Emotional Infidelity
Heard an interesting topic on NPR today, under the title "Emotional Infidelity", so I thought I'd do a search about this exciting new fashion!
http://love.ivillage.com/lnsproblems/lnscheating/0,,fmf6-p,00.html
OH, darn. It's not a fashion, it's a SIN - it's putting your spouse second in your life and looking for the excitement of the affair with the opposite sex without actually getting any sex out of the arrangement?
Hmmmm... wait, I'm not married! Well, I do have a sort of girlfriend, or to say I have a theoretical relationship with a woman, divorced, with 3 kids and we see each other on average about twice a month, or between an average of 1/3 times a month (not seeing each other for 3 months) and then a couple summer vacations seeing each other for nearly a full week! That's strange, but true.
I have sort of surrender here, recognizing we'll never get married, probably never live together. Just the live together idea becomes incompatible - with schedules, specifically mine which stays up until 3-4am and sleeping till noon. I mean I suppose if we had separate bedrooms, perhaps it'd work, but it ALSO means I'm at work until past the time she goes to bed! So I'll take this insanity as mine, my lifestyle isn't compatible with parenthood.
Do I expect to ever find "the right woman" whose life will be compatible with mine, or will be so wonderful that I'll magically or through sheer willpower, reform my ways? Well, doubleful I'm afraid.
So I'm left being a reject, incapable of marriage apparently, easier to confess when I'm not talking to the woman I'd hope to marry, but for this safe little point in time, I'm a loser, best kept at arms length by any sane woman.
Well, I don't know if GOD is going to send me to hell for this failure, (or if I'm sending myself to hell in my weaker moments where I remember how lost I am and how much easier it would be to be virtuous if I was married and could be torturing a woman by my insanity!)
Somewhere I read that men do much better in marriage than women. That is basically men would seem to have more to gain in marriage than women - a good woman will save a man from all his excesses and be his good mommy - always telling him how good he looks - never nagging him to take our the trash or to turn off the football game and help in the kitchen.
A good part of me has much sympathy for women. As much as I'd like a good woman to support me, I'm not 100% convinced her power is greater than my own - for getting me to accept moderation and health over excitement and power - AND I just plain don't know how to play the game fairly. I'll as likely as not end up NOT putting up my fair half of the relationship and she'll feel neglected and unsupported and she'll be right when she leaves me for the milkman or milkwoman as the case may be!
Perhaps it helps to come from a family with divorced parents to be pessimistic about marriage. I certainly have more sympathy for my mom than my dad. I'm no better a "parent" than my dad, on the nurturing side, but at least in little or big ways I can help with money. NOT the worst way to help a single parent, although I don't approve of trying to raise children alone, and basically the same gift my dad offered with child support at least - I mean continued longer than legally needed - through my college graduation. I guess useless men sometimes at least have money.
So back to the emotional infidelity THING, I just sort of wonder what it means in regards to people who never marry? AND if WOMEN actually tend to do BETTER as singles than men, then THEY must know SOMETHING about "emotional health" - something MORE than men who fall down for not being supported by a woman!
I'm sort of being exaggeratingly silly here, but serious in both the differences of men and women and questioning both the place of emotional health in both marriage and outside marriage. The evidence suggests women are MORE CAPABLE with their emotional health IN and OUT of marriage, and conversely men are LESS CAPABLE with their emotional health IN and OUT of marriage.
It's sort of funny as well, since my first girlfriend got married 8 years ago and has STAYED married, while so-implied outside my reality, is now a "swinger" - having physical and emotional relationships besides with her husband, and vice versa I imagine. I mean my overall judgement is that you gotta be pretty emotionally stable to handle that instability of multiplexes, like I imagine a couple of 30 years, after raising children, and wondering what else life is about, along with lower hormones and such, perhaps they'd be able to "explore" outside of marriage, but I don't have much faith in new marriages surviving or thriving like that. That's just my blind fear speaking.
