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Even If Your Partner Is Unwilling. Learn How In 20 Minutes Guaranteed
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That is one of the google ads from my sidebar. Ad copy is interesting because it has to be very short, so they really get to the point. If you want to save your relationship click here. If you don't want to, don't worry, we understand your common problem. You might think it will take too long, but we'll save it in 20 minutes. And you might have a partner who doesn't want to save the relationship, but we can help you save it anyway.

Those are the two major objections they want to overcome. People don't want to spend hours saving the relationship, and their partner doesn't want to save it at all.

Isn't that sad? People say how important relationships are. That's easy to say, but how do people actually behave? Services that help couples overcome their problems, and save the very important relationship, face the objections, "my partner doesn't want to solve our problems" and "sounds nice, but I've got some TV reruns to watch, can we make it really fast?"

[Our young child is] probably brighter than Dear Ol' Dad, but we try not to encourage that thought.

The poster states his best idea of the truth, and then that he does not want his child to believe it. He would prefer his child believe something he considers false. That's awful.

Proof number two came in the form of Anthony

How can you prove something twice? Why bother? It was already beyond doubt after the first proof, wasn't it?

we are firmly in the camp of coercion where necessary

...

Oops. We LET him get opinions? Yup, and he fiercely defends them, too. Even when (or *especially* when?) they don't agree with ours. Which brings us to: DISCIPLINE.

Here's where all our careful planning landed in oblivion. One moment everything was going according to plan, and the next -- he didn't listen when we said, "No." We were devastated. We were nonplussed, too. Being an actor, my gut reaction was, "Hey! This kid isn't reading the script!"

...

We slowly learned which forms of discipline were effective (added chores, time outs, rare spanks), and which were complete wastes of time (yelling, hand slapping, grounding)

This sort of speaks for itself. Child gets opinions. Parent disagrees. This brings them to discipline. The problem is the child sometimes says "no" (which is equated with not listening even though it's very different). To parents, this is "devastating". Children are supposed to obey.

So, the parents tried lots of punishments like hitting their child, yelling at him, and making him do chores. (Remember this next time you meet a child who has a chore list ostensibly so he will learn responsibility or otherwise "for his own benefit". Chores are used as to discipline children, and you don't discipline people by making them do what's best for them -- they would appreciate that and want more discipline.) So with time, the poster learned which type of hitting his child was most effective to cause obedience, and which sorts of other ways of hurting child he is most fearful of. We are supposed to congratulate him.

Putting this in perspective, the poster believes in "coercion where necessary" but his parenting included yelling and hitting, and more, which were "complete wastes of time" (i.e., unnecessary). Further, the child-hurting, such as spanking, which he does deem necessary, and indeed all the punishments, were not to save the child from imminent harm or for some other clear necessity. In fact, they were for a bad cause: the child said "no", and the parent wanted to force the child to say, "yes". All this coercion has nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with the parent's irrational attitude that the solution to a child who disagrees is to hit him until he agrees. This could only seem necessary if "coming up with good, reasonable ideas that child would be happy to agree with" is well beyond the capacity of your imagination.

Our key to success has always been showing greater love to the child after having applied the coercion, to show that all things are done in love. This is what keeps our family running.

This is the same post, which grants us some insight into what this means. Child is given a time out and a spanking and then told it's all because they love him. How sweet? They discovered that telling children they love them makes the children more obedient than telling them they are adversaries.

One wonders just what they love. They do not love the child as he is today. They think the child today is so wicked that coercion and suffering is necessary to change him. What they actually love is an imaginary child, similar to their own child, except that he never says "no". And for the sake of this imaginary child, they are willing to hurt their real child. That's the kind of love they are talking about.

In the short week I have been subscribed to this list, I have witnessed it QUICKLY devolve into:

The Name/Name2/Name3 Arguing With Each Other and Calling Each Other Everything But Blatant Evolutionists While Using the Most Verbose and Banal Language Possible List.

I had hoped this list would bear fruit, but fear the fruit has taken over.

Please remove me from it.

This person wants to leave the list because it has unpleasant arguments and name calling. But before he goes, he felt it best to post some verbal abuse. That will really show those people who are ruining the list with verbal abuse!

