Two great posts from Friends I Haven't Met Yet

Here are recent posts from two of the best bloggers around:
Statistics 101 from Scheiss Weekly, where Mamacita's homework assignment to her college students was,

Topic: "The Perfect Spouse/Partner"

Each of 56 students (ages 18-64) (average age: 36) (31 women, 25 men) made a list of the top 12 attributes of the perfect spouse/partner. Here are the results, averaged, and ranked in order of importance.

Over at Eternity Road, yesterday Francis Porretto posted one of his excellent Sunday Ruminations, Intimacy, Inference, and Identity

My main point here is that each of us has an identity to himself based on incomplete knowledge or comprehension. Such a reflexive identity -- the psychological term for it is "self-concept" -- is composed partly of fiction far more often than not. The fiction helps us to paper over those flaws and shortcomings in ourselves we can't bear to face.

Empirical substantiation is easily available. Virtually everyone believes himself to be above average in most of the measures that people prize. It's so easy to evade objective assessment of oneself that nearly everyone believes himself to be more moral than average, more congenial than average, smarter than average, a better athlete than average, and (of course) a better driver than average. That's not possible even in Lake Wobegon, but study after study indicates that it's the way we view ourselves -- consciously.

Why? Because we need to have a good opinion of ourselves if we're going to face others, and the challenges of life, with any confidence. Apparently, a "good opinion of oneself" seems to demand the belief that others aren't quite as good in the ways that "matter." In other words, we deceive ourselves about our failings because in this instance, deception, by making our self-concepts palatable, improves our survival prospects. In other words, it enhances our security.

Read both - and bookmark their blogs.

Update Make that three posts from Friends I Haven't Met Yet - St. Catherine and Manly Men

Catherine was a woman who was all that she was born to be. She advocated that in everyone and said, “If you are what you should be, you will set the world on fire,” so it makes sense that she would like manly men who had not lost their birth-gifts to fear of the world's regard.

If you are not being what and who you were born to be, you're going through life unfulfilled - and the world is missing whatever it was you were supposed to contribute.

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More blogging later.