Venezuela, and the Death of Old-Fashioned Romance

Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro being extradited in handcuffs

You already know that, in the small hours of January 3^rd, 2026, American forces invaded Venezuela and arrested President Nicolas Maduro. The situation immediately got worse when Taco Administration spokespeople hinted darkly that this was a test run. Other states, including Cuba and Greenland, are potentially next. This action announces both a disdain for United Nations treaties, and America’s potential withdrawal from NATO.

Three days later, a young Threads user with the sign-on handle “josselocks” posted a query. It read, in part, “Do guys like even talk to girls in real life anymore? Like you see them in bookstore and decide to go up and start a conversation.” The poster’s bio indicates she’s 19, and therefore prime age to search for a spouse or long-term partner, perhaps yearning for the old-fashioned “meet cute” that populates romance novels and romantic comedy movies.

Poor “josselocks” got quickly ratioed. Multiple posters, mostly men, including me, reminded her that a decade of public messaging has asserted that women are sick of unsolicited male attention, and that men shouldn’t approach women unprompted in public places. The discussion was more nuanced, of course. But the consensus held that social mores have shifted, and approaching women in public has become insuperably risky for many men.

These two events seemingly exist in different spheres, a Venn diagram with no overlap. Yet upon consideration, I spotted more going on than my initial, flippant response admitted. These two events represent a breakdown in shared social values that makes trust between strangers possible. With it, this failure of trust threatens more than one country or one big-hearted teenager’s ability to audition a mate. Western civilization is threatened.

I’ve written recently that our understanding of social organization has evolved. Nation-states were once the private property of their monarchs, or whatever warlord could hold the throne against challengers, foreign or domestic. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers have attempted to assign moral purpose to states retrospectively. But these attempts are always provisional, changing, and inconsistent. We agree what role states serve for now.

Less obviously, but more pertinent for daily life, we’ve likewise reevaluated what families are for. No longer do people marry to ensure legitimate inheritance, as medieval aristocrats did, or to bind working families in mutual indebtedness, as peasants did. We choose voluntarily when and whether to marry or procreate. Men choose wives, not for the likelihood of hardy offspring, but because relationships serve moral values and bring emotional satisfaction.

Families and nations thus serve concrete purposes. These purposes may be economic, moral, social, or whatever, but in organizing societies or households, we start by understanding that all participants agree on that purpose. We needn’t agree on everything constantly, but we at least share core principles. For instance, a relationship might flourish over a love of books. A state might flourish over a commitment to hemispherical peace.

Somehow, too many Americans seem surprised that a President elected on his supposed merits as a billionaire, thinks America should exist to serve billionaires. While we’ve watched Republicans kick the poor for their poverty, and Democrats fold like wet rags, the Taco Administration has invaded an OPEC nation without Congressional authorization. They’ve shown paltry interest in Venezuelan democracy or civil rights, but are aggressively expropriating its oil reserves.

For this Administration, “trust” exists only between the wealthy and the strong. The greatest masses of people, American or international, don’t deserve respect, consideration, or trust. This administration regards poverty protection, labor rights, and public schools as theft from the wealthy, and strength as the only moral imperative. So they’ve deployed troops into their own cities while invading abroad.

This top-level dick-swinging machismo corresponds with the rise of “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, flexing their literal muscles performatively. The entire MeToo movement happened because some men proved themselves untrustworthy. Sure, not all men, but how many does it need to be? But the counter-push has been real: the ubiquity of TikTok “creep-shaming” videos altered the landscape so men can’t trust women who can’t trust men.

Taken together, on the personal and national levels, we’ve created a culture that no longer includes trust. From national borders to personal boundaries, from checks and balances to love and marriage, all our social arrangements have relied on the expectation that we can trust one another to behave honorably without constant supervision. Right now, all around us, in real time, we’re witnessing that trust wither on the vine.

Without that trust, all social philosophy is empty talk, and the experiment of freedom fails.

Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (left) and his wife, Rama Duwaji (stock photo)

Let’s start with this reality: no serious commentator cares about the six-year age gap between Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji. The objections, which gained brief modish attention on social media last week, appear largely invented by a pseudonymous columnist for online gossip rag Nicki Swift. Yet it bothers me because it reflects a larger pattern I’ve seen developing in online sexual discourse.

The columnist claims Mamdani’s “marriage is full of glaringly obvious red flags,” but lists only two: the fact that Mamdani and Duwaji met on a dating app, and their age difference. Considering that apps have become perhaps the most common way couples meet, supplanting the previous favorite, introduced through mutual friends, this complaint seems disingenuous. But it also bears mention, because it bespeaks the author’s preconceptions.

Strictly anecdotally, I’ve observed a rising tide of moral panic around sexual mores. While American society has become increasingly accepting of the alphabet soup of Queer identities, we’ve become more puritanical, more prescriptive, about others. Age gaps in particular cause many armchair commentators extreme panic. Again, I’ve observed this purely through anecdote, but the paranoia about “groomers” and age-based abuse has become volatile.