Sarah Lawrence writes, in part:

Most parents, including unschoolers, disagree with us about whether refraining from coercion is *right.* They say that coercion, as we have just defined it, is natural, desirable and unavoidable, because unless children are treated in some of these ways some of the time, disaster will result. The sort of "evidence" they cite typically includes: *children need to be trained to clean their teeth regularly because otherwise they will lose them in later life;

This is precisely where I part company with Sarah. I believe in letting children do what they want, when they want - so long as it's not dangerous. (If it involves me, there's also a laziness factor involved; I know there are more energetic and willing parents on the various home-ed lists, but I assure myself that in this, too, I'm well in the 99th percentile.) But what should a non-coercive parent do when a child does not like to have her teeth flossed and brushed, and will kick and fight to avoid it?

Sarah will probably say that the kicking and fighting is a reaction to the coercion, and to my reaction to the kicking and fighting, and I partly agree: If I didn't think it was funny/annoying, it wouldn't keep happening. But our oldest, at least, never liked having his teeth brushed, and always resisted. And, this is not something we can just ignore and wait for him to grow out of: He already has a mouth full of cavities (well, $2K worth of fillings and caps, now) and we do *not* want this to happen to his second set of teeth.

I submit that "no coercion" is a bad ideal. If Sarah has been able to avoid health-related coercion, this says more about her particular children than the general case.

Hmm, let's see. This parent believes health-related coercion works, and has practiced it. And the result has been ... failure. The proof that non-coercion cannot work is that dental coercion doesn't work. Seriously? Sigh.

If non-coercion was just another way to make children do things like brush their teeth, but nicer and less effective, then we could agree that when stronger methods fail, the weaker ones will too. But it isn't about making children do things! One of the key ideas of non-coercive parenting is that if something is actually a good idea, it's possible for any person to see this. Merit can be explained, argued, and demonstrated. Thus, if a child does not brush his teeth, but should, the knowledge of the value of teeth brushing can be communicated so that child will want to brush. And this is in fact much more effective than trying to force child. When he cares about brushing his teeth, he'll do a much better job than what can be coerced out of him. Just as this poster has so kindly illustrated: coerced brushing was not effective enough to prevent cavities. Something else is needed, like cooperation towards common goals. Which means that step one should not be insisting child "listen" (obey), it should be coming to agree about the goals. If you start by creating a common point, such as agreement about the teeth brushing issue, then it's much easier and more effective to proceed because you won't be working towards conflicting purposes.

The argument that "I, as the parent, have to pay for their mistakes" is easily solved: don't pay for their mistakes if you don't want to. If you don't want to pay their dental bills if they neglect their teeth, then make that clear to them ahead of time and stick to your position. Let them pay (or not) for their own dentistry.

If they don't have any income, then they'll have to take that into account in deciding whether or not they prefer not brushing their teeth and having to get a job to pay for possible dentistry in the future or not. If you tell them: "Do it, but if you don't I'll pay for your dental work anyways," then they've got less incentive to prevent the dentistry in the firstplace.

Seriously?

This is some kind of libertarian insanity. By this logic, you can justify anything at all. "Agree to my rules about your entire life, or I won't pay for your food. When making this decision, take into account how much income you have for buying your own food." And of course your child, who isn't even legally allowed to work, won't be able to afford his own apartment and food and so on (let alone take care of himself alone). So this is simply a recipe for parents to justify any set of rules they want, no matter how coercive. It is worse than conventional parenting, which acknowledges that parents have some obligations to provide for their child.

But then the same person says:

I don't see how the age of the child changes anything. I think what you're trying to say is that if your child is old enough to have been sufficiently indoctrinated into the absolute goodness of what you're trying to get the child to do, then your preferred outcome is more likely. But what I question is why all you care about is whether the child brushes his or her teeth, without caring about whether the child does this because the child thinks it's in his or her own best interest based upon their own independent judgement or whether they do it because their parent said so.

Which is, well, good. Posters do indeed like to imagine older children so they can imagine a child who already agrees with them. And it is indeed important whether your child thinks brushing is a good idea or is just avoiding punishment. Notice, for example, what happens when your child moves out, in each case. Parents claim they coerce to instill habits which will be beneficial when the child is an adult. But the habit of brushing-when-under-threat won't be much use when he's an adult -- no one will threaten him, then.

