My pleasure. It's a very sad reality that is climbing in both men and women due to the online world. It's easier than ever to forge faux connections with a swipe of the finger. I hope these pieces help someone...
Did "Tim" get a vasectomy? His missus might be concerned about a number 7 kid if not, which could significantly impact her interest in intimacy. Also, good to know that other people out there are making up for my lack of doing my duty in propagating the species. ๐คฃ
That line you had about couples ending up as just roommates hit hard, it's one of the things my wife said to me before she became my ex-wife. ๐
The vasectomy bit made me laugh. Then the roommate line stopped being funny. Iโm sorry thatโs what she said before she left. Thatโs a hard last memory to carry. Thank you for telling me it hit. <3
I mean... That's *one* of the things she said in the conversation that occurred after she told me that she still loved me, but was no longer *in love* with me. Though that conversation occurred a year prior to the one wherein I started off with something about how the things we were trying in order to resolve our relationship issues weren't working, intending to continue onto, "and so I'd like us to work together on coming up with something different to try", but which she cut off with (roughly, not a precise quote), "I agree. We should get divorced." And a month later, we were.
So, *that's* the actual "last memory", FWIW. I mean, there are obviously other things from the "winding down" stage of everything: Getting actually divorced, selling the house, and so forth. But that's the last memory of anything that could be considered "our relationship".
We started dating when I was 19, a month before my 20th birthday, and got divorced when I was 38, a month before my 39th birthday. 19 years -- half my life -- and the half I remember better at that! We're a month away from the 11th year since the divorce, and it still occasionally catches at me, like a hangnail snagging on something.
I honestly don't know if I'll ever *truly* "recover". The hurt lessens, but as for whether it'll actually go *away*, I cannot say. Maybe in another 8 years, once we've been apart for as long as we were together. *shrug*
> Science backs it: Men need physical intimacy like plants need sunlight; withhold it, and they wilt into depressed husks.
*nod*
Since said divorce, sometimes I just snuggle with my friends. They all understand how at least some measure of physical contact is necessary for survival. We're related to the other great apes, after all, and they all have patterns of social grooming. It'd be absurd to think we upright hairless ones wouldn't need that as well. It's obviously not the same as actual bedroom activities, but it helps keep me sane. Part of it is just knowing that someone else cares enough about that problem to do something about it, too.
Out of the same appreciation I subscribed before even finishing reading your essay.
What the men are actually describing, & acting out โ& the women, tooโ are the untrue stories they have been steeped in & still believe are true โฆ or still believe should be true โฆ & still want, insistently, to be true, out of force of habit/uation.
Hope springs eternal the psychological operations machinery.
(Who builds, maintains, the machines? Not the ordinary people who are run through them as fuel & lubrication.)
Youโve heard, or read, David Foster Wallaceโs Kenyon College commencement speech, โThis Is Waterโ?
โGreetings parents and congratulations to Kenyonโs graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says โMorning, boys. Howโs the water?โ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes โWhat the hell is water?โ
***
What happened, as recounted-understood by one party, is part-osophy.
The rest of, or important more of, what happened โincluding the other partyโs recounting-understandingโ is typically called the why part-osophy.
Phil(in the blanks or, commonly, redactions)osophy to the โrescueโ โidentificationโ of the elephant the blind wise wo/men insisted was many things โฆ but not an elephant.
(You know the JG Saxe poem?)
Pattern recognition can be โisโ a philosophy problem.
Physiology problems can be โareโ too.
Seeing that can pay regenerative soil-building dividends.
And/but philosophies-seen can be, usually are, imported from right off the shelves.
Like water, air food, etc. are imported.
The wet cement imports are pour-internalized into children-forms.
The internalization process rotes as the years perpetually perish.
(Thatโs the be careful part of that quote because it is our time โour passage through timeโ rather than time itself, that slip-slides away โฆ & bothers people โฆ โbut notโ the billionaires who are busy attaining โโswipingโโ immortality.)
Autopilot drives, is forgotten for granted, & unquestioned.
(The What About Bob lashed to the mast scene: โIโm a sailor!โ)
The assumed to be driver-managed properties of the driven driver conflict with, contradict, the scenery the passenger who tells himself heโs driving is being driven through versus the solidified mindโs eye scenes that s/he anticipated-imported-expected.
Comprehension does speak to the whys of the before & after relationships of exploding Pinto gas tanks, painting Grendel the villain for heroes to foil, & the unreasonable expectation that alternatives do not exclude & so โof courseโ all can be had simultaneously-voraciously โฆ & should be.
(And when it canโt, the Iโm owed* victimology kicks in & allโs fair in love & war is re-revealed, too.)
โSwipeโ used to slang โsteal.โ
Well, it still does.
The bases are stolen-loaded. Always have been.
From within first, & then from without.
The old WC Fields line-observation: โYou canโt cheat an honest man.โ Or woman.
Bullies from pulpits repetitiously tell the wet cement stories that harden into โrealitiesโ patterns that do not actually exist โฆ except to confound patterns-seekers โฆ especially the pattern seekers who donโt want to work too hard, donโt want to chip out the cement-packed galoshes, overcoats & baggage they were weighed down with.
