Valentine News Roundup

[robinturner]

Our first romantic news item is a little out of date (it was gleaned from giantlaser's journal): a married Jordanian couple mistakenly dated each other on the Internet. Rather than realising that, contrary to what they had thought, they were ideally suited to each other, they got divorced. I am reminded of the Prophet Muhammed's saying "If a man looks at a woman who is forbidden to him, let him turn to his own wife, and he will see whatever it was that he desired."

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have banned red roses from being sold on Valentine's Day. Naturally this only means that the price of under-the-counter roses has soared. I should point out that this is a Saudi peculiarity and not a general Islamic prohibition; here in Turkey Muslims are quite happy to get into the spirit of the day by charging exorbitant amounts for wilting roses and special "Lovers' Day" nights at clubs and restaurants. These usually feature a set (and incredibly high) charge for as much as you can eat and drink, thus ensuring that by the end of the evening, young lovers are too bloated and drunk to get up to any hanky-panky.

In Singapore, a Christian group has chosen Valentine's Day to launch an Abstinence Awareness Campaign. They are selling wristbands with the message "Worth Waiting For" to teenagers as an even tackier version of America's Silver Ring Thing (cue Beavis and Butthead sniggers). Of course in my day, girls who wished to repel amorous advances didn't bother with jewelry, they just wore dungarees and Doc Martins, and sported badges with pithy comments like "How dare you assume I'm heterosexual?"

I've noticed while trawling through articles and blogs (as part of my usual Monday work-avoidance) that this year the mood has moved from cynical anti-Valentine to condescending anti-anti-Valentine, along the lines of "You're having your annual 'V-Day Sucks' party? You and all your other 'punk rock' single friends getting together and trying to ignore the holiday and drinking Diet Coke?". I have also noticed that the term "single" is increasingly being used to mean not merely "unmarried", but "currently unattached", or even "undatable". In the interests of terminological exactitude, can we please agree on the following definitons?

• married - legally bound to someone, whether gay, straight or whatever
• single - not married
• unattached - not even dating
• abstinent - not engaging in sexual activity, a condition which is compatible with any of the above

Comments

[soliss.livejournal.com]

Yknow what? No.

Single == unattatched. If some guy said he was single to some girl he met, and it turned out he had a girlfriend, but they weren't married, would that make it ok for him to have said that? No! If you want to say someone's not married, the term "unmarried" works perfectly well. Don't try and change common usage to make it fit the things someone decided to put on tax forms.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's yet another of those transatlantic things (or maybe it's my age). In my experience, "single" refers to your marital status (or rather, lack thereof).

I take your point, though, that there is some confusion between "single" as the opposite of "married" and "single" as the opposite of "couple" (not to mention "single" as the opposite of "double", but that's another story). Your hypothetical guy is not being semantically inexact, but he's violating Gricean rules ;-)

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

married - legally bound to someone, whether gay, straight or whatever
single - not married

By that logic, someone who's been in a years-long same-sex relationship with someone is still "single." That just doesn't sound right to me.

I usually interpret "single" to mean "not romantically committed," but actually I hate all that terminology altogether, as you well know. As if I cease to be a singular entity once I'm in some kind of romantically committed relationship. Feh!

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

That Jordanian couple...I wonder if his personal ad on Match.com read, "If you like Pina Colada, and getting caught in the rain..." Do you remember that song? Where the narrator was 'tired of his lady' and answered a personal ad, and it turned out it was the ad placed by 'his lady.' But that was a happy ending according to the song...at least I think it was! The lyrics are here.

Now that I'm married I tend to think more of single as meaning unmarried, but when I was single myself, I thought of single as 'unattached.'
As a single person, I think when an older married person asked me if I was single, I tended to answer, "I'm not married, but I have a boyfriend..." whereas if someone more my own age and also unmarried asked me if I was single, I interpreted it to mean they were asking if I had a serious boyfriend, not if I was married.

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry about that huge link. Too bad I can't edit my comment...

[solri.livejournal.com]

Aha, so "single" is a state relative to the state you are in, rather like "old" tends to mean "ten years older than me."