not sure yet where to go after el jaylostcosmonautJune 22 2012, 14:20:36 UTC
i'm w/ that author's perspective on Joan's negotiation of a shitty situation. She's got a babby to take care of, and th men in her life (her husband and Roger) are untrustworthy. As she approaches "a certain age", her ability to capitalize on her looks wanes. That deal w/ th hairy devil is probably her last, best shot @ financial autonomy. However, I remember this part differently:
“Why do they get to decide what’s going to happen?” That’s what Pete Campbell demanded several weeks ago in an episode titled “Lady Lazarus.” “They just do,” Harry Crane responded.
Campbell, frustrated at his inability to pull off a longer-term affair with Beth Dawes, was talking about women as sexual gatekeepers.
When Pete said "they", wasn't he talking about Don & Megan? I thought "they" meant "beautiful successful people to whom everything seems to come easy". Hmm hmm gotta go back and review th tape ...
One incredible thing about Mad Men -- mebbe THEE most incredible thing -- is that both feminists and non-feminists admire it as a truthful vision. Naturally both sides see it as truthful for different (and probably opposite) reasons -- that's what elevates it above a simpler vision. Not many fictional worlds offer entry points to opposite factions of a culture war and live (five seasons) to tell about it
--mza.
P.S. i am really ending lostcosmonaut as a fictional work but will continue to exist as a human being who enjoys typing
i interpreted pete as talking about women, but maybe that's b/c he was talking to harry - the only other womanizing asshole he has access to for this kind of conversation at this point (since don is noble and husbandly now, and since lane and roger hate him).
i mostly agree about the truthful vision, but i think mad men shelved that realism in favor of needlessly hysterical plot developments this season (and really, beginning with megan, who i still think is a bad uninteresting addition to the narrative). even the joan thing, harsh as it was, felt like a ploy to whip up drama in a show i like best when it's just about the everyday dreariness of going to work and enduring all the bullshit that happens there.
P.S. i am really ending lostcosmonaut as a fictional work but will continue to exist as a human being who enjoys typing
ok, fair enough... but i hope this doesn't mean 140-word-or-less sports updates or whatever.
pete is a sacrificial lamblostcosmonautJune 22 2012, 16:03:51 UTC
a show i like best when it's just about the everyday dreariness of going to work and enduring all the bullshit that happens there.
wHAT but it has been a soap opera th entire time
Does this mean you did not enjoy th lawnmower scene ......
Not sure if I'm in th minority because I haven't read fan responses to th show, but I like Megan and rooted hard for her & Don to stay in love this season. That's no doubt more projection on my part, as somebody who got married superquick to somebody who BAMF'd in out of nowhere and immediately became indispensable. Megan fits th narrative because she's somebody who can challenge Don and make him feel not that cool and not that smart but is still overall remarkably sweet to him. Even when she's @ her most annoying, their relationship makes sense to me, unlike his past affairs in which th woman could make him feel uncool but not be sweet to him (e.g., druggy artist lady from Season 1) or be totally sweet to him but not be v. cool or challenging (e.g., Sally's teacher in Season 3)
As for Twitter, I am a fan of it, but there's not enough Real Talk over there to keep me passionately engaged
Megan fits th narrative because she's somebody who can challenge Don and make him feel not that cool and not that smart but is still overall remarkably sweet to him.
but faye was as well, minus a certain kind of sweetness, which (for my money) is just a simile for submissiveness. megan, unlike faye, is "always going to choose don" as she says literally this season. she has the spunk and childlike ambition of peggy, the sophistication of betty and a non-threatening version of faye's intellect. she has everything don likes about faye, only hotter, younger and less independent. all of which fits the show's pessimism i guess - in fact, i loved some of the harsher moments of previous seasons (don firing sal being a particularly inspired bitter pill to swallow), but i was genuinely enjoying don's evolution into someone with substance. megan is the weak-sauce version of that evolution, and (for me) a sign that the show isn't really that interested in transforming its characters. it reminded me of the last season of "the wire," where mcnulty is suddenly an alcoholic again despite like 4 seasons leading up to him getting his act together. in both cases, the lack of development felt too much like fan service.
i agree that the show is a soap opera, but this season it seemed more and more about pushing its characters into unlikely circumstances for the sake of audience attention spans rather than character development. like, did we really need to see don choke a woman half to death in a fever dream? did him and harry really have to go see the rolling stones? did him and megan need a randomly abandoned S&M subplot? did we need to have a half-episode's worth of cheap fat-shaming jokes to reaffirm how awful betty is for the millionth time?