Anyway, I don't think I'd make much of a swinger, not of the physical sort. Even if you get beyond the fears of STDs and well general Psychos, I'm pretty much more mental than physical. I just can't get very excited about sex with a stranger, or except for perhaps imagining it as a 92 second encounter. Half kidding, but basically admitting sex-drives are rather stupid and boring if that's all there is.
No, well, the interesting thing for me in friendship with women is a sort of emotional intimacy, a trust they can understand feelings and whole inner worlds that don't make a lot of sense in the bigger world. NOW according to STANDARD theory, this intimacy is reserved for MARRIAGE partners. WELL, as my mom's oldest sister, and holder of a 50+ year marriage jokes, "Why would a man buy the cow when he can get the milk for FREE?"! HEHEHEHE - you gotta love the older generations for their "wisdom"!
Of course SHE MEANT SEX, but let's get real here! MEN don't need SEX - they GOT HANDS! Men need MOMMA to take care of them, or at least HOT MOMMA!
Now think of the now old-new book "The rules", basically telling women how they gotta play hard to get to KEEP their man. Men like to chase, so you gotta keep running. Something like that.
What's I've heard since is basically it WORKS in a sort of practical sense, but it is not how women WANT to be. They don't want to have to TRICK their men to stay with them. They don't want to have to always be ON GUARD to play a seductrist role, hide everything important to them that might scary away a man.
So my take is that "The rules" are about SECURITY - the game works like this "IF YOU WORK HARD NOW AND PLAY THE GAME, someday you will be safe enough to show your real self and be accepted."
To be fair, I offer no firm judgement about the nature of marriage. My beliefs on marriage are agnostic - about the same as my belief in God. I acknowledge that such a beast might really exist outside of all the theories and advice, but I'm not willing to say I have any secure knowledge what it looks like from the INSIDE.
It is fun and interesting. Science CAN have more to say about love and marriage than GOD perhaps. Science can study love and marriage, the biology of how love works. Certainly we all would like to know more about the patterns of love and how it progresses - just like parents want to know how growing up works. They can anticipate the changes and be more ready for them than if they just let their feelings lead blindly.
Okay, back to "emotional infidelity", what's up with that? The GAME of marriage says that God gave man and women to each other and they are HALF-people alone, and a FULL person together, and "fidelity" is the name for the boundary a married couple makes to separate their inner lives as a couple and the rest of their lives.
There is certainly a practical side to this approach - time is limited, and it takes real work to find a safe emotional world between two people that allows them to "grow" beyond immature ways of relating to the world. There's equally great FEAR in facing our uglier sides that come out when we're close to someone, and some incentive to jump away back to a safer surface world where our demons can be kept hidden.
Anyway, I don't deny the "laws of marriage", at least I don't have the experience to judge from the inside. I contemplate that there's different mythlogical structures that perform the function that traditionally understood marriage offers to many people.
So back to being a lost single man. It is interesting since I know I project a sense of "emotional depth" to women. I sort of imagine visiting a woman like visiting a zoo in Africa. I know there's this huge expansive wilderness and jungle of complexity, but I just hang out at the zoo, sometimes crossing into the ecoreigions for the animals, but knowing I can quickly run back to the gate if things get scary. It's a controlled experiment.
Now I can imagine if I got married, I'd go deeper into the emotional jungle, but overall, NO I think not. I'll stick with the zoo, married or not. Let the women be the explorers. Let THEM tell me what they find, but I'll just have to listen.
Now given that silly analogy, first it should be clear - if marriage IS the jungle, then any marriage with me will NOT be BOTH of us entering. SHE will be married to me, while I am merely dependent upon her work in the marriage.
Maybe some marriages can work well like that - maybe a brave woman can finally lead the reluctant husband into the wilderness and they can build their home there. Maybe someday it'll be more than the "woman's home", and the man will build something there too. Maybe at least a husband who appreciates the wilderness can be of value to the brave wife explorer.