Some weeks ago, another pseudonymous poster asked readers to settle a debate with her husband. A couple of their acquaintance had an age gap: he was 40, she was 30. The poster said her husband claimed this made the man in that relationship a “pedophile.” That reminded me of an older post I’d read, a woman claiming her girlfriends had called her boyfriend a “groomer” because he was 37, and she was 30.

Words like “pedophile” and “groomer” have specific meanings. In strict psychological language, a pedophile has a pathological desire to have sex with a partner who hasn’t yet experienced puberty. More generally, we use the word to describe someone who desires to have sex with a partner deemed too young to consent, regardless of biological maturity. And a groomer systematically coaches someone underage to regard “bad touch” as acceptable behavior.

These accusations share one theme: the capacity to consent. We deem minors to lack the moral capacity to consent to sex, even when their bodies are developed enough to have sex. And we deem minors’ moral development to be malleable, subject to being distorted by malignant influence. These considerations are real. Children, by dint of being children, don’t understand what it means to consent, especially to somebody who’s charming, influential, or dangerous.

My problem arises when we broaden the definition of minority. When we accuse somebody of “pedophilia” for having a relationship with a 30-year-old woman, we’re declaring that grown women are incapable of making moral decisions. We literally infantilize adult women, reducing them to the moral incapacity of a child. We take a serious concern, that manipulative adults will abuse children, and apply that in ways it doesn’t apply.

Our Nicki Swift columnist quotes a Twitter user saying, of the Mamdani marriage: “When he was 18, she would've been 12. Can I get a YIKES??” I respond with the counterquestion: so what? Had they known one another at that age, it would’ve been skeevy, and potentially actionable, depending on their relationship. But they didn’t, so the comparison is immaterial. They didn’t meet until their twenties, when both were adults.

The reasonable desire to protect children from predatory adults, has morphed into a belief that we must protect adults from each other. In so doing, we reduce adults, mostly grown women, to the stunted moral agency of overgrown adolescents. Please don’t misunderstand: I say “we” do this, but it’s in the hands of online moral scolds who mean well, but reduced the issue into caricature.

British sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” to describe this distortion. A social concern, usually grounded in a kernel of truth, confounds people with media access. But those people perceive the problem as more pervasive than it actually is, and sell their audience on the imminent crisis. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s is a good example. So is QAnon, the accusation of sexual predation among America’s elites.

Social media puts more people in positions to start, or amplify, moral panics. That’s what the Nicki Swift article does: it takes a realistic concern about sexual abuse, and applies it in a slapdash way. But social media also gives more people the opportunity to stand in the way of cascading panic. That’s the point we’re at now: we need to refuse to lose our composure about made-up problems.

First Dates, Economic Violence, and Coffee

Recently, I’ve seen two social media influencers who propounded the “rule” that women shouldn’t settle for coffee on a first date. These two influencers, both women, appear to be working separately, and use unique wording, so they probably aren’t bots. But they agreed that, unless a man takes the initiative to plan a complicated, and implicitly expensive, first date, he wasn’t worth a woman’s time. No coffee, meals a minimum.

Social media had provided would-be influencers a platform to peddle their malarkey, and many have. Few have achieved the cultural permeation of, say, Emily Post’s Etiquette or that 1994 encomium to personal repression, The Rules. But others have become widespread. Thank-you notes for job interviews, a thing that literally didn’t exist when I entered the job market in the 1990s, are now virtually mandatory in most industries.

Rules exist because we need them. Imagine a society without rules against, say, murder. I believe most people wouldn’t murder, but without a specific prohibition, a tiny minority would. Rules exist not only to standardize the principles we use to operate a complicated society, but to standardize punishments for those who transgress. Rules, written in advance and enforced by putatively neutral arbiters, make a safe and reliable society possible.

But the very processes which create rules, frequently turn those rules abusive. As Joe Nocera writes, universities created the NCAA to standardize the rules for American football. But once those rules existed, the NCAA had to enforce them—and it’s become notorious for enforcing them in arbitrary, high-handed ways which frequently disadvantage student athletes. The players hit hardest tend to be disproportionately Black and poor.

The NCAA is perhaps a frivolous example; little truly depends on BCS game rules. But the same principles apply to more significant examples. The perseverance of the Electoral College shows how rules written to preserve slaveholders’ economic advantage remain part of American law. The famous difference between sentencing standards for powdered cocaine versus crack show how lawmakers continue inserting such inequality into law.

Rules inevitably create hierarchies. Even benevolent rules, like laws against murder, enshrine some people (and not others) as worthy to enforce those laws. Rules demanding job interviewees write thank-you notes protect those who not only know to do so, but have the available time. And because rules almost always arise because somebody did something that needs correcting, rules contain moral judgement against some social out-group.

When self-appointed arbiters create dating rules, we should ask whom these rules serve. Declaring that a man must present a lush evening’s entertainment, on his own dime, seems facially neutral. But it serves those who have money enough to observe the rule—which means it serves men who are generally older, Whiter, and from stable urban environments. In other words, only men already well-protected by American society deserve romantic love.