that said, it's not all or nothing. the fight between pete and lane was one of my favorite bits from any season, and roger's LSD trip was surprisingly interesting (albeit a bit needlessly "60's"). and to be honest, i didn't like the lawnmower episode, or don's dumb secret identity for that matter.
turn on tune in but don t drop out rogerlostcosmonautJune 22 2012, 21:44:31 UTC
your assessment of Megan is on th money, except she's not "always going to choose Don", I'm pretty sure, especially in light of Season 5's finale
which means ultimately she's just as capable as (or more capable than) any other woman on th show, in addition to th aforementioned sweetness
in addition to th aforementioned youth & hotness
In a way, his choosing Megan over Faye is not only what makes th most sense for a man in his position, but also an optimistic choice -- he's marrying someone who's probably going to change a lot
It's a pessimistic choice from Faye's perspective because she was in th middle of "fixing" him, but not necessarily pessimistic from th show's perspective
I think Don's really in love, and th show's pessimism is not in having him choose love, but in taking that away from him (or having him take it away from himself, if you want to read it that way)
In conclusion: who's getting divorced first, him or Pete?
--mza.
P.S. that we're even discussing these characters' love lives at this level of investment is in itself a credit to th show's ability to get inside heads
P.P.S. am a big fan of Wire Season 5, but will concede that McNulty totally lost his mind
i'm kind of ambivalent about the legitimacy of don and megan's love. there's been a critique of this show from the get-go (some of my lj folks have even mentioned it) that by "addressing" the chauvinism/racism/sexism/etc. of the early 60's, it actually lets audiences indulge in it from a distance. for the most part i think the show has been decent about not giving in to that impulse. but the fact that we're now getting megan and don's story - instead of faye and don, or rachel mencken and don - moves in that kind of direction. don gets to continue being the sexy seducer, the women don't age with him, and now he's kinda sorta found someone we don't have to feel 100% conflicted about watching him roll around in the sack with. the increase in T & A this season also pushes things in this direction, as did the ridiculous french singing BS in the first episode.
on the other hand, since they went the megan route, i'm glad that they made them have an actual relationship. and that it wasn't just some nightmare descent into domestic abuse or something (which they seemed to hint at early this season). I agree that don is actually in love with her - i even find that occasionally quite interesting (i.e. the howard johnson's episode) and i agree that she's independent enough to leave him if he fools around (don's divorce seems more likely than pete's, though i wouldn't bet on either), but i'm not so sure she's necessarily the kind of person to "change a lot" if i'm interpreting you correctly. best case scenario, she seems like she might blossom into some combination of faye's sophistication with season 1 girl's boho cred. more likely, she'll be the failed actress they're setting her up to be, at least IRL. neither option is all that mysterious to me. plus, there's something about men choosing women of mystery who haven't found themselves yet that strikes me as kind of yucky on premise alone.
that we're even discussing these characters' love lives at this level of investment is in itself a credit to th show's ability to get inside heads
true. and it IS still worth watching. i just ended up more disappointed than usual this season. also, for some reason season-long-story-arc tv is my favorite catalyst for psychological reflection these days.
more ideas for next postlostcosmonautJune 23 2012, 17:08:14 UTC
also, for some reason season-long-story-arc tv is my favorite catalyst for psychological reflection these days.
mine, too, if that hasn't become obvious -- it's pretty great, isn't it? Now that novels for adults have become irrelevant as shared culture, and feature-length popular films are either pretty narrow in scope or insta-forgettable, long-form TV dramas are our novels. I mean, I read a lot of comix, too, and they're great for thinking, but if I start talking about Yuichi Yokoyama on el jay or F-book, something like two people will know what I'm talking about.
Another admirable thing about th show: it seems to elicit real talk like nothing else -- especially on sexual poltics, a topic that can get heated in a hurry and seems to need that extra level of distancing that fictional abstraction provides. I.e., I doubt th present conversation would be as civil if we were anatomizing yr relationship (about which I know nothing, of course) or my marriage (about which you know nothing, although I might have mentioned in a recent post that my wife is younger than me -- coincidentally, by 15 years, exactly Megan & Don's spread). @ any rate, that we can get real about this topic w/o discussing any actual real person is something valuable, independent of just how many interpretations of its relationships th show allows. That MM continues to operate, engage, and entertain while seeming to allow multiple identification points and political interpretations is what makes it transcendent. What it transcends is its own soap operatic nature.
