Something at the Globe and Mail caught the eye:

Now, a study from Pennsylvania State University, to be published next week in Psychological Science, is shedding new light on why genders are jealous about different scenarios, beyond the evolutionary hypothesis.

The article was about the Edwards breakup after so many years:

Women view emotional infidelity as a much more serious breach of trust than sexual trysts.

The reverse for men.  However, the Telegraph says that men are keener to start a relationship than women, which flies in the face of centuries of assuming it is the woman who goes for that bond and fora are full of women commenting that men won’t commit.

The most dismaying aspect, to me, is people splitting and cheating today, often without any justification other than the long accumulated list of minor and not so minor irritations.  It is so fashionable and easy to split these days – there is no stigma and what’s worse -  those two people really believe they did absolutely everything possible to salvage the relationship and that they are the good people in the situation.

Me, me, me

No one ever publicly concedes he or she is the villain.

Or do they? The Mail had this:

The shock and the pain of hearing that the man I loved was not, as he’d promised me, going to leave his wife, felt like a physical blow. I felt angry, betrayed and terrifyingly insecure.

Yes, you read that right – the cheater felt humiliated because the married man she was cheating with had an attack of conscience and said he couldn’t do that to his wife any more – that his wife had done nothing wrong.

And what was our cheater’s romantic, love-is-bigger-than-both-of-us view of what she was doing?

I was thrilled, feeling like a teenager who’s finally captured the man of her dreams. When thoughts about how my daughter would accept a stepfather, or the distress I was about to cause Steve [her husband] , got in the way of my wishful thinking about the future, I told myself it was better to be honest than spend the rest of my marriage living a lie.

I never once asked myself how I would feel if my husband told me he was having an affair, and avoided all thoughts of how upset he was going to be.

Nick [the man she cheated with] made me feel I mattered again, that I was attractive, intelligent and valued. Steve has never been the suspicious type, and as my job involves a lot of socialising, he never inquired closely about where I was going or who I was going to meet.

So:

1.  Hubby was not suspicious, therefore he trusted her, something which, presumably, two people like to have in a relationship and yet that only made it easy for her – nice person;

2.  On the grounds that someone else without any responsibility made her feel “valued”, it was quite OK to instantly forget her husband with whom she had a long term understanding, in which both had invested a lot of themselves, in order to try to make a life with a cheater who would do the same to her further down the track.

This topic occupies a chapter of my novel and concerns emotional immaturity and instability – the idea that you can love someone and make a life with that person and make a stable home, the best environment for children and yet you let yourself fall for another and suddenly the first person is gone. He goes to work one morning, she meets someone, he comes home to a broken marriage [feel free to interchange the genders here].

There’s a lot of “grass is greener” here too.  It’s this notion that you’ve made a bad choice and that almost anyone else out there is a better choice.  It’s highly unstable.

The Sun [which is not usually a rag on my reading list but I saw this in my corner shop yesterday] came out with “Terry did dirty on best pal Wayne”, the British equivalent of Shane Warne or Wayne Carey or anyone else you care to mention.  At least Terry did that with an unmarried woman but the other two animals mentioned here did it with the wife of someone else, one of those wives having children.  In the case of Kelli Stevens, wife of the team mate of Carey, she was doing it whilst still pregnant with her husband’s child.

Interwoven with this is whether one or both partners are reasonable people to begin with or were spoilt children in the family, always trying to get their own way.  Lately, I’ve been thinking that the chances of two individuals ever staying together are quite remote in this day and age – emotional immaturity is rampant.

In less extreme cases, certainly the Modern Woman with her Ms designation and lightly veiled feminism seems to be in a “pick and choose or drop the idea altogether” phase of self-empowerment, certainly whilst young enough to do this and so age might play quite a role as well.  Age also seems to be a factor with the irresponsible young men who get girls pregnant and disappear but who finally grow up and want to settle down and yet see how many of the older generation, themselves, are going into debt, have no pension to speak of and are still into the “Me” thing big time.

Don’t forget that these latter are the ageing, profligate Boomers, as distinct from the godless, pierced ear Generation X for whom nothing is sacred and the neo-greedy Gen Y who have few prospects, no moral code to follow [thanks to the preceding two generations], yet who want it all.

