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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1529 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 26, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This is neither fun nor necessarily limited to Friday, but I wanted to add something to this conversation, lest I be perceived as the resident apologist for libertinism and infidelity.

I met my wife when I was 32 years old. She was young then—we both were—we had an odd courtship which had pauses, hiccups, and what threatened to be an end, but she finally moved in with me, we cohabitated for about three years, moved to the US where we stayed with my family for about 6 months, and eventually wed there officially. We had a Hawaii wedding a year later (She is Japanese, after all.)

My wife and children are to me the most precious part of my life. Without them, I cannot imagine myself. Sometimes when I am alone in the house (as I am right now) I reflect on how fortunate I have been, and how fragile it all is.

I have a folder on my computer titled simply “remember” in which I’ve added 20 or 30 old potato photos taken with ancient phones, of my wife in her younger days—taking naps, at a pub eating a fish eye, in a hammock on one jaunt we took to a large park, at Santa Monica beach, and on and on. I keep this folder so that I can focus my attention laser-like on the her of yesteryear, the girl who loved me (and you always know, gentlemen, when a girl loves you, or likes you, or fancies you. It isn’t hard to know when it happens, though the signals may seem strange and unfamiliar to those who’ve never noticed them.) She does not always love me the same way now. We’ve been married now 21 years. That’s not as long as some, but it’s long enough that we’ve had our share of issues.

Why do I write this? Because I might not have the perfect marriage of my own parents (my father told my mother he loved her at least once pretty much every day I can remember) but I do have a marriage, a good one, one that I would not trade for all the single-man-getting-laid years you could throw at me. In the words of Jordan Peterson: I will never leave her, ever. And, also, I’ve been through the wringer with enough young beautiful women who would sidetrack me to realize that Mike Pence was not as far off as some would have it: Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating. The trick is to stay the hell away from those circumstances. Many, many close calls. In a way I feel fortunate to have been a rake earlier in life. Out of my system, as it were. More or less.

So why the apologist for cheating? Because I live here, in a culture where the norms are different, where one can be completely faithful to societal and even religious expectations and still bang a callgirl on a Tuesday afternoon after seminar. It’s a different world. I will never be used to it, and only understand through a glass darkly. The Harlot's cry from Street to Street may weave old England’s winding sheet, but I am not convinced it will do the same to Japan. At least not yet.

Would I pass @2rafa’s sniff test? Well at one point I would have, but in those days I was a beardless boy, didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, and was completely blinded by a singular obsession with my beloved. (Which is as it should be, which is what I would have all men be in that stage.) Time has hardened me (that is not a pun. Well it is. And isn’t.)

My wife’s birthday is in December. The day she received her gift, I went to the gym and when I returned our sons were upstairs and she beckoned me over saying we needed to talk. I sat down, and she told me that if I had a girlfriend I needed to end it. Baffled, I asked her what she was talking about. Apparently she had seen a receipt for a fairly expensive gift for a woman and that had not been her birthday present. She assumed I was buying for my mistress. Because? She’s Japanese. This is what happens. What are we in Love, Actually?

The receipt was for her Christmas gift, still hidden in our tatami room closet, and I made the decision that confessing this was probably more helpful than keeping the surprise. I suggested she could go look if she liked. She wept, hugged me, then pulled away and regained her Japanese composure. I was amused, but I loved her more at that moment than I could remember in years, simply because I had a glimpse of the girl who didn’t daily complain that I did xyz incorrectly. Have I told you that my wife is beautiful? She is. Unimaginably. She could have been a model, but thank God she never was.

Who was it, @oats_son, who complained about revealing personal shit online? He’s probably right. I don't cheat. But the world is big, more things in this world than dreamt of your philosophy, if I may mangle Shakespeare.

Ayo you're probably too classy a guy to know this, but if you have a Japanese wife you're technically nobility among weebs. Not the modern bullshit kind, either, but more like the awesome Braveheart kind. Like I know you don't want to associate with the peasants, but if you happen to see a kid in a Naruto shirt, you can slap him in the mouth and take his wallet and legally he can't do shit.

A superpower I'll try to wield responsibly

Apparently she had seen a receipt for a fairly expensive gift for a woman and that had not been her birthday present. She assumed I was buying for my mistress. Because? She’s Japanese.

I keep hearing online about Japan's cheating culture; is it true?

The receipt was for her Christmas gift, still hidden in our tatami room closet, and I made the decision that confessing this was probably more helpful than keeping the surprise.

You had the opportunity to do the funniest thing (rent-a-girlfriend and try to keep the charade going until the 25th).

is it true?

I wouldn't want to generalize but I'd suggest it is not a complete myth. Assumptions can be made simply from the number of entertainment districts (in Kitashinchi alone there are probably a hundred or more hostess clubs and Kitashinchi is one small area of Osaka) and call girl services (harder to count but a simple search online for so-called 'delivery health' will find many, many shops, with as many girls employed), to say nothing of the more hidden places such as soaplands (I associate these with the truly depraved), image clubs, girl's bars, deai sites, and all the other categories I am too naive to even know exist.

The trick of course is that the true sin is to open the barn door. It's in a way like 和. Like Fight Club. The ultimate misstep is to talk about it. It's the water trade (水商売), fuzoku (風俗, which actually means public morals but is used for prostitution), what they used to call the floating world (浮世, but this is a very very old term.)

Note that all of these are so-called pay-for-play, with varying degrees of actual intimacy--hostess clubs, for example, might have regulars, and not involve sex (but might.) More traditional affairs where one is cheating with the secretary are I would imagine more rare, if simply because the legal repercussions would be extreme. A wife can sue the mistress into oblivion--notably, even if she does not divorce the husband. The catch is that if it's a business relationship, that (the chance to sue for compensation) all goes out the window because it is not considered an emotional betrayal. Or something .

