"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Credit: http://image.clipdealer.com
The expanse between the question mark and the period
impossibly prolonged contains the secrets of all seekers.
The distance run between confusion and understanding
measures the precise extent of pleasure in our pursuits.
The conquest of cause and effect links us to the principle
the paradox of seeking, knowing and adapting to facticity.
And once we find it, the answer, solution, and knowledge,
our joy ends, for the tickle of the quest vibrates happiness.
credit: https://polysingleish.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/1003954_1423682221182522_1247773358_n.jpg
This time by Salon.com’s Anna Pulley in the article 4 Reasons Humans are so Bad at Sexual Monogamy, which faults our natural proclivities and our ancestors. According to Pulley’s resources, we humans crave variety, get bored easily (especially women with sex) and hear the call of our collectivist primal ancestors who lived, parented and copulated communally. Her cited resources are a few notable books on the topic, including Chris Ryan’s Sex at Dawn, a synopsis of which you can find at Ryan’s site among other of his projects, to bolster her brief scan of the huge monogamy balliwick.
In the end she echoes a call to action I myself have made on this site–more tolerance and less dysfunctional belief when it comes to sex and marraige.
To say we are bad at monogamy isn’t an indictment of monogamy in general. Of course, people can and do succeed at life-long monogamous arrangements. Non-monogamous arrangements aren’t inherently better or worse than monogamous ones. And yet, just because we are monogamous with one person doesn’t negate the fact that many of us are still and always will be attracted to other people. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: “One can choose what to do, but not what to want.” We’d do better as a culture if we could exercise a little more tolerance, acceptance and honest discussions around sex, desire and marriage, and try to be less rigid in our idealistic views of monogamy.
Awakening prompts a glancing checklist:
Same place as last consciousness–
Darkness or light–
Feel my bones collect, my eyes adjust–
First blink: lids dragged over gravel or oil?
First move: any pinches, aches or strains?
On my feet, the day’s first inhale,
a wet finger to the wind.
Last night the pings of paranoia
called through the curtained phone
closed down for good–for the night,
disturbed the blank peace of erasure,
electric muted screams of digging rebuke
nagging disappointment and broken rules
known only to those who hide them.
Ping: You don’t know…
Ping: You don’t have…
Ping: You are not…
Ping: You …
The device pinged and dinged,
begging me to bury sound deep in darkness.
And I did.
The morning checked in misaligned,
a misstep of hungover, awed silence.
Roaming the days hunkered inside me,
downward dream-filled head of cotton
clear cuts paths of fallen dead trees;
upright sight, moving back like Mercury,
the illuminating specks piercing a miasma
best trailed in side-step unresolved truth,
prick the skin like sand in a wind storm
abrading hope-possible of reconciliation.
credit: http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=2216
A static image floats fuzzy still life before a mind’s eye
credit: http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Men-Machines.jpg
…men usually have what they term “single-cue arousability”. Give a man the image of a pair of attractive breasts or a curvy backside and they are half-way to happiness, where women need multiple cues: they are aroused by men who are “attractive and nice to children and self-confident….
I have been wanting to read this text when I first came across the title and recognized the author for his previous studies. However, scanning a few reviews of a new book, Man (Dis)Connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What it Means to be Male, and What Can be Done, by psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, who “argues that technology, online porn, gaming and sedentary jobs are causing terrible damage to the male psyche,” I cannot help but once again bemoan the insidious perpetuation of stereotypes that net individuals into the indoctrinating tidal wave of culturally predetermined roles.
While I am well aware that psychologists observe human behavior and make prognostications, the collateral effects of Zimbardo’s conclusions in his latest book, although an admirable contribution to the conversation of gender roles amidst social climate change, is to reinforce sedimented stereotypes.
Zimbardo, known for his famously criticized Stanford Prison Experiments, asserts in his book that men are biologically susceptible to falter in a world that promotes less physical work, more sedentary entertainment and less in-person interaction due to technology. Male reliance on online gaming, dating, and pornography in addition to less physically demanding office work has socially retarded men and made them not only obese but ineffective as social beings. He also blames the shift in roles due to feminism as well as other social “ills” or challenges for men as The Telegraph’s Chris Moss summarizes.
It’s when you combine absent fathers, staying at home into early adulthood, video gaming, overreliance on internet porn, obesity (with its associated decline in testosterone and increase in oestrogen) and lack of physical activity, educational failure, joblessness and lack of opportunities for interaction – plus a women’s movement that continues to empower that gender and thrust positive female role models into economic and political arenas – that you have the makings of a screwed-up masculinity with all the wider social consequences that implies.
