New columnist Hugo Schwyzer explains that men are too willing to muddle through a mediocre marriage—and women are less inclined to settle.
Vicki Larson had a piece at the Huffington Post the other day, “Why Women Walk Out More Than Men,” citing research indicating that two-thirds of contemporary divorces are initiated by women. Why, she wonders, are men so comparatively reluctant to file for divorce?
Larson notes the “bad behavior” of men like Sean Penn, Jesse James, Tiger Woods, and Tony Parker, habitual cheaters all, and 
asks why it was their wives who chose to end the marriages. Is this a case of men trying to have their cake and eat it too, combining domestic comfort and sexual novelty? Larson isn’t sure.
One thing I’m sure of: infidelity is far from the only reason women initiate divorce more often than men.
Though most statistics indicate men are more likely to cheat than women, the percentage of women who are unfaithful is rising. At the same time, the percentage of divorces women initiate is climbing, too. If there were a simple correlation between infidelity and divorce, then we’d expect men to be initiating divorce more often. But that’s not the case.
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The reason women are more likely to leave is less about cheating than it is about their unwillingness to settle.
Men and women are raised with very different attitudes toward marriage. Though marriage rates are falling, popular culture still foists a romantic ideal of connubial bliss onto young girls. When I ask my college students if they’ve ever fantasized in detail about their wedding day, 80 percent of young women raise their hands. (Only about 10 percent of the guys admit to the same.) Yes, young women are more likely to want to delay marriage, but their expectations of romantic fulfillment are as high as ever. Boys, on the other hand, grow up in a “guy” culture that sees marriage as the end of freedom.
Put simply, boys are taught that marriage is about “settling down” while girls are taught that marriage is about finding enduring fulfillment. And it’s obvious who has the higher set of expectations.
♦◊♦
I met the woman who would be my third wife in 2000. I was 33. I had already burned through two ill-advised marriages in my 20s; my drinking, drug use, and infidelity ruined both relationships. At 31, I got sober. I changed my life. After two years of focus on my recovery, I was ready for something completely different, something stable.
Elizabeth was unlike any woman I’d ever been with. There was no destructive, overpowering chemistry. There was no hint of drama. We were intellectually compatible, from similar social backgrounds. We shared the same values and aspirations. She was hitting 30, eager to be married. I was eager to do something right this time. We were engaged within four weeks of our first date and married within a year.
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Too many of us confuse being a good man with the willingness to endure.
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Elizabeth and I never stopped having those wonderful conversations. We never cheated on each other, never raised our voices in anger to each other, certainly never threw vases or glasses at one another. And of course, we had no “heat” together. The lovemaking was tender but awkward. I couldn’t orgasm without thinking of someone else—and as I found out later, neither could she. By our first anniversary, we were having sex barely once a month.
I never saw it coming. Fifteen months into our marriage, Elizabeth told me calmly that she wanted a divorce. She’d made a mistake, she said, in settling for compatibility and friendship. She wanted more. She deserved more. “And so do you, Hugo,” she added.
I begged her to reconsider. Sure, I’d noticed the lack of passion. Yes, I was unhappy about our sex life. But I was damn sure not going to cheat; after two disastrous failures, I took my marriage vows seriously. Elizabeth and I had a nice house, two nice careers, two nice dogs, many nice friends. At this point in my life, I thought nice was enough. Nice was worth settling for.
Elizabeth wanted more than nice. She wanted passion, romance, and friendship with a spouse. I told her she was unreasonable; she told me I was selling both of us short. She filed for divorce, telling me I’d thank her someday. “When hell freezes over,” I replied.
Six weeks later, hell froze over.
♦◊♦
I moved out of the house I shared with Elizabeth and into a little apartment. A fortnight later, I met the woman who is now my fourth and final wife. We’ve been together over eight years now, and though our marriage is far from perfect, it has the combination of both deep friendship and genuine heat that Elizabeth knew we both deserved.
If I’d had my way, Elizabeth and I would never have divorced. We would have gone on being nice for years and years, each of us vaguely dissatisfied but resolutely committed to what we’d begun. We would have had children. Eventually, one or both of us would have had an affair out of desperation. One way or another, the marriage would have ended. My way would not only have postponed the inevitable, it would have made the inevitable much uglier.
Too many of us confuse being a good man with the willingness to endure. Too many of us think that a “real man” keeps his promises—even when those promises are making him miserable. Good marriages need more than a grim resolve not to leave no matter how bad things get. Men are more likely to forget that than women.
And so, as the statistics tell us, men are more likely to be left.
—Photo by Alex E. Proimos/flickr
About Hugo Schwyzer
A lovely essay. Your writing is fluid and seems effortless. Though, I probably know better. Funny that I kept rooting for you both to have it work out. But in the end, it DID work out, because hell froze over and you have to thank for that.