Because the rules don’t specifically say rich men deserve women, one can argue that the rules don’t marginalize women. But that’s like saying redlining isn’t racist because it doesn’t name race. Making first dates more expensive grants advantages to those already well protected by American law and economics. It functionally states that only those who have money deserve women—an attitude that reduces women to the level of market commodities.

The #MeToo movement arose in 2017 because a subset of American men believed themselves more deserving of women’s affection, romance, and sex. These men were mostly well rewarded by America’s unequal distribution of wealth, and regarded access to women as just another perquisite. Money encouraged America’s worst men to degrade and dehumanize women, specifically because they had money.

Remember, coffee dates were recommended specifically to let women escape potentially hazardous encounters. Any rule, no matter who writes it, reflects the moral presumptions of its authors, and the informal rule of having low-commitment first dates in public places stemmed from the reality that a dangerous minority of men cannot be trusted. If the last decade taught us anything, those men are more likely to have money to splash out.

Some critics might respond that some men use inexpensive first dates as access to cheap sex. This is true; no rule is perfect. But the sense of entitlement that money fosters, has historically served women very poorly, except perhaps the minority of women with comparable social and economic status to their men.

Rules are never morally neutral, and always reflect the people who write them. If those writers are rich, well-protected, and high-status, they’re also probably untrustworthy, and so are their made-up rules.

How To Be a Digital Friend

An old college friend appeared suddenly in my Facebook timeline last week. She popped up, apologized for not posting much recently, shared some mildly exciting career news, and vanished again. A quick check of her timeline reveals that this was her first post in nearly eighteen months.

I’m sorry to say, I hadn’t noticed she’d gone.

Nearly fifteen years ago, this young woman and I shared some classes together, in writing and literature. We didn’t know each other particularly well. I thought she did pretty well in Advanced Fiction Writing, but suffered from a tendency to censor herself unfairly. To my surprise, she’d graduated to a career unrelated to her English major: as a public affairs advocate, she probably writes a great deal, but her life has clearly gone different directions than mine.

Therefore I feel slightly bad admitting I’d forgotten about her. She didn’t do anything wrong; quite the contrary, she’s accomplished a great deal for people suffering from chronic disabilities, lobbying for greater inclusion and research funding in Washington, D.C. It’s just that, one day, she went quiet, and I never noticed. She deserves better than that.

How many other digital “friends” have vanished down this same memory hole in the intervening years? I’d need to skim my Facebook and Twitter lists, checking who’s posted anything recently, to know. But it forces me to wonder what makes friends in the massively connected digital landscape. Because clearly, our ability to instantly call up words from people we haven’t seen in years, changes what the definition means.

Ellen Hendriksen, Ph.D.

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen is merely the latest author I’ve read to reiterate something important: our friends aren’t necessarily the people with whom we have the most in common. Our friends are the people with whom we spend the most time. I’ve recently encountered many people who ask, in tones shading into desperation, how we make friends as adults. The answer, concisely, is: spend more time around people. Volunteer. Take night classes. Go to church.

Unfortunately, while science knows what makes meaningful adult relationships, the exigencies of late capitalism don’t permit physical time spent together. With an increasing fraction of adults required to work nights and weekends, getting involved in activities that permit making friends is exceedingly difficult. Many of us can’t spare time to maintain the friendships we already have.

Social media permits us to casually subvert this limitation. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have politely created venues where well-meaning adults can sustain contact with old friends, even those we haven’t seen in years. No more poky snail mail: I know what friends I haven’t actually seen in over twenty years are doing tonight. In exchange, I simply surrender personal data to Jack and Mark. Cambridge Analytica is a small price to pay.

But what happens when these “friendships” grow overwhelmed? Perhaps you’ve heard of the Dunbar Number, which calculates how many social relationships humans can organize before getting overburdened. That number, for humans, is about 150, or roughly the size of a medieval village. Facebook, by contrast, permits us to maintain 5000 “friends.” I’ve chosen to cap at around 250. But I don’t remember where I met all of them.

This means I’ve maintained parasocial relationships with former co-workers with whom I never had much in common besides the job, college classmates and former students whose lives and interests scarcely resemble mine, and fellow church parishioners whom I never see except on Sunday morning. My 250 friends include maybe twelve people I’ll see in a given week. What makes this a “friendship?”

Plato and Aristotle, painted by Raphael

Aristotle describes his complete ideal of friendship: two people, both alike in virtue, wish nothing but good for one another, and, where possible, strive to bring that wish to fruition. Returning to my friend who became a public services advocate, I indeed wish her nothing but success and happiness in her goals. When she boasts of her accomplishments, I feel good for her. Perhaps that makes me her friend.

Yet I don’t think we’ve been in a room together since 2005. We haven’t shared activities or time in fifteen years. If I never saw her again, my life would be poorer for not learning her accomplishments, but I doubt I’d even notice. Fifteen years along, my life trajectory probably wouldn’t change one whit if, with one mouse click, I quietly ended this friendship. That feels both sad and scary.

We keep digital friendships alive for decades. Then we digitally kill them in an instant. Strange world we live in.