(The evil Count Adehmarโs lines from A Knightโs Tale:
โYou have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting. In what world could you possibly beat me?โ)
And I have never experienced, or seen, bullies amenable to being communicated out of their driven-driver compulsions, either.
But that also goes for masochists. Or โcodependents.โ Etc.
This is an ecology problem. And a biology problem.
The biology begets the ecology.
Fractal. Feeding forward, & back.
This is a pattern of purposely degraded ecology/biology problem.
But down at the level of all us individuals itโs a comprehension problem.
The reasons cheaters (youโve seen what the college cheats are up to with AI) give typically-never cover all the bases.
And that puts them out at, or before, home โฆ & hearth โฆ where the heart is supposed to be, should be, would best be, but rarely is โฆ & thatโs by Count Adhemar design.
Seeming โasideโ my half-brother shared what his father, my stepfather, told him was his reason for cheating on our mother, back in the 60โs & 70โs โฆ & it didnโt matter/horn climb the pattern one bit, either:
You decide. S/he decides. Then one โoften insisting the otherโ does not abide. Then the other justifies not abiding โฆ or not abiding even more than before.
Comprehension, MIA from the start โfrom before the startโ compounds the misses, the trespasses & the reactions.
The anti-miracle of leveraged compound interest on fiat โcounterfeitโ stor(i)es of value & mediums of exchange is the out of control locus/ts of control.
Whatโs the fraud up to in this corner of the anti-ecology? $40 trillion?
Unfunded liabilities are multiples of that.
And the $ symbol doesnโt tally the actual carnage of all the โpretendโ โ the deceit, the appetite disorder.
The pre/text books are cooked.
Hereโs the guy who played Bob, uncooking the books, in his best scene, ever. :
Paul Kingsnorth selected & introduced some of Berryโs essays in The World-Ending Fire - The Essential Wendell Berry.
Chapter one of The Unsettling of America is one of those essays.
Hereโs a bit, link to the rest below it:
"It seems likely that all the โmovementsโ of recent years have been representing various claims that nurture has to make against exploitation. The womenโs movement, for example, when its energies are most accurately placed, is arguing the cause of nurture; other times it is arguing the right of women to be exploiters โ which men have no right to be. The exploiter is clearly the prototype of the โmasculineโ man โ the wheeler-dealer whose โpracticalโ goals require the sacrifice of flesh, feeling, and principle. The nurturer, on the other hand, has always passed with ease across the boundaries of the so-called sexual roles. Of necessity and without apology, the preserver of seed, the planter, becomes midwife and nurse. Breeder is always metamorphosing into brooder and back again. Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real. The farmer, sometimes known as husbandman, is by definition halfmother; the only question is how good a mother he or she is. And the land itself is not mother or father only, but both. Depending on crop and season, it is at one time receiver of seed, bearer and nurturer of young; at another, raiser of seed-stalk, bearer and shedder of seed. And in response to these changes, the farmer crosses back and forth from one zone of spousehood to another, first as planter and then as gatherer. Farmer and land are thus involved in a sort of dance in which the partners are always at opposite sexual poles, and the lead keeps changing; the farmer, as seed-bearer, causes growth; the land, as seed-bearer, causes the harvest.
The exploitive always involves the abuse or the perversion of nurture and ultimately its destruction. Thus, we saw how far the exploitive revolution had penetrated the official character when our recent secretary of agriculture remarked that โFood is a weapon.โ This was given a fearful symmetry indeed when, in discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons, a secretary of defense spoke of โpalatableโ levels of devastation. Consider the associations that have since ancient times clustered around the idea of food โ associations of mutual care, generosity, neighborliness, festivity, communal joy, religious ceremony โ and you will see that these two secretaries represent a cultural catastrophe. The concerns of farming and those of war, once thought to be diametrically opposed, have become identical. Here we have an example of men who have been made vicious, not presumably by nature or circumstance, but by their values."
Youโre right that people are running old stories on autopilot. Iโd only add the part the philosophy sometimes skips: the story gets a body. Weโre not just steeped in myths. Weโre steeped in our own chemistry.
An affair, a secret login, even the fantasy of being chosen again, isnโt only a narrative problem. Itโs a dosing problem. Novelty hits dopamine. Secrecy tightens the loop. The almost-caught feeling is a stimulant. Then oxytocin tries to glue the whole mess to a person who was never supposed to be glue. When the supply cuts off, it isnโt merely โcomprehension arriving.โ Itโs withdrawal. Irritability, rumination, the sudden conviction that lifeโs gray cardboard, the itch to go back and โjust check.โ Same machinery as any other habit that taught the nervous system a shortcut to feeling alive.
So yes. Weโre junkies for our own bodies. The wet cement isnโt only stories poured into children. Itโs also receptors learning what to expect. After enough repetitions, the body votes. It votes for the pattern that used to work, even when the patternโs wrecking the house.
Thatโs why the reasons never cover all the bases. A reasonโs a press secretary. The junkieโs in the basement, counting the hours since the last hit of being wanted.