Well, a part of me sort of thinks this gets to be somewhat limiting. Of course it is limiting... the RULES say if you suffer now and follow the rules SOMDAY you may be rewarded. I make fun, but I don't disagree - boundaries are good - creating a safe container to grow past our dark corners and shame and guilt and fear, and all that naked eden stuff. I BELIEVE there is need for secrets - to hold the uncertainty.
LET me quickly offer a different thought. Women TALK TALK TALK. They will tell the SAME story ten times at least if it is important to them and they are still trying to figure it out. Maybe "figure it out" is a male perspective, but something like that. ANYWAY, there is the idea of SECRETS in marriage - things one partner won't share and the other will share. That's more fair, but there's a difference, and women are more trying to sort out their emotions. I've seen it, and in my utterly useless attempts myself, I know it is often guess work, and as often as not WRONG on a first pass. Perhaps women talking to women find a way to talk and listen in a way that helps in this sorting process. On a different side a husband might feel exposed if his wife is chatting casually about their inner relationships, afraid what people think of him, knowing his wife sees parts of him he doesn't otherwise show. A husband with his limited emotional understanding of his own insecurity will grab the first response he knows - and if he's clever he'll hide his fear under a big word - like fidelity - protecting the boundaries of their relationship. He'll DEMAND his wife refrain from sharing anything to anyone else, first about their relationship, or lack there of, and second about anything that HE can't share in. And in the process the promise of marriage is reduced to the least common demoninator of both people.
I fully accept the situation can reverse, and maybe it's extroversion/introversion even? A introverted wife can equally feel jealous of a husband's freedom to reach out to others while she suffers in silence.
Well, I must end, but overall my thoughts are:
(1) Fidelity is a story, a game, an illusion
(2) Stories, games, and illusions are important to help us learn.
That's not so bad. Right?
Well, I admit, I don't want to be one of those emotionally cripple men who can't survive without constant care of a good woman. I admit that I am too easily sustained these days by the magic of learning and achievement, and wonder. I accept the world may yet become stale, and I'll regret I didn't spend more time in the jungles of a beautiful wild woman who will teach me her secrets. heheheheh....
I don't like that I may be 100% wrong in everything. I'm just not convinced yet.
http://love.ivillage.com/lnsproblems/lnscheating/0,,fmf6-p,00.html
OH, darn. It's not a fashion, it's a SIN - it's putting your spouse second in your life and looking for the excitement of the affair with the opposite sex without actually getting any sex out of the arrangement?
Hmmmm... wait, I'm not married! Well, I do have a sort of girlfriend, or to say I have a theoretical relationship with a woman, divorced, with 3 kids and we see each other on average about twice a month, or between an average of 1/3 times a month (not seeing each other for 3 months) and then a couple summer vacations seeing each other for nearly a full week! That's strange, but true.
I have sort of surrender here, recognizing we'll never get married, probably never live together. Just the live together idea becomes incompatible - with schedules, specifically mine which stays up until 3-4am and sleeping till noon. I mean I suppose if we had separate bedrooms, perhaps it'd work, but it ALSO means I'm at work until past the time she goes to bed! So I'll take this insanity as mine, my lifestyle isn't compatible with parenthood.
Do I expect to ever find "the right woman" whose life will be compatible with mine, or will be so wonderful that I'll magically or through sheer willpower, reform my ways? Well, doubleful I'm afraid.
So I'm left being a reject, incapable of marriage apparently, easier to confess when I'm not talking to the woman I'd hope to marry, but for this safe little point in time, I'm a loser, best kept at arms length by any sane woman.
Well, I don't know if GOD is going to send me to hell for this failure, (or if I'm sending myself to hell in my weaker moments where I remember how lost I am and how much easier it would be to be virtuous if I was married and could be torturing a woman by my insanity!)
Somewhere I read that men do much better in marriage than women. That is basically men would seem to have more to gain in marriage than women - a good woman will save a man from all his excesses and be his good mommy - always telling him how good he looks - never nagging him to take our the trash or to turn off the football game and help in the kitchen.