That said, it is still a soap opera, which means it's fun to argue about what a character should or should not do, and about if what he did was good or bad. Here's why marrying Megan is a good, optimistic thing: she makes Don happy. Whether or not Don being happy is good for th show is a separate matter, and we also suspect that Don's view of happiness contains seeds of its own disintegration -- "What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness" -- but @ th end of Season 4, hanging out w/ his babbies & Megan @ Disneyland -- that's one happy motherfucker. Has he thought this through? Hell naw. Have a lot of un-thought-through RL marriages happened? Have a lot of totally-thought-through RL marriages ended in divorce anyhow? Nobody has to suspend disbelief when Don marries a woman who makes him feel happy and who makes him feel "like himself" when no other woman has done that.
As for Megan, yes, she is more likely to change a lot than is Faye, who's older and already established in her profession. Megan doesn't come off as mysterious, you're right, but I'm not sure what you find yucky about th attraction of mystery -- it's a powerful attractor for both women and men in th beginning of a relationship, and den it goes away. Don, who has presumably been w/ many more women than you or I have (law of averages), knows that. He also knows that marriage can be painful and can go south. What would make him risk it again?
Nobody has to suspend disbelief when Don marries a woman who makes him feel happy and who makes him feel "like himself" when no other woman has done that.
i think faye (and maybe potentially rachel mencken, had she stuck around) made don "feel like himself" in a deeper way than megan does, because she made him feel like the self he actually is (i.e. chauvinistic and manipulative in addition to intelligent and attractive) rather than the self he'd like to think he can become. you can't get to YYMB without a clear look at YYA, to bring it back to your post!
there's something about men choosing women of mystery who haven't found themselves yet that strikes me as kind of yucky on premise alone.
the other part of the sentence is more important than the "mystery" part - it's the idealization of women who haven't found themselves yet. this is also why peggy leaving SDCP is so encouraging - it denies don the role of surrogate father (and author-by-proxy of her accomplishments). don has woody allen syndrome - he likes the "smart-but-not-as-smart-as-me" type. with megan, he sees himself as a mentor as well as a husband. this is why he's so disappointed when she leaves the agency, or when her success as an actor threatens to set a distance between them. i think there's an ugly power imbalance when men seek out this kind of mentor relationship with women. i saw a lot of it in school from bombastic "radical" professors. the movie the squid and the whale satirizes this pretty well, for example.
I doubt th present conversation would be as civil if we were anatomizing yr relationship (about which I know nothing, of course) or my marriage (about which you know nothing, although I might have mentioned in a recent post that my wife is younger than me -- coincidentally, by 15 years, exactly Megan & Don's spread).
haha, honestly, i think we could both handle it, but i see what you mean. obviously i hope that none of the above seems like some back-handed critique of your marriage, which i know zero about (though i like your wife's assessment of why you found the episode so sad). i'm actually quite happy for you! and you don't strike me as someone who tries to mold people into your own image a la don, for what it's worth. to lay my cards on the table, i've been with my GF for just shy of four years. neither of us really believe in marriage, but we might as well be at this point logistically. we moved to erie, PA for her work (english professor) last september, which was probably the most "adult" style commitment - or for that matter, decision - that i've ever had to make in a relationship.
my sad little book reportlostcosmonautJune 23 2012, 23:52:26 UTC
all right, our perspectives on Don have a chance to converge a bit here: Peggy's leaving SCDP is certainly a hopeful move -- for her and (I hope, ultimately) for him, too. He hits a low point when we see him on his knees kissing her hand, and still trying to take credit for her work -- it's pathetic, and I never want to see him there again. While it's appropriate for him to see himself as a mentor to Peggy, since that's exactly what he is, it's v. unbecoming for him to act this way. It ought to serve as a wake-up call, and it does. Later, when th two of them bump into each other @ th movies, he gets hit by Part 2 of that wake-up call: Peggy suggests that instead of being hurt for being left behind, he could be happy for her success. Next we see him experiencing wake-up call #3 in private, watching Megan's screen test in his office, seeing something special in her on screen, th way he first did in person in California. But he knows that helping her get her big break might put distance between them, literally and emotionally, and he fears that if he does this, he's losing his wife, which is a lot different than losing his protégé. He's already woken up, though. He has to do this. That's what we see as he's walking away from th set of th commercial -- that belief that his life is gone (again), that Don Draper was a dream, that there's no Dick Whitman to go back to, and he doesn't know if he has another reinvention in him
Would this have happened had he married Faye? Probably not. She's an older woman w/ fewer mating options -- Don is more of a catch relative to Faye. But he wouldn't have been in love w/ her. Th heart wants what it wants, etc.