Berryโs nurture versus exploitation lands better from there. Exploitation isnโt only a cultural style. Itโs what a hungry nervous system does when itโs been trained to treat other people as the vending machine. Nurtureโs slower chemistry. It doesnโt spike as hard. It also doesnโt leave you rattling the cage at 2 a.m. because the story ran out.
I can see the elephant. I can also see the drip.
Thank you for writing. And for subscribing before you finished.
Ainโt Them Bodies Saints (a pretty good movie about โBonnie & Clydeโ bodies in motion) & Ainโt all us Saints, Boondock & urban alike, mostly water?
Well, structured water, apparently; a gel.
Preferably gel from a good well โtap water isnโt about muni/ficence.
(I know.
And that many canโt sit still for the first, abridged, strangle-โeditedโ edition of Stranger In A Strange Land, & all that Water Brotherhood stuff, let alone the longer complete original Heinleinโs widow got marketed.
Kudos appreciation for not flouncing the โTL;DRโ affirmative action handicapped license plate that so clogs the roads anymore.)
Yes, agreed: The body.
I alluded to that & I donโt minimize it. Iโve got one of my own, which is to say its got me.
These bodies of ours are not imperviously sealed bobbers floating in culture seas dirty with myths & other substances of influence, though.
Chemical reactions, exo or endo, is part of the explanation of motives, motivations, but itโs not a sealed justification or defense for whatever actions are let fly due to those drug-stoked (or drug-like stokings of) motivations.
If it feels good, do it (even โin the roadโ ~ Beatles) is an ethos Iโve seen, experienced, crash & burn.
And Iโve read about hedonismโs historical booms & busts, too.
Extremes that continuously recycle into old-is-new-again are โWhat weโve got here is โฆ failure to communicate.โ
(The Captain was a rigid grammarian out of the Hemingway school & Cool Hand Luke was Thomas Wolfe expressive โฆ & much more comprehensive, but still, missed it by a significant margin).
Which rounds bases back to the thing whose seasons are spread far, & thin: comprehension.
Or apprehension.
An apprehended marshmallow in the hand is not worth the prospect of a second marshmallow โnor even a guaranteed oneโ in the bush because the second one has to be waited for for a few minutes worth of seconds.
Canโt wait, a lot of kids.
Or maybe merely โcanโt.โ
โHow can you have your pudding if you donโt eat your meat?โ ~ Pink Floyd panders to the pink-cheeked children
Monkey see, monkey do.
What saturates the sights? And the exhibitions?
Sex, for one thing.
Would you say sex, the subject-predicate of it, is saturated with understanding, comprehension?
I wouldnโt.
Janisโs cover of Kristoffersonโs Me & Bobby McGee was superior. Her rendition reached number one in โ71.
Posthumously.
Janis ODโd on heroin in โ70.
โFeeling good was good enough for me & my Bobby McGee โฆโ
No, not enough. Incomplete. Imbalanced.
Appetite disorders ensue.
I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth.
I crossed his path via Iain McGilchrist.
The latter steeps-emphasizes the order of things brain-hemispherical that is all too generally out of order.
LH dominates when its actual biological role is as Emissary to the Master RH.
The martinet Captain has got comprehensive Luke in chains.
I think too that a lot of the music of the (hemi)spheres is stunted โthatโs what domestication is, does, is aboutโ & is the easiest of pickings for โhigher upโ the high-er-archy LH domination.
So & thus Why Donโt We Do It In The Road?
And so & thus Paul, who once upon a time did โTaxman,โ โbecomesโ Sir Paul.
โDesiring a thing cannot make you have it.โ
Is it corollary that faking it never actually does make it?
Is the village mostly front-to-back solid, or is it more Potemkin?
Agreed on the body: chemistry can explain a motive without licensing whatever the motive does next. โFeels goodโ is a weather report, not a verdict, and Joplin is a rough exhibit; the line landed, the life didnโt. McGilchristโs emissary-turned-martinet is a useful picture for the same failure: the part that files, ranks, and canโt wait has the comprehensive part in chains, then calls the arrangement realism. Wanting it, or knighting it, still doesnโt make the village load-bearing.
I donโt know the clip well enough to judge the scene on one pass.
Also, and I say this with affection: you are medically incapable of pith. I asked my brain for a short reply and it came back with a gel-water prologue, a Heinlein footnote, and a Potemkin village. Pretty sure it caught it from you, lol
Quite possibly. I know that lack of communication definitely did. I also know that Viagra actually works for women, yet they refuse to market it to women and instead came out with what I consider to be glorified antidepressants messing with neurotransmitters.
Because I spent over 15 yrs in biotech in the stock market I know the shenanigans of drug companies.
So, if we combine these two things together, imagine how many marriages could be saved if they both came together to solve the physical and emotional problems instead of becoming sullen, shutting down and straying.
Actually, estrogen plus testosterone. Without these life/gender affirming hormones in near youthful quantities, the spouse just doesn't care enough to try. Did you know that on a mg basis, a premenopausal woman has MORE testosterone than estrogen?
