The 5 Reasons Marriage Scares Men (Aren’t What You Think)

Jan 6 |22:03
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After a couple years of sending my girlfriend a clear message of, “We’re never getting married,” I proposed. There are reasons it took me so long to come around, but none of them fell into those magazine/sitcom stereotypes (which can be summed up as, “He’s having too much fun screwing around and doesn’t want to commit”).

In fact, I’m pretty sure that the people who write sitcoms and jewelry commercials and movies about bachelor parties don’t have any goddamned idea how actual human relationships work. So for the women who have been conditioned to believe that we men are afraid of commitment because we don’t want to give up our seat on the Saturday Night Fuck Train, allow me to give you the real reasons marriage scares guys.

#5. We’re Flooded with Anti-Marriage Messages

I can’t name many comedians who haven’t made fun of marriage in a negative way. I think the most famous was Sam Kinison, who was in so many fucked up relationships, he made it his goal to “save” other men from it.

Now, given, Sam made the whole topic pretty goddamn funny, but then every comedian who has ever taken a stage decided to give their version, and before you knew it, the entire industry is saturated with, “You know what sucks about marriage?” No, what sucks about it, angry guy on a stage? Does the sex stop? I bet he’s going to tell us that the sex stops. While you’re at it, what’s your opinion of airplane food?

I’ve heard the joke about “fucking the same woman for the rest of your life” since before I knew what it meant. Oh, hey, look — here’s Vince Vaughn making the joke I’ve heard so many times, my reaction is considered a form of bulimia.

The point is that when you’re immersed in this message long enough, it’s easy to start believing it, yourself. And that message is everywhere. From the cliche sitcom best friend who freaks out when he hears that his buddy is engaged, to beloved comedians who are actually married, like Chris Rock, talking about how boring and sexless it is.

And that’s not to say that it isn’t funny. One of my favorite sketch shows, Mr. Show, pulled it off beautifully. But after a lifetime of standing in dead fish, it’s impossible to not absorb the smell.

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Mmmmm … marriage.

This may not sound very logical to you, and that’s perfectly understandable. It barely makes sense to me, and I’m a dude. But it’s the no-magazine, no-bullshit truth. We’re afraid of marriage because we smell like dead fish.

#4. Ridiculously Expensive, Lavish Weddings

Men aren’t totally disconnected from the idea of a wedding. We understand that it’s important for not only the couple, but for their families. Our marriage is linking two entire groups of people, and yes, they deserve to bear witness to that ceremony. We also understand that those invitations are more than just a piece of paper that says when and where it’s going to be held. It’s telling the person, “You are important enough to me that I want you involved in this celebration.” And to anyone who didn’t get one: “You are a fucking embarrassment, and we don’t want you anywhere near us on this day.” We get that, and we’re fine with it.

But every time we add another name to that list, we can hear our bank account go from a trickling, high-pitched squeal to that farting sound a balloon makes when you let it go without tying the end.

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Let it go, man. You’re trying to save the boat by draining the ocean.

The average wedding in the United States costs $27,000. That’s not counting the honeymoon — that’s just the ceremony and the reception. That’s because in every movie, every TV show, every magazine, the message is very clear: A wedding has to be fancy to the point of evaporating an entire year’s salary. Even the most simple service shown in movies is something that in reality would cost five figures. It’s become a necessity. Just another part of getting married. The fact that “wedding planner” is an actual job is a testament to that.

Men, on the other hand, feel like failures if they can’t financially provide that type of a ceremony. But that’s understating what a double edged sword it is for us because on one hand, if you can’t afford to give her a wedding that makes her feel like royalty, you’re inadequate. But if you do pull it off, you’re now left with a debt on par with a brand new, zero-miles car — you’ve failed your new wife as a responsible provider.

Oh, wait. The father of the bride is supposed to pay for all of that, right?

Here in the farming region of the Midwest, $27,000 is more than most people make in a year. Asking a woman’s father for his approval is hard enough — but asking him to shell out enough money to move into the townhouse Courtney Love was recently evicted from? What kind of balls are required for that?