If Don is manipulative in his personal life, I'm not sure how aware he is of it. He doesn't have Roger's horn-doggedness, silliness, or "I'm a jerk, what are ya gonna do about it" gamesmanship. Their seduction styles are like th laughing mask versus th crying mask. Don is reckless, and given to neediness & despair. These are not things that go away because a girlfriend, however perceptive, points them out.
Don probably received a vision of his YYMB @ th end of Season 4. Whether we credit Faye or Megan for that (or both, as I do), only he can actually see it, so only he can move himself toward it
I'm all for adults loving each other and getting older together and transcending th limitations of th attraction that brought them together and finding th next level(s) of being in love, and I'm glad to hear about yr commitment -- 4 years is longer than a lot of marriages. I wonder if men like Don are simply not cut out for marriage
As for professor/student relationships, they def can be gross, but they're not manipulative from only one side. Young women aren't about to stop being attracted to experienced, powerful men; we can't stop them from leveraging their youth & beauty to get what they want. It's a transaction, and it can be v. cynical, but that doesn't mean a loving, long-term relationship can't come out of it
“Why do they get to decide what’s going to happen?” That’s what Pete Campbell demanded several weeks ago in an episode titled “Lady Lazarus.” “They just do,” Harry Crane responded.
Campbell, frustrated at his inability to pull off a longer-term affair with Beth Dawes, was talking about women as sexual gatekeepers.
When Pete said "they", wasn't he talking about Don & Megan? I thought "they" meant "beautiful successful people to whom everything seems to come easy". Hmm hmm gotta go back and review th tape ...
One incredible thing about Mad Men -- mebbe THEE most incredible thing -- is that both feminists and non-feminists admire it as a truthful vision. Naturally both sides see it as truthful for different (and probably opposite) reasons -- that's what elevates it above a simpler vision. Not many fictional worlds offer entry points to opposite factions of a culture war and live (five seasons) to tell about it
--mza.
P.S. i am really ending lostcosmonaut as a fictional work but will continue to exist as a human being who enjoys typing
Reply
i mostly agree about the truthful vision, but i think mad men shelved that realism in favor of needlessly hysterical plot developments this season (and really, beginning with megan, who i still think is a bad uninteresting addition to the narrative). even the joan thing, harsh as it was, felt like a ploy to whip up drama in a show i like best when it's just about the everyday dreariness of going to work and enduring all the bullshit that happens there.
P.S. i am really ending lostcosmonaut as a fictional work but will continue to exist as a human being who enjoys typing
ok, fair enough... but i hope this doesn't mean 140-word-or-less sports updates or whatever.
Reply
wHAT but it has been a soap opera th entire time
Does this mean you did not enjoy th lawnmower scene ......
Not sure if I'm in th minority because I haven't read fan responses to th show, but I like Megan and rooted hard for her & Don to stay in love this season. That's no doubt more projection on my part, as somebody who got married superquick to somebody who BAMF'd in out of nowhere and immediately became indispensable. Megan fits th narrative because she's somebody who can challenge Don and make him feel not that cool and not that smart but is still overall remarkably sweet to him. Even when she's @ her most annoying, their relationship makes sense to me, unlike his past affairs in which th woman could make him feel uncool but not be sweet to him (e.g., druggy artist lady from Season 1) or be totally sweet to him but not be v. cool or challenging (e.g., Sally's teacher in Season 3)
As for Twitter, I am a fan of it, but there's not enough Real Talk over there to keep me passionately engaged
--mza.
