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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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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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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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 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.
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.
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.
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