An effortpost on all of this would be interesting to write, but I don't know if I want to be known as the guy who writes about Japanese prostitution.

An effortpost on all of this would be interesting to write, but I don't know if I want to be known as the guy who writes about Japanese prostitution.

My understanding is that 90%+ of this world is not open to foreigners, and even less if you don't speak Japanese, so I would think you could do so without undue suspicion.

Revealing personal shit online is not what I was complaining about. I've revealed tons of personal shit myself. My complaint was more that self_made_human had just made an absolute monster of a relationship post, and then not a week later giving a play-by-play of a hot date that he was smitten by, in pretty excruciating detail from what I could tell. If I had a great night with someone, I'm not going to go spend an hour typing up my best attempt to tell everyone in the world about it. On the other hand, I like this post and I feel like I have learned something new from it, though I disagree with the Japanese way of handling marriages.

And, also, I’ve been through the wringer with enough young beautiful women who would sidetrack me to realize that Mike Pence was not as far off as some would have it: Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating.

I've become very strict on the Pence Rule lately. A friend of mine had a business trip, big conference kind of deal, and a bunch of people on the trip made plans to go to a local bar. Well my friend shows up and everyone bailed except him and a girl who was a friend/plus-one of one of the other women on the trip. Well, they disappear, no one can get a hold of them all night, or the next morning, and everyone figures they have hooked up. Which rather upsets his wife, who is also on the trip.

My friend woke up the next morning on a bare mattress on the floor of a flophouse apartment two hours from his hotel, with no memory of anything after the first beer, and no wallet or phone, having to find his way back to the hotel on the kindness of strangers in a bad part of a town he's not from. He thinks he was drugged, while I love him I'm always skeptical of Mickey Finn Cocktail stories as there's almost no confirmed cases and it's typically just too much alcohol. Regardless of how it happened, I don't think it was intentional to get that fucked up. But the circumstances made it all so damaging: he disappeared last seen in the company of a young woman.

I always avoided situations where I was alone with a woman. But I think the utility of the rule stretches way past just what you might do, but to all the strange unlikely occurrences that might happen to you and leave you with a lot of 'splainin to do.

I mean, is there any evidence that his narrative is true and not ass covering?

I've seen plenty of people engage in absolute nonsense to put a veil of plausible deniability over "we didn't sleep together."

I've known him since we were literal children, and frankly in our lives we've done worse things together, so I trust him when he tells me this, if he had cheated he'd tell me knowing I'd do my best to help him and I'd never tell another soul and I'd hold the line to his boss and his wife. I'm skeptical of the "I only had one beer and the bartender slipped me a mickey Finn" part of the story, but not of the "I didn't cheat on my wife" part.

I realize he's not your friend and hence the story lacks that element for you, but I don't really have a way to fix that.

Fair enough!

Couldn't you just avoid that by, you know, not drinking? I'm a pretty big fan of that. Alcohol just makes people act like idiots, and being a teetotaler seems to me like a much smaller imposition than never being alone with a woman who is not your girlfriend/wife/family.

-- The vast majority of men throughout European history would disagree with you that drinking is less important than avoiding loose women.

-- Drinking was the problem in this case, but it is far from the only unlikely occurrence that can put you in a bad situation.

-- You say alcohol causes people to act like idiots. I say there are many people who need to act like idiots a little more often.

This is why I buy gifts for my wife from my personal slush fund.

I did! Alas, they still gave me a receipt.

For what it's worth, I didn't perceive you as trying to do apologetics for infidelity (let alone that you were cheating on your wife yourself). I took it as you offering up the perspective that Japanese culture has (one that most people here wouldn't know about), with perhaps a light dose of devil's advocate for the sake of an interesting discussion about what is right or wrong.

Beautiful story thanks. Also we watched love actually on Christmas Eve again and wow I had forgotten how messed up it is. Terrible movie.

Terrible movie

Seriously, it's like such a "classic" in that it's referenced all the time in pop culture, but it's actually, so bad

And yet: Beautiful people in a simple storyline is something apparently beyond the ability of Hollywood to produce nowadays.

Ha, my wife and I used to watch that every year and I still enjoy it. Pretty messed up from a certain perspective but I find so are many things I enjoy.

Adorable story, but I have to say, I find it a bit odd that your wife found a receipt for an expensive woman's gift and her mind immediately went to "it's for his mistress" rather than "it's a gift for me, because Christmas is right around the corner".

My wife's assumption in the past has been "did someone steal access to our credit card?" but neither one of us is known for extravagant purchases (and sometimes things show up weirdly on the credit card statement...)

That would have been the preferred reaction, yes. There is another story there that may answer you but I'll save that one for some other occasion.

Quite a sweet story, Love Actually indeed (it’s interesting that there isn’t a comma in the actual movie, maybe because both “love, actually, is all around us” and “love actually is all around us” are grammatically correct? I’m no English lecturer).

Anybody is capable of cheating in the right circumstances, and so the first duty of the maritally faithful is to avoid those situations. But just like the propensity to get drunk various from person to person, with people who can have have four or five drinks and cut themselves off without a second thought and people who cannot have a sip of alcohol without a one hundred percent chance of blacking out, propensity to cheat varies too, especially in middle ground situations that are neither “my spouse is the only non-geriatric adult of the opposite sex I interact with in any real capacity, ever” nor “I regularly get drunk and do MDMA with a group of hot beautiful people I’m attracted to who all want to have sex with me”.

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