New York Times Modern Love: Bad "Pick-Up" Lines

I've been hitching since its heyday when I was a teenager... and I've made it to middle age without any traumatic experience of hitchhiking that would alter my behavior.

That's the nut of Jessica Krasilovsky's ode to hitchhiking. This deconstruction will be brief, as the essay fits in two easy parts, neither of which contains much in the way of useful romantic substance beyond your typical Readers' Digest essay.

(That's probably the worst insult I've ever dropped on anyone here at The Lectern. And that's saying something.)

The first half of the essay is a collection of musings about the social aspects of hitchhiking. I'd love to have a discussion about this, but we're supposed to be talking about love/dating here and there's hardly a whiff of it in this section of the essay. This would have been great for the "Lives" column in the Magazine, and I'm almost positive that this essay would have been submitted for that column on a secondary basis (if it wasn't the primary target for this essay from the beginning).

The second half is a description of a stronger personal relationship than anything described previously. Some unnamed, grey-haired, Richard Gere look-alike with a permanently raised arm is the target of affection. (No hamster jokes here.) Jessica describes how she meets him, talks with him, deconstructs him, spends some quality time with him... and then leaves to go back to her life in NYC. Oh, how nice. It's love as a transient emotion, which is seemingly justified in the context of adventure.

Love is not a transient emotion, though, and only people who watch Hollywood westerns would buy into the concept that there is enough honor in being adventurous to overcome the weakness of being noncommittal. Jessica accepts abandoning established acquaintances as a necessary condition of meeting new people. Or, maybe she keeps her distance and likes it that way, and we're supposed to accept that because she's a free bird. Whether or not you, as a reader, agree that this is any way to live or conduct your personal relationships, I simply note that there are ethical concerns when it comes to plumbing people's emotions for your own fascination when you cannot or will not reciprocate. I assume that she does not have much to say to others before she leaves, because she said not much about herself in this essay before she left us, either.

Actually, that's a good thing. She presents the first Modern Love essay in a while where the author was merely an observer and not the masked, self-obsessed subject. And, as much as I disagree with her transient approach to bonding with others, she does make earnest attempts to understand the people with whom she interacts. That's a departure for this column, and I suppose it's a welcome one. It didn't come without compromise, but then again, compromise is often a condition of Modern Love...