Warren Zevon sang [pity there's no youtube]:

We keep walking away for no reason at all
And no one says a word
We were always so busy protecting ourselves
We never would have heard
And the rate of attrition for lovers like us
Is steadily on the rise
Nobody’s in love this year
Not even you and I

Due to lack of commitment on both of our parts
We’re going our separate ways
This show of indifference is breaking our hearts
It’s making us crazy, yeah
You sit back and wait for your love to accrue
You’ll be waiting a long, long time
Nobody’s in love this year
Not even you and I

I don’t want to be Mr. Vulnerable
I don’t want to get hurt
I don’t want to be Mr. Vulnerable
I don’t want to be the one who gets left behind

We keep walking away for no reason at all
For the sake of being free
No one’s invested enough of themselves
To yield to maturity
And the rate of attrition for lovers like us
Is steadily on the rise
Nobody’s in love this year
Nobody wants to try
Nobody’s in love this year
Not even you and I

I don’t want to be Mr. Vulnerable
I don’t want to get hurt
I don’t want to be Mr. Vulnerable
I don’t want to be the one who gets left behind

Me, me, me.

Just how does one define “emotional commitment” anyway?  How can you be emotionally committed and yet go round bonking others?  Doesn’t seem too committed to me.

Personal anecdote

In one long term partnership which had its ups and downs, there were three incidents in particular I remember, not in any chronological order, mind, so it’s a chicken and egg situation.

I’ve always had friendships with a few women at a time but some are closer than others and so they range from acquaintance friendships to something a partner would start to be concerned about.

She, in turn, had a work colleague friend she had lunch with because the signal she emitted, despite her efforts to appear sophisticated, was “bonkability” and she was sick of the come-ons, nice though the overall attention itself was. This work colleague was apparently Mr. Genuine, without my ascerbic tongue and unpredictability but also without my energy.

I took the point of view, naively of course, that it wasn’t a problem as long as it didn’t stray into one-on-ones after work – she had her friendships, I had mine. She warned me she might have feelings for this one and I couldn’t see that it was a problem at the time, that she’d still remain true – that is, she wouldn’t be bonking him, just as I don’t bonk other women when I have one of my own, the one of own being a full-time job in herself.

Apparently she was bonking him and telling him she loved him too but during that time, she’d visit me to see if I was OK and it always ended up on the bed or floor.  When he found out about this because a mutual girlfriend of ours told him, apparently he went ballistic.  So, in a weird way, I was the “other man” but technically I’d  lost her and was free to roam.  I was going to phone him and meet him at a cafe to discuss her but then I thought nah, I’ll let him find out about her for himself and best of luck.

One of those women friends of mine came to supper at my place one evening and I cooked [I can sometimes actually do that without poisoning the guest ].  Call me a thicko for missing the point of the evening but I thought it was for discussion, wine and food.  This friend knew I had a partner, for the simple reason that she’d been her best friend up to this point and our recent so-called breakup was going to be on the discussion agenda.

This dinner guest’s other best friend [a woman] phoned my ex-partner and told her the dinner guest had been seeing me, my erstwhile love went ballistic and cut off all connection with me for some time [which was interesting because we were technically estranged anyway].  I then happened, by chance in the street, to meet the one who had shopped us and I asked why she’d done it.  Was it to maximise the chances of her best friend and I staying together?

No, she said, it was because she was disgusted with all that was going on with different people, that I was the devil incarnate for playing women off against one another which I effing had not been consciously doing and that was where the penny dropped [for me at least] that even inter-gender friendships were off limits.

Months later, my erstwhile love and I were back together again but only on condition we dropped all these others.  We both agreed on that but the problem was that we both interpreted it differently.  For me, the criterion was purely physical – no intim.  For her, it was no other women at all, one-to-one, whether I was bonking them or not [which I wasn't].

We discussed Mr. Genuine and she said she’d returned to me because she’d been “wrong in her feelings”.  When I mentioned the little matter of her having made love to him, she said it had been”only sex”.  That appalled me because that is the one thing supposedly reserved for the one you love.  If you fall out of love and break up, then that transfers to the one you eventually fall in love with … but never at the same time.

She didn’t see it that way.  For her, the emotional commitment was everything and the act was just a minor detail.  I flatly refused to accept that then and still don’t accept it today.

That’s also behind the latest chapter in the saga of Tiger Woods and the lovely Elin.

When his email to Rachel Uchitel was exposed, with Woods stating that she was everything to him, Elin was heading for Sweden and a new life, a highly reimbursed life.  However, the moment she was able to rationalize in her head that it was all sexual aberration on his part, nothing emotional at all, she forgave him and decided to stick with him.  After all, naughty boys can be led astray by wicked witches.

So, the lesson from that, Elin, is that we men can have a partner whom we “officially” love and at the same time we can happily dip the wick into any other woman, as long as we tell our partner there’s no emotional attachment with those other women, that it’s “just sex”; everything’s fine and we continue on.

Sorry but I don’t buy that.  For me, the sole criterion is the bonking.

Filed under: Life issues & people