No, the days of the father paying for the wedding are over. Especially in an economy where people are having to shave down their lifestyles in favor of survival. Dumping tens of thousands of dollars into a one-day ceremony is not only unreasonable, but impossible for an average person to do alone. And every bullshit story we hear about other weddings just makes us cringe.

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“Yeah, keep on smiling. I’m getting anal after all this.”

Recently, one of my fiance’s coworkers told her that a good way to reduce the price is to go with “alternative props.” For instance, instead of buying sterling silver candle holders for the Unity Candle (whatever the hell that is), she and her husband opted to pour two different colors of sand into a jar. That way, they made the same symbolic gesture, and got a nice memento to boot. The sand only cost them $50. The jar was $100.

Wait, what? Fifty bucks for goddamn sand? A hundred bucks for a jar?

See, stories like that scare us. We as men don’t need or want the huge, showy production of a wedding. We do it because we know you want it, and you deserve to be put on a pedestal. We know this day is about you. But the mere thought of all that money just up and vanishing for a 30 minute ceremony and a couple hour reception is just seems … retarded to us.

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“That’ll be $200. And there’s nothing abnormal about that at all.”

#3. We Compare Our New Relationships to Old Ones

One of the top reasons we’ve given for men being afraid of marriage is one perpetuated by magazines like Cosmopolitan or shows like MTV’s Guy Code, which is so bad, it’ll give you chlamydia. They tell us that guys are afraid of not just marriage but the general idea of commitment. According to them, we just love to fuck every woman we see, every second of the day, and committing to one person ends that ability.

Now while I concede that those men do exist in the world, you have to understand that they make up a fraction of a percent of the male population. It’s a personality type that the entertainment industry finds fascinating, so they focus on it … and I can’t really blame them. Who wants to watch a reality show about an average looking, normal guy not getting laid for six months?

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“This week, on Steve …”

The average guy doesn’t have a line of women sitting by the phone, just waiting for him to call so they can be blessed by his awe-inspiring ass tamer. No, the truth behind our fear is far less stupid.

Men are creatures of habit. We like to find a nice comfortable routine to live in and stick to that. The problem is that over years of building our patterns, we’ve come to expect certain inevitabilities from relationships. Obviously, we’ve never had one that worked because if we did, we would have never found you — we’d still be with one of our past girlfriends.

So over time, we’ve come to learn that the pattern of all relationships is “meet, date, commit, break up.” Even if it’s not a conscious thought, right at the forefront of our brains, it’s still there. Because of this, the mere idea of marriage is foreign to us. We’re not thinking about the fact that marriage means “committing to stay together forever.” We’re thinking, “Won’t that make our eventual breakup a hundred times harder?”

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“Is … is it because of my sweater?”

Now don’t get me wrong here — we’re not sitting around, planning a future breakup. Far from it. We’ve just become conditioned over years to assume that X + Y = Z … where both X and Y equals “sex followed by breakup.” And Z also means “sex followed by breakup.”

Adding marriage to that formula seems like an extra layer of complication that makes it that much harder to decide who gets the Xbox when we’re packing our shit.

And it’s not that all of our past relationships were agreed upon to be month-long flings. They all started out with the best of intentions, just like with you. But over time, things happen. The impression stage wears off. People fall out of love. You find out that the woman you’re with likes to wear the skin of her fallen enemies. Or you find out that all the stupid shit you’re doing makes her think of you as her 14-year-old brother. My ex wife and I didn’t realize that we weren’t right for each other until three children and a decade after we tied the knot. And that’s even taking into account that we were making a concerted effort to make things work.

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I may have gone a little overboard.

#2. Divorce is Terrifying

There is no avoiding divorce. Even if you never go through it yourself, you see it everywhere. My mother has been divorced and remarried so many times, I’ve legitimately lost count. To this day, I can’t remember the last name of her third husband. My dad did the same thing. Most of my friends in high school came from single parent households. In my extended family, I can think of five couples who are still married to their first spouse.

