Love In The Time Of Apps by Jay Begler Page A

so that Pragat could keep Goodwin in the Survey, since he was a big draw to the site, even though he ultimately had all zeros.
    Sheila regarded her exclusion as a personal disaster. More than most, she fully understood the importance that the Pragat rating system would ultimately hold for society and was acutely aware of the social consequences of her exclusion. Men and women to whom she had always felt superior now possessed something she would never have, a PPR. An instant before the PPR survey went public these people had looked up to, admired and in a number of cases envied Sheila. Now, as if by some type of social fiat, she would be regarded by these people as inferior. For all intents and purposes, many of her peers would now view her as a nobody, a non-entity, the “Unrated of Grace Harbor.” While the term had not been coined yet, she would soon fall into a group called “No Lifes.”
    Sheila was in tears. When Goodwin sought to comfort her just before leaving for his birthday luncheon and offered to forego his luncheon, she swiped away the sympathetic hand he had placed on her shoulder and said gruffly as if touched by a leper, “Don’t touch me!” Then, possibly to make Goodwin feel guilty and in tone underscoring that she didn’t really mean it, she said, “Have fun.”
    “In many ways,” Maxine opined at the end of their first session, one populated by articulations of frustration on both sides, “you are similar. You come from similar middle class backgrounds, have solid middle class values, grew up in similar environments, and appear to have many similar interests and philosophies. You are both collegegraduates, hold post-graduate degrees, (Goodwin’s from Harvard’s Business School; Sheila’s from the London School of Economics.) It’s the humorless condition of Sheila that I see as the central problem.”
    “I know,” Goodwin said feeling a bit of vindication.
    “No, no. That’s the wrong attitude. HH is not a bad thing. It’s simply an inherent part of Sheila’s persona. I could have just as easily said that it’s your highly developed sense of humor that’s the problem. Your pathology Philip, for lack of a better word, is that you are afflicted, again for lack of a better word, with a case of irrepressible humor.” He was about to quip, “I guess having a case of irrepressible humor, is no laughing matter,” when he fully understood what Maxine meant by the term irrepressible humor.
    “The quandary you both face is that HH is incurable just as having a sense of humor is, in a manner of speaking, incurable. It’s essentially an element of your being. Unlike some of the couples I see, where one or both adjust by making changes, neither of you can change these aspects of your personality.”
    “What is important here is that humor is vital to any relationship. It’s essential to coping with life. It helps smooth some of a couple’s rough patches and, let’s face it, considering the spate of all of the bad news, it’s almost critical for survival. That you don’t have a sense of humor, Sheila, makes life very hard for you.” She shook her head in agreement and wiped away a slight rivulet of tears.
    “And Philip, the fact that you are virtually prohibited from spontaneously joking or laughing in the presence of Sheila, has to be incredibly frustrating, perhaps impossible.” Goodwin shook his head in agreement. “But if you are both willing to try I’d be happy to help. While conventional counseling involves working with you as a couple, in your situation I think it best that we go one on one at this point.”
    Despite his anger, when Goodwin recalled Maxine’s exact words, “one on one” he began to laugh in a bitter way. He muttered to himself, “One on one. I guess I should have realized that Maxine intended the term “one on one” to relate to his physical relationship with Sheila.” Nor was Goodwin suspicious when Maxine said to him, “I’m makinggreat progress