Reply
but faye was as well, minus a certain kind of sweetness, which (for my money) is just a simile for submissiveness. megan, unlike faye, is "always going to choose don" as she says literally this season. she has the spunk and childlike ambition of peggy, the sophistication of betty and a non-threatening version of faye's intellect. she has everything don likes about faye, only hotter, younger and less independent. all of which fits the show's pessimism i guess - in fact, i loved some of the harsher moments of previous seasons (don firing sal being a particularly inspired bitter pill to swallow), but i was genuinely enjoying don's evolution into someone with substance. megan is the weak-sauce version of that evolution, and (for me) a sign that the show isn't really that interested in transforming its characters. it reminded me of the last season of "the wire," where mcnulty is suddenly an alcoholic again despite like 4 seasons leading up to him getting his act together. in both cases, the lack of development felt too much like fan service.
i agree that the show is a soap opera, but this season it seemed more and more about pushing its characters into unlikely circumstances for the sake of audience attention spans rather than character development. like, did we really need to see don choke a woman half to death in a fever dream? did him and harry really have to go see the rolling stones? did him and megan need a randomly abandoned S&M subplot? did we need to have a half-episode's worth of cheap fat-shaming jokes to reaffirm how awful betty is for the millionth time?
that said, it's not all or nothing. the fight between pete and lane was one of my favorite bits from any season, and roger's LSD trip was surprisingly interesting (albeit a bit needlessly "60's"). and to be honest, i didn't like the lawnmower episode, or don's dumb secret identity for that matter.
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which means ultimately she's just as capable as (or more capable than) any other woman on th show, in addition to th aforementioned sweetness
in addition to th aforementioned youth & hotness
In a way, his choosing Megan over Faye is not only what makes th most sense for a man in his position, but also an optimistic choice -- he's marrying someone who's probably going to change a lot
It's a pessimistic choice from Faye's perspective because she was in th middle of "fixing" him, but not necessarily pessimistic from th show's perspective
I think Don's really in love, and th show's pessimism is not in having him choose love, but in taking that away from him (or having him take it away from himself, if you want to read it that way)
In conclusion: who's getting divorced first, him or Pete?
--mza.
P.S. that we're even discussing these characters' love lives at this level of investment is in itself a credit to th show's ability to get inside heads
P.P.S. am a big fan of Wire Season 5, but will concede that McNulty totally lost his mind
Reply
on the other hand, since they went the megan route, i'm glad that they made them have an actual relationship. and that it wasn't just some nightmare descent into domestic abuse or something (which they seemed to hint at early this season). I agree that don is actually in love with her - i even find that occasionally quite interesting (i.e. the howard johnson's episode) and i agree that she's independent enough to leave him if he fools around (don's divorce seems more likely than pete's, though i wouldn't bet on either), but i'm not so sure she's necessarily the kind of person to "change a lot" if i'm interpreting you correctly. best case scenario, she seems like she might blossom into some combination of faye's sophistication with season 1 girl's boho cred. more likely, she'll be the failed actress they're setting her up to be, at least IRL. neither option is all that mysterious to me. plus, there's something about men choosing women of mystery who haven't found themselves yet that strikes me as kind of yucky on premise alone.
that we're even discussing these characters' love lives at this level of investment is in itself a credit to th show's ability to get inside heads
true. and it IS still worth watching. i just ended up more disappointed than usual this season. also, for some reason season-long-story-arc tv is my favorite catalyst for psychological reflection these days.
Reply
mine, too, if that hasn't become obvious -- it's pretty great, isn't it? Now that novels for adults have become irrelevant as shared culture, and feature-length popular films are either pretty narrow in scope or insta-forgettable, long-form TV dramas are our novels. I mean, I read a lot of comix, too, and they're great for thinking, but if I start talking about Yuichi Yokoyama on el jay or F-book, something like two people will know what I'm talking about.
Another admirable thing about th show: it seems to elicit real talk like nothing else -- especially on sexual poltics, a topic that can get heated in a hurry and seems to need that extra level of distancing that fictional abstraction provides. I.e., I doubt th present conversation would be as civil if we were anatomizing yr relationship (about which I know nothing, of course) or my marriage (about which you know nothing, although I might have mentioned in a recent post that my wife is younger than me -- coincidentally, by 15 years, exactly Megan & Don's spread). @ any rate, that we can get real about this topic w/o discussing any actual real person is something valuable, independent of just how many interpretations of its relationships th show allows. That MM continues to operate, engage, and entertain while seeming to allow multiple identification points and political interpretations is what makes it transcendent. What it transcends is its own soap operatic nature.
