Wednesday, February 25, 2015

When the Best Sex Is Extramarital. Again?

"If I eat meat, I feel like I am cheating" said a colleague who tries to stick to a vegetarian diet.

We make promises all the time.  To our kids. To our neighbors. To fathers, mothers, friends, neighbors.  Yes, even to ourselves.

And, then we cheat.  The colleague ends up eating smoked salmon!

But then there is that mother of all cheating--the sharp deviation from a marriage contract to be faithful.  Remember that joke about Tiger Woods?  That he became a "cheetah"--get the pun? ;)  Speaking of Tiger Woods, boy has his career crashed after that headlines making crash!

I blogged about Murakami's story, but with the title that might have sounded a tad incongruent.  Well, life is incongruent; deal with it! ;)

It merely worked out that way.  I read the story, fell asleep.  After waking up in the morning, when scanning through my news sources, it seemed like a pretty darn coincidence that I had read that short story--yes, there is life issues there related to extramarital sex--and then to read today about extramarital sex in the NY Times. What was the cosmos telling me? Remember, it is always, always about me in this blog! ;)
At our best we learn to refrain from doing things that would make our spouses jealous and insecure, despite our temptations, and when they make us jealous we try to restrain our hostility, despite our hurt.
That is one heck of a difference between cheating to oneself about food habits, versus cheating on a spouse, eh!

It only took ten days after Valentine's Day for the opinionator piece on extramarital sex! ;)
Freud claimed that people often split love and lust. It is not uncommon to have great sex with someone who isn’t lovable, or to have a trustworthy loving relationship with someone with whom the sex is boring. Recent empirical research shows that individuals who exhibit high degrees of narcissism, like Neal, have difficulty integrating love and lust in a single relationship.
Way back when I was an undergraduate student, the fact that there were no girls to distract us in an all-male engineering college did not mean that we didn't talk about our future selves.

I recall that in one of the discussions sitting on the railway tracks, a friend argued that infidelity was not a big deal and he compared it to home-cooked food that we might soon tire of, which is why we go restaurants and have the rich and decadent dishes there.  That never appealed to me--even now, I am very happy to make the same ciabatta sandwich every day for lunch.  Hmmm, I am already drooling thinking about the sandwich ;)



Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, "could there be patterns in who is mostly likely to cheat?"  Oh Yes, there are, says the WSJ:
Have you ever wondered if you’re in danger of being unfaithful? The experts advise you to look at these risk categories. People who engage in infidelity typically fall into more than one.
Yes, gender is a category:
If you are a man, you’re more likely to cheat. ... The gender gap isn’t as big as it used to be
Of course, I know that the gender gap is not as big as it used to be.

So, what are the other categories, you ask?  Don't be lazy--do at least that much reading in your life! ;)

Oh, btw, I did have rich and decadent food at a restaurant and, my god, it was Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious , and the "cheating" colleague stayed faithful to vegetarianism! ;)

Fried Gnudi:
Fried naked ravioli, mushrooms, caramelized fennel, sauce sugo, Romano cheese & chives



3 comments:

Anne in Salem said...

Interesting choice in Frank Sinatra given his track record.

Not sure the point of your post. I am not sympathetic to cheaters, but that is a detached opinion based on religion and lack of first- or second-hand experience. Perhaps it would be one of those muddy areas so common in adulthood in which the rigid opinion does not allow for compassion or empathy.

Experimenting with one's food is far safer, both for one's health and for one's pleasure in life. Carry on!

Ramesh said...

I am totally lost. I shall read this again when I get back !

Sriram Khé said...

That is the exact reason I chose that Sinatra piece. Almost often, the personal lives of the performers of the songs that we might cherish are contradictory to the ideas and values the lyrics mean.

If both the "argumentative" commenters are feeling lost, then something was surely lost in the translation ;)