Hey Steve: Can I be Disgusted without being Puritanical for a minute?

EDIT:  Okay, I had my minute, and I’m done now.  Getting ranty and judgmental is fun for a little while, but I always get sick of it fast.  ;)  The original post is behind the cut, if you really want it.

2009 Focus – Intimate Relationships

Oh, Steve Pavlina.  You talk like Mokey Fraggle and are far too impressed with your own advice for my taste, but I had to read this latest post because usually, I don’t disagree with the things you do; I just don’t think they’re as be-all-and-end-all as you do. 

This time you gave me a real WTF?! moment, though.  I read the whole thing very carefully, and I think I understand what you’re feeling and what you’re aiming to do about it, and obviously you’ve given it a lot of thought.  I think you’re a creep for doing it, though.

So you’re married for fifteen years, and you have young children, and you’re feeling that your "sexandintimacy" (you don’t separate the two) life is a bit constricted.  You find yourself wanting to have long deep conversations, back massages and nookie with other women. 

Well, good for you, I guess that makes you pretty normal and healthy, then.  Monogamous relationships are indeed a bit on the restrictive side when it comes to sexandintimacy, and after fifteen years it’s normal to get a little bored, and lonely for the sparkle of fresh encounters.  The pages and pages you spend justifying and explaining your feelings seem to exist mostly to obfuscate, rather than reveal, this simple truth.  You want it to sound like something oo-big and compelling, this magic lack that only you have in spite of having a (you insist) otherwise perfect relationship with your wife … but dude, you’re just a little bored.  Normal.  Seriously.

Your answer is to be a "pioneer" and talk your wife into letting you strike out and "create intimate relationships" (but not ones that involve any "major hang-ups or possessiveness", you know) with "other women".  You want those women to be "conscious" but not as "completely" so as your wife, so that you can teach them things, you know — which is Mokey-Fraggle-language for saying you want to boff a younger woman.  You want the experience of a less-mature girlfriend that will be super-impressed with everything you do, as opposed to your wife, who probably knows all your tricks and foibles by now.  You want a relationship that you can feel totally in control of, which doesn’t involve the pesky "serious" bits in your marriage that take away from the fun and frequency of massages and nookie (or at least make that fun and frequency more work).

Again, this is also normal.   However, it’s also egotistic.  Call it "having so much love inside that you can’t give" all you like, but what you’re experiencing is not an unselfish need to "spread your love" — it’s a selfish desire to be excited, and to feel complimented and desired by someone who doesn’t know the darker or less-impressive things about you.  Look around you and notice how many middle-age guys leave their wives for younger women…think that’s an accident?  Completely unrelated to what you’re feeling?  Wake up, man.

There’s nothing wrong with having such a desire; like I said, I think just about everybody who’s married gets there — I sure have, and I’ve been married half as long as you have.  But what you’ve done is to elevate your selfish desire into a necessity, and to do so is to say that neither your relationship to your wife, nor the right of your young children to live in an unbroken household, supercedes that desire. 
(more ranting below, if you wanna…)

Look.  I’m an intellectual by nature; I understand the tendency to think that if you just figure things out clearly enough in words, you can trump or get around the usual workings of things — you have the perfect path laid out, so the fact that everybody else who goes this way ends up X doesn’t matter, right?  But here’s what you’re overlooking:  A monogamous relationship is a monogamous relationship, and when it has been one for fifteen years, the rules of a monogamous relationship are going to apply to it, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t.  A monogamous relationship doesn’t expand in the same direction as a poly one — it doesn’t spread out to involve more people; rather it goes deeper to involve more intimacy between two people.  Your feeling of frustration that there isn’t any deeper for you and your wife to go is understandable, but also bullshit; it’s just that the path deeper that’s open to you isn’t the one you want.  Your relationship with your wife, as the two of you mature and deepen your commitment to each other, involves endless exploration and contact, and levels of compassion and understanding that you seriously cannot guess — go ask a couple who’s been married fifty years, and they’ll get a nearly-religious look on their faces and be unable to put it in words.  (I’m lucky enough to know some.)  It’s a beautiful and worthwhile thing — but it does, as the years go on, involve the occasional discomfort from lack of varied and exciting nookie.  On the flipside, polyamorous relationships, when they work, typically involve lots of intimacy and excitement, but involve the occasional discomfort from lack of the kind of deep connection that monogamous relationships have.  Call it give-and-take.  And also call it damn near impossible to turn a mono relationship, especially a well-established one, into a poly one:  Your relationship is built on deepening intimacy and connection between two people.  When you bring in someone else (especially for intimacy rather than just sex, I think), you’re going to lose the level of connection with your wife that’s necessary to sustain a relationship at your level … and that’ll be it.