Destiny, hormones, I don’t know, I think it all plays some part. Hopefully, we either go into marriages adult enough to make the best decisions, or we become the people we should be, and really want to be.
I look forward to more thoughtful and thought provoking essays from you!
‘Too many of us think that a “real man” keeps his promises—even when those promises are making him miserable.’
If you aren’t going to keep a promise that makes you miserable, in what sense is that promise different than a lie you might make true if it makes you happy? A real man does in fact keep his promises, as does a real woman or any other honest person. Whether breaking your promise makes you happy or not is irrelevant.
I am recently divorced, in a divorce initiated by my wife. One of the problems in the marriage was that I did not feel that I was getting enough sex; she brought me off about every other week, I gave her an orgasm through cunnilingus about three times a week. I would have been happy (or at least a lot happier) with handjobs, she just didn’t feel enough like it to do it. But I’d sworn that “the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife;” (1 Cor 7:4) as she’d sworn the other way around. So I kept taking the initiative and offering. Her failing to keep her promise did not release me from mine. Let alone just unhappiness releasing me.
BTW, I think if she had seriously kept her vows in the marriage, we both would have been happy.
And how was that working out for you, going down with your highly principled ship of marital commitment?
You say if she had kept her vows seriously, then you both would have been happy. But if this transpired as you have described, then you were clearly married to a selfish person who was not willing to change (supposing you spoke to her about it, and didn’t expect her to read your mind.)
I would not stay with a husband who treated me like your wife treated you, and I’m having a hard time seeing your decision to suffer for basically no reason as virtuous in any way.
There’s a wide gulf between giving up at the same sign of trouble and chaining yourself to a hopeless situation for no reason. Admitting failure doesn’t lessen you.
Should be, *at the /first/ sign of trouble
Not well. But, of course, my point is that it making me happy is not the point of a promise. If my promise is to go down with the ship, I go down with the ship.
Yes, I did talk to her about it, many times. And she did do things for me, like cleaned and reorganized my messy home office that I asked her to leave alone. It wasn’t that she was selfish, it was kind of like she had an image of who I was and what I’d like that was immune to my actual words.
We’re friends now. I’ve also been told that I shouldn’t remain so close a friend, that I shouldn’t see her so often, that I would get over her better if I stayed away. Most of my other friends don’t invite her to things despite my arguments with them. And probably I would recover faster if I stayed away; certainly it would make things easier with my circle. But that’s principle again.
Hugo has a deep seated need to justify his serial monogamy. His “fourth and final” wife is most likely not. It wouldn’t surprise anyone that the fifth is on the horizon.
I’ve heard this argument before.
I’m a woman, and I think that if men were walking out of two-thirds of marriages we would be calling them selfish pigs, not saying they are more “evolved” and “unwilling to settle”. Isn’t there a double standard here? Also, why not mention here that second and third marriages have even higher rates of divorce than first marriages? That’s the hard truth. So is this quest for “something better” really leading to better relationships?
There is a slight double standard here. I read Hugo’s blog regularly and he does seem to buy the feminist belief that women are deep, men are shallow. Aside from that, I do think he believes in human happiness, for what it’s worth and he definitely has high hopes for companionate marriage as an institution. For my part, I don’t see companionate marriage enjoying, in the long run, any more success than it’s predecessors. Not to say it should never be entered into. But one person being all that more to another person? Doesn’t sound tneable for most people. Serial relationships and infidelity exist for reasons apart from character or lack thereof.
Of course there is a double standard. Our society has many. Thank you for having an open mind.
@FF
“I am not aware of a religion in China that involves a female deity.”
I’m treferrng to the widespread worship of Guan Yin. But it’s not uniiversal by any means.
” Buddhism is a male-centric religion, for example. ”
It sure is. But no religion has ever been universal in China, other than the civil religion (actually quite secular) of Confucianism.
“Since there’s been no female governance or true joint governance in China you can’t really compare how that would have been more peaceable and productive than the male governance. Yes, you’re correct that the minority women tended to go along with the violent, authoritarian, patriarchal cultures. ”
There’s nothing patriarchal about it – it’s just the unavoidable imperatives of wielding absolute power in a very large society. It works the same way in a nunnery or an elementary school, female dominated insititutions. It makes no difference if you are Catherine the Great or Peter the Great.
“But other studies show that societies where women have status closer to/equal with men, are indeed more peaceable and productive. ‘
Historically those societies have eihter been pastoral, where raiding and war is endemic, or else like Polynesian cultures, where the same was true until colonial intervetion. Societies where women had significant political power such as the Five Nations (Iroquois) or the Comanche, were war machines. And it makes snese that a society that devalues mens’ lives and holds them expendable will be quite warlike. But then again the very male-dominated Zulu were quite a war machine themsleves. so gneder power relationships seem to have a only a minor influence.
