This man has a problem. Actually, he has several problems — he’s just resigned from the office of the governor of New York, he’s facing an FBI probe, and his wife is well and truly pissed off at him. But really, those aren’t his problems; they’re merely the consequence of his real problem.
As you’re no doubt aware unless you live under a rock or in Kansas City, this man is in a lot of trouble. He’s in a lot of trouble for a very simple reason: he had sex with this woman.
Now, I already know what you’re thinking. “How can the person that someone has sex with possibly have any bearing on his ability to govern the state? What, did she break into his office and steal government funds? Was she engaged in industrial espionage for a shadowy group of French business executives? What difference can it possibly make?”
And I agree with you. I won’t pretend to understand our cultural obsession with the penises of elected government officials; it’s a little weird, and a little unhealthy, and a little stupid.
That’s not the problem, though.
The woman into which Governor Spitzer inserted his member is, or rather was, a very high-priced call girl, which is the euphemism we use for prostitutes who make more than a certain amount of money. The term “prostitute” carries to our sexually repressed, Puritanical ears certain…unsavory connotations, but fortunately, as with all things American, a sufficient application of money is often effective at removing the stain. Hence, a person who charges $100 for sex is a prostitute, whereas a person who charges $4,500 an hour for sex, as Ms. Dupre is alleged to have done, is a “call girl.”
Now, I don’t know about you, Gentle Reader, but when I hear of folks making $4,500 an hour for having sex, all I can think is that I’m in the wrong goddamn business. And hey, if Ms. Dupre can make that kind of money without even getting out of bed, more power to her, says I. I frankly have no interest in the adventures of a politician’s penis, nor in the amount of money those adventures cost. Some people spend their mad money on skiing, some folks buy $1,200 titanium golf clubs…hell, if I were to trade money for recreation, and those were my choices, you could bet I wouldn’t be buying the golf clubs. Stupid goddamn sport anyway…but I digress.
Now, it appears that Mr. Spitzer may have spent official State of New York funds on doing the horizontal mambo with Ms. Dupre, and engaged in some complicated financial handwaving to conceal that. Which is a problem; in fact, I believe there are even words for that sort of behavior. “Fraud,” for one. And “corruption,” that’s a good word. “Embezzlement,” too.
That’s still not the problem, though.
As news of this whole penis-related affair broke, the predicable wailing in the media began. How can this happen?” some people asked. (Well, it’s really quite simple. You take some money, you give it to a person-I’m told it’s customary to leave it on the dresser–and in return, that person engages in sexual intercourse with you.) “Who would think that a powerful political figure would do such a thing?” other people–presumably, people who are not students of history–asked.
Magazines ran articles about how Men Are Like That, and Our Biology Makes Men Cheat And Women Fidelitous…because there’s nothing we like more than pop junk science that affirms cultural norms. Religious leaders wailed about The Death of Public Morality (from the smell of the corpse, I think it’s probably been dead for about as long as we’ve walked upright on three legs…but again, I digress).
Some folks wondered Why A Powerful And Successful Man Would Need a Prostitute, which betrays a profound lack of insight into the nature of power. A man in Mr. Spitzer’s position doesn’t pay for sex because he can’t get his dick wet any other way; he pays for sex because his money is an extension of his power. By exchanging money for sex, the way he wants it, on his terms, when he wants it, with the implied understanding that the person to whom he is giving this money is going to go away when it’s over, he is exerting power over the world around him; he can call up sex, and dictate its terms, at any time he pleases.
Now, far be it from me to cast any negative words on the notion of mixing power and sex; far from it. I’m a big fan of the idea of sex as an expression of power, and indeed spent about two hours last night expressing sexual power with dayo, a process that involved two vibrators, sixteen feet of rubber tubing, and a great deal of screaming. (Okay, so I lied about the rubber tubing, and once again, I digress.)
I personally don’t project power by means of money, largely because…err, I haven’t got enough money to make a very compelling statement. “Drop your pants and I’ll give you a dollar” doesn’t really do it, you know? Also, though, because I really dont like that particular expression of power; the business of sex tends to commodify the folks involved, and my partners are not interchangeable. I’m not keen on the implicit “go away without a fuss after we’re done” part of the equation.
That’s not the problem either.
The problem is basic. In the transcripts that came out on the news after the state of Mr. Spitzer’s penis was uncovered, it was claimed that he had a fondness for asking those people with whom he exchanged sex for money to do unusual things, or even “dangerous” things. Now, I have no idea what that means, and the folks who do know aren’t telling. I’ve probably got a wildly miscalibrated scale for evaluating unusual and dangerous things in bed; when I think “unusual and dangerous,” things like fire, knives, and trying to tell one of my sweeties how to live her life spring to mind. For other folk, maybe it’s more a question of letting her be on top without a condom, I dunno.
But anyway, that’s getting close to the problem. Forget issues of projecting power through money; forget issues of the thrill of getting some on the sly. If it’s “unusual and dangerous” our boy Eliot wanted, one might reasonably surmise he wasn’t getting it at home.
Which probably means he wasn’t asking for it at home. In fact, it would surprise me not one whit to learn that if his wife ever discovered the whatever-it-is that Mr. Spitzer is into, she’d be startled, shocked, stunned, surprised, and other words beginning with the letter “s”. My hunch? Eliot’s been kinked for quite some time, and his wife of twenty years now (anyone want to take any bets on the two of them hitting twenty-one?) doesn’t know a goddamn thing about him.
So when faced with an urge for the unusual and dangerous, he hired a stand-in.
It’s hard to know where to start with this. Actually, no, I take that back. It’s easy to know where to start with this. Let’s start with how goddamn fucking ridiculous it is to spend two decades, or more than one-quarter of one’s normal life expectancy, with a person that you don’t even talk to about yourself. Seriously. What do these two talk about, the weather? Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, this isn’t rocket science. You want to get down and get jiggy with the trapeze and the Day-Glow Silly String, say so! Partnerships are built on communication and trust, you know?
I have conversations–my God, do I have conversations–with folks all over the place about this. I get emails from my Web site, I see folks posting in net forums and on mailing lists: “I know communication is important, but…”
There’s no “but.” The correct way to punctuate the phrase “I know communication is important” is with a period at the end. That’s it. No fucking “but.” The “but” that inevidably follows always ends up boiling down to “but it feels awkward to expose myself to my partner and I’m scared of feeling awkward” or “but what if my partner says no” or “but what if rabid shapeshifting werewolf-aliens from the planet Zolog-9 come and carry us away for unspeakable experiments aboard the mothership” or some other real-seeming but ultimately kind of silly thing that’s a damn stupid reason to undermine and corrode the very foundation of a romantic relationship.
There’s also the little niggling subtext: “Of course I wouldn’t want to tell my partner about it, becausewhat if she thinks poorly of me? But it’s cool to tell a prostit–err, call girl, ’cause, y’know, it doesn’t matter what they think.” And that’s a little creepy, but kinda beside the point.
Now, there’s a universal rule of life that I always tell folks: You can’t reasonably expect to get what you want if you don’t ask for what you want. Clearly, I’m wrong; you can’t reasonably expect to get what you want if you don’t ask for what you want or you don’t have a pile of money you can use to buy what you want from someone whose opinion on the subject doesn’t matter to you, more like. But that’s beside the point, too. The truth is, that’s the real issue at work here. Mr. Spitzer went elsewhere–with the taxpayers’ money, Eliot, you naughty boy–quite likely because he couldn’t find the guts to ask for what he wanted from the one person who had pledged her love and commitment to him.
And that’s pretty damn stupid, if you ask me. Which, I realize, nobody has, but still.
At least we can trust American pop culture to get it right. In all the media circus surrounding this whole sad tale of a powerful political figure’s penis, only VH-1’s coverage has got it right:
Politicians are people too… I wish the public would let it go… they are people too…
Politicians are people too… I wish the public would let it go… they are people too…
I wouldn’t assume his wife didn’t know about his “dangerous” desires. When I first saw her standing beside him when he apologized I figured that he had a kink that she wasn’t gonna supply and “let” him seek that elsewhere, which is why she was willing to stand by him in humiliation. Likely, we’ll never know which of us is correct.
The other thing I thought is that he likes to do it without a condom. Lots of pros would define that as unsafe behavior.
As a pro-domme who sees folks (mostly men) to satisfy their dangerous desires I can tell you that lots of them HAVE tried to talk to their partners about it. It often didn’t go well, with the best case scenario being their partners gave it a try for a bit, didn’t like it, then made them feel bad for wanting it in the first place.
I can tell you that lots of them HAVE tried to talk to their partners about it. It often didn’t go well
Yes, I was going to suggest that possibility too. Maybe Eliot didn’t bring his kink up with his wife, but maybe he did, and she gave him a big old thumbs-down.
Her standing there may have more to do with minimizing the privacy invasion she’d likely experience. If she wasn’t there, the press would ask why. They’d hound her to find out why. They’d ask her as she’s taking the kids to school or whatever. Better she’s up there as the stoic wife and then kicks him in the naught bits when the camera lights are off.
The question I have about situations like that is, if two people are sexually incompatible, is this something they realized before they were married? Or did they simply accept that things would magically work themselves out afterward?
I also kind of have to wonder at some point if there wasn’t some self-deception or going on. Well, I have fantasies about being tied up, but thats no big deal, it doesn’t really matter to me,” that kind of thing. Or possibly a bit of “nobody will ever get his part of me, and nobody will ever love me, so I best grab the first partner who’s willing to put up with me, even if we’re not sexually compatible.”
And I do realize that people can and do change over time, but I also think that a good relationship should be resilient enough to accommodate this. It seems to me from looking at some of the relationships I’ve seen, including my parents’, that folks can get so attached to the way they think a relationship “ought” to be that they seem not to notice that the relationship isn’t actually working for the folks involved.
I wouldn’t assume his wife didn’t know about his “dangerous” desires. When I first saw her standing beside him when he apologized I figured that he had a kink that she wasn’t gonna supply and “let” him seek that elsewhere, which is why she was willing to stand by him in humiliation. Likely, we’ll never know which of us is correct.
The other thing I thought is that he likes to do it without a condom. Lots of pros would define that as unsafe behavior.
As a pro-domme who sees folks (mostly men) to satisfy their dangerous desires I can tell you that lots of them HAVE tried to talk to their partners about it. It often didn’t go well, with the best case scenario being their partners gave it a try for a bit, didn’t like it, then made them feel bad for wanting it in the first place.
I hope and dream of the day when a politician gets busted for using government money on a hooker and people are more concerned about the government money than the hooker.
Yeah. You know, that’s the thought I had too. Who cares what he’s doing with the money? The only thing that’s important here is that he’s doing it with public funds, right?
I hope and dream of the day when a politician gets busted for using government money on a hooker and people are more concerned about the government money than the hooker.
I can tell you that lots of them HAVE tried to talk to their partners about it. It often didn’t go well
Yes, I was going to suggest that possibility too. Maybe Eliot didn’t bring his kink up with his wife, but maybe he did, and she gave him a big old thumbs-down.
Hmmm, I thought “call girl” meant she was hired via telephone service, as opposed to street-walkers or brothel employees (is there a specific term for a prostitute who works in a brothel?).
You know, I hadn’t heard “call girl” used in that context, so I consulted the Oracle at Google to see what it had to say.
A search for “define:call girl” in Google produces three definitions. The first is “A high-priced prostitute who usually works outcall from a home or office as opposed to getting customers on the street or at a brothel,” which makes it seem that “high priced” is the defining characteristic (such a person “usually” works outcall, suggesting that this is not always the case).
The second definition is “a female prostitute who can be hired by telephone,” which doesn’t mention price but seems to favor the ability to call such a person as a defining characteristic.
The third definition is from Wikipedia (take it for what it’s worth) and says ” call girl or escort is a sex worker who (unlike a street walker or prostitute) is not visible to the general public. Nor does she usually belong to an institution like a brothel. One must summon her, usually by calling a telephone number–hence the name call girl.” This definition makes the ability to call such a person the defining characteristic.
Whenever the Oracle at Google is confused on an issue, I think it’s safe to say the issue is beyond the knowing of mere mortals. 🙂
Hmmm, I thought “call girl” meant she was hired via telephone service, as opposed to street-walkers or brothel employees (is there a specific term for a prostitute who works in a brothel?).
hmmm the “dangerous” activity he wanted to partake in, from what I heard, was that he didn’t want to use a condom.
hmmm the “dangerous” activity he wanted to partake in, from what I heard, was that he didn’t want to use a condom.
I wonder what kind of things she would let him do to her or did to him for $4500 per hour? Maybe I don’t want to know.
I think his wife has known about his use of prostitutes for a while. I think she puts up with it for whatever reasons.
I wonder what kind of things she would let him do to her or did to him for $4500 per hour? Maybe I don’t want to know.
I think his wife has known about his use of prostitutes for a while. I think she puts up with it for whatever reasons.
I see and agree with your point, but I see two other problems that have nothing to do with his relationship with his wife.
1. The man made his career by going after prostitution.
2. Prostitution is illegal in the first place.
If there was no 2, there would be no 1, and perhaps, no one would care if he had ‘cheated’ (which we don’t know for sure) on his wife with a *gasp* prostitute.
That’s how I felt too
His use of public funds and the fact he made a career out of ‘cleaning up’ prostitution are reasons enough for me to want to see him forced out of office. And I think both are indicators of serious problems with society as well.
But I do think
I see and agree with your point, but I see two other problems that have nothing to do with his relationship with his wife.
1. The man made his career by going after prostitution.
2. Prostitution is illegal in the first place.
If there was no 2, there would be no 1, and perhaps, no one would care if he had ‘cheated’ (which we don’t know for sure) on his wife with a *gasp* prostitute.