If you convert the units, early in the cycle a woman can have more testosterone than estradiol in her blood. Midcycle she often makes more estrogen. Women do make more androgens as a group than estradiol. Thatโs different from โmore testosterone than estrogen all month.โ
Milligrams also arenโt how those hormones work. Estrogen is potent at very low levels, and some testosterone gets converted into estrogen. Low hormones can flatten desire. They donโt by themselves mean someone stopped caring, and they donโt replace the harder conversation about the marriage.
A womanโs physical battles donโt replace the conversation and itโs sloppy to put it all on menopause and hormones.
What would happen if husbands acknowledged the physical drawbacks and had the conversation with their wives and offered support? I think itโs human nature to want to point to one thing, but humans are messy and biology is too, so itโs not a one size fits all kinda thing. We still come back to lack of communication being the underlying barrier to solving these roadblocks.
As for Viagra, my guess would be that Eli Lilly isn't "refusing" to market it towards women out of any sense of prudishness, but rather are quailing before the gimlet eye of the FDA in not doing so. It isn't as though drug companies aren't known for being staffed by folks who'd sell their own mothers as discount pork to make a buck.
A lot of people donโt know this about me, but I spent over 15 yrs in Biotech in the stock market. Once a drug is on the market for so long that it has a generic, the price falls through the ground, so drug companies stop trying to market it outside the original parameters. What they do is create something completely new or mess with the original formula enough, so they can market it under a new name and charge sky high prices for it. Nothing about pharma is on the up and up.
As someone who is only still alive through "off-label" use of ketamine for psychiatric purposes, I'm well aware. Nobody will *ever* do a full FDA study on the use of it for the treatment of severe chronic treatment resistant depression, because nobody could possibly make back the billion dollars it would cost to conduct the study. I don't necessarily blame the drug companies for this, they aren't in the charity business, and so I'm more inclined to blame the FDA. There should *really* be a less expensive route to approval.
because you let yourself go is a top reason. As someone who has been with a married man for 15 years and his wife doesnโt know, I have advice for wives on my substack.
(Wasnโt there an โold westโ corral by that name?)
The slower "swipe" of high school sweethearts & other ever more bygone conventions sped up to the lickety-splits just-in-time global tech-comms techomps of broโs & sister-queens.
Chompโฆchomp โฆ cue the memory, โeverybody said it was a shameโ:
More like trying โor notโ to outrun the un-outrunnable exploding Ford Pinto gas tanks (& race cars that come apart at the triple-digit seams) that are cheaper to litigate/payoff than to reengineer โฆ yeah, those comms:
Hereโs Gardenerโs antihero Grendel, the beast, giving lie to the boast that cosmopolitan wo/man is the most:
โO the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost.โ
โ John Gardner, Grendel
Hereโs Sir Walter Raleigh prison-poeming before his erstwhile pals chopped off his head:
I appreciate you taking the time as a subscriber. The piece wasnโt arguing that โcommunicationโ is a magic fix. It was reporting what 103 married men actually said: the marriage went quiet, they stopped feeling wanted, they stopped asking, then they started swiping.
Thatโs a specific pattern, not a philosophy problem. โComprehension,โ exploding Pintos, Grendel, and Cosmo feminism donโt answer why a father of six who hired a nanny still hadnโt been touched in four years. If you think the interviews missed the real cause, say what you think the men were actually describing. Iโm listening. Iโm not going to debate whether Time is perpetual perishing.
There will always be a small soulless percentage who see men only as a dollar sign. Itโs just awful, and I hope karma runs all over her for the pain and devastation she causes.
Boy, sad reality here- thanks for this โค๏ธ
My pleasure. It's a very sad reality that is climbing in both men and women due to the online world. It's easier than ever to forge faux connections with a swipe of the finger. I hope these pieces help someone...
They will โค๏ธ
Did "Tim" get a vasectomy? His missus might be concerned about a number 7 kid if not, which could significantly impact her interest in intimacy. Also, good to know that other people out there are making up for my lack of doing my duty in propagating the species. ๐คฃ
That line you had about couples ending up as just roommates hit hard, it's one of the things my wife said to me before she became my ex-wife. ๐
The vasectomy bit made me laugh. Then the roommate line stopped being funny. Iโm sorry thatโs what she said before she left. Thatโs a hard last memory to carry. Thank you for telling me it hit. <3
I mean... That's *one* of the things she said in the conversation that occurred after she told me that she still loved me, but was no longer *in love* with me. Though that conversation occurred a year prior to the one wherein I started off with something about how the things we were trying in order to resolve our relationship issues weren't working, intending to continue onto, "and so I'd like us to work together on coming up with something different to try", but which she cut off with (roughly, not a precise quote), "I agree. We should get divorced." And a month later, we were.
So, *that's* the actual "last memory", FWIW. I mean, there are obviously other things from the "winding down" stage of everything: Getting actually divorced, selling the house, and so forth. But that's the last memory of anything that could be considered "our relationship".
We started dating when I was 19, a month before my 20th birthday, and got divorced when I was 38, a month before my 39th birthday. 19 years -- half my life -- and the half I remember better at that! We're a month away from the 11th year since the divorce, and it still occasionally catches at me, like a hangnail snagging on something.