There's also the further issue that sometimes parents are mistaken, and the policy, "the parent must always be obeyed," does not have any mechanism for error correction. If the parent is mistaken, then a mistake will happen. The rival policy, "the parent and child should come to agree on something, and do that," does have a mechanism for error correction: during the discussion, bad ideas will be criticized and thrown out.

Infants have to be coerced into wearing diapers and clothes, even though they'd probably prefer to avoid the latter.

How parochial! Clothes are the kind of necessity requiring coercion? Why? What disastrous harm will come to your infant from not wearing clothes? He won't get the job as a baby fashion model? His parent will be mildly embarrassed?

the need for and/or justifiability of coercion is inversely correlated with the child's abilities

...

some teenagers have to be coerced into writing those damn college application essays.

Some teenagers do not want to write college application essays. Let's consider why that might be. Maybe they aren't enthusiastic about college. Notice the child is not allowed any more leeway to make his own judgment when he is older. Parents say that older children with more abilities don't need to be coerced, it's only ignorant babies. But then when it comes down to it, if a child of any age has a different opinion than his parent, this is taken as proof he's still a child at least in some ways, and still must be coerced. Because mother always knows best. Mother is so amazing she even has a logical justification of the statement, "mother always knows best." I'd love to hear it, but unfortunately, she doesn't share it with mere mortals like myself, who probably couldn't understand it anyway.

The age of the child makes no difference? Sometimes newborn babies don't initially want to nurse. Such situations can be difficult.

I have no doubt that such situations can be difficult. What I doubt is that the problem is caused by the _age_ of the baby. In this case, I'd attribute the problem to the baby's unwillingness to nurse, rather than its age.

It isn't that the problem is caused by age. It's that the age limits the possible solutions. It's not always possible to negotiate with a very young child.

That's odd. Prima facie, if a baby does not want to nurse, that isn't a problem. It's an indication the baby isn't hungry at this time. What are we to imagine: a starving child that refuses nourishment until dead?

And supposing we did imagine that. Is that a problem caused by age? Of course not. Countless other people of the same age do not have that problem.

Is the problem causing by not wanting to nurse? No, that doesn't make sense. That isn't a problem by itself. The issue is when and why the baby does not wish to nurse. Apparently this is a wicked, sinful baby, and not wanting to nurse when it should is one of the manifestations.

Or not. Perhaps it's just an honest mistake. And there is a solution to be found. No one must be hurt. However, we are told, the baby's age limits the possible solutions. Well, that's true. You cannot solve the problem with a quick trip to the pub to drink it away. The baby won't be admitted due to its age.

But we are told something more specific: the especially young people do not negotiate. The implication is that they form unreasonable preferences, which will cause serious problems, and that they become so attached to these preferences that there is nothing to be done. Except to force the baby. It will cry now, and protest, but it's for its own good. This is a very disturbing notion. But necessary, so we are told.

As has been the case previously, examples are somewhat lacking. The particular example of nursing is ridiculous. Babies don't starve themselves to death by refusing to eat. If the baby does not want to nurse, it is in no danger.

So what are the critical situations where babies don't negotiate and thus sabotage reaching an amicable solution? It must be something like this:

Babies need diapers. This is their own fault for not being potty trained. This is due to their age. This results in unpleasant hot-to-cold transitions when the diaper is changed. Some babies don't like that sensation; it is a problem. But the baby won't negotiate! It won't compromise and agree to a certain number of unpleasant sensations per month. It won't agree to speed up its potty training by a few years, and to look forward to the end of the problem as a way grit its teeth and happily bear it. It won't even propose that maybe it could accept the diaper changes if only parents would get a heater, because its ignorant of heaters. I mean, too young to comprehend what a heater is. We are told the issue is age itself, not ignorance.

I'll leave the lunacy of this analysis as an exercise for the reader, and try again.