A good part of me has much sympathy for women. As much as I'd like a good woman to support me, I'm not 100% convinced her power is greater than my own - for getting me to accept moderation and health over excitement and power - AND I just plain don't know how to play the game fairly. I'll as likely as not end up NOT putting up my fair half of the relationship and she'll feel neglected and unsupported and she'll be right when she leaves me for the milkman or milkwoman as the case may be!
Perhaps it helps to come from a family with divorced parents to be pessimistic about marriage. I certainly have more sympathy for my mom than my dad. I'm no better a "parent" than my dad, on the nurturing side, but at least in little or big ways I can help with money. NOT the worst way to help a single parent, although I don't approve of trying to raise children alone, and basically the same gift my dad offered with child support at least - I mean continued longer than legally needed - through my college graduation. I guess useless men sometimes at least have money.
So back to the emotional infidelity THING, I just sort of wonder what it means in regards to people who never marry? AND if WOMEN actually tend to do BETTER as singles than men, then THEY must know SOMETHING about "emotional health" - something MORE than men who fall down for not being supported by a woman!
I'm sort of being exaggeratingly silly here, but serious in both the differences of men and women and questioning both the place of emotional health in both marriage and outside marriage. The evidence suggests women are MORE CAPABLE with their emotional health IN and OUT of marriage, and conversely men are LESS CAPABLE with their emotional health IN and OUT of marriage.
It's sort of funny as well, since my first girlfriend got married 8 years ago and has STAYED married, while so-implied outside my reality, is now a "swinger" - having physical and emotional relationships besides with her husband, and vice versa I imagine. I mean my overall judgement is that you gotta be pretty emotionally stable to handle that instability of multiplexes, like I imagine a couple of 30 years, after raising children, and wondering what else life is about, along with lower hormones and such, perhaps they'd be able to "explore" outside of marriage, but I don't have much faith in new marriages surviving or thriving like that. That's just my blind fear speaking.
Anyway, I don't think I'd make much of a swinger, not of the physical sort. Even if you get beyond the fears of STDs and well general Psychos, I'm pretty much more mental than physical. I just can't get very excited about sex with a stranger, or except for perhaps imagining it as a 92 second encounter. Half kidding, but basically admitting sex-drives are rather stupid and boring if that's all there is.
No, well, the interesting thing for me in friendship with women is a sort of emotional intimacy, a trust they can understand feelings and whole inner worlds that don't make a lot of sense in the bigger world. NOW according to STANDARD theory, this intimacy is reserved for MARRIAGE partners. WELL, as my mom's oldest sister, and holder of a 50+ year marriage jokes, "Why would a man buy the cow when he can get the milk for FREE?"! HEHEHEHE - you gotta love the older generations for their "wisdom"!
Of course SHE MEANT SEX, but let's get real here! MEN don't need SEX - they GOT HANDS! Men need MOMMA to take care of them, or at least HOT MOMMA!
Now think of the now old-new book "The rules", basically telling women how they gotta play hard to get to KEEP their man. Men like to chase, so you gotta keep running. Something like that.
What's I've heard since is basically it WORKS in a sort of practical sense, but it is not how women WANT to be. They don't want to have to TRICK their men to stay with them. They don't want to have to always be ON GUARD to play a seductrist role, hide everything important to them that might scary away a man.
So my take is that "The rules" are about SECURITY - the game works like this "IF YOU WORK HARD NOW AND PLAY THE GAME, someday you will be safe enough to show your real self and be accepted."
To be fair, I offer no firm judgement about the nature of marriage. My beliefs on marriage are agnostic - about the same as my belief in God. I acknowledge that such a beast might really exist outside of all the theories and advice, but I'm not willing to say I have any secure knowledge what it looks like from the INSIDE.
It is fun and interesting. Science CAN have more to say about love and marriage than GOD perhaps. Science can study love and marriage, the biology of how love works. Certainly we all would like to know more about the patterns of love and how it progresses - just like parents want to know how growing up works. They can anticipate the changes and be more ready for them than if they just let their feelings lead blindly.