“Men and women are raised with very different attitudes toward marriage. . . Yes, young women are more likely to want to delay marriage, but their expectations of romantic fulfillment are as high as ever. Boys, on the other hand, grow up in a “guy” culture that sees marriage as the end of freedom.
Put simply, boys are taught that marriage is about “settling down” while girls are taught that marriage is about finding enduring fulfillment. And it’s obvious who has the higher set of expectations.”
But it’s not about expectations as much as it is the gap between expectations and reality. Boys are taught to expect a negative (loss of freedom), but what they get in marriage is a much sweeter deal than what their wives get. Yes, I’m talking about housework and childcare. Women, on the other hand, get the bait and switch, the positive romantic fulfillment replaced by the drudgery of domestic labour.
You know, the division of labour is a conflict for every (hetero) couple I know, and every guy I know exploits his privilege in this regard, and yet your post renders it pretty much invisible. If I was in an unhappy marriage, being the maid might be what would nudge me towards divorce, while having someone take care of the mundane details of my life might encourage me to “settle” for a less than ideal arrangement.
From Barbara Ehrenreich’s Maid to Order:
“To make a mess that another person will have to deal with — the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack — is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms. One person’s arrogance — or indifference, or hurry — becomes another person’s occasion for toil. And when the person who is cleaned up after is consistently male, while the person who cleans up is consistently female, you have a formula for reproducing male domination from one generation to the next.”
http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/maidtoorder.htm
“Boys are taught to expect a negative (loss of freedom), but what they get in marriage is a much sweeter deal than what their wives get. Yes, I’m talking about housework and childcare. ”
Yes, but you’re conveniently forgetting to mention the major upside for wiomen that outweighs all the downsides for them and any upsdie for me: marriage is typically so financially advantageous to women that it amounts to contract prostitution.
That that that upside/downside rain speaks of only holds if the couple involved really want that. Just I’ve heard wives talk about their short end of the stick (being expected to keep up the affairs of house and home) I’ve heard husbands talk about their short end of the stick (being expected to keep out of the affairs of house and home).
Have you ever heard of the problem w/o a name? Obviously the unhappiness of domestic servitude cannot be offset by money.
When traditional sex roles are in place, women do most of the housework and men make most of the money. Which is worse? It’s hard to say, but what isn’t hard to say is that you are failing to acknowledge the difficulty of the male role while throwing a pity party for the female. It’s equivalent to a guy who complains that he always pays the mortgage but refuses to acknowledge the work done by the wife to take care of the house and kids. It’s just stupid. Also, domestic labor isn’t that big of a deal. I’m happily single and I spend a few hours a week cooking and cleaning. It’s not that big of a deal cleaning up after a guy. How long does it take to pick up a set of clothes a day and wipe off the mirror? 15 seconds for the clothes, 30 for the mirror. It’s not that big of a deal. The guy would be perfectly happy picking the clothes up once a week and wiping the mirror once a month, messes don’t bother most of us that much. Women have a lower tolerance for messes so they end up doing most of the cleaning. It’s never gonna change and it’s hardly a human rights tragedy.
1) Recent studies have shown that women are “usurping” that traditional manly role of being the primary breadwinner. The changes in these statistics do not correlate with a proportional uptick in male domestic service.
2) Way to stereotype. I tend to be about 10% messier than the males I’ve dated. Am I just an outlier or are you just generalizing way too much and reinforcing negative social mores?
3) Despite the difference in messiness, I tend to unwittingly conform to their expectations because it’s “my job” to do so. This is never voiced outright, but the pernicious attitude is there and reinforced in a dozen ways.
4) “Doesn’t take a lot of time.”
a) Not the point.
b) Picking up clothes, wiping down mirrors, washing the dishes, cooking the food, doing the laundry (washing, drying, folding/hanging, ironing), vacuuming, taking care of kids (feeding, clothing, bathing, putting to sleep)… It’s a lot more than 45 seconds a day.
c) If it doesn’t take that much time, why don’t men do it (generalizations are fun!) when their partners express that they would like them to do it?
@UH:
“1) Recent studies have shown that women are “usurping” that traditional manly role of being the primary breadwinner. The changes in these statistics do not correlate with a proportional uptick in male domestic service.”
Of course what you failed to mention that overall men and women have virtually equal ‘free’ time, to do the the things they like to do like hobbies etc.
It’s interesting how feminists (and other intellectuals) can find ‘domination’ everywhere they look. Domination implies an intent to exert dominance. The inequality in marriage persists out of self-centered laziness and the fact that many women care more about cleanliness than their spouses do.