Parents have hired a baby sitter and are preparing to go to a romantic restaurant. Baby starts crying. It doesn't want to stay with the sitter. If only child were older, they could negotiate. They could bribe their child with some money or TV. Or makes threats if it doesn't stop raising a fuss. There are many ways the older child would be caused to obey no matter how unpleasant the sitter was. That's the sort of negotiation parents like, and the sort babies are too young for. You see, babies cannot be bribed with TV or other distractions. Except that, umm, they can: younger, more ignorant children are actually easier to distract and amuse. Well, what about threats? The father should take care of that. If you can't scare a baby, you're not much of a man. Hmm, so what kind of negotiation won't work? Oh, it must be the kind where you tell your eight-year-old how important the dinner is, and how bad you would feel if you missed it, and how he wouldn't want to hurt his parents, would he? That kind of slightly subtle and indirect pressure helps parents feel good. They didn't threaten, they used reason. Not wanting to upset his parents is a great reason for a child to do something. He was very helpful and rightly so. But babies, they don't negotiate like this. They just don't listen. You have to communicate more explicitly, or they won't pick up the implied threats.

So there you have it. Babies really are impossible to negotiate with in the usual way because they are not well versed in euphemism, and not yet trained to respond to emotional blackmail. Older children are really much nicer. All you have to do is have a personality such that you would be upset if they do not obey, and then obedience is a matter of reason: it's only reasonable that children do not upset their parents.

Despite it all, I must insist this is not really a matter of age itself, but of knowledge. An especially precocious baby could perfectly well negotiate in this manner.

Understanding the _limitations on non-coercion_ would seem to me to be the most essential single issue for those who subscribe to non-coercive parenting exclusively.

That's strange. That seems to me more of an essential issue for those who would advocate coercion. If they can prove non-coercion has limits, it will help them feel better. They are not hurting their children because they are cruel and callous. It simply isn't possible to avoid.

But a person who subscribes to non-coercive parenting. What does he care for these limits? If it would be of any use to him -- perhaps the situation is avoidable if you see it coming -- then it is in fact not a limit on non-coercion, because there is a solution. A problem truly with no solution but pain -- there is no value in seeing that coming. No foresight will save you from it. It is useless except to depress you.

Those who subscribe to non-coercive parenting would be much better advised to approach life in a spirit of optimism. To solve what problems they can, and if they should fail, to expect that to be their own mistake and not a necessity, and then to look for a way to do better next time. This attitude will lead to the best possible results whether non-coercion is entirely possible, or not. Any time coercion cannot be avoided, it will happen, no matter what our method is. But any time it can be avoided, that is when our approach matters most, and we must not be lured into temptation of imagining that we have done the best possible, when we have not.

Seeking limits on non-coercion is a strategy to comfort coercive parents, not to help non-coercive parents to do better.

You're beginning to piss me off, Steve, with these constant personal attacks. I don't want to have to get personal with you, so why don't you spare us all the abusive ad hominems? As a matter of fact, you were the one begging the question and you damn well know it.

At least Steve has remained a gentleman in demeanor. Why don't you just take Steve seriously? I think his questions are sincere.

This is very funny, don't you think? First, apparently, Steve makes personal attacks. Then someone replies to say that personal attacks are bad, and thus Steve is an abusive jerk. He doesn't want to get personal, but he has to. It's Steve's fault for provoking him. Steve is guilty of so many crimes.

The poster himself must have imagined that he was not writing a personal attack of exactly the sort he criticized. How that can be is a tough question. Perhaps he figured that Steve had caused him to be angry, so it was only natural for him to act in anger, and the consequences all belong to Steve. Or he imagined that what he said was true, and that that somehow changed its character.

As amusing as that is, next we have a third person writing in with yet another personal attack, again attacking someone for writing personal attacks to the list. This third person saw that the second person was a hypocrite. He recognized that the personal attack guised as righteous fury was, in fact, just the sort of ad hominem it rightly decried. And then he proceeded to do exactly the same thing himself. Truly amazing.

...and it's not as though the child has the *practical* freedom to leave the relationship if they don't like the rules the parent chooses to live by.

Whose fault is that?

From context, we know the intent of this question is to say that it's the child's fault for not being an adult yet, and therefore it's not the parent's fault or problem if his child doesn't like "my rules or move out."

Let's reconsider who's fault it is. The parent created a dependent. And hasn't yet changed that dependent into an independent person. So who's fault is that? The parent's. This is a result of his decision and he should take responsibility for it.