Now here I thought the problem was that he had passed some tough anti-prostitution laws and then was hypocritically paying a prostitute for sex. But yeah, I think what you’ve got here is more of a root cause.
However, I still think the hypocrisy is the only good reason to force him out of office.
Well, I’ll go for the “misappropriation of public funds” as a god reason also. (Eliot, you naughty boy!)
I dunno. I haven’t followed the story closely, but I’d heard that he *hadn’t* misappropriated public funds. If he has, that’s a good reason too.
According to an article in the NY Times (registration required), Federal prosecutors suspect he has diverted public funds to pay for at least three of his sessions, and they have brought in forensic accountants to audit his books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/nyregion/14spitzer.html?ex=1363147200&en=633fbef1a5833651&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Registration-free link courtesy of the lovely folks at the New York Times Link Generator:
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink
Now here I thought the problem was that he had passed some tough anti-prostitution laws and then was hypocritically paying a prostitute for sex. But yeah, I think what you’ve got here is more of a root cause.
However, I still think the hypocrisy is the only good reason to force him out of office.
Actually it IS rocket science
“Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, this isn’t rocket science.” …”ultimately kind of silly thing that’s a damn stupid reason to undermine and corrode the very foundation of a romantic relationship.”
Yep. Agree.
As someone who has lived this, it’s not that simple. If you’re in a vanilla marriage/long term relationship, what you’ve done is negotiate a contract, explicit or implicit, that you’re willing to spend your life with this person and that this life will take certain forms. You agree on your goals before moving in together, usually. We’ll live in the city/country, we want kids/don’t, we’ll have this or that kind of sex.
But when these goals change, some are renegotiable and some aren’t. In my marriage, for instance, it was easy to renegotiate which city to live in, or even which country was open to discussion. City/rural was not, as both of us have city-based careers and if one wanted a country life, it would be a dealbreaker.
In my case, vanilla sex was a dealbreaker. I knew this, because from time to time I would suggest something slightly kinky – spanking, or threesomes, or whatever – and get a total blank NO WAY.
I knew that insisting on it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for him, and that having it on the side totally unacceptable.
My choice, then, was to never have this experience, and keep my marriage with a man who in other respects was a lovely husband (at least for the first 20 years, lol). Or to have bdsm sex, which I wasn’t even sure would be what I wanted, having not experienced it, and totally trash my marriage.
Communicating openly was going to negate the contract and completely destabilise the relationship, *and I didn’t want that to happen*. I made a tradeoff.
Some people then go the extra step and say, okay, I don’t want this marriage to die because I value it in every other way. My spouse won’t tolerate an open relationship. So I’ll cheat.
This is not a lack of communication, it’s a choice about what you value in your life.
I didn’t get to that point until my husband checked out of the marriage emotionally. At that point, the tradeoff calculation changed, and I was getting almost nothing back in return for what I’d decided, freely, to give up.
And *that* was when I communicated, and insisted on renegotiating the contract. And *that* was when his total lack of interest in any serious bdsm became glaringly apparent.
I’ve seen this many many times, and it nearly always results in the marriage breaking up.
So substitute “communicate with your spouse, it’s not rocket science” with “talk to your spouse and very likely precipitate the end of the marriage”, and suddenly you see why it is that people are scared or unwilling to do that, and give all kinds of justifications for why not.
Leaving a 20 year marriage is, let me tell you, very very scary and unpleasant. So, speaking from a position of experience, I would say that it IS rocket science. You have to be prepared for the likelihood that communicating will blow up your entire way of life, for something that you don’t even know is worth it.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think part of the problem is that (and I, for that matter) can’t really fathom agreeing to spend the rest of your life with someone with whom you haven’t had these kinds of discussions with in the first place or thinking that a relationship is “wonderful in every other way” when the very foundation of it requires lies and deception about who you truly are.
I know I, at least, don’t comprehend the idea of loving someone you don’t know very well, and keeping this self-exploration into something as deep and personal as sexuality to oneself without being able to share it with your spouse out of fear your spouse won’t like you if you do, keeping something this big a secret pretty much guarantees that your spouse doesn’t really know you that well. And my definition of “love” requires knowing someone very well, even the big, bad, scary parts of them. So the idea that someone believes they love their spouse when they don’t even know their spouse, when huge paths to intimacy are blocked entirely, is really just incomprehensible.
It’s sort of like, well, I understand the definition of all the words you’re saying, but strung together in that order and suddenly it becomes another language. If I said “blue fish tuba” to you, it would be the same thing. You know what each of those words mean, but put all together, it doesn’t really make sense.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“keeping this self-exploration into something as deep and personal as sexuality to oneself “
That’s fine, if you know it. But when I married, I didn’t know it. I had no clue at all that bdsm existed. You may not know that I’m in my 40s, and grew up in a smallish town. In those days, there, there was absolutely no way for me to know of it. I thought I was just particularly weird and twisted, and it’s not that I kept it to myself. It’s that I didn’t even make a connection between my darkest thoughts when masturbating, and something you could actually *do* in the world.
So it’s not that I kept it a secret, it’s that I didn’t even know it was there for like a couple of decades. You live in a completely different world, where there’s the internet, and there are groups, and these things have names and books and web sites.
I didn’t even have access to naked-women type porn, let alone anything else.
It’s really worth getting your head around this. Because, despite all the lovely open and accepting things you say, this comes across as really judgemental, with a flavour of really not trying very hard to understand where a person like that is coming from.
I know that this isn’t your normal approach, or tacit’s, and that’s why I took the trouble to explain in such detail. Have some compassion, try to put yourself in my shoes, and the shoes of the countless others in the same position. Yes, some people are cowardly and secretive. Others are just ignorant, and make mistakes based on what they know, and then need to live with them.
I do blame myself for staying as long as did once I found out. It was three years, from finding out to leaving. It would have been three months – that’s when I got up the courage to go – but I got cancer, and couldn’t do anything but survive for a while.
You can call this a justification, but I invite you to think how you would act in the same situation.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
The time when one discovered it is irrelevant. It is unfathomable to me to be in a long term relationship that does not have an avenue for sharing your deepest, darkest part of who you are with your partner. I just don’t understand it and I’ve heard from people like you before. Your situation is nothing new, it doesn’t make sense to me at all.
When I feel as though I can’t share all of myself with my partner, I do not stay with that partner, so no, I would not act this way in your situation.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am not entirely sure why I’m still trying to make you understand, when you so clearly don’t. I think what bothers me is “it doesn’t make sense to me at all”.
What you’re saying is, if you wouldn’t act that way, according to your own values, you can’t understand anyone else acting a different way.
I’m in a different place from where I was at 18, which is how old I was when I married. What I think you’re missing, is a couple of key things. One of them is absent from your equation altogether, as far as I understand it. And that is that I didn’t HAVE a darker side to share. I didn’t know it was there, or that it needed sharing, until 24 years into the marriage.
The other is not having an avenue for sharing your deepest self with your partner. This seems very straightforward from my perspective now, but then, it was as though it was seen from the other side of a mountain. You knew there was something on the other side, but you didn’t know what.
24. Years. Think about that. One relationship that spans 24 years is a very very different thing from a 2 or 3 year one. It has history, layers of history, and shared property, and often kids (though not me). By the time I was 40, more than half my life, and all my adult life, had been spent with one man.
The agreements of how the relationship would be conducted were laid down when I was 17 years old, and didn’t know anything. Sharing my deeper self? I didn’t even know who I was. I was working out that in the context of an existing marriage, with a man who really liked me exactly as I was when we met.
There was an avenue for discussion. That wasn’t the issue. THe avenue is absolutely there. The issue is that once the discussion takes place, once you share your deepest desires, and you find out that your parnter doesn’t share them? You have to either accept that you’ll never realise them, or cheat, or leave. They are the three stark choices.
I was willing to make that choice, and I did. Three months from discovery to realisation (and then a delay for having surgery and chemotherapy and radiotherapy, without which there would have been just the three months).
But most people, faced with that choice, are afraid. You’re not just giving up a partner. When you’re living a poly life, when you’re a person who has a relationship here, a relationship there, when even you’re a serial monomgamist.. you can choose to up and leave and the consequences are much lower. For a 25 year marriage, the consequences are absolutely huge. Not just shared property and kids, though that’s a big consideration for some people. They have to give up a lifestyle, a house, a whole set of friends, the lot. That wasn’t a big deal for me really because I’m not especially material.
But for many it’s more a question of you’ve got something that is pretty good. Your husband is great, better than many other husbands, and you are grateful to have him. Your relationship is way better than most marriages you know of. And is it actually going to be better, being single, dating, living in a tiny house that you can afford on your own, making your own way in the world?
In my case, I decided fuck that, I’m going to have to do it. In many cases though, people are too afraid, and I for one have compassion for that. It may not be something you can ever understand, since you haven’t walked in their shoes, and you’ve made different choices that have landed you someplace different, and probably better.
Maybe it’s impossible for a person with a poly lifestyle to really connect with how that is. The relationship is a different beast, founded on different beliefs and behaviours and modes of thought.
I moved from that world into this one and I prefer this one immensely, and would never ever go back there.
But I do dislike the moral high horse tone of these posts, and I wish you would accept that things are not as simple as they look from the outside. Particularly when people aren’t equipped with the tools, situation and knowledge that you are blessed with/have learned and acquired.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I wish you would accept that I’m not some silly teenager who has only had a string of short-term relationships and can’t possibly know the depth and history of a long term relationship or learning something new about oneself after a relationship begins. I’m not the only one around here who has trouble understanding someone else’s position.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I knew I wasn’t the only one 🙂
We don’t have kids. That makes a difference I guess. For the rest: even in a free minded country as the Netherlands were at that time, I had no clue whatsoever.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think it’s difficult for some people to understand where you’re coming from, because you were coming from a wholly different worldview and environment. It’s sort of like trying to get a deeply religious person and a starkly skeptical atheist to see eye to eye: there’s just a huge gulf to try bridging there.
It’s relatively easy to talk about openness and honesty when you’re in an environment that’s supportive of the subjects. It’s hard to remember what risks are out there in other environments, some times.
Thank you muchly for sharing your perspective. – it’s actually given me a lot to think about. I’ve got some interests of my own, that I was raised to see as dirty, evil things. The sort of thing you simply never shared, because everyone decent would reject you for it. To me, the choice was either “not have a relationship” or else keep this secret.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“It is unfathomable to me to be in a long term relationship that does not have an avenue for sharing your deepest, darkest part of who you are with your partner.“
This philosophy boggles me. I have friends who are squicked by me discussing vanilla sex. I have partners that get really uncomfortable if I talk about hardcore BDSM. I don’t need to be able to talk to everyone about everything.
Now, that said, this is the reason I’m polyamorous: I refuse to stop looking for someone who is compatible with me. I’d never be able to make a meaningful fidelous commitment to anyone who I wasn’t able to share everything with – I’d leave them the instant I discovered that better options existed.
I don’t know how far out there on the “edge” your own interests lie, but there’s some stuff that you just can’t safely advertise. In some places, being gay or transsexual is on that list. In others, it’s BDSM and other kinks. Even in the most liberal of areas, there’s taboo subjects.
Yes, it’s incredibly awesome that I have someone in my life that I really can discuss every aspect of myself with, but that was a result of calculated risks, perserverance, and a bit of luck. It’s really genuinely hard to find someone like that, for some people and some environments. I don’t think it’s an excuse not to try, but why sell yourself short in the meantime?
If a happy, 20 year marriage resulted from it, how in the world is this a bad thing? Yes, she denied that part of herself – but what were the chances, at the time, of her finding someone she could share this with? Why throw away 20 years of happiness in the quest for some idealized perfection? She found what worked well for her life, what was realistic. When her life changed, she found something that worked for that new life.
There’s parts of me that I refuse to be closed off about. The reason I do that, though, is because I know enough supportive people that I can afford to be choosy and still leave the life I want. Not everyone has that luxury.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I never once said “discuss everything with everyone you meet”, I said have a romantic partner that has developed avenues for discussing the deeper parts of who you are as they come up. One of the reason someone becomes a romantic partner is because there’s some connection with them that sets them apart from everyone else you know who remains “just friends” or acquaintences.
I’m only talking about people here that someone would consider marrying, since the original topic is about a husband and wife who don’t even know each other’s sexual preferences. I can’t imagine reaching the point where this person next to me is someone I would take all legal and emotional steps to intentionally make him a permanent part of my life if I didn’t feel I could discuss anything with him that might come up about who I was and what I wanted our life to look like.
As for “safely advertise”, I have a very unusual kink (so I hear), but I’m about as out as you can get. I discuss it freely at work and with friends and on the internet. I keep hearing about people who can’t discuss things because they might get fired, but I’ve quit jobs that were like that, so that’s another thing I don’t fully understand.
And before anyone tries to explain to me how their particular circumstance makes it impossible to quit their job, I’ve heard all that too and it still doesn’t make sense to me.
I question the “happy, 20 year marriage” if, for the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire that goes unfulfilled for their entire life. It’s not just “hmm, I’d kinda like to go skydiving some day, but no biggie”, it’s the kind of secret that drives people to act it out no matter the consequences, like cheating. Living with this kind of drive and pressure and keeping that a secret automatically creates limits and boundaries on intimacy and I have to question just how happy someone really is.
Discovering this kind of secret 15 years into a 20 year marriage, well, I can imagine the first 15 years being “happy” with the discontent growing over the last 5 years, and that’s slightly more reasonable to me. But in a “happy” relationship, I don’t see why someone would feel they couldn’t discuss this with their spouse, couldn’t share with them who they are, couldn’t grow together. I would not feel “happy” for 15 years with a person if, on the 16th year I discovered something new and my first thought was “I better not tell my husband”. That indicates to me a limit to our intimacy.
