A coworker today said that he's never looked at a porn site on the Internet. Part of me is happy for him, that he has disciplined himself so that he carries a point of pride. Another part of me thinks that it's a stupid practice to deny part of our essential nature. Like our head and heart it just needs to be used wisely and responsibly, even made into an art form. And have fun.
I'll admit I've looked, and come to find that there are a lot of women who pose nude who...uhm...shouldn't. But for every yin there's a yang, and there are some very pretty women. Yet I find that the eyes are more important than anything else: if they are self-involved, hateful, or clueless it doesn't matter how good her bod looks. I'm turned off. If they are intelligent, kind, and playful it makes a woman so attractive.
A woman at our day center today said that I'm handsome. Haven't heard that for years. The self-deprecating part of me concludes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and one comment in several years is an aberration. A question also arises: this woman is diagnosed with a mental illness; does her comment mean that only a crazy woman can find me attractive, or does it mean that a person with a diagnosis is only in that one way affected and in most other ways is like any other normal human, and from years of therapy she has learned to merely say what she honestly sees?
The woman next to her asked if I was a psychiatrist. Clearly off her rocker.
I wrote in a recent blog that I struggle in relationships because I don't like to be emotionally dishonest. Last weekend on Car Talk Tom and Ray were in rare form and laughing more than usual. One of the topics throughout the show was about relationships, and one female caller said that it was not that she lets her husband be right about things, as Tom and Ray had posited, but that she led her husband to think he was right. Lots of laughs. And a very common comment. It was another example for me that we somehow think that one person in a relationship is to be in control, and manipulation is necessary to retain one's sense of control. How sad, that we don't trust our partners to have knowledge, wisdom, decision-making skills, and our best interests at heart as well as their own; if we aren't willing to share as equals aren't we being pretty immature or insecure? When we say we love someone but then don't show trust in them there's something wrong. That machinery is going to throw a scrap iron fit one day, or will spend its life laboring on only half its cylinders.
With thoughts like that I'm gonna be single for a looooong time, huh?