I'm not saying the parent did anything wrong, it's just that he chose to cause the situation and is thus responsible for it. On the other hand, a young child had no choices which would let him be financially and otherwise independent of his parents, so blaming the child is ludicrous.

Any act of definition is a selection of axioms, and is therefore not subject to reason. If someone disagrees with your choice of axioms, reason cannot come into play to convince them to change their mind, outside of inconsistent axioms. In the case of property, you're restricting the actions of someone else. If they disagree with your definition, one or the other of you will have to capitulate when it comes to those restrictions.

The right way to approach axioms is that they are just ideas, about which we might be mistaken. If someone else points out a problem with one of our axioms, or suggests a reason an alternative would be better, we should consider it and be open to changing our mind. In this way, a person with different axioms can have a fruitful discussion with us.

What prevents reasoned discussion from being effective is not choosing different axioms, it is holding them with a closed mind. If we refuse to reconsider our ideas which we call axioms, that is the cause of the problem, and if we don't, there is no difficulty.

Force may be justifiable in those cases where incompetent use is a danger not just to oneself but to others

I agree. What I don't agree with is the notion that people should be presumed incompetent.

Then you can come up with your own examples to support it. For me, in my community, it all depends on what risk one's incompetence poses to one's neighbors, I think. In some cases, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, in others the pound of cure might be so cheap it doesn't matter.

Using contextual clues, we can tell that the issue is whether to use force against your children on the justification that their incompetence might create a danger to others. For example, if your child picks up a gun, but isn't trained in gun safety, then you can force him to put it down.

First of all, how often does this happen? (And if your young child gets ahold of a loaded gun, that is your mistake for leaving it lying around on the floor.) When do small children have the power to hurt people? It's pretty rare. They are just looking for an excuse so they can oppose the TCS principle that, "it is possible and desirable to raise and educate children without either doing anything to them against their will, or making them do anything against their will."

Second, they bring up the specific issue of whether children should be presumed incompetent on account of their age. Why presume? What is their to gain by it? Why not use our knowledge of the child to evaluate what he is competent at? Sadly, the answer is that the poster wants to say, "it all depends" and hide behind vagueness, so that he can maintain that "sometimes, in some situations" children should be coerced. He doesn't want to offer a plausible example. It's hard to think of an example where it isn't blatantly the parent's fault (like letting a toddler have a weapon). If child would be dangerous in possession of something, shouldn't you keep it on a high shelf or behind a lock? There, problem solved without coercing child.

I think the ounce of prevention, which is worth a pound of cure, is to make children obedient. With this simple step, all dangerous situations become safe. When child gets a loaded gun, now we can just say, "Put that down, son," and he'll obey. This obedience "just in case" is necessary for our neighbor's safety. In what specific situation? Umm, it depends on what you consider a risk, and where you live, and what your children's personality is, and stop asking me for details I'm busy teaching my child to listen.

Notice that this kind of bad, vague arguing and failing to listen to reason (as explained by me) is just the kind of thing these people accuse their children of, and use as a justification for force. Well, as far as I am concerned, they are ignorant, and don't listen to reason. So by their own logic, shouldn't I force them to listen, for their own good?

Nor do I understand how non-coercive parenting can be effective with a very young child who has an unusually strong temper and little to no self control. It's not that I prefer coercion. Yet in certain situations reasoning with a child just isn't a viable option and immediate action is necessary to contain the impending violence.

See what I mean? Parents claim they have to use force to defend themselves against their violent three-year-olds. Absurd!

And look at the excuse implied: it's not the parent's fault, the child was born bad. It isn't that the parent has failed to teach self-control, and temper control, it is the child's fault (somehow). The child was born with original sin. He's already going down the path of wickedness by resisting his parent's wise, reasonable ideas.

Back in real life, tempers are not inborn, they are cultural. "Lack of self control" is the same. These traits, which are supposed to justify mistreatment of the child, were in fact taught to the child by the parent (unintentionally).

This should not surprise us. No one designs a lesson plan to teach "turning into your mother". Yet, many women discover that, at some point, they learned how to act like their mother. And the best explanation is that they learned it from their own mother. That's why people usually turn into their own mother and not someone else's. As this illustrates, parents often unintentionally teach major ideas, even to children who consider it a bad idea and do not want to learn it.