The chances of finding someone that any given person could share their kink with, particularly now with the internet, are extremely high. There’s nothing new under the sun and someone somewhere has the same fetish as anyone else.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think it’s interesting that you can’t seem to understand anyone who doesn’t agree with you.
I know we’ve had this argument before, but there is nothing morally wrong with choosing to prioritize aspects of your life differently. Relationships and sex *do not need* to be number one.
There’s also a difference between a job and a career. Is there something inherently wrong with engaging in a career you like (knowing that to participate in that career you cannot be out?) I like making enough money to travel. I made the conscious choice a long time ago that certain aspects of my lifestyle would not be shared with work. And you know what? I’m perfectly, 100% ok with that. My co-workers do not need to be my friends.
You’ve given the impression through your posts that it is less morally correct to conduct your life in any way that is closed. My obligation is to provide for my well being first and foremost. If you choose to sacrifice other things to be out, it’s a choice, but not any more “correct” than the choices i’ve made.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I can understand lots of people I don’t agree with. I’m quite good at following the train of their thought processes that brought them to a conclusion I disagree with. I was a psych major going into family couseling because my high school counselor encouraged me based on my ability to mediate and facilitate and see several sides of a story at once.
I don’t understand this one.
And I’m losing my patience with people who feel a need to explain their side and try to get me to change my opinion while simultaneously acting the injured party when I don’t understand their opinion or wish to get them to see mine. In this post, I did not even try to convince someone that their opinion was wrong, I stated only that I had a different one and didn’t understand the other.
It’s not about morals, it’s about practicality. I see the cost of being closeted about anything as being higher than the cost of being out. I also see it as futile – information wants to be free and I don’t see how a secret that involves other people can ultimately be kept. As the saying goes, 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead. I do not claim that life should be all about relationships and sex (and if you knew me for more than a couple of months and had met any of my past partners, you’d know just how far off that claim is). But when someone does make a decision to make a relationship take on that level of importance, it seems incongruous to me that someone would then choose a partner they do not feel they can share themselves with, or, since the subject of being closeted has come up, that this partner must be kept a secret or compartmentalized from the rest of one’s life.
I will not get married and my career and my personal happiness has always been of higher priority than any relationship, so I caution anyone from making assumptions about how I conduct my life because frankly, no one here really knows me or how I operate.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I was making no assumptions about you – you explained your position, I explained mine.
However frequently posting – “I don’t understand” does tend to lead people to want to explain further. It has nothing to do with any degrees or innate ability to follow thought processes, it’s just how it appears in the medium through which we are communicating.
We happen to disagree on the relative value of being closeted. It’s a higher cost/benefit ratio to you than it is me, and again no value judgment from me but the impression conveyed through posts is that it is less right. My co-workers don’t discuss their home lives with me. I don’t discuss it with them.
Your experience varies because of the environment in which you work. In my profession, there is no socialization. I didn’t tell them about my monogamous relationships, I don’t tell them about my poly relationships – it’s not a decision to be closed because it is poly, it’s a decision to not share my personal life with people I have no connection with other than we get paid by the same employer.
As far as sharing with a partner, I agree with Sterno in that relationships evolve, and sometimes the cost/benefit of change is higher than the perceived cost of remaining in the relationship without whatever it is you’ve recently discovered you’d like.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“a need to explain their side and try to get me to change my opinion while simultaneously acting the injured party when I don’t understand their opinion or wish to get them to see mine.”
Actually, (again assuming that one of the people you’re referring to is me) I didn’t want to change your opinion or the way you live your life. It’s very interesting that you think this. In fact, as I said before, I fully support the way you want to live your life. I think it’s admirable and importantly, it’s internally consistent with your own values and ideals.
What I was after was to help you with what you stated, namely that you *didn’t understand*. Explanations normally help another person understand.
However, it seems that what you were really saying was not that you didn’t understand, but that you don’t agree, that you think your way is better, and that any reasons anyone put forward for their own behaviour would be dismissed as morally inferior.
“someone would then choose a partner they do not feel they can share themselves with”
Again, this is NOT what happened. You really haven’t listened. YOu’ve taken a position, you’ve closed your mind, and that’s the really disappointing thing, not that you disagree. Disagreement I find interesting – it’s where you learn. Close minded repetitions of your position are dull and disappointing to me.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
If you see yourself in general statements that I make, that says more about you than it does about me.
Again, when I’m referring to you specifically, I’ll say so.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am curious to understand your position, since you keep defending that it is something other than how I am representing it.
It is quite possible that you’ve lived through this before, and firmly believe that openness is a thing worth having your life ruined over. I don’t know you. But I’m trying to figure out which one it is. You’ve discussed “unusual”, but I’m talking “socially taboo”.
If you don’t believe that “safe space” exists, you’re not going to look for it. It’s harder to find safe spaces for some kinks. It’s within the last three months that I discovered that there are completely casual, above-board, pro-pedophilia communities out there. Last week I read an article about the FBI trolling other websites and doing raids on anyone that clicked the link to the fake video they were offering.
I had genuinely assumed that certain things were simply verboten. The only time you hear about pedophilia communities is in the context of illegal ones being busted, and how bad and dirty and evil pedophiles all are.
When I’m talking about “edge” kinks, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire”
“I question the “happy, 20 year marriage” if, for the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire that goes unfulfilled for their entire life.”
OK, if you’re still referring to *my* marriage, let me say *again*: I did not have a desire that I kept secret. I. Did. Not. Know.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
When I’m referring to anyone in particular, I’ll say so
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think what happens is that some people sort of choose not to look behind the curtain themselves. They purposely cut off self-knowledge because they think the knowledge will upset their lives. I have some level of personal experience with this. :-/
I don’t think that’s good, but I can easily see how it would happen. It sounds like the person who started this thread kind of put all that stuff in a box and only took it out when the self-knowledge wouldn’t ruin other things she held dear.
In the case of Spitzer though, it’s clear that this isn’t the case. Once you start acting on something you’d better be aware of what you’re doing. *think* Though, in truth, I think that’s how a lot of addictions start. People doing things while avoiding understanding the reasons why.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
We married when we were 18 and 19. I didn’t find out I was submissive untill I was 45. My husband can never be my master. I wouldn’t accept him but he’s no dominant to start with.
We did discuss things, I found my ways to act on my being a sub, we now live in a threesome with my master.
But “we never had these kind of discussions” because it never played a role in our marriage.
I know some one (who would probably be my master and probably the ideal one as well); who is married almost as long as we are. His wife shudders away from every hint in SM directions.
This man is a very intelligent, kind, gentle man. He tried to discuss his dominant feelings, but then there are these articles in the Dutch newspapers about a couple of men who kept three Philipine women in a shed in the polders, whom they forced to have SM-sex and sex with animals to put on vid and sell.
Their defence was, that it was BDSM and that there was concensus (which of course wasn’t so).
And then there were the stories about the Belgian judge, who allowed his wife to visit SM-clubs because he couldn’t give her what she needed. And he allegedly ‘sold’ her. I don’t know what is the true story here, but I do know he is convicted (up until the European Court) and no longer allowed to be a judge.
And this woman looks at her loving, gentle husband and for her eyes the image is changed for that of these ‘beasts’, who do horrible things to women in the name of BDSM. And she does really not understand anything of his desires, his wishes, his needs.
And he falls silent. We had lengthy discussions about this. Because to me it is like he is not showing her who he really is. She loves a man that he is not. But he loves her and he is loyal.
So he is not my master. And we never speak eachother any more.
“We weren’t meant to be, at least not in this lifetime
but you gave me something to remember”
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I have to agree with you. I have seen a lot of this is long term marriages. The sex is wonderful in the beginning and then one partner just stops trying or in many cases just stops having sex. Unilateral changes in the rules involving sex are fairly common and very hard to deal with because society seems to applaud people refusing sex. If things go south, it is the fault of the oversexed partner, not the one who changed the rules without asking.
Things get very, very complicated when you add kids and real property to the mix. While it completely sucks to have a shitty sex life, you don’t want to blow up your kids lives. Frequently, you stay and find other ways to deal with the frustration. Affairs are a very common way to deal with this (oddly enough, so is gay sex, which is much easier to get and readily available even if you are middle aged). Leaving the relationship has bigger complications than simply packing up your toys and going home.
When I was younger, I had nothing but contempt for people who cheat, I thought it because they were either cowardly or deceptive. Now I know that there is a lot more more to it. A friend of mine is getting a divorce in 4 years when the kids graduate highschool. Her husband, in the meantime, like to loudly talk about how sex shouldn’t take more than five years. In 15+ years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm. He unilaterally implemented don’t ask, don’t tell and she finally got to find out what orgasms were all about. She’s counting the days till her kids move out so she can go find out more.
I never questioned why he was going to a prostitute. The answer was pretty simple, he wanted one. (not sure how to say it without sounding snarky….) People enjoy having sex with different people. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your partner or even that you don’t find them really sexually stimulating. They can be a lot of things, but they can never be a second opinion. No matter how you negotiate with your partner, you cannot make them someone else (though the roleplay is fun). The problem is that that desire is totally and completely contrary to the monogamous relationship. Even if the spouse is perfectly ok with it (and frequently, these things are worked out privately), that doesn’t mean the public will forgive you for breaking this rule. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t matter how he did it or why he did it, the fact that he was having sex with someone other than his designated partner was enough to hang him.
Until we can come to terms with the reality that adults like to have sex with other adults, we are going to continue to have these problems. We really need to rethink a system of values that thinks what you do with your cock is more relevant than what you do with public funds.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Unilateral changes in the rules involving sex are fairly common and very hard to deal with because society seems to applaud people refusing sex. If things go south, it is the fault of the oversexed partner, not the one who changed the rules without asking.
That’s very true, and it’s always seemed a little…um, odd to me. We have built a society with very rigid expectations about sexual roles and activity, in which it is considered normal and reasonable for one person to say to another person, “You must look to me and to nobody else for all of your sexual needs; you are specifically forbidden to go anywhere else to have any of your needs met…and I am not going to have sex with you.” That strikes me as being about twenty different kinds of fucked up.
However, having said that…
Things get very, very complicated when you add kids and real property to the mix. While it completely sucks to have a shitty sex life, you don’t want to blow up your kids lives. Frequently, you stay and find other ways to deal with the frustration. Affairs are a very common way to deal with this (oddly enough, so is gay sex, which is much easier to get and readily available even if you are middle aged). Leaving the relationship has bigger complications than simply packing up your toys and going home.
I don’t accept the notion that cheating is a valid and viable way out of this particular situation. The problem with cheating, other than the fact that it rests on a foundation of deception which is inherently corrosive to a relationship, is that it exposes one’s partner non-consensually to real physical risk.
I am a big fan of the idea of informed consent in all things sexual. If I have sex with someone, that sex is valid only if it is consensual, and consensual only if I have all the information necessary and relevant for me to give consent. If a person is having partners on the side without my knowledge, then that person is potentially exposing me to an unknown level of STD risk, and I am not consenting to that. For me, that is one of th key elements of cheating relationships that is often overlooked.
This isn’t just some theoretical one-in-a-million risk, either. I personally kow a woman who cheated on her husband, contracted hepatitis from her affair, and then gave it to her husband. She died from it a few years back.
A friend of mine is getting a divorce in 4 years when the kids graduate highschool. Her husband, in the meantime, like to loudly talk about how sex shouldn’t take more than five years. In 15+ years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm. He unilaterally implemented don’t ask, don’t tell and she finally got to find out what orgasms were all about. She’s counting the days till her kids move out so she can go find out more.
I honestly question the wisdom of “stay together for the sake of the kids.” I think kids are smarter than adults sometimes give them credit for, and can tell when a relationship is dysfunctional. And honestly, I think that remaining in a dysfunctional relationship can be just as traumatic, or more traumatic, than staying in it for the sake of the kids.
A better example to set for kids, I think, is “This is an honest, positive, and constructive way to deal with problems and changes in a relationship. Your mother and I have realized that our relationship isn’t working for us the way it used to be, so we have talked about it honestly and agreed to change it in these ways.”
Even if the spouse is perfectly ok with it (and frequently, these things are worked out privately), that doesn’t mean the public will forgive you for breaking this rule. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t matter how he did it or why he did it, the fact that he was having sex with someone other than his designated partner was enough to hang him.
New York seems to be pretty okay with it; had he just been honest about it (and not embezzled state funds), he might’ve been okay. The governor before him had a publicly-acknowledged mistress, and so did his former lt. governor (who just became governor a couple fo days ago).
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I honestly question the wisdom of “stay together for the sake of the kids.”
I always did, too, but I’m realizing lately that it’s not just staying together for the emotional sake of the kids, but quite likely the financial sake of the kids. Whatever way child support goes, there’s still going to usually be an extra household maintained, and that may cost too much for separation to be feasible.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am saying I understand cheating from the people who do, I didn’t say I thought it was a good idea.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
We never changed the rules, we just stopped having sex. Yes, my husband wanted it more frequently than I. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want it, I just didn’t get arroused enough to enjoy it. And guess whom I blamed? Let me tell you: It wasn’t him I blamed. And I can assure you that in my neck of the woods it is always the one that can not have or does not (seem to) want sex as often as the other one is usually the one that is blamed.
