Real life is complicated and real-life marriages are not like sitcom couples where they argue sarcastically then make-up and everything is neatly resolved in 22 minutes. Try living in a sexless marriage for a couple of decades and then see how simple it is to just end it. “Just get a divorce already” is not really helpful advice.
I wish every couple could just sit down and talk about these things openly and honest but sex is a highly charged and emotional area and that’s not always possible.
I recommend checking out Reddit’s DeadBedroom forum for examples of what real-life couples face every day: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/. The sadness and desperation being expressed there is heart wrenching.
Ha! Hilarious. So any party gets to re-write the contract at any point if they feel the other party has “voided” part of the contract, and then not tell the other party that they’ve fundamentally changed the terms of the contract?
Yeah, someone who is supposed to be your committed partner but who thinks his right to not let you give someone else a blowjob is more important that your desire to do so. And if dumping him will cause massive fallout for your kids, then he thinks not having you give someone a blowjob is more important than that fallout for your kids just as much as you think giving someone a blowjob is more important than that fallout for your kids.
The best advice is to not marry someone you aren’t sexually compatible with in the first place, but obviously a lot of people mess that step up. Years later, when you have a house and children and other things that bind you together. Yes, you promised to be sexually faithful when you got married, maybe you never should have done that. Given that you did, what do you do now? Is that promise the only or event the most important consideration in your life?
Cheating is bad on it’s face. But I find it a lot easier to have sympathy for a person who would cheat on their partner than for a person who would break up their kid’s home life merely because* their partner is having sex with other people. If I thought my partner wasn’t capable of putting the well being of our children ahead of their sexual jealousy then I sure wouldn’t expose them to sexual jealousy. Obviously the best way to accomplish that is to not cheat in the first place, but if someone already has cheated, or if they haven’t had any luck avoiding cheating, I don’t see how honesty is necessarily the best policy.
* Key word “merely”. In any situation there will be more factors than that and that home life might be worth breaking up if the marriage is really rocky anyway - we are talking about situations where people say they would rather not get divorced otherwise.
I don’t buy it though… the gender breakdown of users on AM is 90-95% male… sounds like this guy was doing all the women on there… I don’t buy it, sorry, I just don’t.
Conservatives (and not what the American media calls “conservatives” but actual conservatives who want to preserve valuable practices and traditions and resist changes to them as potentially harmful) are often concerned that changes to mores, especially mores concerning family structure, are directly harmful to society and thus a concern for all of society.
If you think moderns are bad in this respect, try looking up the ancient Assyrian legal penalties for adultery. Kissing someone else’s wife would be punished by the man’s lips being cut off (and the woman’s nose IIRC). Homosexual sex between males was punished by castration of both parties.
One factor to consider is that libertine periods like our current one seem to consistently precede the decline of a society. I’m not sure whether it’s a causal factor or another symptom of the decline, though.
Reminds me of Libertarians, contract supremacists up until the point where one inconveniences them, then they spend all their efforts to weasel out of what they signed up for.
Yeah, social conservatives. But in the US social conservatives get lumped in with Republicans in general, which means neoconservatives – who aren’t conservative at all.
I’m not entirely sure what your counterpoints are supposed to counterpoint. Are these declining societies which did not experience a libertine period? Or societies which experienced a libertine period and did not decline? Context being what it is, a few of these don’t make much sense to me without the addition of a time period.
I tend to think libertine periods indicate a renunciation of the value systems that allowed for the coordination that builds up societies in the first place, so I lean towards a causal or partially causal explanation myself.
Which is not to say that a libertine period necessarily precedes a collapse or that a collapse is necessarily preceded by a libertine period – I think it’s one causal factor among many, and not all of those factors need to be present in any given instance.
Heck, maybe if a society really had its shit together otherwise, it could support the sort of loose sexual mores that most appeal to me and my fellow mutants.
“I met a woman who said she’d never given a man a blowjob. It was her fantasy. She said her husband would call her a freak. I made her fantasy come true.”
This seem like something that would have come up before the “I dos”. And if in fact there is a married man who doesn’t like a blow job, I believe there are counseling options available to work through this issue before hooking up with someone online.
Well, without doing too much research I was simply pointing out that several huge, important empires have collapsed in the last 200 years without a ‘libertine period’. So without further evidence that doesn’t include Greece or Rome, I am inclined to believe it is a casual relationship.
But as all (decent) scholars, I am open to new arguments.
And to add timelines to empires, cultures, or important countries that collapsed without a series of a libertine period:
USSR: speaks for itself, post tsar
British empire: while Thatcher may disagree, most see the the end of the empire as 1948, and the salt added in 1998
Germany: lets say 1850 till 1945
Ottoman empire: till 1923
Japan: come on, the rise and fall and rise and fall of Japan through the last millennia has nothing to do with permissiveness
France after the first revolution: the headless after the french revolution were weirdos, but the next hundred years?
The Balkans: http://www.historyguy.com/balkan_war_third.htm
I am sure we both lived through this one.
These are radical, world shifting changes that had nothing to do with libertine ideas. And none preceded these falls (that I can find). So I just don’t buy it as an argument that permissiveness precedes downfalls.
