Musings on Miscommunication

I was corresponding with a relative this morning and she said (I paraphrased, and changed some identifying details) :

When I was dating my future husband I drank with him a lot, and I pretty much stopped after we married for some reason. He loved beer, any kind. He said I lured him in by drinking with him until he put a ring on my finger and changed. I didn’t do it intentionally, I’ve never been much of a drinker.

Luring a man with some behavior and then changing after marriage is so common it’s a cliche. And the change in behavior is often about the quantity of affection and/or sex. I’ve been told by many frustrated men that at a certain point their wives just stopped wanting to have sex. Often it’s after the births of the children.

Do women do this consciously? I doubt it, and I don’t think they love their husband any less. I think many women don’t connect affection with sex, and I think for most men, sex and affection are very much intertwined — and no sex means no affection.

I was talking with my sister once, and I don’t know how the conversation came up, but she said something like: How come men buy you something and then expect sex as a reward?

I responded that a lot of men wonder: How come I have to buy you something in order to get sex?

Isn’t miscommunication wonderful?

It’s sad that so many parents don’t teach life skills and affirming behaviors to their children, mostly I think because they didn’t learn those behaviors as children themselves; and if you’re a parent who didn’t, how do you acquire those skills and teach them to your children? For so many, it just doesn’t happen.

Think about food. Parents who enjoy a large variety of food teach their children to enjoy a variety of food as well. If the parents are a meat and potatoes kind of eaters, their children almost certainly will be too. Parents who believe in forcing their children to eat foods they don’t like, and parents who believe in “clean your plate or else” create children who are pathologically dysfunctional about food.

In order for a person to change they have to examine what they were taught, and consciously decide to eat differently — if it matters to them. My parents were the clean your plate variety, and my sister says she remembers times when I would have to sit for hours staring at a plate of peas or something because I refused to eat it. I remember my mother (stepmother actually) trying to physically force me to eat something when I was about 13 or 14. By then I was bigger than she was and she did not succeed.

If so many people are dysfunctional about food, and a huge number of us are, is it any wonder that even more people are dysfunctional in their relationships, which are far more complex?

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about that. There are men where sex is no more emotional than shaking hands, but it certainly isn’t true of all men. Some men may see sex as a game, others may see it as a conquest.

Then there are men who have a strong emotional connection with sex. Those men usually aren’t promiscuous because promiscuity entangles the emotions and causes pain. Just as every woman is unique, so is every man.

Certainly biological drives enter into it, and the biological drives for women and men are different, complicating things even more.

I think that it’s not so much that someone has to buy their partner something to get sex, it’s that buying them something hopefully puts them in a good and generous mood, and I think many men see their partner withholding sex as being stingy — and whether it’s with sex or gifts, why would someone want to be stingy with someone they love?

Then there’s the issue of the enjoyment of sex itself. It’s pretty obvious when a man has enjoyed sex. It’s hard to fake. Not so much with women. Going back a generation or two here in America many women were told by their mothers: You’re not going to like it, but you have to put up with it.” Some were told it was a duty: “Think of England!” And then, how many women were told that they were whores if they liked sex?

In some Muslim countries women are circumcised, if you can call it that. Usually the entire labia and clitoris are removed with a razor blade, with no anesthesia, and in unsanitary conditions. Why? So she won’t enjoy sex when she is married. Why? Because women who enjoy sex are whores. Sex for these women is essentially rape.

In America circumcising men (almost always without anesthesia) is still common, although it’s becoming less so. Why? Except for religious Jews, because it’s “the custom.” Because we want little Johnny’s penis to look like his dad’s.

Why circumcise? Historically, because of the connection between the Jews and Christianity, and in Victorian times to stop masturbation.

Because it’s cleaner? It is not.

The foreskin is a piece of protective skin that will grow to approximately 15 square inches, and contains more nerve endings than the rest of the body’s skin combined.

After circumcision the head of the penis becomes a callus, skin thickness is tripled, making achieving orgasm more difficult. Sometimes making sex more work than fun. Not good for the man or his partner.

I had a friend whose 80-year old mother confided to her that she had never had an orgasm. How sad is that? I doubt she communicated that fact to any of her partners.

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