It took us a very long time to discover the facts that caused our ‘incompatibility’.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Ah, I hear it from the perspective of the people who aren’t getting enough sexual contact (because they are generally the ones who are talking about it about). From my perspective, it really matters very little who is given responsibility for the fall off because everyone comes to their own conclusions. I have seen a general pattern with these:
1. General tendency to ascribe the problem to an external sources (kids, schedule etc)
2. They start to internalize it, wondering what they did wrong, why they aren’t attractive.
3. The focus of the problem shifts to the less desirous partner. Concern may initially crop up but this eventually turns into resentment and even anger.
4. They start to disconnect, this might lead to an affair, divorce or just emotional withdrawal.
Sexuality is a primary connection point in a marriage, once it stops, other connections start to deteriorate. I generally tell people to make certain their partner is getting some sort of sexual contact, even if it is utility or a favor from a friend. While finding the turn-on is important, the absence of sex will hit critical mass long before that particular problem is sorted out.
Often, the problem is simply that the initial turn on tapered off and people didn’t find a way to create the excitement deliberately. They just assume it is there or not.
So, in your case, what caused the incompatibility? I am curious.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Let me first state that whatever sex you have, frequent, not frequent, kinky, not at all, it does not matter to the relationship when both (or all) partners are happy with it. There are problems when one or more of the partners aren’t satisfied with what they get or not get.
And I agree: there actually should not be blame. No self blame, no blame to the other person(s) involved.
But since I was the one who didn’t get aroused, who didn’t like it, who eventually shied away from it, I always felt that I withheld him (husband) something he was entitled to. It’s only now that I realised I was also not getting what I needed or wanted 🙂
Hehe… I knew I wasn’t getting away with the short story.
Marrying young, inexperienced, most likely played a roll.
Around the age of thirty I found out that I have something called hyperprolactinemy (meaning my hypofyse (one of the glands pre-thyroid) produces to much prolactine – the stuff that makes young mothers lactate plus that it has some soothing effects and it also plays a role in the libido (only not in NL 20 years ago when you complain about a low libido to a male doctor (lots of them actually)… women didn’t have a libido then overhere, let alone that it could get low).
Then, when I was 39 and very occasionally, not sought after, happened to walk into a lover I found out that I could actually get very aroused and that there was nothing wrong with my libido.
When I was 45 I was diagnosed with ADHD (the emotional, impulsive, pretty hyperactive type).
When my husband was 48 he was diagnosed to have ‘something in the autistic spectrum’.
Somewhere in these years I found out that I love phone sex and that with men on the phone I played a pretty submissive roll. And that the more dominant the men were, the better I liked it.
Put all these things together and you have a woman that has a high arousal level (due to ADHD and high prolactine levels); and needs a special type of foreplay to get aroused (because of being submissive) as one partner and you have a man who is limited in his way of communicating, limited in his way of showing affection and has a hard time in finding out how bodies work in the way of getting aroused and does not interpret body language well as the other partner.
And yes: we didn’t know when we were 18 and 19 and it took us nearly 30 years to figure that out.
Does that mean we have/had a lousy marriage? No, I don’t think so. We always were best friends, still are. I never hid anything for him, nor did he ever hid anything for me (though it is very complicated to get everything discussed because when I don’t ask the right question, I don’t get the right answer, but intentionally he’s not hiding anything. From the start I was open about my lover (heck, the way I am I cannot hide anything and surely not something so important as that).
And I found out that having a lover didn’t mean I loved my husband less. It didn’t change anything but for the better:.
we enjoyed the sex we had when I was aroused. Some one recently said “He has outsourced the hard work”
Of course there is some remorse. We could have had a lot better sex together when we would have known sooner or when some one had been willing to listen sooner.
But we found it out, and we live together with my master now. That doesn’t mean I get a lot of sex these days, because over the last two years some how survival was more important than having sex (life can be very demanding at times).
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I knew that insisting on it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for him, and that having it on the side totally unacceptable.
My choice, then, was to never have this experience, and keep my marriage with a man who in other respects was a lovely husband (at least for the first 20 years, lol). Or to have bdsm sex, which I wasn’t even sure would be what I wanted, having not experienced it, and totally trash my marriage.
Would it totally trash your marriage? There’s a lot of space between “this conversation will feel awkward and will make my partner uncomfortable,” and “this conversation will destroy my marriage.” I think that awkward, difficult, uncomfortable subjects hilight precisely those places where communication is most vital. If it were always easy and comfortable, everyone would do it, right?
Some people then go the extra step and say, okay, I don’t want this marriage to die because I value it in every other way. My spouse won’t tolerate an open relationship. So I’ll cheat.
This is not a lack of communication, it’s a choice about what you value in your life.
It is a lack of communication; the cheater is deliberately and systematically withholding information from a spouse.
It may feel to the cheater like a decision motivated out of a desire to preserve what’s good in the marriage, but I believe that’s self-deception on the part of the cheater. After all, presumably, if the cheater’s spouse knew about the cheating, then the marriage would be over; the cheater conceals the truth for this very reason. The cheater is making a unilateral decision for both of them about what is and is not acceptable and about what is and is not worth preserving, and is doing it without the knowledge or consent of the spouse.
I’m big on consent. A key component of consent is information; consent is meaningless if it’s not informed. And, like I said below, I personally know a woman who cheated on her spouse, contracted a serious and incurable STD (which she died from a couple years ago), and gave it to her husband.
And *that* was when I communicated, and insisted on renegotiating the contract. And *that* was when his total lack of interest in any serious bdsm became glaringly apparent.
I’ve seen this many many times, and it nearly always results in the marriage breaking up.
Yep. Which points to a number of flaws, I think, in the accepted social conventions of marriage and monogamy; we live in a society which promotes a model of relationships that is not resilient enough to accommodate change, and in which we think it’s perfectly OK for one person to tell another “You are forbidden to meet your sexual needs with anyone except me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs.”
So substitute “communicate with your spouse, it’s not rocket science” with “talk to your spouse and very likely precipitate the end of the marriage”, and suddenly you see why it is that people are scared or unwilling to do that, and give all kinds of justifications for why not.
Sure. Hey, nobody said it’d be easy. That’s why I don’t engage in conventional relationships; I think they’re flawed and often unworkablem and in the real world are often recipes for tragedy.
Leaving a 20 year marriage is, let me tell you, very very scary and unpleasant.
Oh, I know. I left an 18-year marriage when it became clear to me that it could not and would never meet our needs.
You have to be prepared for the likelihood that communicating will blow up your entire way of life, for something that you don’t even know is worth it.
You have to be prepared for that anyway, even in an ideal situation. You could meet the lover of your dreams, build a healthy and joyous relationship, and then your lover could be run over by a bus or die of cancer. Happily ever after is a delusion; the possibility of loss always exists, every minute of every day, for everyone. There are no exceptions.
Now, personally, I think it’s important to acknowledge the reality of a relationship, and to say so if it no longer works for the people involved, even if that is hard. Remaining in a relationship that does not work for you for years, continuing to invest energy in a situation which is ultimately unfulfilling, does not seem healthy to me.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“”this conversation will destroy my marriage”
In my case, I knew it would. Because as soon as I realised what I wanted, and we both knew that he wouldn’t be prepared to make that happen, that it would be over. And it was, too.
He had the chance to change things, to accept a different way of being, but he couldn’t do it. Game over.
“we live in a society which promotes a model of relationships that is not resilient enough to accommodate change, and in which we think it’s perfectly OK for one person to tell another “You are forbidden to meet your sexual needs with anyone except me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs.”
Exactly. And that’s why it had to blow up the marriage, because our marriage was totally founded on that assumption.
“You have to be prepared for that anyway, even in an ideal situation.”
Yes but that’s future and uncertain, whereas blowing up the marriage is immediate and quite likely, and most people choose future uncertain. I didn’t and that’s something I’m very proud of. It’s won me a life that I totally love.
“Remaining in a relationship that does not work for you for years, continuing to invest energy in a situation which is ultimately unfulfilling, does not seem healthy to me.”
Agreed.
Actually it IS rocket science
“Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, this isn’t rocket science.” …”ultimately kind of silly thing that’s a damn stupid reason to undermine and corrode the very foundation of a romantic relationship.”
Yep. Agree.
As someone who has lived this, it’s not that simple. If you’re in a vanilla marriage/long term relationship, what you’ve done is negotiate a contract, explicit or implicit, that you’re willing to spend your life with this person and that this life will take certain forms. You agree on your goals before moving in together, usually. We’ll live in the city/country, we want kids/don’t, we’ll have this or that kind of sex.
But when these goals change, some are renegotiable and some aren’t. In my marriage, for instance, it was easy to renegotiate which city to live in, or even which country was open to discussion. City/rural was not, as both of us have city-based careers and if one wanted a country life, it would be a dealbreaker.
In my case, vanilla sex was a dealbreaker. I knew this, because from time to time I would suggest something slightly kinky – spanking, or threesomes, or whatever – and get a total blank NO WAY.
I knew that insisting on it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for him, and that having it on the side totally unacceptable.
My choice, then, was to never have this experience, and keep my marriage with a man who in other respects was a lovely husband (at least for the first 20 years, lol). Or to have bdsm sex, which I wasn’t even sure would be what I wanted, having not experienced it, and totally trash my marriage.
Communicating openly was going to negate the contract and completely destabilise the relationship, *and I didn’t want that to happen*. I made a tradeoff.
Some people then go the extra step and say, okay, I don’t want this marriage to die because I value it in every other way. My spouse won’t tolerate an open relationship. So I’ll cheat.
This is not a lack of communication, it’s a choice about what you value in your life.
I didn’t get to that point until my husband checked out of the marriage emotionally. At that point, the tradeoff calculation changed, and I was getting almost nothing back in return for what I’d decided, freely, to give up.
And *that* was when I communicated, and insisted on renegotiating the contract. And *that* was when his total lack of interest in any serious bdsm became glaringly apparent.
I’ve seen this many many times, and it nearly always results in the marriage breaking up.
So substitute “communicate with your spouse, it’s not rocket science” with “talk to your spouse and very likely precipitate the end of the marriage”, and suddenly you see why it is that people are scared or unwilling to do that, and give all kinds of justifications for why not.
Leaving a 20 year marriage is, let me tell you, very very scary and unpleasant. So, speaking from a position of experience, I would say that it IS rocket science. You have to be prepared for the likelihood that communicating will blow up your entire way of life, for something that you don’t even know is worth it.
A couple thoughts…
First, I’ve seen a lot of assumptions about the wife’s perspective on this issue. Is she angry? Is it perhaps possible her husband wanted to do some kinky things she’s wasn’t into and said, “hey honey, go ahead and do what you want, but don’t do it here with the kids around.” Odds are low, but everybody seems to be jumping to conclusions.
Second, if you’re married and have kids and you come to the realization at some point in your marriage that you are interested in exploring certain sexual activities that your wife isn’t into, prostitution may actually be the best option. You don’t necessarily know what all you’re into when you enter a relationship.
We don’t know that he didn’t ask his wife to do whatever it was he was doing. She may have said no and not been okay with what he wanted. At that point, going to a high end prostitute that you’re reasonably sure is disease free and has an interest in protecting your privacy might be the best thing. Prostitutes aren’t likely to go calling your wife telling about how he’s been cheating on her when you won’t leave your wife. You get your jollys, you stay married to the mother of your children, and all is well.
At the end of the day, you have ZERO idea what the nature of their relationship was. You don’t know what was said, what their feelings were, etc. It’s very easy to get on a high horse about communication when it’s only your fate you have to consider. When you have to factor in your kids, things change drastically. You love your wife and you love your kids and it turns out you’ve got a kink she’s not comfortable with. Seems to me that the deception may ultimately be the better thing for everybody involved.
You may be right about the nature of their relationship, but the simple truth is you have no idea. So when you’re done getting saddle sores from your high horse, consider that maybe this may be more complicated than all of that.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Second, if you’re married and have kids and you come to the realization at some point in your marriage that you are interested in exploring certain sexual activities that your wife isn’t into, prostitution may actually be the best option. You don’t necessarily know what all you’re into when you enter a relationship.
Indeed you don’t. And that’s precisely where communication is most vital, and precisely where many of the conventions and social norms of marriage fail spectacularly.
We have created a society built on an idealized notion of relationship that is, in the real world, often unworkable. We create this notion that a person should remain a virgin until marriage, and then have sex only with his or her spouse until death do us part, which essentially means that we want people to go into what is supposed to be a lifetime commitment with no clue about whether or not they are sexually compatible. We create a system whereby it is Bad And Wrong to have any lover but your spouse, under any circumstances and for any reason, and then we think it is reasonable for a person to sy “You may not have your sexual needs met by anyone but me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs, so suck it up”–as if that’s reasonable. We pay lip service to the idea that sex should not be an important part of a relationship, and then turn around and make it the defining part of relationship, embedding ideas of sexual fidelity into the very cornerstone of a marriage, and creating the expectation that if someone has another sexual partner, of course it must mean the end of the relationship.
And we act like this is reasonable.
People change–but our social conventions can not accommodate that. If two people in a marriage become sexually incompatible, they’re expected to suck it up (or rather, the person who wants sex is expected to suck it up, and the person who says “no” is generally considered to be somehow in the right).
Visiting a prostitute is one way to solve the problem. So is having a non-monogamous relationship. I have no problems with either idea. I do have a problem with concealing it from one’s partner, however, for both practical and ethical reasons.
You say we can not know whether or not our boy Eliot had an agreement with his wife that permitted this. Well, I rather suspect he didn’t. Ol’ Eliot is a multimillionaire dozens of times over; he could easily have put his $4,500 trysts on his check card, and it’d be less of an expense for him than going to McDonald’s is to me.