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Some have better reasons than others.

We cannot go through life without witnessing, first hand, the brutal hell of a breakup on that level. We see what it does to kids caught in the crossfire. And the friends who are forced to choose a side. And family members who have grown to love the removed party, and now have to shun them for the sake of their blood relative. And then you have the media putting statistics on it.

They’re in the nightly news. They’re in political ad campaigns, preaching that America needs to get back to “old-fashioned family values.” They’re in newspapers and Sociology classes and talks around the water cooler at work. I’m pretty sure I heard my 6-year-old daughter playing a game of “Divorce Lawyer” last weekend, though that could have very well been an extension of her normal game of, “Spouse Murder Trial.” It’s hard to tell — they all blend together after a while.

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“Your honor, I would like to submit as evidence, the actual corpses of the slain.”

The most common stat we hear is that 50 percent of all first marriages end in divorce. If you remarry, the numbers get more depressing: 60-67 percent. Third marriages: 70-73 percent. I’m guessing the fourth time you get to the altar, you just burst into flames right when you say, “I do.”

After hearing those stats, we tend to weave it onto our idea of “inevitable breakup” that I mentioned earlier. And unfortunately, our fears have now been backed up with solid numbers: We are doomed to failure the second we propose. Men don’t typically argue with math. Math fights dirty. It cuts.

So going into the relationship, assuming things will end badly, we look into the future and see even more horrifying statistics. If we have kids, we can pretty much kiss them goodbye when the divorce happens. Mothers end up with the children 84 percent of the time. If alimony is awarded, it’s probably going to be us paying it — 97 percent of all alimony payments are made by men.

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“Here you go. I wrapped it around my own shit.”

Now, obviously, some of these stats are skewed, and the reasoning behind them is fairly logical. As that article points out, men typically make about 25 percent more than women of the same age. And as far as custody, only 33 percent of men even want to have sole custody of their children. But we don’t see that part. We see dark, black, looming numbers forecasting the end of our financial lives, and we see those numbers reflected in real life demonstrations on a daily basis.

So how do we deal with it? We avoid the problem altogether by staying as far away from marriage as humanly possible. We can’t be a statistic if we’re not a part of the group they’re studying.

#1. Loss of Power

Men, like most other animals, are territorial. Our apartment is fucking ours. The mess is our mess. The chaos on top of our computer desk is exactly the way we want it. Nobody can tell us what to do — we put those posters of Wolverine on the wall, and goddammit, nobody can make us take them down. Not even Wolverine.

Introduce a woman into the mix, and suddenly our bed sheets need to be washed more than once a year. The blanket hanging over the windows needs to be replaced with actual curtains. Underwear doesn’t go on the floor. It goes in the hamper. Wait, what the hell is a hamper, and when did I get one?

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“Hey, what are you doing to my mold?!”

But it’s not all just about cleaning — there are plenty of men out there who are meticulous in their apartment’s hygiene. But even though the living style is different, the same message applies: “It’s mine. Don’t fuck with it.” We see any woman’s touch in the decor as emasculating, and that scares us.

After my fiance moved in, it took me over a year to stop referring to our place as “my apartment.” And I’m not a very materialistic or selfish person. It’s just that the average man has trouble coming to terms with the idea of “sharing everything equally.” We still think of the money from our jobs as my paycheck, even though (as I’ve brought up in another article) both people are sharing all of the living expenses and mutual ups and downs together.

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“Mmmmm … one thing I know for sure: This will never smell like your fingers.”

But what scares us even more is observing our married friends, and misinterpreting the husband’s reactions to questions that used to require no thought. When we ask him if he wants to go out and grab a beer with us, and he replies with, “Sure, just let me run it by the wife real quick,” we see him as imprisoned. As if everything he does requires permission from a secondary mother.

We don’t see it for what it really is: a simple act of courtesy. Making sure that you both don’t have prior plans. Or you’re not hurting for money this week. Or that the kids don’t have something that requires your attention. No, instead, we give him shit. “Sure, sure. You just go ask your mommy, and we’ll be over here having a good time like grown fucking men.”