Also notice how this poster is asserting something in the mode of, "I don't want to coerce my child. But my child forces me to do it. He has power over me. It's his fault, not mine." This is upside down. The parent is the one with all the power and control.

In such situations, force must be meet with force. The child is not exercising his better judgment. He is out of control. It may take years to develop enough self control to handle such a strong temper. In the meanwhile, there must be constraints placed on such a child's behavior. Certain types of inappropriate behavior can not be tolerated.

This paragraph directly follows the previous quote. In it, the poster's motivations are even more clear. You see, three year olds are very dangerous. If parents aren't authorized to use force, they would be killed or maimed. Non-coercive parenting would be like hunting angry tigers and cannibals without a gun. That's suicide! Don't do it!

More philosophically, the idea is that until the child's original (inborn) sin (lack of self control) is defeated, he is not a real person. He is dangerous. But after you beat the sin out of him by force (but only using force if he won't obey peacefully), it's all smiles and puppies. He's a person (adult) then, and you can get along peacefully.

Very telling is how the poster fails to give an example of a type of behavior that cannot be tolerated. Are we talking about back talk? Refusing to share his gameboy? Not wanting to visit Grandma? Beating up his frail parents? Or what? The poster simply wants us to imagine whatever we would feel justifies violence, and then agree with him that, in general, violence against children is sometimes necessary to protect parents from intolerable behavior.

Besides, the phrase, "inappropriate behavior," is a give away. It reveals we are talking about mundane things like the child being rude.

Quotes are from the Taking Children Seriously email list from 1994 or 1995.

Non-coercion requires the interplay of reason. I think that fairly young children (under six) do not find *reason* very persuasive.

As I've watched my children develop, I think I've observed them grow from a basically pre-rational stage

Children under six learn English. English is extremely complex. It is much harder than learning any programming language, which many people, adult or child, have great difficulty with. So we can see that children under six routinely engage in high quality rational learning.

But I want to look at this claim another way. How does a person come to this conclusion? What sort of things did he actually observe? The specific detail given is that children do not seem to be persuaded by reason. So we have this scenario: Parent says something which he considers reasonable. Child disagrees. And parent concludes young children don't use reason. But all the evidence seems to show is that he had a disagreement or misunderstanding with his child. Those are common among adults, so why shouldn't they happen even more between adults and children (who have less shared knowledge in common, so communicating is harder).

Essentially, the attitude is that if his child doesn't agree with him, his child isn't using reason. His criterion of reasonableness is obedience.

My 18 month old has *never* liked getting his diaper changed (after all, it's a transition from warm to cold), but it *is* a matter of his health and well-being that the diaper get changed.

This is supposed to be an argument for why things have to be done to children that they don't like. But it is silly because it's so easy to think of a solution. Why does diaper changing have to have an unpleasant hot-to-cold transition? If parent had looked for a solution, couldn't he have come up with using a heater? This is, by the way, from the same post as above. So how confident can we be that this adult is usually right? He apparently does not use reason to solve simple problems to help his children.

Most absurd was the part about striking a bargain for the child to pay for his own dental work. This strikes me as a threat, rather than the non-coercive relationship you are trying to acheive.

That only begs the question of why the child has any right to have her dental work paid for by her parent(s).

Seriously? He's defending threatened children with the prospect of not having dental care, by saying parents do not owe dental care in the first place?

From contextual details I know the reason for this position: libertarianism. Some libertarians have a disgusting habit of considering children property. Children use their parents' resources, so they are in debt to their parents. They can either abide by their parents' rules, or move out. This moving out option does not actually help children or make the harsh treatment acceptable.

If you don't want to help a child, and provide for them, until they are reasonably and happily independent, then you should not have a child. Why bring someone into the world who can't take care of himself, and then abandon him (or only help him conditionally if he will obey you -- that's giving him a choice of slavery or abandonment).

Isn't that scary? You write one thing on your receipt (when you put a tip and a total) and they go make up some other amount to charge you. The way someone figured this out is cool, too.

I've used Enscript to syntax highlight ruby code in html, but it's not very good and causes html validation errors. So I found a better approach. I added some CSS and here's the ruby code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby 
 
  
 
 require 'rubygems' 
 
 require 'syntax/convertors/html' 
 
 require 'rio' 
 
  
 
 use_stdin = ARGV.empty? 
 