But instead, he engaged in all sorts of financial contortions, shuttling the money in and out of various accounts to conceal the expenses…think his wife knew? I bet she didn’t, else why conceal his tracks to that degree? (I am appreciating, by the way, the irony of the fact that he pioneered the forensic accounting techniques that red-flagged his financial transactions and ultimately ended up exposing him. Funny thing, life.)
At that point, going to a high end prostitute that you’re reasonably sure is disease free and has an interest in protecting your privacy might be the best thing. Prostitutes aren’t likely to go calling your wife telling about how he’s been cheating on her when you won’t leave your wife. You get your jollys, you stay married to the mother of your children, and all is well.
All is well?
I like my sexual partners to give consent to having sex with me. Consent is meaningless if it isn’t informed. If I deliberately withhold information from my wife, or anyone else, knowing that she would not consent to be with me if she had that information, then she is not giving consent in any meaningful way to be with me.
And what exactly is “reasonably sure” about STD status? Reasonable by whom? Sexual desire tends to lower the bar on what folks think is “reasonable,” and tends to make rationalization easy. Think his definition of “reasonable” would match hers? After all, he’s exposing both of them to risk…
Re: A couple thoughts…
Actually I was hearing a fascinating study about monogamous pairings in the animal kingdom. Turns out that, depending on the species, between 10-70% of the offspring are from affairs outside of the monogamous pairing. True monogamy, it turns out, is quite rare.
Now that’s interesting and not entirely surprising, but it turns out the jealousy is also a common part of this. So it seems that the most common arrangement is a “monogamous” couple where one or both of the pair cheats. They state together for the purpose of raising children, but spreading it around increases the chances for species suvival.
So strangely it seems that the natural thing may be for us to expect sexual fidelity from our partner, not get it, and not give it ourselves. You can see a blog post about it here.
Now, moving on from that point, whatever may exist between his wife and him, his children are still there. He is still dad and she is still mom. If getting consent means divorce, a broken family, etc, and a lie means maintaining the family, and the kids having a normal life, it’s not that simple of an equation. Of course the ideal is open communication, consent, etc, but it’s WAY more complicated when it’s not just two of you.
As for the STD issue, if it was something he was concerned about, he could jump through various hoops to protect himself. I’m not betting that he did, but obviously using protection would be an element of it. He could have asked that the prosititute get tested prior to them getting together, etc. Having said that, it sounds like he was explicitly not using it which further suggests that it was the risk element he was getting off on. If you’re turn on is just the risk, it’s not clear to me how it can possibly end well because the tendency will be to keep pushing the line til you end up over it.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Like I said earlier: my mileage varies 🙂
Re: A couple thoughts…
I agree about the assumptions. We have no idea the nature of their relationship. For all we know the wife endorsed and encouraged the hiring of extra help.
While I like the idea that everyone whom gets involved in a relationship is able, or courageous enough, or fully-formed at the time, to be able to communicate their inner desires to their partner; it also seems fantastic and naive.
While it seems a safe assumption that this maestro has lead himself into his own dangerous downward spiral by failing to be forthcoming to his wife and we can extrapolate that into all sorts conjectures about products of dishonesty and silly pressures of rigid social conventions. In the end, whatever arrangements he may or may not have had with his wife seem tertiary to the point on how he presented himself to his constituents.
Personally I’m only interested in the pieces where he has actually committed a crime. The irony is the degree of scrutiny we apply as a community seems to fuel this vicious circle of duplicity and the subsequent obverse hypocrisy. If we weren’t so secretly fascinated and horrified by what public figures do in their bedrooms and hotel rooms and public bathroom stalls then perhaps they wouldn’t feel the need to polish so brightly their breastplates of self-righteousness to blind us.
Then again if we are in the business of making assumptions about what is in this man’s minds and the inner mechanics of his personal relationships we might also consider that perhaps what he has fetishized above all things was the danger , crime and duplicity itself. Perhaps what REALLY got him off was doing all of this and risking everything. Maybe in the end he’s enjoying his ultimate orgasm?
Re: A couple thoughts…
I agree about the assumptions. We have no idea the nature of their relationship. For all we know the wife endorsed and encouraged the hiring of extra help.
While that is possible, I think the lengths to which he went to conceal the financial transactions speak against it. He’s wealthy enough that he could easily just put it on his MasterCard and not even blink, but instead he appears to have shuttled money around from other sources, possibly including his campaign fund and/or state funds, in a series of complex transactions designed to hide the transfers. I think it’s a pretty good bet he did this in order to conceal what he was doing from his wife, who would, presumably, have access to the family finances.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Actually his attempt to hide the transactions is what revealed him. Had he put it on his credit card, he’d have been totally ignored.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Precisely the point. I suspect he didn’t just use his credit card because he didn’t want his wife to know.. That is, he diverted money from his campaign fund and transferred money through a series of accounts not to hide his activities from political opponents, but to hide them from his wife (who, presumably, would have access to his credit card bill).
Re: A couple thoughts…
Did he transfer money from his campaign funds? I know it’s under investigation but I didn’t get the impression there was anything solid. Ignoring that detail though, he was clearly trying to obfuscate what was going on and yes, it’s probably that his wife was one of the subjects of obfuscation.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Well and the funny thing is that it’s not clear he actually broke any laws. There’s the mann act, which is a law that prevents interstate transportation of somebody for sex like that, but historically it was mostly about kidnapping somebody. The way he paid for it was slightly shady looking because he structured the transactions, so it doesn’t look like he did anything illegal there either.
And yeah it’s quite possible that it was the risk/excitement factor that did it for him. He wouldn’t be the first :). Actually I think that’s very likely, because of the structured payments. He’s the former AG of New York State. He knows how those things work. He knows people were out to get him. He did a few things with it that were deliberately suspicious. I think he wanted to get caught on some level and was enjoying the risk in the game of it.
A couple thoughts…
First, I’ve seen a lot of assumptions about the wife’s perspective on this issue. Is she angry? Is it perhaps possible her husband wanted to do some kinky things she’s wasn’t into and said, “hey honey, go ahead and do what you want, but don’t do it here with the kids around.” Odds are low, but everybody seems to be jumping to conclusions.
Second, if you’re married and have kids and you come to the realization at some point in your marriage that you are interested in exploring certain sexual activities that your wife isn’t into, prostitution may actually be the best option. You don’t necessarily know what all you’re into when you enter a relationship.
We don’t know that he didn’t ask his wife to do whatever it was he was doing. She may have said no and not been okay with what he wanted. At that point, going to a high end prostitute that you’re reasonably sure is disease free and has an interest in protecting your privacy might be the best thing. Prostitutes aren’t likely to go calling your wife telling about how he’s been cheating on her when you won’t leave your wife. You get your jollys, you stay married to the mother of your children, and all is well.
At the end of the day, you have ZERO idea what the nature of their relationship was. You don’t know what was said, what their feelings were, etc. It’s very easy to get on a high horse about communication when it’s only your fate you have to consider. When you have to factor in your kids, things change drastically. You love your wife and you love your kids and it turns out you’ve got a kink she’s not comfortable with. Seems to me that the deception may ultimately be the better thing for everybody involved.
You may be right about the nature of their relationship, but the simple truth is you have no idea. So when you’re done getting saddle sores from your high horse, consider that maybe this may be more complicated than all of that.
Her standing there may have more to do with minimizing the privacy invasion she’d likely experience. If she wasn’t there, the press would ask why. They’d hound her to find out why. They’d ask her as she’s taking the kids to school or whatever. Better she’s up there as the stoic wife and then kicks him in the naught bits when the camera lights are off.
People hide what they want out of sex from their partners because it’s a way to control and compartmentalize the relationship, avoid vulnerability, and then blame the hoodwinked partner for not giving them what they want. It’s underhanded and cruel. Do you know how many people I’ve heard say “his wife wasn’t giving him what he wanted,” as if he’d even told her?
Eh. I’m projecting and ranting. Many comments above make good sense as well.
People hide what they want out of sex from their partners because it’s a way to control and compartmentalize the relationship, avoid vulnerability, and then blame the hoodwinked partner for not giving them what they want. It’s underhanded and cruel. Do you know how many people I’ve heard say “his wife wasn’t giving him what he wanted,” as if he’d even told her?
Eh. I’m projecting and ranting. Many comments above make good sense as well.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think part of the problem is that (and I, for that matter) can’t really fathom agreeing to spend the rest of your life with someone with whom you haven’t had these kinds of discussions with in the first place or thinking that a relationship is “wonderful in every other way” when the very foundation of it requires lies and deception about who you truly are.
I know I, at least, don’t comprehend the idea of loving someone you don’t know very well, and keeping this self-exploration into something as deep and personal as sexuality to oneself without being able to share it with your spouse out of fear your spouse won’t like you if you do, keeping something this big a secret pretty much guarantees that your spouse doesn’t really know you that well. And my definition of “love” requires knowing someone very well, even the big, bad, scary parts of them. So the idea that someone believes they love their spouse when they don’t even know their spouse, when huge paths to intimacy are blocked entirely, is really just incomprehensible.
It’s sort of like, well, I understand the definition of all the words you’re saying, but strung together in that order and suddenly it becomes another language. If I said “blue fish tuba” to you, it would be the same thing. You know what each of those words mean, but put all together, it doesn’t really make sense.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I have to agree with you. I have seen a lot of this is long term marriages. The sex is wonderful in the beginning and then one partner just stops trying or in many cases just stops having sex. Unilateral changes in the rules involving sex are fairly common and very hard to deal with because society seems to applaud people refusing sex. If things go south, it is the fault of the oversexed partner, not the one who changed the rules without asking.
Things get very, very complicated when you add kids and real property to the mix. While it completely sucks to have a shitty sex life, you don’t want to blow up your kids lives. Frequently, you stay and find other ways to deal with the frustration. Affairs are a very common way to deal with this (oddly enough, so is gay sex, which is much easier to get and readily available even if you are middle aged). Leaving the relationship has bigger complications than simply packing up your toys and going home.
When I was younger, I had nothing but contempt for people who cheat, I thought it because they were either cowardly or deceptive. Now I know that there is a lot more more to it. A friend of mine is getting a divorce in 4 years when the kids graduate highschool. Her husband, in the meantime, like to loudly talk about how sex shouldn’t take more than five years. In 15+ years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm. He unilaterally implemented don’t ask, don’t tell and she finally got to find out what orgasms were all about. She’s counting the days till her kids move out so she can go find out more.
I never questioned why he was going to a prostitute. The answer was pretty simple, he wanted one. (not sure how to say it without sounding snarky….) People enjoy having sex with different people. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your partner or even that you don’t find them really sexually stimulating. They can be a lot of things, but they can never be a second opinion. No matter how you negotiate with your partner, you cannot make them someone else (though the roleplay is fun). The problem is that that desire is totally and completely contrary to the monogamous relationship. Even if the spouse is perfectly ok with it (and frequently, these things are worked out privately), that doesn’t mean the public will forgive you for breaking this rule. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t matter how he did it or why he did it, the fact that he was having sex with someone other than his designated partner was enough to hang him.
Until we can come to terms with the reality that adults like to have sex with other adults, we are going to continue to have these problems. We really need to rethink a system of values that thinks what you do with your cock is more relevant than what you do with public funds.
oh, and the film is already gone.
Hmm. Weird; it’s still working for me!
oh, and the film is already gone.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“keeping this self-exploration into something as deep and personal as sexuality to oneself “
That’s fine, if you know it. But when I married, I didn’t know it. I had no clue at all that bdsm existed. You may not know that I’m in my 40s, and grew up in a smallish town. In those days, there, there was absolutely no way for me to know of it. I thought I was just particularly weird and twisted, and it’s not that I kept it to myself. It’s that I didn’t even make a connection between my darkest thoughts when masturbating, and something you could actually *do* in the world.
So it’s not that I kept it a secret, it’s that I didn’t even know it was there for like a couple of decades. You live in a completely different world, where there’s the internet, and there are groups, and these things have names and books and web sites.
I didn’t even have access to naked-women type porn, let alone anything else.
It’s really worth getting your head around this. Because, despite all the lovely open and accepting things you say, this comes across as really judgemental, with a flavour of really not trying very hard to understand where a person like that is coming from.
I know that this isn’t your normal approach, or tacit’s, and that’s why I took the trouble to explain in such detail. Have some compassion, try to put yourself in my shoes, and the shoes of the countless others in the same position. Yes, some people are cowardly and secretive. Others are just ignorant, and make mistakes based on what they know, and then need to live with them.
I do blame myself for staying as long as did once I found out. It was three years, from finding out to leaving. It would have been three months – that’s when I got up the courage to go – but I got cancer, and couldn’t do anything but survive for a while.
You can call this a justification, but I invite you to think how you would act in the same situation.
How can the person that someone has sex with possibly have any bearing on his ability to govern the state?
I think it has more to do with when he was attorney general (not long ago) and responsible for prosecuting such things.
call girl, which is the euphemism we use for prostitutes who make more than a certain amount of money
I think call girl is a term for a prostitute you call for an appointment, vs. a streetwalker or a prostitute working in a brothel. I think you could make a good argument that there’s much less reason for that to be illegal than at least streetwalking. They do tend to make more, but I think $100-$500/hour is more typical than $3100.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well (about the phrase “call girl, that is). As it turns out, according to Google, there are multiple definitions of “call girl,” one of which is a high-priced prostitute and one of which is the definition you’re using. (I’d never heard the phrase used in terms of a person who is hired by phone, but it makes perfect sense.)
How can the person that someone has sex with possibly have any bearing on his ability to govern the state?
