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.
PaperclipPerfector
12hr ago
(text post)
277 thread views
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 girls 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.
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”.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link