I honestly don't know if I'll ever *truly* "recover". The hurt lessens, but as for whether it'll actually go *away*, I cannot say. Maybe in another 8 years, once we've been apart for as long as we were together. *shrug*
> Science backs it: Men need physical intimacy like plants need sunlight; withhold it, and they wilt into depressed husks.
*nod*
Since said divorce, sometimes I just snuggle with my friends. They all understand how at least some measure of physical contact is necessary for survival. We're related to the other great apes, after all, and they all have patterns of social grooming. It'd be absurd to think we upright hairless ones wouldn't need that as well. It's obviously not the same as actual bedroom activities, but it helps keep me sane. Part of it is just knowing that someone else cares enough about that problem to do something about it, too.
She could get an IUD if she didn't want another kid.
Out of the same appreciation I subscribed before even finishing reading your essay.
What the men are actually describing, & acting out โ& the women, tooโ are the untrue stories they have been steeped in & still believe are true โฆ or still believe should be true โฆ & still want, insistently, to be true, out of force of habit/uation.
Hope springs eternal the psychological operations machinery.
(Who builds, maintains, the machines? Not the ordinary people who are run through them as fuel & lubrication.)
Youโve heard, or read, David Foster Wallaceโs Kenyon College commencement speech, โThis Is Waterโ?
โGreetings parents and congratulations to Kenyonโs graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says โMorning, boys. Howโs the water?โ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes โWhat the hell is water?โ
***
What happened, as recounted-understood by one party, is part-osophy.
The rest of, or important more of, what happened โincluding the other partyโs recounting-understandingโ is typically called the why part-osophy.
Phil(in the blanks or, commonly, redactions)osophy to the โrescueโ โidentificationโ of the elephant the blind wise wo/men insisted was many things โฆ but not an elephant.
(You know the JG Saxe poem?)
Pattern recognition can be โisโ a philosophy problem.
Physiology problems can be โareโ too.
Seeing that can pay regenerative soil-building dividends.
And/but philosophies-seen can be, usually are, imported from right off the shelves.
Like water, air food, etc. are imported.
The wet cement imports are pour-internalized into children-forms.
The internalization process rotes as the years perpetually perish.
(Thatโs the be careful part of that quote because it is our time โour passage through timeโ rather than time itself, that slip-slides away โฆ & bothers people โฆ โbut notโ the billionaires who are busy attaining โโswipingโโ immortality.)
Autopilot drives, is forgotten for granted, & unquestioned.
(The What About Bob lashed to the mast scene: โIโm a sailor!โ)
The assumed to be driver-managed properties of the driven driver conflict with, contradict, the scenery the passenger who tells himself heโs driving is being driven through versus the solidified mindโs eye scenes that s/he anticipated-imported-expected.
Comprehension does speak to the whys of the before & after relationships of exploding Pinto gas tanks, painting Grendel the villain for heroes to foil, & the unreasonable expectation that alternatives do not exclude & so โof courseโ all can be had simultaneously-voraciously โฆ & should be.
(And when it canโt, the Iโm owed* victimology kicks in & allโs fair in love & war is re-revealed, too.)
โSwipeโ used to slang โsteal.โ
Well, it still does.
The bases are stolen-loaded. Always have been.
From within first, & then from without.
The old WC Fields line-observation: โYou canโt cheat an honest man.โ Or woman.
Bullies from pulpits repetitiously tell the wet cement stories that harden into โrealitiesโ patterns that do not actually exist โฆ except to confound patterns-seekers โฆ especially the pattern seekers who donโt want to work too hard, donโt want to chip out the cement-packed galoshes, overcoats & baggage they were weighed down with.
(The evil Count Adehmarโs lines from A Knightโs Tale:
โYou have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting. In what world could you possibly beat me?โ)
And I have never experienced, or seen, bullies amenable to being communicated out of their driven-driver compulsions, either.
But that also goes for masochists. Or โcodependents.โ Etc.
This is an ecology problem. And a biology problem.
The biology begets the ecology.
Fractal. Feeding forward, & back.
This is a pattern of purposely degraded ecology/biology problem.
But down at the level of all us individuals itโs a comprehension problem.
The reasons cheaters (youโve seen what the college cheats are up to with AI) give typically-never cover all the bases.
And that puts them out at, or before, home โฆ & hearth โฆ where the heart is supposed to be, should be, would best be, but rarely is โฆ & thatโs by Count Adhemar design.
Seeming โasideโ my half-brother shared what his father, my stepfather, told him was his reason for cheating on our mother, back in the 60โs & 70โs โฆ & it didnโt matter/horn climb the pattern one bit, either:
You decide. S/he decides. Then one โoften insisting the otherโ does not abide. Then the other justifies not abiding โฆ or not abiding even more than before.
Comprehension, MIA from the start โfrom before the startโ compounds the misses, the trespasses & the reactions.
The anti-miracle of leveraged compound interest on fiat โcounterfeitโ stor(i)es of value & mediums of exchange is the out of control locus/ts of control.
Whatโs the fraud up to in this corner of the anti-ecology? $40 trillion?
Unfunded liabilities are multiples of that.