That said, it is still a soap opera, which means it's fun to argue about what a character should or should not do, and about if what he did was good or bad. Here's why marrying Megan is a good, optimistic thing: she makes Don happy. Whether or not Don being happy is good for th show is a separate matter, and we also suspect that Don's view of happiness contains seeds of its own disintegration -- "What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness" -- but @ th end of Season 4, hanging out w/ his babbies & Megan @ Disneyland -- that's one happy motherfucker. Has he thought this through? Hell naw. Have a lot of un-thought-through RL marriages happened? Have a lot of totally-thought-through RL marriages ended in divorce anyhow? Nobody has to suspend disbelief when Don marries a woman who makes him feel happy and who makes him feel "like himself" when no other woman has done that.
As for Megan, yes, she is more likely to change a lot than is Faye, who's older and already established in her profession. Megan doesn't come off as mysterious, you're right, but I'm not sure what you find yucky about th attraction of mystery -- it's a powerful attractor for both women and men in th beginning of a relationship, and den it goes away. Don, who has presumably been w/ many more women than you or I have (law of averages), knows that. He also knows that marriage can be painful and can go south. What would make him risk it again?
--mza.
Reply
i think faye (and maybe potentially rachel mencken, had she stuck around) made don "feel like himself" in a deeper way than megan does, because she made him feel like the self he actually is (i.e. chauvinistic and manipulative in addition to intelligent and attractive) rather than the self he'd like to think he can become. you can't get to YYMB without a clear look at YYA, to bring it back to your post!
there's something about men choosing women of mystery who haven't found themselves yet that strikes me as kind of yucky on premise alone.
the other part of the sentence is more important than the "mystery" part - it's the idealization of women who haven't found themselves yet. this is also why peggy leaving SDCP is so encouraging - it denies don the role of surrogate father (and author-by-proxy of her accomplishments). don has woody allen syndrome - he likes the "smart-but-not-as-smart-as-me" type. with megan, he sees himself as a mentor as well as a husband. this is why he's so disappointed when she leaves the agency, or when her success as an actor threatens to set a distance between them. i think there's an ugly power imbalance when men seek out this kind of mentor relationship with women. i saw a lot of it in school from bombastic "radical" professors. the movie the squid and the whale satirizes this pretty well, for example.
I doubt th present conversation would be as civil if we were anatomizing yr relationship (about which I know nothing, of course) or my marriage (about which you know nothing, although I might have mentioned in a recent post that my wife is younger than me -- coincidentally, by 15 years, exactly Megan & Don's spread).
haha, honestly, i think we could both handle it, but i see what you mean. obviously i hope that none of the above seems like some back-handed critique of your marriage, which i know zero about (though i like your wife's assessment of why you found the episode so sad). i'm actually quite happy for you! and you don't strike me as someone who tries to mold people into your own image a la don, for what it's worth. to lay my cards on the table, i've been with my GF for just shy of four years. neither of us really believe in marriage, but we might as well be at this point logistically. we moved to erie, PA for her work (english professor) last september, which was probably the most "adult" style commitment - or for that matter, decision - that i've ever had to make in a relationship.
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Would this have happened had he married Faye? Probably not. She's an older woman w/ fewer mating options -- Don is more of a catch relative to Faye. But he wouldn't have been in love w/ her. Th heart wants what it wants, etc.
If Don is manipulative in his personal life, I'm not sure how aware he is of it. He doesn't have Roger's horn-doggedness, silliness, or "I'm a jerk, what are ya gonna do about it" gamesmanship. Their seduction styles are like th laughing mask versus th crying mask. Don is reckless, and given to neediness & despair. These are not things that go away because a girlfriend, however perceptive, points them out.
Don probably received a vision of his YYMB @ th end of Season 4. Whether we credit Faye or Megan for that (or both, as I do), only he can actually see it, so only he can move himself toward it
I'm all for adults loving each other and getting older together and transcending th limitations of th attraction that brought them together and finding th next level(s) of being in love, and I'm glad to hear about yr commitment -- 4 years is longer than a lot of marriages. I wonder if men like Don are simply not cut out for marriage
As for professor/student relationships, they def can be gross, but they're not manipulative from only one side. Young women aren't about to stop being attracted to experienced, powerful men; we can't stop them from leveraging their youth & beauty to get what they want. It's a transaction, and it can be v. cynical, but that doesn't mean a loving, long-term relationship can't come out of it
--mza.
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