Picturing ourselves in that situation is like trying to imagine the rest of our lives being reverted back to our six year old selves. Living our lives the way someone else dictates.

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“She … said no.”

But as irrational as some of these fears may seem to you, at least they’re honest and not some writer’s bullshit assumption, picturing what they think the average guy is like (probably based on what they saw on TV when they were growing up). And if you do happen to be in a relationship with the rare “marriage ruins my fucking” guy, it’s probably time to reevaluate your taste in men. A cocksucker like that doesn’t deserve you in the first place.

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5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won’t)

Jan 5 |21:37
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If 80s movies taught us anything, it’s that at some point you’re going to run into a mysterious relic that lets you switch bodies with other people.Would you use it? Would you choose to switch lives with, say, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Dale DeBone? Most people would.

But let’s say the artifact doesn’t let you choose, but will instead switch you randomly with one of the other six billion people on the planet. Virtually nobody will take that deal, for fear they’d switch with some poor villager in Nigeria.

So what does that say about us? Well, according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let’s look at the five things we’re most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure.

#5. Fame

Go to the little girls’ aisle at the department store, if you’re not there already. On the shelves you’ll see the dominant little girl fantasy isn’t Cinderella or even Dora the Explorer. It’s Hannah Montana. Playsets come complete with a camera, makeup and a mirror for Hannah to admire herself in.

The girls play with that when they’re eight, and by 16 they’re on MySpace, pouting at the camera in their underwear and watching the friend requests pour in. In a recent survey of high school kids, 51 percent said their ultimate goal was to become famous.

This is brand new to humanity; for thousands of years, material goods and security dominated. Now, fame is at the top. Obviously part of the reason is the perception that anybody can get famous these days–reality TV and YouTube have proven that you can become a celebrity for doing not a goddamned thing. But there’s another, less obvious factor. And it explains why so many famous people are miserable.

So What’s the Problem?

Experts say where you find kids who desperately want to be famous, you find a history of neglect at home. Parents were either absent completely or, at best, emotionally distant dicks. It turns out the whole surge in aspirations for fame came right along with the explosion of single parents and “broken” homes. Only half of today’s children live with their original two parents.

You can see how this sad mechanism works in the attention-starved mind. The kid is programmed by biology to love a parent, but the parent doesn’t return the love. Fame lets them turn the tables on that arrangement. When you’re famous, millions love you, but you don’t even know their names. It’s purely one-sided. They wait for hours in the cold for your autograph, you barely glance at them on the way to your limo. You get to take their love and wipe your ass with it, the same as your parents did to you.


“I love you!” “Your deaths would mean nothing to me.”

But it turns out that kind of massive, paper-thin adoration is a poor substitute. Famous people are four times as likely to commit suicide as the rest of us (Hell, you’d think it’d be higher–everybody reading this has seen more than one of their favorite performers self-destruct).

Wait, it Gets Worse…

If you’re saying that your parents were awesome and that fame still looks pretty freaking cool, well, we’re not done. Studies show nothing is more stressful for a human than when their goals are tied to the approval of others. Particularly when those “others” are an enormous crowd of fickle strangers holding you up to a laughably unrealistic ideal built by publicists, thick makeup and heavily Photoshopped magazine covers.

You could seek comfort from your circle of friends, only now your friends have been replaced Invasion of the Body Snatcher’s-style with hangers-on, vultures, unscrupulous characters and plain dumbasses who only want a piece of the spotlight. . . even if it means selling you out later.

For example, have you ever lit up a bong at a party? Were you worried that one of your friends would snap a photo of you, sell it to a tabloid for thousands of dollars and ruin your career?

Well become famous, and then try it.

#4. Wealth

Let’s not bullshit each other. You see those ads on the side of the screen? And at the top? And at the bottom? Go look at one of them. We just made $800, baby. Seriously, they’re set up to detect the position of your eyeballs. If you actually click on one, we make enough to fill our SnoCone machine with Cristal.

Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss’s inbox.

So What’s the Problem?

Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn’t do the body-switching thing for fear they’d wake up in Nigeria? Well according to surveys, Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country.


Can your country fit three to a motorcycle? Didn’t think so.

The USA came in 16th.

Hey, did we mention that the average Nigerian makes $300 a year? That’s less than a hundredth of what the average American makes. America being the country that hands out 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants every year.

China is turning into a great object lesson in this, as their economy explodes and incomes skyrocket, but levels of happiness and personal satisfaction are dropping at the same rapid rate.

There’s a couple of reasons for it. First, your brain adjusts feelings of happiness downward after you’ve reached some goal or other. It regulates the good feelings, presumably so that you have motivation to reach the next goal instead of just lounging by the pool for the rest of your days.

The second one is that as social creatures, we compare ourselves to our neighbors. This is why executives can cry about the $500,000 salary cap that comes with taking government bailout money. Their friends are making $3 million a year and live in igloo made out of cocaine. We can laugh at their complaints, but of course then you’re giving the Nigerian permission to laugh at yours. That guy made 100 times more than you, you make 100 times more than the Nigerian.

Once you start hanging around the other high earners, you’ll want all the stuff they have. No, that’s not right–you’ll want the stuff that’s so much better than their stuff that they’ll vomit with envy. As one magazine for Wall Street bigshots put it, you want the stuff that will be “a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home.”


“Yeah, same model as yours. Only covered in solid fucking gold.“

But what about sudden wealth, like if you won the lottery, or sold your novel for $10 million? That’d be cool, right, because you’d still remember your former life and appreciate your new riches! Well, just ask William “Bud” Post, who wound up broken and bankrupt after he won $16 million in the lottery. It turns out that while he knew how to handle the stress of being poor thanks to a lifetime of experience, he had no concept of how to handle the new and alien stresses of wealth.

Wait, it Gets Worse…

Remember the whole Invasion of the Body Snatchers phenomenon we talked about with famous people, where suddenly all of your friends turn into leeches? Same here, only worse. With your newfound riches, suddenly “friends” pop up from all over. Cousins who you’ve never met, forgotten classmates from school, women who’d never even look your way before, all suddenly in your orbit, complimenting you, doing you favors. Then they casually slip it into conversation that they’re going to have to default on their mortgage unless somebody helps out.


Your very own entourage!

Suddenly every relationship is in doubt. Do they actually care about you? Or do they just want a seat on the Bling Train? Would they sell you out to get to your cash?

That lottery winner we mentioned above . . . somebody hired a hitman to take him out, to get to his money. That somebody was his own fucking brother.

#3. Beauty

We know all about this one first-hand. That old stereotype about how comedy writers and heavy Internet users tend to have bodies chiseled out of solid sex? It’s true. One visitor remarked that the Cracked office “Looked like a Manowar album cover came to life.”


Office Christmas party, 07

Yes, being physically attractive has concrete advantages. Attractive people earn more, get better grades, have better jobs and find more successful partners than average or ugly people. Strangers are more likely to help them in a crisis. They have wider social circles.

So What’s the Problem?

Remember, we’re talking about happiness here, not success. For one, attractive people have the same self-esteem problems the ugly people do. Like money, attractiveness is relative and if you’re hotter than your friends, at that stage you start comparing yourself to people in the media. You know, like the magazine covers we mentioned before, the ones that that have had the living shit Photoshopped out of them.


Before and After

In other words, they’ve adjusted to the experience of being attractive the same as our high income earners have adjusted to having money; they just pick other flaws to worry about. Sure, if you used the magical artifact up there to become Angelina Jolie tomorrow, you’d notice the difference over how you’re treated now. But if you were born Angelina Jolie, you’d have no way of grasping it, the same as right now you don’t realize what it’s like to live life with some kind of horrible deformity (if you do have a horrible deformity, then you don’t know what it’s like to live with a worse one. Work with us here).

