After seeing Spider-Man 2 (thoughts below, spoilers abound there and here), I ended up in argument over whether it was worse/more humiliating (are the two the same?) to be left at the altar or to be unilaterally divocred shortly after the ceremony.

This itself has two related questions. The first is which act-- the act of being told "I want a divorce" or the act of standing dopily around in one's tux -- is the more humiliating/worse. The second is whether the status of "having been divorced" is worse than the status of "having been stood up at the altar."

I will grant that the altar-jilt, with its emotions and nervousness run high, large audience, and larger bills, is probably more embarassing than a private (though no doubt heartwrenching) conversation where one learns that one's wife wants to leave one. [Even so, it is worth noting that Miss Manners gives her implicit imprimatur to the tactic: noting wryly (6/3/79), "the party (will) go on, with a little more spice, even, than if the wedding had taken place."]

But even if it's true that the act of being left at the altar is more painful or humiliating than the act of having a semi-solemn promise put asunder, I'm not sure that the negative status that attaches to a divorced man (let's say, for stereotype's sake, that the jiltee was a man) is worse than the status that attaches to the jilted one.

Ahh, you say, but in a divorce it's often unclear who left who; being left at the altar makes it all too clear who was found wanting. This is largely a good point [though again, it's worth noting Miss Manners' (wrong, but intriguing,) claim that (4/13/03): "All engagements are broken by mutual consent, if only because no sensible person would consent to marry someone who purposely failed to show up at the altar."] So in order to really compare divorce and altar-abandonment, we should limit ourselves to considering unilateral divorces.

With all that done, we are now comparing a man who was left at the altar by a woman he (hopefully) loved, to a man who was attended at the altar but left a short time later by said woman. In this case, I think the societal shame attached to the former is far less. Rightly or wrongly, there's a perception of women (especially the sort of women who duck out of engagements) as flighty and moved by whim, so many people are likely to see the chap-- especially if he is some red-blooded American astronaut-- as the victim of some nearly exogenous event, more like a car accident or a lightning strike. (This is presuming that the bride does not run out on him because she catches him two hours before the wedding having sex with the maid of honor or something equally gauche.)

By contrast, if the same man gets divorced after they've actually given marriage a go, the divorce seems less like a whim than a considered escape. The counterargument to this is that since being left at the altar is so much more of a nuisance for everybody else, a bride is only likely to do if it she has a really good reason, whereas she might divorce on lesser grounds. I think this counterargument is precisely backwards-- because of the drama and inconvenience attached to running out at the altar, a bride is only likely to do if it she is acting more on whim or impulse than following some rational plan.

Furthermore, thanks to the (weakening) taboo against bride-groom contact on the day of the wedding, the jilted groom is unlikely to even get a last ditch chance to present his case. (Some divorcers deny the divorcee this chance too-- by leaving without warning-- but not all of them do.) So-- the idea will go-- a guy who got left at the altar was probably the victim of something that wasn't really his fault: a whim, or an epiphany, rather than the result of some irremediable flaw in his personality.

Finally, it's worth noting at least one example of people who agreed with my call here. When Mary Richards arrives in Minneapolis at the start of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show she does so with a little bit of baggage; she has just left a man (we don't know who, or why) at the altar. I've heard that in the original idea for the series, she was going to arrive at her new life after a divorce, but the test audiences or network execs were squeamish about it. Obviously one could argue that times and divorce rates have changed since then, but I think casual empirical observation confirms that we still have something of a Mary Tyler Moore view of the matter. Would the condemnation and ridicule of Britney Spears's marriage have been as severe if she had rolled up to the altar and then backed out? Would the ending to The Princess Bride be as charming if Wesley said not, "It never happened; if you didn't say it, you didn't do it," but rather, "don't worry Buttercup, we'll head to Nevada in the morning"? I doubt it.

I don't actually have much of a problem with divorce myself-- it's the regrettable breaking of a promise, to be sure, but these days it's a caveat that's basically implicit in the marriage promise (barring something like a covenant marriage). But I don't think my enlightened sentiments are shared by all (like those who endlessly fulminate about the terribly things that are happening to the institution of marriage), and I also do think it's generally superior to avoid making a promise one intends to break shortly. As Miss Manners says, the party will go on.

UPDATE: And here's a rather salient data point.

In Today's Minimalist Column, Mark Bittman touts "the distinctively Thai combination of sweet, sour, salty and spicy" in a shrimp recipe. Coincidentally, my father emailed me earlier this week with another Bittman recipe (from The Minimalist Entertains, which I've read but not skimmed) which consists, basically, of cold slice of watermelon served with lime juice, crushed chiles, and salt.

Lacking good chiles in my larder (my chipotles are currently in my family's refriegerator back in Indiana) I used crushed red pepper flakes, which worked fairly well, although I had to pile them on much more heavily than I expected to. Also, I used seedless watermelon (perhaps with a subconscious nod to my childhood fears that vines would sprout in my belly if i swallowed a black seed) which tastes sweeter to me; this necessitates slicing the melon fairly thin to allow the salt, lime, and spice to blend through.