I think it has more to do with when he was attorney general (not long ago) and responsible for prosecuting such things.
call girl, which is the euphemism we use for prostitutes who make more than a certain amount of money
I think call girl is a term for a prostitute you call for an appointment, vs. a streetwalker or a prostitute working in a brothel. I think you could make a good argument that there’s much less reason for that to be illegal than at least streetwalking. They do tend to make more, but I think $100-$500/hour is more typical than $3100.
The question I have about situations like that is, if two people are sexually incompatible, is this something they realized before they were married? Or did they simply accept that things would magically work themselves out afterward?
I also kind of have to wonder at some point if there wasn’t some self-deception or going on. Well, I have fantasies about being tied up, but thats no big deal, it doesn’t really matter to me,” that kind of thing. Or possibly a bit of “nobody will ever get his part of me, and nobody will ever love me, so I best grab the first partner who’s willing to put up with me, even if we’re not sexually compatible.”
And I do realize that people can and do change over time, but I also think that a good relationship should be resilient enough to accommodate this. It seems to me from looking at some of the relationships I’ve seen, including my parents’, that folks can get so attached to the way they think a relationship “ought” to be that they seem not to notice that the relationship isn’t actually working for the folks involved.
Yeah. You know, that’s the thought I had too. Who cares what he’s doing with the money? The only thing that’s important here is that he’s doing it with public funds, right?
You know, I hadn’t heard “call girl” used in that context, so I consulted the Oracle at Google to see what it had to say.
A search for “define:call girl” in Google produces three definitions. The first is “A high-priced prostitute who usually works outcall from a home or office as opposed to getting customers on the street or at a brothel,” which makes it seem that “high priced” is the defining characteristic (such a person “usually” works outcall, suggesting that this is not always the case).
The second definition is “a female prostitute who can be hired by telephone,” which doesn’t mention price but seems to favor the ability to call such a person as a defining characteristic.
The third definition is from Wikipedia (take it for what it’s worth) and says ” call girl or escort is a sex worker who (unlike a street walker or prostitute) is not visible to the general public. Nor does she usually belong to an institution like a brothel. One must summon her, usually by calling a telephone number–hence the name call girl.” This definition makes the ability to call such a person the defining characteristic.
Whenever the Oracle at Google is confused on an issue, I think it’s safe to say the issue is beyond the knowing of mere mortals. 🙂
Well, I’ll go for the “misappropriation of public funds” as a god reason also. (Eliot, you naughty boy!)
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
The time when one discovered it is irrelevant. It is unfathomable to me to be in a long term relationship that does not have an avenue for sharing your deepest, darkest part of who you are with your partner. I just don’t understand it and I’ve heard from people like you before. Your situation is nothing new, it doesn’t make sense to me at all.
When I feel as though I can’t share all of myself with my partner, I do not stay with that partner, so no, I would not act this way in your situation.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Unilateral changes in the rules involving sex are fairly common and very hard to deal with because society seems to applaud people refusing sex. If things go south, it is the fault of the oversexed partner, not the one who changed the rules without asking.
That’s very true, and it’s always seemed a little…um, odd to me. We have built a society with very rigid expectations about sexual roles and activity, in which it is considered normal and reasonable for one person to say to another person, “You must look to me and to nobody else for all of your sexual needs; you are specifically forbidden to go anywhere else to have any of your needs met…and I am not going to have sex with you.” That strikes me as being about twenty different kinds of fucked up.
However, having said that…
Things get very, very complicated when you add kids and real property to the mix. While it completely sucks to have a shitty sex life, you don’t want to blow up your kids lives. Frequently, you stay and find other ways to deal with the frustration. Affairs are a very common way to deal with this (oddly enough, so is gay sex, which is much easier to get and readily available even if you are middle aged). Leaving the relationship has bigger complications than simply packing up your toys and going home.
I don’t accept the notion that cheating is a valid and viable way out of this particular situation. The problem with cheating, other than the fact that it rests on a foundation of deception which is inherently corrosive to a relationship, is that it exposes one’s partner non-consensually to real physical risk.
I am a big fan of the idea of informed consent in all things sexual. If I have sex with someone, that sex is valid only if it is consensual, and consensual only if I have all the information necessary and relevant for me to give consent. If a person is having partners on the side without my knowledge, then that person is potentially exposing me to an unknown level of STD risk, and I am not consenting to that. For me, that is one of th key elements of cheating relationships that is often overlooked.
This isn’t just some theoretical one-in-a-million risk, either. I personally kow a woman who cheated on her husband, contracted hepatitis from her affair, and then gave it to her husband. She died from it a few years back.
A friend of mine is getting a divorce in 4 years when the kids graduate highschool. Her husband, in the meantime, like to loudly talk about how sex shouldn’t take more than five years. In 15+ years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm. He unilaterally implemented don’t ask, don’t tell and she finally got to find out what orgasms were all about. She’s counting the days till her kids move out so she can go find out more.
I honestly question the wisdom of “stay together for the sake of the kids.” I think kids are smarter than adults sometimes give them credit for, and can tell when a relationship is dysfunctional. And honestly, I think that remaining in a dysfunctional relationship can be just as traumatic, or more traumatic, than staying in it for the sake of the kids.
A better example to set for kids, I think, is “This is an honest, positive, and constructive way to deal with problems and changes in a relationship. Your mother and I have realized that our relationship isn’t working for us the way it used to be, so we have talked about it honestly and agreed to change it in these ways.”
Even if the spouse is perfectly ok with it (and frequently, these things are worked out privately), that doesn’t mean the public will forgive you for breaking this rule. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t matter how he did it or why he did it, the fact that he was having sex with someone other than his designated partner was enough to hang him.
New York seems to be pretty okay with it; had he just been honest about it (and not embezzled state funds), he might’ve been okay. The governor before him had a publicly-acknowledged mistress, and so did his former lt. governor (who just became governor a couple fo days ago).
Well, yes and no. As prosecutor, one of the groups he busted was a high-class, high-price prostitution ring exactly like the one he patronized. In fact, ironically, he developed many of the forensic accounting techniques that were used to catch him; his background is in forensic accounting.
Well, yes and no. As prosecutor, one of the groups he busted was a high-class, high-price prostitution ring exactly like the one he patronized. In fact, ironically, he developed many of the forensic accounting techniques that were used to catch him; his background is in forensic accounting.
Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well (about the phrase “call girl, that is). As it turns out, according to Google, there are multiple definitions of “call girl,” one of which is a high-priced prostitute and one of which is the definition you’re using. (I’d never heard the phrase used in terms of a person who is hired by phone, but it makes perfect sense.)
I dunno. I haven’t followed the story closely, but I’d heard that he *hadn’t* misappropriated public funds. If he has, that’s a good reason too.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I honestly question the wisdom of “stay together for the sake of the kids.”
I always did, too, but I’m realizing lately that it’s not just staying together for the emotional sake of the kids, but quite likely the financial sake of the kids. Whatever way child support goes, there’s still going to usually be an extra household maintained, and that may cost too much for separation to be feasible.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am saying I understand cheating from the people who do, I didn’t say I thought it was a good idea.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I knew that insisting on it would be uncomfortable and unpleasant for him, and that having it on the side totally unacceptable.
My choice, then, was to never have this experience, and keep my marriage with a man who in other respects was a lovely husband (at least for the first 20 years, lol). Or to have bdsm sex, which I wasn’t even sure would be what I wanted, having not experienced it, and totally trash my marriage.
Would it totally trash your marriage? There’s a lot of space between “this conversation will feel awkward and will make my partner uncomfortable,” and “this conversation will destroy my marriage.” I think that awkward, difficult, uncomfortable subjects hilight precisely those places where communication is most vital. If it were always easy and comfortable, everyone would do it, right?
Some people then go the extra step and say, okay, I don’t want this marriage to die because I value it in every other way. My spouse won’t tolerate an open relationship. So I’ll cheat.
This is not a lack of communication, it’s a choice about what you value in your life.
It is a lack of communication; the cheater is deliberately and systematically withholding information from a spouse.
It may feel to the cheater like a decision motivated out of a desire to preserve what’s good in the marriage, but I believe that’s self-deception on the part of the cheater. After all, presumably, if the cheater’s spouse knew about the cheating, then the marriage would be over; the cheater conceals the truth for this very reason. The cheater is making a unilateral decision for both of them about what is and is not acceptable and about what is and is not worth preserving, and is doing it without the knowledge or consent of the spouse.
I’m big on consent. A key component of consent is information; consent is meaningless if it’s not informed. And, like I said below, I personally know a woman who cheated on her spouse, contracted a serious and incurable STD (which she died from a couple years ago), and gave it to her husband.
And *that* was when I communicated, and insisted on renegotiating the contract. And *that* was when his total lack of interest in any serious bdsm became glaringly apparent.
I’ve seen this many many times, and it nearly always results in the marriage breaking up.
Yep. Which points to a number of flaws, I think, in the accepted social conventions of marriage and monogamy; we live in a society which promotes a model of relationships that is not resilient enough to accommodate change, and in which we think it’s perfectly OK for one person to tell another “You are forbidden to meet your sexual needs with anyone except me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs.”
So substitute “communicate with your spouse, it’s not rocket science” with “talk to your spouse and very likely precipitate the end of the marriage”, and suddenly you see why it is that people are scared or unwilling to do that, and give all kinds of justifications for why not.
Sure. Hey, nobody said it’d be easy. That’s why I don’t engage in conventional relationships; I think they’re flawed and often unworkablem and in the real world are often recipes for tragedy.
Leaving a 20 year marriage is, let me tell you, very very scary and unpleasant.
Oh, I know. I left an 18-year marriage when it became clear to me that it could not and would never meet our needs.
You have to be prepared for the likelihood that communicating will blow up your entire way of life, for something that you don’t even know is worth it.
You have to be prepared for that anyway, even in an ideal situation. You could meet the lover of your dreams, build a healthy and joyous relationship, and then your lover could be run over by a bus or die of cancer. Happily ever after is a delusion; the possibility of loss always exists, every minute of every day, for everyone. There are no exceptions.
Now, personally, I think it’s important to acknowledge the reality of a relationship, and to say so if it no longer works for the people involved, even if that is hard. Remaining in a relationship that does not work for you for years, continuing to invest energy in a situation which is ultimately unfulfilling, does not seem healthy to me.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Second, if you’re married and have kids and you come to the realization at some point in your marriage that you are interested in exploring certain sexual activities that your wife isn’t into, prostitution may actually be the best option. You don’t necessarily know what all you’re into when you enter a relationship.
Indeed you don’t. And that’s precisely where communication is most vital, and precisely where many of the conventions and social norms of marriage fail spectacularly.
We have created a society built on an idealized notion of relationship that is, in the real world, often unworkable. We create this notion that a person should remain a virgin until marriage, and then have sex only with his or her spouse until death do us part, which essentially means that we want people to go into what is supposed to be a lifetime commitment with no clue about whether or not they are sexually compatible. We create a system whereby it is Bad And Wrong to have any lover but your spouse, under any circumstances and for any reason, and then we think it is reasonable for a person to sy “You may not have your sexual needs met by anyone but me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs, so suck it up”–as if that’s reasonable. We pay lip service to the idea that sex should not be an important part of a relationship, and then turn around and make it the defining part of relationship, embedding ideas of sexual fidelity into the very cornerstone of a marriage, and creating the expectation that if someone has another sexual partner, of course it must mean the end of the relationship.
And we act like this is reasonable.
People change–but our social conventions can not accommodate that. If two people in a marriage become sexually incompatible, they’re expected to suck it up (or rather, the person who wants sex is expected to suck it up, and the person who says “no” is generally considered to be somehow in the right).
Visiting a prostitute is one way to solve the problem. So is having a non-monogamous relationship. I have no problems with either idea. I do have a problem with concealing it from one’s partner, however, for both practical and ethical reasons.
You say we can not know whether or not our boy Eliot had an agreement with his wife that permitted this. Well, I rather suspect he didn’t. Ol’ Eliot is a multimillionaire dozens of times over; he could easily have put his $4,500 trysts on his check card, and it’d be less of an expense for him than going to McDonald’s is to me.
But instead, he engaged in all sorts of financial contortions, shuttling the money in and out of various accounts to conceal the expenses…think his wife knew? I bet she didn’t, else why conceal his tracks to that degree? (I am appreciating, by the way, the irony of the fact that he pioneered the forensic accounting techniques that red-flagged his financial transactions and ultimately ended up exposing him. Funny thing, life.)
At that point, going to a high end prostitute that you’re reasonably sure is disease free and has an interest in protecting your privacy might be the best thing. Prostitutes aren’t likely to go calling your wife telling about how he’s been cheating on her when you won’t leave your wife. You get your jollys, you stay married to the mother of your children, and all is well.
All is well?
I like my sexual partners to give consent to having sex with me. Consent is meaningless if it isn’t informed. If I deliberately withhold information from my wife, or anyone else, knowing that she would not consent to be with me if she had that information, then she is not giving consent in any meaningful way to be with me.
And what exactly is “reasonably sure” about STD status? Reasonable by whom? Sexual desire tends to lower the bar on what folks think is “reasonable,” and tends to make rationalization easy. Think his definition of “reasonable” would match hers? After all, he’s exposing both of them to risk…
Hmm. Weird; it’s still working for me!
According to an article in the NY Times (registration required), Federal prosecutors suspect he has diverted public funds to pay for at least three of his sessions, and they have brought in forensic accountants to audit his books.
Re: A couple thoughts…
I agree about the assumptions. We have no idea the nature of their relationship. For all we know the wife endorsed and encouraged the hiring of extra help.
While I like the idea that everyone whom gets involved in a relationship is able, or courageous enough, or fully-formed at the time, to be able to communicate their inner desires to their partner; it also seems fantastic and naive.