And the $ symbol doesnโt tally the actual carnage of all the โpretendโ โ the deceit, the appetite disorder.
The pre/text books are cooked.
Hereโs the guy who played Bob, uncooking the books, in his best scene, ever. :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyT4rsObXgc
*The Frog & the Scorpion scene from Animal House:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LARx7M9s15w
Wendell Berry passed away 8/31.
Paul Kingsnorth selected & introduced some of Berryโs essays in The World-Ending Fire - The Essential Wendell Berry.
Chapter one of The Unsettling of America is one of those essays.
Hereโs a bit, link to the rest below it:
"It seems likely that all the โmovementsโ of recent years have been representing various claims that nurture has to make against exploitation. The womenโs movement, for example, when its energies are most accurately placed, is arguing the cause of nurture; other times it is arguing the right of women to be exploiters โ which men have no right to be. The exploiter is clearly the prototype of the โmasculineโ man โ the wheeler-dealer whose โpracticalโ goals require the sacrifice of flesh, feeling, and principle. The nurturer, on the other hand, has always passed with ease across the boundaries of the so-called sexual roles. Of necessity and without apology, the preserver of seed, the planter, becomes midwife and nurse. Breeder is always metamorphosing into brooder and back again. Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real. The farmer, sometimes known as husbandman, is by definition halfmother; the only question is how good a mother he or she is. And the land itself is not mother or father only, but both. Depending on crop and season, it is at one time receiver of seed, bearer and nurturer of young; at another, raiser of seed-stalk, bearer and shedder of seed. And in response to these changes, the farmer crosses back and forth from one zone of spousehood to another, first as planter and then as gatherer. Farmer and land are thus involved in a sort of dance in which the partners are always at opposite sexual poles, and the lead keeps changing; the farmer, as seed-bearer, causes growth; the land, as seed-bearer, causes the harvest.
The exploitive always involves the abuse or the perversion of nurture and ultimately its destruction. Thus, we saw how far the exploitive revolution had penetrated the official character when our recent secretary of agriculture remarked that โFood is a weapon.โ This was given a fearful symmetry indeed when, in discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons, a secretary of defense spoke of โpalatableโ levels of devastation. Consider the associations that have since ancient times clustered around the idea of food โ associations of mutual care, generosity, neighborliness, festivity, communal joy, religious ceremony โ and you will see that these two secretaries represent a cultural catastrophe. The concerns of farming and those of war, once thought to be diametrically opposed, have become identical. Here we have an example of men who have been made vicious, not presumably by nature or circumstance, but by their values."
https://kyl.neocities.org/books/[SOC%20BER]%20the%20unsettling%20of%20america.pdf
WW1 era bone is connected to the WWW era bone: How Yaโ Gonna Keep โEm Down On The Farm After Theyโve Seen โbeen shownโ The Paree Pattern?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_%27em_Down_on_the_Farm_(After_They%27ve_Seen_Paree)%3F
โFarmโ as Berry reveals. Connection. Integration. Synthesis. Wholeness. Sovereignty. Independent-Interdependence.
The divide & conquer divorcing has been chewing people up & spitting them out for a long time.
Itโs a trick.
Comprehension.
Thank you.
That was a lot of water to take in before coffee.
Youโre right that people are running old stories on autopilot. Iโd only add the part the philosophy sometimes skips: the story gets a body. Weโre not just steeped in myths. Weโre steeped in our own chemistry.
An affair, a secret login, even the fantasy of being chosen again, isnโt only a narrative problem. Itโs a dosing problem. Novelty hits dopamine. Secrecy tightens the loop. The almost-caught feeling is a stimulant. Then oxytocin tries to glue the whole mess to a person who was never supposed to be glue. When the supply cuts off, it isnโt merely โcomprehension arriving.โ Itโs withdrawal. Irritability, rumination, the sudden conviction that lifeโs gray cardboard, the itch to go back and โjust check.โ Same machinery as any other habit that taught the nervous system a shortcut to feeling alive.
So yes. Weโre junkies for our own bodies. The wet cement isnโt only stories poured into children. Itโs also receptors learning what to expect. After enough repetitions, the body votes. It votes for the pattern that used to work, even when the patternโs wrecking the house.
Thatโs why the reasons never cover all the bases. A reasonโs a press secretary. The junkieโs in the basement, counting the hours since the last hit of being wanted.
Berryโs nurture versus exploitation lands better from there. Exploitation isnโt only a cultural style. Itโs what a hungry nervous system does when itโs been trained to treat other people as the vending machine. Nurtureโs slower chemistry. It doesnโt spike as hard. It also doesnโt leave you rattling the cage at 2 a.m. because the story ran out.
I can see the elephant. I can also see the drip.
Thank you for writing. And for subscribing before you finished.
Ainโt Them Bodies Saints (a pretty good movie about โBonnie & Clydeโ bodies in motion) & Ainโt all us Saints, Boondock & urban alike, mostly water?
Well, structured water, apparently; a gel.
Preferably gel from a good well โtap water isnโt about muni/ficence.
(I know.
And that many canโt sit still for the first, abridged, strangle-โeditedโ edition of Stranger In A Strange Land, & all that Water Brotherhood stuff, let alone the longer complete original Heinleinโs widow got marketed.