While I can appreciate Zimbardo’s work, my sensibilities are a bit ruffled at the suggestion that empowering women disempowers men and thereby ominously causes “social consequences” implied by that disempowerment. But why do the implications necessarily bode ill? Intelligent, resilient men, of which there are plenty, certainly realize the freedom from sole breadwinner responsibility results not only in less pressure to perform and be their careers, but also more opportunity to develop other neglected skills and traits long scorned by social necessity due to inherited cultural predispositions.
Just like the current shifted economy squeezes out old patterns of work formulas like the corporate career that ends in a gold watch retirement and forces individual innovation and creativity for survival, so too the breakdown in traditional role models can lead and has led to opportunities for growth emotionally and psychologically through the loss that naturally occurs in evolution. All transitions are an equation of cost and benefits, the pre and aftermath of change.
But the reiteration of steretypical male expectations to be physical and in control, and the remorse suggested in the loss of that attribute and power position, all bundled in a cause and effect legitimacy (we all trust cause and effect, right?), ominously confirms both the stereotypes and the doomsayers who look for feminism to blame for harming men. Pointing the finger at feminism, even as a co-contributor, couched in scientific clout–the psychologist–serves to confirm the current suspicions piled on feminism by some factions as harmful, a disturbance of a centuries old patriarchal order. For some, the byproduct fear and hatred results in injury to women.
The country does not need any more binaries, dichotomies and polarization. Blaming feminism even under the guise of scientific observation does not help men. Bringing men the positive about change that has inevitably occurred and will continue to occur–technology and empowered women–benefits men.
I am hopeful that when I read his text, Dr. Zimbardo will conclude his observations with helpful insights on how to help men adjust.
credit: http://i.huffpost.com
Every day is a thrill to be alive, to be human–even when it’s not. Nothing pleases me more than settling into my writing routine each day with nothing on my mind. Reading around the Internet, then, is an adventure: wide open.
I also don’t know if I was more bitter about the cheating or the lying. Lying makes me pretty bitter.
It’s not. Cheating is never the answer; if only because it ultimately won’t make us feel good. We’re far better off to figure it out or part ways peacefully. Of course, that’s way easier said than done sometimes and all my experience and those of others will never replace your own experience. That’s how life works.
Also, never blame the cheater. Or the other person. No blame, or blame both parties in the primary relationship. No matter how perfect one partner may seem to be, it’s a two way street. Ladies, if we hold out on giving our man the cookie, we’re asking him to cheat (eventually). Men have very few needs (primarily freedom, respect, appreciation, food, sex) to be content, but they will even put up with a lack of most of those to a large degree if they’re getting sex gratefully. Put out (happily) or put up with a cheater. I’m aware this will ruffle some feathers. I’m not saying we can never say no, but I am saying we’d be best off to not use sex as a weapon or bargaining chip. As a bonus, working out differences between the sheets is a lot more fun for both team mates.
When the Best Sex is Extramarital by Lawrence Josephs, a New York psychotherapist, chronicles the study of one patient, Cynthia, who, though married to a devoted husband and father of their two young children, begins an affair with a co-worker. Sex with her husband is reported as “boring” while she claims to have had the best sex of her life with her lover, Neal. When Neal suddenly dies of a heart attack, she is left to mourn him in secret, which drives her to the therapist, Josephs, who makes her realize that her work is in reinvigorating her sex life with her husband.
Other than the therapist’s inserted judgment of the deceased Neal, which I found disconcerting, the article drew intriguing insights into that long-perceived dichotomy of good love vs. good sex. Apparently a Freudian, Josephs cites the good father of psychotherapy on love and lust:
Freud claimed that people often split love and lust. It is not uncommon to have great sex with someone who isn’t lovable, or to have a trustworthy loving relationship with someone with whom the sex is boring. Recent empirical research shows that individuals who exhibit high degrees of narcissism, like Neal, have difficulty integrating love and lust in a single relationship. This is also true of individuals, like Cynthia, who are “avoidantly attached” — they can’t tolerate the vulnerability of being intimate with someone on whom they are dependent, and so they create a self-protective distance from their partner.
The latter term “avoidantly attached” is not a phrase with which I am so familiar and since Dr. Josephs does not define his term or discuss how he reached the conclusion that Cynthia was “avoidantly attached,” I had to research.