While it seems a safe assumption that this maestro has lead himself into his own dangerous downward spiral by failing to be forthcoming to his wife and we can extrapolate that into all sorts conjectures about products of dishonesty and silly pressures of rigid social conventions. In the end, whatever arrangements he may or may not have had with his wife seem tertiary to the point on how he presented himself to his constituents.
Personally I’m only interested in the pieces where he has actually committed a crime. The irony is the degree of scrutiny we apply as a community seems to fuel this vicious circle of duplicity and the subsequent obverse hypocrisy. If we weren’t so secretly fascinated and horrified by what public figures do in their bedrooms and hotel rooms and public bathroom stalls then perhaps they wouldn’t feel the need to polish so brightly their breastplates of self-righteousness to blind us.
Then again if we are in the business of making assumptions about what is in this man’s minds and the inner mechanics of his personal relationships we might also consider that perhaps what he has fetishized above all things was the danger , crime and duplicity itself. Perhaps what REALLY got him off was doing all of this and risking everything. Maybe in the end he’s enjoying his ultimate orgasm?
Re: A couple thoughts…
I agree about the assumptions. We have no idea the nature of their relationship. For all we know the wife endorsed and encouraged the hiring of extra help.
While that is possible, I think the lengths to which he went to conceal the financial transactions speak against it. He’s wealthy enough that he could easily just put it on his MasterCard and not even blink, but instead he appears to have shuttled money around from other sources, possibly including his campaign fund and/or state funds, in a series of complex transactions designed to hide the transfers. I think it’s a pretty good bet he did this in order to conceal what he was doing from his wife, who would, presumably, have access to the family finances.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am not entirely sure why I’m still trying to make you understand, when you so clearly don’t. I think what bothers me is “it doesn’t make sense to me at all”.
What you’re saying is, if you wouldn’t act that way, according to your own values, you can’t understand anyone else acting a different way.
I’m in a different place from where I was at 18, which is how old I was when I married. What I think you’re missing, is a couple of key things. One of them is absent from your equation altogether, as far as I understand it. And that is that I didn’t HAVE a darker side to share. I didn’t know it was there, or that it needed sharing, until 24 years into the marriage.
The other is not having an avenue for sharing your deepest self with your partner. This seems very straightforward from my perspective now, but then, it was as though it was seen from the other side of a mountain. You knew there was something on the other side, but you didn’t know what.
24. Years. Think about that. One relationship that spans 24 years is a very very different thing from a 2 or 3 year one. It has history, layers of history, and shared property, and often kids (though not me). By the time I was 40, more than half my life, and all my adult life, had been spent with one man.
The agreements of how the relationship would be conducted were laid down when I was 17 years old, and didn’t know anything. Sharing my deeper self? I didn’t even know who I was. I was working out that in the context of an existing marriage, with a man who really liked me exactly as I was when we met.
There was an avenue for discussion. That wasn’t the issue. THe avenue is absolutely there. The issue is that once the discussion takes place, once you share your deepest desires, and you find out that your parnter doesn’t share them? You have to either accept that you’ll never realise them, or cheat, or leave. They are the three stark choices.
I was willing to make that choice, and I did. Three months from discovery to realisation (and then a delay for having surgery and chemotherapy and radiotherapy, without which there would have been just the three months).
But most people, faced with that choice, are afraid. You’re not just giving up a partner. When you’re living a poly life, when you’re a person who has a relationship here, a relationship there, when even you’re a serial monomgamist.. you can choose to up and leave and the consequences are much lower. For a 25 year marriage, the consequences are absolutely huge. Not just shared property and kids, though that’s a big consideration for some people. They have to give up a lifestyle, a house, a whole set of friends, the lot. That wasn’t a big deal for me really because I’m not especially material.
But for many it’s more a question of you’ve got something that is pretty good. Your husband is great, better than many other husbands, and you are grateful to have him. Your relationship is way better than most marriages you know of. And is it actually going to be better, being single, dating, living in a tiny house that you can afford on your own, making your own way in the world?
In my case, I decided fuck that, I’m going to have to do it. In many cases though, people are too afraid, and I for one have compassion for that. It may not be something you can ever understand, since you haven’t walked in their shoes, and you’ve made different choices that have landed you someplace different, and probably better.
Maybe it’s impossible for a person with a poly lifestyle to really connect with how that is. The relationship is a different beast, founded on different beliefs and behaviours and modes of thought.
I moved from that world into this one and I prefer this one immensely, and would never ever go back there.
But I do dislike the moral high horse tone of these posts, and I wish you would accept that things are not as simple as they look from the outside. Particularly when people aren’t equipped with the tools, situation and knowledge that you are blessed with/have learned and acquired.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“”this conversation will destroy my marriage”
In my case, I knew it would. Because as soon as I realised what I wanted, and we both knew that he wouldn’t be prepared to make that happen, that it would be over. And it was, too.
He had the chance to change things, to accept a different way of being, but he couldn’t do it. Game over.
“we live in a society which promotes a model of relationships that is not resilient enough to accommodate change, and in which we think it’s perfectly OK for one person to tell another “You are forbidden to meet your sexual needs with anyone except me, and I refuse to meet your sexual needs.”
Exactly. And that’s why it had to blow up the marriage, because our marriage was totally founded on that assumption.
“You have to be prepared for that anyway, even in an ideal situation.”
Yes but that’s future and uncertain, whereas blowing up the marriage is immediate and quite likely, and most people choose future uncertain. I didn’t and that’s something I’m very proud of. It’s won me a life that I totally love.
“Remaining in a relationship that does not work for you for years, continuing to invest energy in a situation which is ultimately unfulfilling, does not seem healthy to me.”
Agreed.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I wish you would accept that I’m not some silly teenager who has only had a string of short-term relationships and can’t possibly know the depth and history of a long term relationship or learning something new about oneself after a relationship begins. I’m not the only one around here who has trouble understanding someone else’s position.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Well and the funny thing is that it’s not clear he actually broke any laws. There’s the mann act, which is a law that prevents interstate transportation of somebody for sex like that, but historically it was mostly about kidnapping somebody. The way he paid for it was slightly shady looking because he structured the transactions, so it doesn’t look like he did anything illegal there either.
And yeah it’s quite possible that it was the risk/excitement factor that did it for him. He wouldn’t be the first :). Actually I think that’s very likely, because of the structured payments. He’s the former AG of New York State. He knows how those things work. He knows people were out to get him. He did a few things with it that were deliberately suspicious. I think he wanted to get caught on some level and was enjoying the risk in the game of it.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Actually his attempt to hide the transactions is what revealed him. Had he put it on his credit card, he’d have been totally ignored.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Actually I was hearing a fascinating study about monogamous pairings in the animal kingdom. Turns out that, depending on the species, between 10-70% of the offspring are from affairs outside of the monogamous pairing. True monogamy, it turns out, is quite rare.
Now that’s interesting and not entirely surprising, but it turns out the jealousy is also a common part of this. So it seems that the most common arrangement is a “monogamous” couple where one or both of the pair cheats. They state together for the purpose of raising children, but spreading it around increases the chances for species suvival.
So strangely it seems that the natural thing may be for us to expect sexual fidelity from our partner, not get it, and not give it ourselves. You can see a blog post about it here.
Now, moving on from that point, whatever may exist between his wife and him, his children are still there. He is still dad and she is still mom. If getting consent means divorce, a broken family, etc, and a lie means maintaining the family, and the kids having a normal life, it’s not that simple of an equation. Of course the ideal is open communication, consent, etc, but it’s WAY more complicated when it’s not just two of you.
As for the STD issue, if it was something he was concerned about, he could jump through various hoops to protect himself. I’m not betting that he did, but obviously using protection would be an element of it. He could have asked that the prosititute get tested prior to them getting together, etc. Having said that, it sounds like he was explicitly not using it which further suggests that it was the risk element he was getting off on. If you’re turn on is just the risk, it’s not clear to me how it can possibly end well because the tendency will be to keep pushing the line til you end up over it.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
We married when we were 18 and 19. I didn’t find out I was submissive untill I was 45. My husband can never be my master. I wouldn’t accept him but he’s no dominant to start with.
We did discuss things, I found my ways to act on my being a sub, we now live in a threesome with my master.
But “we never had these kind of discussions” because it never played a role in our marriage.
I know some one (who would probably be my master and probably the ideal one as well); who is married almost as long as we are. His wife shudders away from every hint in SM directions.
This man is a very intelligent, kind, gentle man. He tried to discuss his dominant feelings, but then there are these articles in the Dutch newspapers about a couple of men who kept three Philipine women in a shed in the polders, whom they forced to have SM-sex and sex with animals to put on vid and sell.
Their defence was, that it was BDSM and that there was concensus (which of course wasn’t so).
And then there were the stories about the Belgian judge, who allowed his wife to visit SM-clubs because he couldn’t give her what she needed. And he allegedly ‘sold’ her. I don’t know what is the true story here, but I do know he is convicted (up until the European Court) and no longer allowed to be a judge.
And this woman looks at her loving, gentle husband and for her eyes the image is changed for that of these ‘beasts’, who do horrible things to women in the name of BDSM. And she does really not understand anything of his desires, his wishes, his needs.
And he falls silent. We had lengthy discussions about this. Because to me it is like he is not showing her who he really is. She loves a man that he is not. But he loves her and he is loyal.
So he is not my master. And we never speak eachother any more.
“We weren’t meant to be, at least not in this lifetime
but you gave me something to remember”
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
We never changed the rules, we just stopped having sex. Yes, my husband wanted it more frequently than I. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want it, I just didn’t get arroused enough to enjoy it. And guess whom I blamed? Let me tell you: It wasn’t him I blamed. And I can assure you that in my neck of the woods it is always the one that can not have or does not (seem to) want sex as often as the other one is usually the one that is blamed.
It took us a very long time to discover the facts that caused our ‘incompatibility’.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Like I said earlier: my mileage varies 🙂
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Ah, I hear it from the perspective of the people who aren’t getting enough sexual contact (because they are generally the ones who are talking about it about). From my perspective, it really matters very little who is given responsibility for the fall off because everyone comes to their own conclusions. I have seen a general pattern with these:
1. General tendency to ascribe the problem to an external sources (kids, schedule etc)
2. They start to internalize it, wondering what they did wrong, why they aren’t attractive.
3. The focus of the problem shifts to the less desirous partner. Concern may initially crop up but this eventually turns into resentment and even anger.
4. They start to disconnect, this might lead to an affair, divorce or just emotional withdrawal.
Sexuality is a primary connection point in a marriage, once it stops, other connections start to deteriorate. I generally tell people to make certain their partner is getting some sort of sexual contact, even if it is utility or a favor from a friend. While finding the turn-on is important, the absence of sex will hit critical mass long before that particular problem is sorted out.
Often, the problem is simply that the initial turn on tapered off and people didn’t find a way to create the excitement deliberately. They just assume it is there or not.
So, in your case, what caused the incompatibility? I am curious.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I knew I wasn’t the only one 🙂
We don’t have kids. That makes a difference I guess. For the rest: even in a free minded country as the Netherlands were at that time, I had no clue whatsoever.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
Let me first state that whatever sex you have, frequent, not frequent, kinky, not at all, it does not matter to the relationship when both (or all) partners are happy with it. There are problems when one or more of the partners aren’t satisfied with what they get or not get.
And I agree: there actually should not be blame. No self blame, no blame to the other person(s) involved.
But since I was the one who didn’t get aroused, who didn’t like it, who eventually shied away from it, I always felt that I withheld him (husband) something he was entitled to. It’s only now that I realised I was also not getting what I needed or wanted 🙂
Hehe… I knew I wasn’t getting away with the short story.
Marrying young, inexperienced, most likely played a roll.
Around the age of thirty I found out that I have something called hyperprolactinemy (meaning my hypofyse (one of the glands pre-thyroid) produces to much prolactine – the stuff that makes young mothers lactate plus that it has some soothing effects and it also plays a role in the libido (only not in NL 20 years ago when you complain about a low libido to a male doctor (lots of them actually)… women didn’t have a libido then overhere, let alone that it could get low).
Then, when I was 39 and very occasionally, not sought after, happened to walk into a lover I found out that I could actually get very aroused and that there was nothing wrong with my libido.
When I was 45 I was diagnosed with ADHD (the emotional, impulsive, pretty hyperactive type).
When my husband was 48 he was diagnosed to have ‘something in the autistic spectrum’.
Somewhere in these years I found out that I love phone sex and that with men on the phone I played a pretty submissive roll. And that the more dominant the men were, the better I liked it.
Put all these things together and you have a woman that has a high arousal level (due to ADHD and high prolactine levels); and needs a special type of foreplay to get aroused (because of being submissive) as one partner and you have a man who is limited in his way of communicating, limited in his way of showing affection and has a hard time in finding out how bodies work in the way of getting aroused and does not interpret body language well as the other partner.
And yes: we didn’t know when we were 18 and 19 and it took us nearly 30 years to figure that out.
Does that mean we have/had a lousy marriage? No, I don’t think so. We always were best friends, still are. I never hid anything for him, nor did he ever hid anything for me (though it is very complicated to get everything discussed because when I don’t ask the right question, I don’t get the right answer, but intentionally he’s not hiding anything. From the start I was open about my lover (heck, the way I am I cannot hide anything and surely not something so important as that).
And I found out that having a lover didn’t mean I loved my husband less. It didn’t change anything but for the better:.
we enjoyed the sex we had when I was aroused. Some one recently said “He has outsourced the hard work”
Of course there is some remorse. We could have had a lot better sex together when we would have known sooner or when some one had been willing to listen sooner.