Wait, it Gets Worse…

You know how when the hot girl at the bar tells an unfunny joke, all the guys laugh anyway? Or when the office stud makes a mistake, the female boss laughs it off?

Attractive people live in a world where most feedback they get is bullshit. The compliments mean nothing–they’ve learned that’s just the sound people make when they walk by. That’s why studies show they tend to dismiss the genuine compliments they get in other areas (their work, personality, sense of humor, creativity) because it gets lumped in with the same counterfeit flattery they’ve been getting their whole lives.


“I find your views fascinating.”

 

#2. Genius

We’re using the broader definition of the word “genius” here, meaning anyone with an extraordinary talent or skill. So for instance Dennis Rodman was a genius when it came to rebounding basketballs, but was probably not a genius in the way that Einstein was.


Or was he?

But as Dennis demonstrates, genius–whether it involves writing ground-breaking computer code, picking stocks or writing the dopest rhymes–means one thing above all else: You are forever granted an exception to society’s rules.

The fictional archetype for this these days is TV’s Dr. House, whose being a genius means he gets a free pass to do drugs on the job, break hospital policy, insult his superiors and treat patients like shit. But don’t blame the writers, the real world examples are just as extreme, from Hemingway to Kanye West. Being a genius means you get to do great things, sure, but it’s also a blank check for douchebaggery.

Who could turn that down?

So What’s the Problem?

Want to know what it’s like to live life as a genius? All you have to do is go hang around with the stupidest, most incompetent people you know. Cringe at their stupid jokes, feel the frustration as they fumble even the easiest tasks and fail to grasp the simplest concepts. Being a genius must be like that, only everyday. Everyone is an idiot compared to them. They’re living Idiocracy.

We can’t imagine what it’s like to make friends in that world. Genuine connections will be rare indeed when every honest expressions of thought or feelings on your end is met with a look of dull Keanu Reeves-esque befuddlement.

If you’re not the Einstein kind of genius, it doesn’t matter, any situation where you’re 10 levels above your coworkers is going to be daily frustration. If you’re a genius at spreading concrete, that feeling only occurs to you in the form of everyone else being sloppy and helpless. No wonder they wind up treating people like dirt.

Not that you’d have time for friends anyway. Genius takes practice. Lots of it. Shows like House don’t tell you that to become as good at your job as Dr. House, you’ve got to devote an enormous amount of time to working, studying and practicing your craft (at least 10 thousand hours, according to that Malcolm Gladwell book everyone is quoting these days). Behind the genius is hundreds of weekends spent pouring over texts while everyone else was at the party, playing bikini Twister.


This is what they do at parties, right?

All of this is a great recipe for the stereotypical depressed, moody genius who dies alone and bitter.

Wait, it Gets Worse…

If your genius lies in some kind of creative field, then there’s a good chance you have actual mental illness to deal with. While only one percent of the population suffers from bipolar disorder, it is claimed that 50 percent of poets, 38 percent of musicians and 20 percent of painters have it. It’s just part of the package.


Eminem, prior to launching music career.

Compare the number of great musical innovators who have died of suicide or drug overdose versus, say, the number of plumbers who have died the same way. It might be better to just stand in the poop all day.


After.

#1. Power

You never hear little kids say they want to be “powerful” when they grow up. Parents don’t encourage that sort of thing, since it’s kind of terrifying coming from a toddler.

Yet, power is what everything else on this list is about. Fame is about having power in the relationship with the fans. Beauty is about gaining power through others’ sexual desire and jealousy. Genius means society needs your skills more than you need its approval. Money . . . well, money and power are conjoined twins.

So it’s pretty safe to say that while not many of you reading this specifically aspire to go into any kind of political office, a great many of you do aspire to some kind of power. Maybe you’re eying the kind of job where you’ll be the boss, or maybe you want to go into law enforcement. Or maybe you’re just driven by that bitter, unspoken urge almost all of us feel at least once in our youth: “I’ll show them! I’ll show them all.”