Avoidant attachment yields two different separate behaviors: “fearful” and “dismissing.” Fearful avoidants have a negative self-image, but are also passive and dependent; they actually want intimacy but they are also desperately afraid of being hurt and distrust others. Fearful avoidants are the hardest category of insecure people to deal with in a relationship since they send out a mixed bag of signals. The dismissing avoidant has a more positive self-image but would agree with the following statement: “ I am comfortable without close emotional relationships, It is very important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient and I prefer not to depend on others and have others depend on me. “ These working models affect individuals in myriad ways.
In the article with the above excerpt, Avoidant Personalities Destroy Relationships, author Peg Streep later notes what we all know: people marry their opposite sex parents. Hearing this early on in my dating days, I thought I was safe in that I married someone so different from my father. But having lived with my father the last few years, I realize I am mistaken.
My father, when physically present on those rare occasions he was not working or sleeping, was not a warm, accessible guy when I was growing up. As an adult, I was more relatable to him and he showed a very warm, sentimental side amidst his general crankiness and abusive language to not only my mother but all of his five children.
But that overly sentimental side lurched between the nasty brutal cutting side, which later showed me that he is simply incapable of relating to others, incapable of truly attaching. He either loves you or hates you depending on what you have done for him lately. Then again, how could he have learned how to attach when he was one of 9 children of scraping by parents?
So it’s no wonder I married someone devoted yet aloof and emotionally unavailable, he coming from parents who were the same. My mother, at least, was very warm and affectionate, but very busy with five children. I, being the middle child, fashioned my world, my niche in this enclave, as the independent one who needed her least so as to caretake her some. I still do.
All arrows point to the “dismissing avoidant” in the mirror, but the arm chair self-analyzing therapist is a lousy therapist indeed.
What do you do when the best sex of your life is outside of marriage, but you still want the emotional security of a stable long-term relationship with someone you love and trust? I’ve worked with a few couples over the years who have been able to make an open marriage work, but most people, even those who think they might want such an arrangement, are too insecure and jealous to do so.
Interestingly, Josephs does not discount that an open relationship could work, only that most people are too insecure and jealous to succeed. But how about two people forced into honestly engaging with each other about their needs and inability to fulfill them? What about those forced to stay together despite a lousy sex life because they have higher responsibilities to fulfill, like kids and aging parents?
Cynthia decided to work on her sex life in couples therapy, but how often does that “fix” an ailing sex life? I don’t have the data, but I do have a couple dozen years in divorce story land. My gut and experience tell me that many couples do not work out a sex life even after proper diagnosis and willingness to do so.
Sex is as mysterious as it is natural or primal.The complex of psychological, emotional, intellectual and physical cocktails that make some sex the best and some the worst is rocket science or voodoo to me. Honesty is critical to a healthy sex life but not easy. How do you instruct someone you love how to kiss you or please you, especially if you don’t really know how to instruct or what you need–for example, young teen or twenty something starter couples?
Sometimes the circumstances are such that two people want to stay together, perhaps at first for the kids, but later for more reasons than that; maybe there is no one out there to go rushing to that’s any better suited or as time tested as their marital partners, despite the dead sex life. Though the two may feel jealous and unwilling, they both know and are open to sex outside the marriage. And when they do so, in time both parties become acclimated. Exigencies make it work at first and time settles everything else afterward.
Freud claimed that children are emotionally possessive and jealous creatures who don’t like sharing their parents’ affection with anyone else. As a clinician I try to keep an open mind about romantic partner sharing, but when it comes to our spouses, it seems most of us never outgrow being fundamentally childlike in our possessiveness. At our best we learn to refrain from doing things that would make our spouses jealous and insecure, despite our temptations, and when they make us jealous we try to restrain our hostility, despite our hurt.
This would describe the majority of people most of the time and some of the people some of the time. I can remember being jealous of my husband’s friends, the coveted time he spent with them. When we separated and I dated someone else, he was jealous. And later when we reunited and then agreed to an open marriage, we were both jealous at times, but knew it had to be this way and so became inured to seeing other people come and go in our communal lives. The other option was divorce, which was clearly unnecessary.
We talk about our lives, but do not open up to each other much emotionally. He has always struggled with articulating what or that he feels. Yet, we provide each other the steadfast support that allows security, safety and adventure too–time tested love and respect–immeasurably comforting.
The best sex of my life has been with those I have been most emotionally connected to, felt the most love for–at that moment of enjoyment. With some, it has been easier to have great sex due to chemistry (scents, voice, hormones) or physical compatibility, similar aims, fantasies and spirit. Those relationships that afforded the greatest sex were firm, committed, yet clearly not forever. Perhaps the attachment avoidant in me has made that so.
In the gaze of the other 