  
 
 if use_stdin 
 
   code = $stdin.read 
 
 else 
 
   code = File.read(ARGV[0]) 
 
 end 
 
  
 
 convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby" 
 
 code_html = "<code class='ruby'> #{convertor.convert(code)} </code>" 
 
  
 
 if use_stdin 
 
   puts code_html 
 
 else 
 
   fn = "#{File.basename(ARGV[0], File.extname(ARGV[0]))}.html" 
 
   rio(fn) << code_html 
 
 end

The Prince and Me is a typical, modern relationship movie. That means shallow characters who don't think about each other (the little that there is), who fall in love for no reason, cement their relationship with sexual touching, dramatically breakup once or twice, and then live happily ever after.

Here are the interests of the characters:

Paige: medicine, getting into medical school

Eddie: cars, girls

What do they do together? First, he annoys her and gets rejected. She appears beautiful and challenging. Then, she starts liking him but denies it for some reason, after a bit of persistence and doing some schoolwork together. They meet her family. They work at the same restaurant and she teaches him to slice meet. She also teaches him to do laundry. That's about it. Throw in flirting and you have the basis of their relationship.

Of course, once they kiss, everything changes. Now they touch all the time and smile a lot, and this distracts them from doing anything else. However, this is too boring to last long in a movie, even though it's supposed to be the good part (and shouldn't the good part of a relationship be interesting?). So they quickly get caught making out by the media, and then she finds out he's a prince and never told her. And then she dumps him for "lying" to her (by omission). How quickly "happily ever after" isn't!

As usual, she soon realizes her mistake and regrets it. If only she'd ever seen a movie like this one, she'd have realized it's better to think first and breakup second. So she goes back to him.

Then he's going to be King soon, so proposes marriage. She agrees without asking any questions. Isn't that strange? Why does becoming King mean he needs a wife immediately? Is it really a good idea to get engaged a couple days after a breakup? And what responsibilities does a queen have? And where will they live? And what will happen to her life and future plans? Will she still go to medical school? At the school she intended, or one in Denmark?

But considering stuff like that is a matter of reason. This is a movie about love. So she just agrees and finds out what it means later. She has a very busy schedule, most of which seems boring. Worse, he's busier and has to leave her in the middle of activities (which means sexual touching getting interrupted, because that's all they really do). This leaves her waiting around, alone.

So she dumps him again to back to the USA and go to medical school. She doesn't want to give up her career. It never occurs to her to try to get both things she wants. She just picks one and painfully gives up the other.

If he cared about her at all, he would have seen this problem coming in advance. I sure did, and I'm just an audience member. He could have been figuring stuff out like whether there is a medical school in Denmark she could go to (of course there is). She could have thought of this too it's not that hard.

So after she dumps him and leaves, he follows her and says "I'll wait." She can go to medical school, and whatever else she wants, and they'll be together afterwards. They still don't seem to realize she could go to school in his country and they don't have to be far apart. Regardless, she agrees, and the movie closes without further discussion: they will live happily ever after. The last two times that appeared to be true, and then she dumped him, were just bad luck, but there is no possible way they'll be unlucky again. Why not? Because they are in love. Being in love prevents bad luck, except when it doesn't. Umm. Yeah I give up, they are just dumb. Relationships should contains mechanisms to stabilize them against bad luck, and ameliorate the effects of bad luck. And not just bad luck (it wasn't actually a matter of luck), but problems of all sorts, whatever their cause. What sort of mechanism would work well? For a start, they should think about how they can get the things they want and solve problems, instead of resorting immediately to breaking up. And they should get to know each other over time and avoid any commitments or obligations which don't have specific and valuable function instead of just jumping into things and having faith that love will see them through.

Everyone knows that communication is the key to a good relationship. Or so they say. Yet movies like this are the norm, and movies featuring good communication are nonexistent. Romance novels, which have plenty of space for dialog, also feature poor communication. The truth is, reasoned discussion isn't sexy. Love doesn't like being talked about, and people enjoy it more when they aren't talking, they are just touching and smiling.

The best part of the movie was when they first approach the royal palace together:

Paige: Oh no.
Eddie: What?
Paige: You didn't tell me you lived with your parents.