So What’s the Problem?

Saying “power corrupts” is stating something so obvious we feel stupid even typing it. It’s like saying elevators elevate. If you found out tomorrow your congressman was caught firing orphans out of a cannon, you’d barely raise an eyebrow.

It has nothing to do with the “culture of corruption in Washington DC” the Libertarians are always talking about. You find it everywhere, from the asshole supervisor to the bitter gym coach. Small people driven to mindless, unethical behavior, drunk on just a few drops of bullshit power. They often can’t make friends, their marriages end badly, they self destruct. The world is full of these miniature, sad Tony Montanas, destined for a proverbial bloody downfall.


Usually instead of a mansion it’s a cubicle, and instead of bullets it’s a series of pissy emails

Wait, it gets worse…

The thing is, it’s the desire itself that’s poisonous. You find that need for power most in the type of person who hates having to obey all of society’s social contracts, particularly the ones that require them to not act like cocks all day. These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible (this is why sociopaths tend to seek positions of power, by the way).

So it’s not just that power will destroy you. It’s that the urge itself is bad news. That desire for power is a vicious, ravenous animal and feeding it only makes it strong enough to tear its way out of your belly and go on a bloody rampage.


Pic unrelated

“So what will make me happy, Cracked.com writers? What’s left?”

For the next 10 seconds, stare at this picture of a guy hugging a tiger.

Notice how you weren’t worrying about your job during those 10 seconds?

Experts have figured out that the brain has no ability to actually predict your emotional reaction to life changes that haven’t happened yet. In other words, you physically do not know what you want. The act of sitting around pondering it is apparently what fucks you up.

This might be because for most of human history, we didn’t have time to do that. We were too busy gathering berries and running from wild animals. Now that we’ve got things so under control that the animals hug us. . . well, we’re like the guy up there who didn’t know what to do with his lotto winnings.

This may be why studies show friendships, altruism and religious practices bring happiness. It may be that taking the focus off your own happiness is what makes happiness possible.

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Are you poor ? I believe not.

Jan 5 |21:19
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Even in times of financial uncertainty, it’s always important to keep things in perspective.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
- Henry David Thoreau

  1. You didn’t go to sleep hungry last night.
  2. You didn’t go to sleep outside.
  3. You had a choice of what clothes to wear this morning.
  4. You hardly broke a sweat today.
  5. You didn’t spend a minute in fear.
  6. You have access to clean drinking water.
  7. You have access to medical care.
  8. You have access to the Internet.
  9. You can read.
  10. You have the right to vote (or at least think you do).
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How To : Improve Your PHP Programming

Jan 1 |19:37
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How To : Improve Your PHP Programming

 

Hello everyone,

I’ve decided that I would make a thread here describing the different things that I do to improve other people’s PHP scripts.

Hope you enjoy it and learn a thing or two.

1 – Your PHP Tags
I know some of you prefer to use the short tags when writing PHP scripts <? ?> but this is not always the best way of doing it.
The standard tags <?php ?> are much better as they will work on every server that you write your PHP code on. You may move to a server some day that doesn’t allow the short tags or the ASP-style tags and you will have to sit for an hour and update your PHP scripts.

2 – Debugging Your PHP Code
Some of us may run into a problem when programming a PHP script and don’t know what’s wrong with it. The error_reporting() function in PHP helps you out by telling every error you have on your page. To show all of the errors on the page that you’re editing, put this on the second line :

PHP Code:
error_reporting(E_ALL);

3 – Debugging Your PHP Code (again)
When you finish editing your 1200-line PHP script, click onto it in your Internet browser, you see an error that says that is on line 561. Don’t hit the panic-attack button quite yet, because there is an easy way to find out what line 561 is. Follow these easy steps :
- Open up Microsoft Notepad
- Paste your PHP script into it
- Go to ‘Edit’ >> ‘Go To…’ (or Control+G)
- Type in line #561 and hit the enter key
- Your cursor is taken to line #561.
- Look above and below line #561 to see if there is any kind of trouble.
- Fix the error, re-upload the script to your website, and most likely it will work. If there is another error, repeat the above steps.

