Sweet Emotion

Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape in 1967. I likely read it in my teens.

My takeaways from the book are:

1. Humans are highly sexual.

2. Unlike many mammals, we often engage in sex for reasons other than procreation and  emotional bonding is an extremely big part of that.

Men that I had important relationships to tended to want a live person meeting their needs. They typically weren't interested in porn.

I eventually concluded these were men for whom the emotional piece was extremely important and my experience was these were generally nicer men who treated women better than average by quite a lot. They saw a sexual relationship as primarily a social and emotional relationship and they treated women like whole human beings both in ways other men didn't typically treat me and also to a much greater degree.

This conclusion took me some time to get to because these were men typically involved with me "as their side dish." These were typically men in a serious relationship who had taken an interest in me and my initial reaction was that it wasn't really good behavior on their part.

But over time I reassessed what was going on there and drew new conclusions.

Tom was legally separated for years before meeting me. He wasn't doing anything wrong legally or morally to be looking for a new wife candidate or having a relationship with me in the here and now.

He was still living with his wife while they both dated on the down low because they both had careers and their youngest child was just three when they got legally separated. They both had a right to date and it was handled discreetly for privacy reasons not because it was in some way bad behavior.

She moved out shortly after my relationship with him ended. My feeling is my relationship with him helped him get to where he needed to be emotionally to finally do that.

Navarre was sleeping at his office more than at home and contemplating a divorce. I never met the man. I knew him by phone and online. I'm not even sure that technically qualifies as an affair under the law.

Jack once said publicly on Hacker News that he preferred a living breathing bedmate to porn. I didn't have an affair with him either.

He was a wealthy, divorced man whose divorce had been ugly. He wasn't actually hitting on me. He was checking me out and what he learned is that I was extremely ill, celibate for medical reasons and this was unlikely to change anytime soon.

And yet unlike multiple other men who were attracted to me and couldn't have me, he didn't get me cut out of his social circle. 

Our relationship was entirely emotional and social and he still respected me and my boundaries and my needs more than most men on the planet. And not because it was easy to do because I only knew him online. 

It really wasn't. It could have done him enormous harm because I knew personal information about him that other people would have interpreted as "They are having an affair." and no amount of denying it would have been sufficient to repair the damage.

And most people would not have felt "He has a crush" and "He was checking her out as a potential future relationship" would have been sufficient explanation to conclude he was innocent and there was no wrongdoing.

Most people would get up in arms about "You're living with a chick and have kids with her and you are chatting up some other woman!" 

But they weren't married and their failure to marry had absolutely nothing to do with me. 

I've read the research. Affairs don't destroy marriages. Dying relationships foster affairs.

If he was checking me out, it was because he didn't want to marry her, he never wanted to marry her and didn't expect to live happily ever after with her. Then he met me and thought I might be a better long-term relationship.

I thought a lot about what was going on there not just because of his interest in me but also because we were both friends with Genevieve and Genevieve was in an extremely abusive situation and Jack was an important lifeline for her. So I discussed Jack's relationship with her to help her strategize.

I talked to her about the fact that Jack was introducing her to his friends but not his girlfriend. Genevieve was employed by a friend of Jack's because Jack was making introductions and saying nice things about how she was smart and technically inclined.

And I asked her "What are you to Jack?" And she said "Surrogate child." because she was a teenager and he was largely estranged from his oldest child from his marriage.

I told her "The girlfriend is giving him the kids he wants because a child is a commitment he will keep without a ring or a piece of paper. It's her security, securing her position with a rich man who doesn't want to marry her. He's not in love with her. You're a threat to her security. She is not an ally for you."

I wasn't looking for a relationship to Jack. But we ran in the same social circle and I defacto had a relationship to him and it defacto ended up being a big deal though I never met him.

So my extensive analysis of Jack's situation wasn't because I had designs on the man. I wasn't plotting to seduce him away from his girlfriend.

But I had multiple reasons for thinking about his situation and in the process of trying to save Genevieve's life, I had reason to think strategically about his private life so I could tell Genevieve how to not cut her own throat, including "Don't impose on the girlfriend. Don't expect her to be supportive. She's potentially trouble for you."

I believe if Jack and I had been the same gender, we would have been good friends. I think it's sad that we never got to just be friends because we aren't the same gender.

Multiple other men banned me from their social circle when they realized they found me wildly attractive and we weren't going to get together and THEY couldn't get over it and stop making an ass of themselves. I was repeatedly burned for "being attractive" and as best I can tell I was attractive because I was polite, kind and ethical not because I was dressed like a trollop.

Jack chose to not burn me, so he remained food for thought for a lot of years. And it took a long time for the door to close on the possibility of getting with him precisely BECAUSE he didn't burn me like other men had done in similar circumstances.

Had I gotten well enough and had he left his girlfriend and emailed me and said "Hey, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods. I was wondering if you would have coffee with me?" I likely would have said "yes" and I think we probably would have hit it off and gotten involved.

I think planet Earth used to care more about men having this emotional piece. I think it's why a mistress was tolerated if a man was wealthy and could financially support two households and was good to both his wife and mistress.

I think the emotional piece is one reason some men see sex workers instead of making love to a dirty magazine and their hand.

I think porn addiction is a problem in part because of what it does to twist people emotionally. Porn ACTIVELY promotes focusing on looks over an emotional connection to a person and actively encourages people to see other people as sex objects, not human beings, and porn frequently relies on "breaking taboos" to get a rise out of people.

I think that last fact actively promotes racism, getting hot and bothered over unhealthy relationships that break the rules, etc. It means men are actively encouraged to get hot and bothered over someone "barely legal" because of the age difference and not to get involved with someone you deeply cared about in spite of the age difference and that's all kinds of problematic.

I don't know what to do about it. 

Title from the song, of course.