Okay, back to "emotional infidelity", what's up with that? The GAME of marriage says that God gave man and women to each other and they are HALF-people alone, and a FULL person together, and "fidelity" is the name for the boundary a married couple makes to separate their inner lives as a couple and the rest of their lives.
There is certainly a practical side to this approach - time is limited, and it takes real work to find a safe emotional world between two people that allows them to "grow" beyond immature ways of relating to the world. There's equally great FEAR in facing our uglier sides that come out when we're close to someone, and some incentive to jump away back to a safer surface world where our demons can be kept hidden.
Anyway, I don't deny the "laws of marriage", at least I don't have the experience to judge from the inside. I contemplate that there's different mythlogical structures that perform the function that traditionally understood marriage offers to many people.
So back to being a lost single man. It is interesting since I know I project a sense of "emotional depth" to women. I sort of imagine visiting a woman like visiting a zoo in Africa. I know there's this huge expansive wilderness and jungle of complexity, but I just hang out at the zoo, sometimes crossing into the ecoreigions for the animals, but knowing I can quickly run back to the gate if things get scary. It's a controlled experiment.
Now I can imagine if I got married, I'd go deeper into the emotional jungle, but overall, NO I think not. I'll stick with the zoo, married or not. Let the women be the explorers. Let THEM tell me what they find, but I'll just have to listen.
Now given that silly analogy, first it should be clear - if marriage IS the jungle, then any marriage with me will NOT be BOTH of us entering. SHE will be married to me, while I am merely dependent upon her work in the marriage.
Maybe some marriages can work well like that - maybe a brave woman can finally lead the reluctant husband into the wilderness and they can build their home there. Maybe someday it'll be more than the "woman's home", and the man will build something there too. Maybe at least a husband who appreciates the wilderness can be of value to the brave wife explorer.
Well, a part of me sort of thinks this gets to be somewhat limiting. Of course it is limiting... the RULES say if you suffer now and follow the rules SOMDAY you may be rewarded. I make fun, but I don't disagree - boundaries are good - creating a safe container to grow past our dark corners and shame and guilt and fear, and all that naked eden stuff. I BELIEVE there is need for secrets - to hold the uncertainty.
LET me quickly offer a different thought. Women TALK TALK TALK. They will tell the SAME story ten times at least if it is important to them and they are still trying to figure it out. Maybe "figure it out" is a male perspective, but something like that. ANYWAY, there is the idea of SECRETS in marriage - things one partner won't share and the other will share. That's more fair, but there's a difference, and women are more trying to sort out their emotions. I've seen it, and in my utterly useless attempts myself, I know it is often guess work, and as often as not WRONG on a first pass. Perhaps women talking to women find a way to talk and listen in a way that helps in this sorting process. On a different side a husband might feel exposed if his wife is chatting casually about their inner relationships, afraid what people think of him, knowing his wife sees parts of him he doesn't otherwise show. A husband with his limited emotional understanding of his own insecurity will grab the first response he knows - and if he's clever he'll hide his fear under a big word - like fidelity - protecting the boundaries of their relationship. He'll DEMAND his wife refrain from sharing anything to anyone else, first about their relationship, or lack there of, and second about anything that HE can't share in. And in the process the promise of marriage is reduced to the least common demoninator of both people.
I fully accept the situation can reverse, and maybe it's extroversion/introversion even? A introverted wife can equally feel jealous of a husband's freedom to reach out to others while she suffers in silence.
Well, I must end, but overall my thoughts are:
(1) Fidelity is a story, a game, an illusion
(2) Stories, games, and illusions are important to help us learn.
That's not so bad. Right?
Well, I admit, I don't want to be one of those emotionally cripple men who can't survive without constant care of a good woman. I admit that I am too easily sustained these days by the magic of learning and achievement, and wonder. I accept the world may yet become stale, and I'll regret I didn't spend more time in the jungles of a beautiful wild woman who will teach me her secrets. heheheheh....
I don't like that I may be 100% wrong in everything. I'm just not convinced yet.
posted by Ares Olympus at 5:55 PM
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