With those two adjustments made, the result was highly delicious, and luckily more of all four ingredients remain in my kitchen for further snacking. Bittman says this is basically Bangkok street-food. If only the metro-side D.C. vendors were so good.

I saw Spider-Man 2 last weekend, and now that Amber (who accompanied me) has put up her reflections on the movie, that has prompted me to add mine. [There are probably spoilers inside.]

I agree with Amber that the movie had some of surplusage, including the lectures from Aunt May and the late Uncle Ben (the former seemed to have much more effect on Parker than the latter did). In retrospect those scenes probably weren't as long as they seemed (they couldn't have been more than ten minutes, combined, could they?) but since they were jammed in amidst a lot of fun web-swinging and young romantic drama, they seemed to drag.

Of course, Umberto Eco in his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods defends that kind of storytelling sometimes because of the sense of tempo it creates. Spiderman's life really does consist of a sort of endless string of too-much-to-do and too-many-places-to-be punctuated only occasionally by some breathing room, so these sequences could have been (Eco might argue) intended to draw our attention to the (enjoyable!) hecticness of the rest of the film.

I doubt that was really the director's intention, though. Maybe those scenes were necessary for some folks who wouldn't have grasped the movie's central dilemma otherwise, but I doubt it. The Aunt May scene probably needed to be there, to clean things up between May and Peter. I'm not convinced the Uncle Ben scene needed to exist at all.

But if you're thinking how revealing it is that I've just devoted three long paragraphs to suggesting that maybe 10 minutes of the movie that I found boring should have been cut down to two, you're right-- that's a pretty minor complaint, and the fact that it's one of my bigger complaints says a lot about how well the movie works, how Hollywoody it is in that charming, comic-book, summer-movie way.

[I'm still a little hazy on how dragging a cold-fusion generator into the river will stop it, but it's obviously silly to pick that as the point to start holding comic-book-movies to task on their scientific accuracy. Gregg Easterbrook tries to make some clever points about the acceleration of gravity, but they still miss the point. We're talking about a guy who can swing at a seemingly constant speed from buildings via webs that he shoots out of his wrists, who falls from skyscraping heights on multiple occasions with only a little back pain to show for it, and who constantly bounces and bangs off of buildings at bone-crunching speeds getting only a few bruises and scrapes. Comic book science obeys a logic, but its not physics-book logic.]

Kirsten Dunst is a great Mary Jane, and the movie is generally admirably brave about scattering things for us to catch throughout the movie without force-feeding us its own cleverness. (On which, see Jacob Levy-- a far greater expert than I).

That leaves us with the slightly schmaltzy ending, which Matt Yglesias originally decried, but then under pressure Henry Farrel and Brayden King, reversed himself to support. I add only the empirical observation that nearly ever 20-something t-shirted guy in the theater was leaning forward intently in his seat during Mary Jane's wedding, and that a collective sigh of relief went up when we learned that being a superhero didn't always suck. Somebody has cottoned on to how to adopt the chick-flick formula for emotional resonance with the male-geek crowd. I think it was nice that Parker got a break and a few smooches before heading back into what will surely be his emotional roller-coaster of part 3. It's not as if even Kirsten Dunst has made his life a lush, enviable one.

I'll have some thoughts about being left at the altar, but they await a post of their own [UPDATE: It is here].

A few final links in the aftermath of International Kissing Day:

Amber Taylor rounds up myriad links.

The Curmudgeonly Clerk shows why an Idaho jury's decision that "stealing a kiss is not a crime" is suspect (as I had hoped he would).

Spencer at Mediocrity's Co-Pilot complains that kissing people can lead one to be obligated to see them again, and-- even if you like seeing them-- that obligation is a cost. Two reponses to that: 1) if that is a problem, International Kissing Day seems to slightly alleviate it, since it can be used as an excuse for those who prefer to kiss-and-run ("oh, that was on Kissing Day..."). 2) romantic obligations (implied or explicit) are a mixed bag. On one hand, there's some obvious sense in which having the option to do A or to do B is strictly preferable to being forced to do A or forced to B. On the other hand, making promises to do things (even things you wanted to do anyway) makes people trust you, encourages them to rely on you, and can increase the chance of their coming around for you in the future. It's especially hard to tell which of these factors prevail in the case of something as versatile as a kiss, which is perhaps one of the least binding forms of romantic commitment known to man.

Finally, Waddling Thunder recognizes (even if he does not completely admit) the link between the kiss-blogging he has grown tired of, and the physical pleasures of which he will never grow tired. His comments on the curiosity of hugging ("Are they testing their strength? Seeing if they could kill their huggee if necessary?") are brilliant.

Last October, I wrote:

Like abortion, foreign war is just a lost zone. You don't leave (or join) the Libertarian party because of your stance on abortion or war.

Well, not really an erratum per se, I guess....

Anyhow, in reference to yesterday's mention of the Hyde Park Music Scene, Maureen (Craig) at Blog or not? (a twist perhaps on "Bloggernaut?" -- hence the megakudos) very correctly points out that a list of the various Hyde Park sounds can be found here....a well as a more complete listing of bands, which can be found here.

Thanks a lot, Maureen!