I’m not being puritanical, and I don’t have a problem with polyamorous relationships, but dude, you’re not in one.  We’re not talking about whether a single guy should be poly or not, here; we’re talking about whether a married father of two should throw away (or seriously endanger, at least) his married and family life in the interest of sexandintimacy.  You’re IN a monogamous relationship that you’re about to put at HUGE risk, and by doing so you’re saying "my feelings of sexual and romantic unfulfillment right now are more important than my wife of fifteen years and my two kids".  Even if you should have thought harder about whether you wanted a mono relationship before you got this far, I think the claims of your wife and kids morally outweigh your desire to have more sexandintimacy in your life by a lot.  At the very least, I think you have an obligation to put off this kind of experimentation until the possible probable consequences wouldn’t be as damaging to your children.

And by the way, in all your linguistic gymnastics, you never mentioned how your wife feels about your relationship now, other than to say she’s "okay" with your plan to fix everything by having girlfriends.  (Since you effectively threatened to divorce her unless she went along, I guess she would be.)  But you never said, Do you think your relationship would survive her going out to find younger boyfriends?  Would you really feel that your connection with her as your wife wasn’t diminished at all, if that’s what she did?  (If you do think it would work, then why didn’t you encourage her to do it?  Anyway she probably wouldn’t want to, because she probably realizes it would lessen the strength of her relationship to you, and also probably because it’s more important to her to not put the kids at risk…though to be fair, if she was really thinking about that she’d have slapped you for suggesting it and told you to get control of your urges and put your family first.  …At least that’s what my mom would have done.)  …And since this post is already on the personal side for me, I might as well go all the way, and say that perhaps if you paid more attention to your wife’s needs, you wouldn’t need to make her "receptive" in order to get enough action.  *cough*  Sorry.  You brought it up.

I guess what bothers me most of all about your post is the disingenous language; the framing of your wants as necessities; the blaming your relationship for having hit some sort of dead-end that justifies your going elsewhere to get what you want, rather than addressing your desires for what they are.  There’s a subtle undercurrent of "this is my wife’s fault", too — by carefully saying that there’s NO problems with your relationship (a wholly unbelievable claim that rings immediately false to anyone who’s ever been married), you’re in effect saying "what else could the problem be?  It’s not ME…"; and by refusing to acknowledge that you have desires which are simply not compatible with treating your family the way they deserve at this moment, you’re putting your ego on a pedestal and refusing to admit it. 

In conclusion, everybody has mid-life (and other) crises.  Everybody feels sometimes that they’re trapped in their relationships (poly or mono); and everybody at some point wants more sex and intimacy than they get.  What separates the saints from the scum is how we react to those feelings and situations.  The right thing to do is to protect your kids from negative consequences they don’t deserve, and treat your wife with respect; she’s owed it.  Maybe that means, perhaps in conjunction with other changes, that you have to be okay with less sexandintimacy than you’d like for a while.

But seriously, is that really the end of the world?  You don’t have a problem being hungry for food when you need to, Mr. Vegan Faster; what’s so terrible about being a little hungry for ego-validation and nookie, if your family needs you to? 

If you throw away the two biggest accomplishments in your life — a meaningful fifteen-year relationship and the security of two beautiful kids, then you’re going to live to regret it, and that will suck, way worse than any amount of boredom.  Obviously I’m not going to stop that from happening, even if I’d like to, but it’s worth writing about just so that maybe other people who read your post don’t get the idea that it’s useful or okay to do what you’re planning on doing. 

Unfortunately, cliches are cliches for a reason, and what you’ve written is simply a clever (if mushy) restatement of the same old urge to choose sexual fulfillment over real commitment that many men your age struggle with.  If you must do it, that’s too bad, but the one thing you and I always agree on, in words anyway, is the need to be honest about what you’re really up to.