Kudos appreciation for not flouncing the โTL;DRโ affirmative action handicapped license plate that so clogs the roads anymore.)
Yes, agreed: The body.
I alluded to that & I donโt minimize it. Iโve got one of my own, which is to say its got me.
These bodies of ours are not imperviously sealed bobbers floating in culture seas dirty with myths & other substances of influence, though.
Chemical reactions, exo or endo, is part of the explanation of motives, motivations, but itโs not a sealed justification or defense for whatever actions are let fly due to those drug-stoked (or drug-like stokings of) motivations.
If it feels good, do it (even โin the roadโ ~ Beatles) is an ethos Iโve seen, experienced, crash & burn.
And Iโve read about hedonismโs historical booms & busts, too.
Extremes that continuously recycle into old-is-new-again are โWhat weโve got here is โฆ failure to communicate.โ
(The Captain was a rigid grammarian out of the Hemingway school & Cool Hand Luke was Thomas Wolfe expressive โฆ & much more comprehensive, but still, missed it by a significant margin).
Which rounds bases back to the thing whose seasons are spread far, & thin: comprehension.
Or apprehension.
An apprehended marshmallow in the hand is not worth the prospect of a second marshmallow โnor even a guaranteed oneโ in the bush because the second one has to be waited for for a few minutes worth of seconds.
Canโt wait, a lot of kids.
Or maybe merely โcanโt.โ
โHow can you have your pudding if you donโt eat your meat?โ ~ Pink Floyd panders to the pink-cheeked children
Monkey see, monkey do.
What saturates the sights? And the exhibitions?
Sex, for one thing.
Would you say sex, the subject-predicate of it, is saturated with understanding, comprehension?
I wouldnโt.
Janisโs cover of Kristoffersonโs Me & Bobby McGee was superior. Her rendition reached number one in โ71.
Posthumously.
Janis ODโd on heroin in โ70.
โFeeling good was good enough for me & my Bobby McGee โฆโ
No, not enough. Incomplete. Imbalanced.
Appetite disorders ensue.
I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth.
I crossed his path via Iain McGilchrist.
The latter steeps-emphasizes the order of things brain-hemispherical that is all too generally out of order.
LH dominates when its actual biological role is as Emissary to the Master RH.
The martinet Captain has got comprehensive Luke in chains.
I think too that a lot of the music of the (hemi)spheres is stunted โthatโs what domestication is, does, is aboutโ & is the easiest of pickings for โhigher upโ the high-er-archy LH domination.
So & thus Why Donโt We Do It In The Road?
And so & thus Paul, who once upon a time did โTaxman,โ โbecomesโ Sir Paul.
โDesiring a thing cannot make you have it.โ
Is it corollary that faking it never actually does make it?
Is the village mostly front-to-back solid, or is it more Potemkin?
What do you think of this scene?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDVD3YTRAV8
Agreed on the body: chemistry can explain a motive without licensing whatever the motive does next. โFeels goodโ is a weather report, not a verdict, and Joplin is a rough exhibit; the line landed, the life didnโt. McGilchristโs emissary-turned-martinet is a useful picture for the same failure: the part that files, ranks, and canโt wait has the comprehensive part in chains, then calls the arrangement realism. Wanting it, or knighting it, still doesnโt make the village load-bearing.
I donโt know the clip well enough to judge the scene on one pass.
Also, and I say this with affection: you are medically incapable of pith. I asked my brain for a short reply and it came back with a gel-water prologue, a Heinlein footnote, and a Potemkin village. Pretty sure it caught it from you, lol
Excellent Article.
A lot of Truth here.
Tysm. I wish we didn't need to write these things, but if I can help one marriage, it's worth it. ๐
We are not in disagreement.
Apologies. I didnโt feel that we were, but intent is often lost in text.
My guess is that 50% of the time itโs estrogen that robs the relationships of intimacy.
Quite possibly. I know that lack of communication definitely did. I also know that Viagra actually works for women, yet they refuse to market it to women and instead came out with what I consider to be glorified antidepressants messing with neurotransmitters.
Because I spent over 15 yrs in biotech in the stock market I know the shenanigans of drug companies.
So, if we combine these two things together, imagine how many marriages could be saved if they both came together to solve the physical and emotional problems instead of becoming sullen, shutting down and straying.
Actually, estrogen plus testosterone. Without these life/gender affirming hormones in near youthful quantities, the spouse just doesn't care enough to try. Did you know that on a mg basis, a premenopausal woman has MORE testosterone than estrogen?
Thatโs a real stat, just not the whole picture.
If you convert the units, early in the cycle a woman can have more testosterone than estradiol in her blood. Midcycle she often makes more estrogen. Women do make more androgens as a group than estradiol. Thatโs different from โmore testosterone than estrogen all month.โ
Milligrams also arenโt how those hormones work. Estrogen is potent at very low levels, and some testosterone gets converted into estrogen. Low hormones can flatten desire. They donโt by themselves mean someone stopped caring, and they donโt replace the harder conversation about the marriage.
