Two Realizations at Midlife

Posted by Jew from Jersey
12 January 2022

Two realizations at mid-life:

1. Men I regard as larger than life have spent their entire lifetimes dead broke. The fact that me and a scattering of others around the world have long thought of men like David Berman and Blaine Reininger as great artists has done absolutely nothing for their bottom lines.

2. Many men who make and have a lot more money than I do, who wear nicer clothes than me and drive nicer cars, etc., have never known what it is to be loved by a woman. They think money buys you love and don’t even realize that what they’re getting is not it. At least the above-mentioned suffering artists know that they’re broke.

I have no envy of any man who has lived his life as a serial monogamist. A serial monogamist is just a sloppy monogamist. Accidents happen, but having more accidents doesn’t make you a race car driver. If all the sex you’ve had is either in a marriage or a long-term relationship, or through cheating outside of such an arrangement, or even seeking thrills before or after one or as otherwise defined in relation to one, I don’t believe you know anything I don’t know. If you’re in an “open marriage” or keep bouncing from one broken family arrangement to the next, I don’t believe you have experienced anything I have not experienced. The fact that you have physically known a few more women than I have doesn’t mean anything more. Possibly, it means less.

There are however some rare men who have lived completely different lives. I am not saying they have lived better lives or even that I would like to have lived as they have, but I believe they know something the rest of us do not know for having experienced something we have not experienced.

I am speaking here of men who have been able to live truly promiscuous lives due to the willingness of large numbers of women to associate sexually with them free of any pretense or anticipation of commitment or transactional exchange.

(If you’re a woman or a gay man reading this, well, no, your promiscuity doesn’t qualify you for this distinction.)

Even if none of the women were particularly beautiful and none of the sexual acts particularly incredible, the sheer numbers, the variety, the resulting familiarity with unfamiliarity, are bound to instill in a man an experience and understanding of women that the rest of us can only guess at.

Then again, a monogamist, a patriarch, in turn knows something they do not know.