presentist one to an eternalist one: she wants to feel like she’s the only girl in the world now, that I’ll love her at some point and that there won’t be any new girls arriving into the world whom I’ll one day love. But the age differences or space travel involved make this interpretation implausible.

Maybe we should read the definite descriptions in lines two and three as Russellian, i.e. she’ll feel like there are no other girls who know my heart or whom I’ll ever love; and the first one as Lewisian, i.e. she’ll feel like she’s the most salient girl in the world. This suggests that definite descriptions are ambiguous between these two readings though, which I doubt. Instead we could take the first definite description as Russellian but with the quantifier restricted to very salient things, but without conversationally presupposing how salient objects would be in the context of the feelings she wants her beloved to make her have. I think that’s probably what she’s getting at.