A womanโs physical battles donโt replace the conversation and itโs sloppy to put it all on menopause and hormones.
What would happen if husbands acknowledged the physical drawbacks and had the conversation with their wives and offered support? I think itโs human nature to want to point to one thing, but humans are messy and biology is too, so itโs not a one size fits all kinda thing. We still come back to lack of communication being the underlying barrier to solving these roadblocks.
~Signed a menopausal woman, lol
As for Viagra, my guess would be that Eli Lilly isn't "refusing" to market it towards women out of any sense of prudishness, but rather are quailing before the gimlet eye of the FDA in not doing so. It isn't as though drug companies aren't known for being staffed by folks who'd sell their own mothers as discount pork to make a buck.
A lot of people donโt know this about me, but I spent over 15 yrs in Biotech in the stock market. Once a drug is on the market for so long that it has a generic, the price falls through the ground, so drug companies stop trying to market it outside the original parameters. What they do is create something completely new or mess with the original formula enough, so they can market it under a new name and charge sky high prices for it. Nothing about pharma is on the up and up.
As someone who is only still alive through "off-label" use of ketamine for psychiatric purposes, I'm well aware. Nobody will *ever* do a full FDA study on the use of it for the treatment of severe chronic treatment resistant depression, because nobody could possibly make back the billion dollars it would cost to conduct the study. I don't necessarily blame the drug companies for this, they aren't in the charity business, and so I'm more inclined to blame the FDA. There should *really* be a less expensive route to approval.
because you let yourself go is a top reason. As someone who has been with a married man for 15 years and his wife doesnโt know, I have advice for wives on my substack.
All good reasons perhaps why I never got married.
Very insightful article
Communication.
Sure. OK.
(Wasnโt there an โold westโ corral by that name?)
The slower "swipe" of high school sweethearts & other ever more bygone conventions sped up to the lickety-splits just-in-time global tech-comms techomps of broโs & sister-queens.
Chompโฆchomp โฆ cue the memory, โeverybody said it was a shameโ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCSsVvlj6YA&list=RDMCSsVvlj6YA&start_radio=1
More like trying โor notโ to outrun the un-outrunnable exploding Ford Pinto gas tanks (& race cars that come apart at the triple-digit seams) that are cheaper to litigate/payoff than to reengineer โฆ yeah, those comms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX9GVAlDvLQ
Race-worn enough, I think, therefore I am, going to counter its not ever been the one thing โcommunication.โ
What it is & has always been is the starry constellation that goes by the symbol-string โcomprehension.โ
A more comprehensive communication network residing โฆ everywhere. Even in really good proprioceptive asses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7tYg7gxV5s
First time I heard Adele on the radio she sang of waiting-wading in โdirty water.โ
But itโs not just in the water.
Itโs in the air.
Itโs in the food.
I
tโs in the communications that are pitched fast & that strike out & Boston bake bean batters.
Which means all of that is in the batters, & the pitchers, & Whoโs On First is damn near everybody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
Itโs base, very base, ball.
Boringest game ever.
But coke it up, that frees the bases, makes it all addictive.
(Can you hear the hor-moans?)
And if a few faces, or even most faces, get burned off โRichard Pryor โ hey, thatโs baseball.
A prescription just canโt beat a proscription like that.
But here one is, anyway:
Scrape that odiferous Helen Gurley Brown stuff off your soles โฆ feet & souls.
Because no, you canโt have it all.
Nobody can.
Trying to prove that reality wrong means youโre on drugs.
Exogenous, endogenous, con/sciousness-altering drugs is drugs
(Remember the frying egg image? โThis is your brain on drugs.โ)
So hereโs Adele belting the tune lie, rolling in the deep doo-doo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
Hereโs Gardenerโs antihero Grendel, the beast, giving lie to the boast that cosmopolitan wo/man is the most:
โO the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost.โ
โ John Gardner, Grendel
Hereโs Sir Walter Raleigh prison-poeming before his erstwhile pals chopped off his head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHhvKpp2PA0
Another Walter loses the plot, comprehension, his head, & reads โthe sameโ poem with newer tech-added ominousness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE
White Russians & cannibis, โThe Dudeโ merely asserts, bowling pin-like, abode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYsw0KVRjCM
Decide and abide.
Or continue to let pusher-others do it โforโ โtoโ you.
Whose with me, somewhere other than on first? ๐
I appreciate you taking the time as a subscriber. The piece wasnโt arguing that โcommunicationโ is a magic fix. It was reporting what 103 married men actually said: the marriage went quiet, they stopped feeling wanted, they stopped asking, then they started swiping.
Thatโs a specific pattern, not a philosophy problem. โComprehension,โ exploding Pintos, Grendel, and Cosmo feminism donโt answer why a father of six who hired a nanny still hadnโt been touched in four years. If you think the interviews missed the real cause, say what you think the men were actually describing. Iโm listening. Iโm not going to debate whether Time is perpetual perishing.
My ex wife said she wants to get married and divorced one more time saying she would then be set for life. It can be extremely lucrative.
There will always be a small soulless percentage who see men only as a dollar sign. Itโs just awful, and I hope karma runs all over her for the pain and devastation she causes.