4 – Using Comments
If you have a 1200-line PHP script, it may be quite hard to figure out what’s going on all through-out it. The solution to figure out what you’re doing is to add PHP-comments.
PHP-comments are different than the <!– HTML Comments –> as they are not outputted to the user’s page (meaning that they are not even going to see it in the source code).
There are three ways to make comments in PHP :

PHP Code:
<?php
// The double-backslash is my personal favorite.  I add another set after my code so that it looks even, though it is not necessary. //
# The hash-style comment is another way of making a comment.
/* And, this is the final way of making PHP-comments.  You can use
multiple
lines
at a time by using this style. */
?>

You can decorate it however you like, you are the only one who may use them.

5 – Indenting Your PHP Codes
I don’t personally like to indent my PHP codes, but it helps when reading it. When I do have to, I use the tab key to accomplish this. Example :

PHP Code:
<?php
// Settings //
$var1 = "This";

// Showing Variables //
if($var1 == "This"){
echo"You said This";
}else{
echo"You said That";
}
?>

6 – Improving your PHP-File Includes
I’m sure that most of us on here include a PHP file or two for our layouts. Well, what if your layout file was missing ? Wouldn’t that look pretty unprofessional to the people on your website ?
In every PHP-script that I write, I make sure that the file exists before it is even included. Here’s an example :

PHP Code:
<?php
if(!file_exists("layout.inc.php")){exit("Error :  LayOut File Missing");}else{include_once("layout.inc.php");}
?>

I’m sure that a small error message will seem better than half a page that is all messed-up looking.

7 – Your MySQL Queries
Sometimes when you’re writing a PHP script that includes connections to your MySQL database, you may run into a few problems. Most everyone that had MySQL problems ran a command like this one :

PHP Code:
<?php
mysql_query("INSERT INTO tableName ('id','name') VALUES('1','Mike')");
?>

..and they figure out that it’s not inserting into their database. Here’s the solution to this :

PHP Code:
<?php
mysql_query("INSERT INTO tableName ('id','name') VALUES('1','Mike')") or exit("MySQL Error :  " . mysql_error());
?>

8 – Combining Alike If-Then Statements
You may have a register page, and want to make sure that everything has been filled-in. You may use many if-then statements like so :

PHP Code:
<?php
if(!$_POST[name]){exit("Sorry, but you did not fill-in all of the requested fields.");}
if(!$_POST[email]){exit("Sorry, but you did not fill-in all of the requested fields.");}
?>

You can combine these two lines into one by joining their if-then statements together :

PHP Code:
<?php
if((!$_POST[name]) || (!$_POST[email])){exit("Sorry, but you did not fill-in all of the requested fields.");}
?>

Simply, || is the same thing as OR and && is the same as AND.

9 – Using echo or print ?
Most of you may say ‘echo is the same thing as print’, in which I agree with you all. The echo command is much faster than the print command, and is one less character to type. The echo command came later than the print command (I believe), so you make the judement on which to use.

10 – Printing out a Huge Chunk of HTML at a Time
Well, I’m sure that many of us found a way to get around this, but I’d like to share with you a few of the ways you can do it.

1 – Break off your PHP-code, print the HTML, and start your PHP-code up again. (I don’t prefer doing this as it looks pretty unprofessional to me).
2 – Adding backslashes to each HTML tag. (It works, but takes forever to do).
3 – Using the echo/print command, but without having to do much work. (I recommend) :

PHP Code:
<?php
// Showing a huge chunk of HTML at a time //
echo<<<END
<font face="Verdana" color="Orange" size="3">Large, Orange Text in Font Size 3</font>
<br><br>
More HTML down here..
<br><br>
<div align="Center">Centered text</div>
END;
?>

Well, I have many other things to tell about sprucing up your PHP-code, but I don’t want to bore you.

I hope I’ve helped.

Best Regards,

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