But we found it out, and we live together with my master now. That doesn’t mean I get a lot of sex these days, because over the last two years some how survival was more important than having sex (life can be very demanding at times).
Re: A couple thoughts…
Precisely the point. I suspect he didn’t just use his credit card because he didn’t want his wife to know.. That is, he diverted money from his campaign fund and transferred money through a series of accounts not to hide his activities from political opponents, but to hide them from his wife (who, presumably, would have access to his credit card bill).
This essay is excellent. Thank you!
Oh, in other news… happy birthday!
This essay is excellent. Thank you!
Oh, in other news… happy birthday!
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think it’s difficult for some people to understand where you’re coming from, because you were coming from a wholly different worldview and environment. It’s sort of like trying to get a deeply religious person and a starkly skeptical atheist to see eye to eye: there’s just a huge gulf to try bridging there.
It’s relatively easy to talk about openness and honesty when you’re in an environment that’s supportive of the subjects. It’s hard to remember what risks are out there in other environments, some times.
Thank you muchly for sharing your perspective. – it’s actually given me a lot to think about. I’ve got some interests of my own, that I was raised to see as dirty, evil things. The sort of thing you simply never shared, because everyone decent would reject you for it. To me, the choice was either “not have a relationship” or else keep this secret.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“It is unfathomable to me to be in a long term relationship that does not have an avenue for sharing your deepest, darkest part of who you are with your partner.“
This philosophy boggles me. I have friends who are squicked by me discussing vanilla sex. I have partners that get really uncomfortable if I talk about hardcore BDSM. I don’t need to be able to talk to everyone about everything.
Now, that said, this is the reason I’m polyamorous: I refuse to stop looking for someone who is compatible with me. I’d never be able to make a meaningful fidelous commitment to anyone who I wasn’t able to share everything with – I’d leave them the instant I discovered that better options existed.
I don’t know how far out there on the “edge” your own interests lie, but there’s some stuff that you just can’t safely advertise. In some places, being gay or transsexual is on that list. In others, it’s BDSM and other kinks. Even in the most liberal of areas, there’s taboo subjects.
Yes, it’s incredibly awesome that I have someone in my life that I really can discuss every aspect of myself with, but that was a result of calculated risks, perserverance, and a bit of luck. It’s really genuinely hard to find someone like that, for some people and some environments. I don’t think it’s an excuse not to try, but why sell yourself short in the meantime?
If a happy, 20 year marriage resulted from it, how in the world is this a bad thing? Yes, she denied that part of herself – but what were the chances, at the time, of her finding someone she could share this with? Why throw away 20 years of happiness in the quest for some idealized perfection? She found what worked well for her life, what was realistic. When her life changed, she found something that worked for that new life.
There’s parts of me that I refuse to be closed off about. The reason I do that, though, is because I know enough supportive people that I can afford to be choosy and still leave the life I want. Not everyone has that luxury.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I never once said “discuss everything with everyone you meet”, I said have a romantic partner that has developed avenues for discussing the deeper parts of who you are as they come up. One of the reason someone becomes a romantic partner is because there’s some connection with them that sets them apart from everyone else you know who remains “just friends” or acquaintences.
I’m only talking about people here that someone would consider marrying, since the original topic is about a husband and wife who don’t even know each other’s sexual preferences. I can’t imagine reaching the point where this person next to me is someone I would take all legal and emotional steps to intentionally make him a permanent part of my life if I didn’t feel I could discuss anything with him that might come up about who I was and what I wanted our life to look like.
As for “safely advertise”, I have a very unusual kink (so I hear), but I’m about as out as you can get. I discuss it freely at work and with friends and on the internet. I keep hearing about people who can’t discuss things because they might get fired, but I’ve quit jobs that were like that, so that’s another thing I don’t fully understand.
And before anyone tries to explain to me how their particular circumstance makes it impossible to quit their job, I’ve heard all that too and it still doesn’t make sense to me.
I question the “happy, 20 year marriage” if, for the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire that goes unfulfilled for their entire life. It’s not just “hmm, I’d kinda like to go skydiving some day, but no biggie”, it’s the kind of secret that drives people to act it out no matter the consequences, like cheating. Living with this kind of drive and pressure and keeping that a secret automatically creates limits and boundaries on intimacy and I have to question just how happy someone really is.
Discovering this kind of secret 15 years into a 20 year marriage, well, I can imagine the first 15 years being “happy” with the discontent growing over the last 5 years, and that’s slightly more reasonable to me. But in a “happy” relationship, I don’t see why someone would feel they couldn’t discuss this with their spouse, couldn’t share with them who they are, couldn’t grow together. I would not feel “happy” for 15 years with a person if, on the 16th year I discovered something new and my first thought was “I better not tell my husband”. That indicates to me a limit to our intimacy.
The chances of finding someone that any given person could share their kink with, particularly now with the internet, are extremely high. There’s nothing new under the sun and someone somewhere has the same fetish as anyone else.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think it’s interesting that you can’t seem to understand anyone who doesn’t agree with you.
I know we’ve had this argument before, but there is nothing morally wrong with choosing to prioritize aspects of your life differently. Relationships and sex *do not need* to be number one.
There’s also a difference between a job and a career. Is there something inherently wrong with engaging in a career you like (knowing that to participate in that career you cannot be out?) I like making enough money to travel. I made the conscious choice a long time ago that certain aspects of my lifestyle would not be shared with work. And you know what? I’m perfectly, 100% ok with that. My co-workers do not need to be my friends.
You’ve given the impression through your posts that it is less morally correct to conduct your life in any way that is closed. My obligation is to provide for my well being first and foremost. If you choose to sacrifice other things to be out, it’s a choice, but not any more “correct” than the choices i’ve made.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I can understand lots of people I don’t agree with. I’m quite good at following the train of their thought processes that brought them to a conclusion I disagree with. I was a psych major going into family couseling because my high school counselor encouraged me based on my ability to mediate and facilitate and see several sides of a story at once.
I don’t understand this one.
And I’m losing my patience with people who feel a need to explain their side and try to get me to change my opinion while simultaneously acting the injured party when I don’t understand their opinion or wish to get them to see mine. In this post, I did not even try to convince someone that their opinion was wrong, I stated only that I had a different one and didn’t understand the other.
It’s not about morals, it’s about practicality. I see the cost of being closeted about anything as being higher than the cost of being out. I also see it as futile – information wants to be free and I don’t see how a secret that involves other people can ultimately be kept. As the saying goes, 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead. I do not claim that life should be all about relationships and sex (and if you knew me for more than a couple of months and had met any of my past partners, you’d know just how far off that claim is). But when someone does make a decision to make a relationship take on that level of importance, it seems incongruous to me that someone would then choose a partner they do not feel they can share themselves with, or, since the subject of being closeted has come up, that this partner must be kept a secret or compartmentalized from the rest of one’s life.
I will not get married and my career and my personal happiness has always been of higher priority than any relationship, so I caution anyone from making assumptions about how I conduct my life because frankly, no one here really knows me or how I operate.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I was making no assumptions about you – you explained your position, I explained mine.
However frequently posting – “I don’t understand” does tend to lead people to want to explain further. It has nothing to do with any degrees or innate ability to follow thought processes, it’s just how it appears in the medium through which we are communicating.
We happen to disagree on the relative value of being closeted. It’s a higher cost/benefit ratio to you than it is me, and again no value judgment from me but the impression conveyed through posts is that it is less right. My co-workers don’t discuss their home lives with me. I don’t discuss it with them.
Your experience varies because of the environment in which you work. In my profession, there is no socialization. I didn’t tell them about my monogamous relationships, I don’t tell them about my poly relationships – it’s not a decision to be closed because it is poly, it’s a decision to not share my personal life with people I have no connection with other than we get paid by the same employer.
As far as sharing with a partner, I agree with Sterno in that relationships evolve, and sometimes the cost/benefit of change is higher than the perceived cost of remaining in the relationship without whatever it is you’ve recently discovered you’d like.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/nyregion/14spitzer.html?ex=1363147200&en=633fbef1a5833651&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Registration-free link courtesy of the lovely folks at the New York Times Link Generator:
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I am curious to understand your position, since you keep defending that it is something other than how I am representing it.
It is quite possible that you’ve lived through this before, and firmly believe that openness is a thing worth having your life ruined over. I don’t know you. But I’m trying to figure out which one it is. You’ve discussed “unusual”, but I’m talking “socially taboo”.
If you don’t believe that “safe space” exists, you’re not going to look for it. It’s harder to find safe spaces for some kinks. It’s within the last three months that I discovered that there are completely casual, above-board, pro-pedophilia communities out there. Last week I read an article about the FBI trolling other websites and doing raids on anyone that clicked the link to the fake video they were offering.
I had genuinely assumed that certain things were simply verboten. The only time you hear about pedophilia communities is in the context of illegal ones being busted, and how bad and dirty and evil pedophiles all are.
When I’m talking about “edge” kinks, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire”
“I question the “happy, 20 year marriage” if, for the whole time someone is keeping this secret of a desire that goes unfulfilled for their entire life.”
OK, if you’re still referring to *my* marriage, let me say *again*: I did not have a desire that I kept secret. I. Did. Not. Know.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
When I’m referring to anyone in particular, I’ll say so
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
“a need to explain their side and try to get me to change my opinion while simultaneously acting the injured party when I don’t understand their opinion or wish to get them to see mine.”
Actually, (again assuming that one of the people you’re referring to is me) I didn’t want to change your opinion or the way you live your life. It’s very interesting that you think this. In fact, as I said before, I fully support the way you want to live your life. I think it’s admirable and importantly, it’s internally consistent with your own values and ideals.
What I was after was to help you with what you stated, namely that you *didn’t understand*. Explanations normally help another person understand.
However, it seems that what you were really saying was not that you didn’t understand, but that you don’t agree, that you think your way is better, and that any reasons anyone put forward for their own behaviour would be dismissed as morally inferior.
“someone would then choose a partner they do not feel they can share themselves with”
Again, this is NOT what happened. You really haven’t listened. YOu’ve taken a position, you’ve closed your mind, and that’s the really disappointing thing, not that you disagree. Disagreement I find interesting – it’s where you learn. Close minded repetitions of your position are dull and disappointing to me.
That’s how I felt too
His use of public funds and the fact he made a career out of ‘cleaning up’ prostitution are reasons enough for me to want to see him forced out of office. And I think both are indicators of serious problems with society as well.
But I do think
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
I think what happens is that some people sort of choose not to look behind the curtain themselves. They purposely cut off self-knowledge because they think the knowledge will upset their lives. I have some level of personal experience with this. :-/
I don’t think that’s good, but I can easily see how it would happen. It sounds like the person who started this thread kind of put all that stuff in a box and only took it out when the self-knowledge wouldn’t ruin other things she held dear.
In the case of Spitzer though, it’s clear that this isn’t the case. Once you start acting on something you’d better be aware of what you’re doing. *think* Though, in truth, I think that’s how a lot of addictions start. People doing things while avoiding understanding the reasons why.
Re: Actually it IS rocket science
If you see yourself in general statements that I make, that says more about you than it does about me.
Again, when I’m referring to you specifically, I’ll say so.
Re: A couple thoughts…
Did he transfer money from his campaign funds? I know it’s under investigation but I didn’t get the impression there was anything solid. Ignoring that detail though, he was clearly trying to obfuscate what was going on and yes, it’s probably that his wife was one of the subjects of obfuscation.
daaaamn that chick is hoottttttt!
but I digress.
w00t to communication1 I wish more people understood the importance of that.
daaaamn that chick is hoottttttt!
but I digress.
w00t to communication1 I wish more people understood the importance of that.
A comment on the “dangerous activity” and being open with your partner:
The #1 thing US men go to prostitutes for is oral sex. That’s what Hugh Grant wanted from Divine Brown & what Bill Clinton was getting from Monica Lewinsky. While Monica wasn’t a prostitute, Bill & Hugh likely had the same motivation of not being able to get it at home.
The #2 activity is anal sex, again because they can’t get it.
It’s not that they’re not honest with their wives or won’t ask, the ladies simply say “no.”
In many cases, the women did/would engage in some of these activities at the BEGINNING of the relationship, but as the relationship went on they began to refuse.
There’re common jokes that say “Why does a bride smile on her wedding day? Because she knows she’s given her last blowjob.” Or “What food is guaranteed to kill a woman’s sex drive? Wedding cake!”
Often after kids this becomes more pronounced.
This is not to say it’s all the woman’s fault, as there’re often things the male half of a couple does/won’t do that exacerbate the issues.
But these changes and unwillingness are often the impetus for a guy to seek something he can’t get at home.
It’s not always a communications issue in the sense you describe.
A comment on the “dangerous activity” and being open with your partner:
The #1 thing US men go to prostitutes for is oral sex. That’s what Hugh Grant wanted from Divine Brown & what Bill Clinton was getting from Monica Lewinsky. While Monica wasn’t a prostitute, Bill & Hugh likely had the same motivation of not being able to get it at home.
The #2 activity is anal sex, again because they can’t get it.
It’s not that they’re not honest with their wives or won’t ask, the ladies simply say “no.”
In many cases, the women did/would engage in some of these activities at the BEGINNING of the relationship, but as the relationship went on they began to refuse.
There’re common jokes that say “Why does a bride smile on her wedding day? Because she knows she’s given her last blowjob.” Or “What food is guaranteed to kill a woman’s sex drive? Wedding cake!”
Often after kids this becomes more pronounced.
This is not to say it’s all the woman’s fault, as there’re often things the male half of a couple does/won’t do that exacerbate the issues.
But these changes and unwillingness are often the impetus for a guy to seek something he can’t get at home.
It’s not always a communications issue in the sense you describe.