Generalizing from my experiences with male roommates, many men just can’t be bothered to care until the floor is too cluttered to walk on or something starts to smell.
Great video:
Sex Differences: Why Won’t Men Commit?
http://www.youtube.com/user/1menaregood1#p/a/u/1/Va-YTf5Caj8
Men Are Good.
Are you out of your mind?
I initiated at least two of my divorces. And it felt good.
There comes a point when you just can’t take it anymore. There comes a point when you’re sick of hearing about her issues, and why they don’t like her at this one particular store at the mall, and how all of the women who frequent this store talk about her, and they don’t like her shoes, and they think that her hair was better when it was longer, and then they talk about it, but there’s always this one friend who–and I’m not saying I did this, but she’s a terrific lay–and suddenly, no, there’s this line you’re not supposed to cross.
What is that line? I can’t have sex with someone who’s good in bed because I’m not married to her? Who made that rule?
Men, initiate that divorce. You’ll end that throbbing headache when you do.
Too many of us confuse being a good man with the willingness to endure. Too many of us think that a “real man” keeps his promises—even when those promises are making him miserable. Good marriages need more than a grim resolve not to leave no matter how bad things get. Men are more likely to forget that than women.
Is it that men forget or are they socialized to believe that grim resolve is the only option (as in not that they forget but are told that there are no other options)?
Wow, this is a sad story. I endure. I endure every day for my two daughters. I had an affair for two and a half years that tore me apart and I debated whether to leave my wife for her or stay and endure niceness.One year later, Im still enduring. You endure for the kids. My kids are happy. Though mom and dad are barely physical and quite remote. Its probably not as bad as that, but it sure feels like it. I hate guys like Mark Sanford who left his wife for that Argentine woman. I should havedone the same. The kids’ll get over it. Dunno sometimes. I think the writer of this piece, and his wife, would have stayed together longer if there were young children involved. Indeed, THAT Is why men stay married: for the kids. And because we are hard wired to do our best not hurt women. We prefer to take the pain, admit it.
It’s very bizarre reading a criticism of men who choose to “endure” in their marriages written by a man who has been divorced three times before the age of 35. I don’t mean to be rude, Hugo, but I hope you can at least appreciate the humor. You’ve been married FOUR times before the age of forty!! I guess it should come as no surprise that you’re a big proponent of trading up.
I too, am a serial monogamist (though luckily I’ve only been married once), so I identify with your need to convince yourself that THIS time it’s “for real” and to defend your previous divorces/break-ups, since they led you to where you are now, in your “final” marriage. I have the same inclinations. But I must say, reading this article was sort of like reading a satire of my own thoughts taken to a logical extreme, thus revealing my own self-delusion.
I too was once married, and we divorced because I couldn’t endure the boring sex life, and I knew I could find more satisfying sex and passion elsewhere, which I couldn’t resist. And I’ve been with my current boyfriend for four years, all of which have been extraordinarily fulfilling on a sexual and companionate level, much better than my marriage. But unlike you, I don’t celebrate this. In fact I am ashamed. I was selfish, that’s all there is to it. I put my desires for sexual gratification above all the other interests that marriage promotes, above my ex-husband’s wishes, above my parents’ feelings, etc. And while I don’t think my divorce did *too* much harm, since we had no children and I assuaged a lot of my guilt through the alimony I paid my ex-husband, it still isn’t something I would ever hold up as a social good. To me, the lesson is simply that I shouldn’t have married in the first place, since I was obviously incapable of upholding my vows. And I consider it a failure of character that I did not do so.
You state that women have higher expectations of marriage than men, and that men are more likely to view it as “settling” and not be bothered when the marriage isn’t romantic and emotionally fulfilling. I agree. But you then argue that the (typical) female perspective is SUPERIOR to the(typical) male perspective, which is where you lose me. Essentially, you are saying that there is a disconnect between expectations and reality when it comes to marriage. But then instead of advocating for modifying those expectations to meet reality, you advocate that it is better to keep one’s expectations high and to modify the reality by divorce. That seems insane to me. Expectations are just ideas in one’s head. Reality is reality. Since happiness is a function of expectations equaling or exceeding reality, then doesn’t it make sense to lower one’s expectations if they don’t concur with reality??
You didn’t want your third divorce, which occurred because your ex-wife thought she could find a more satisfying sex-life elsewhere, but now you’re okay with it because it turned out that you ended up meeting someone better. But what if you hadn’t? Would your analysis be the same? What if you never found someone again or your next relationship involved even worse sex? What of the 56-year-old woman whose husband divorces her because he finds a more satisfying sex life elsewhere, who is now largely considered undesirable and never finds another mate? Is your analysis still the same? What happens if in another 8 years your sex life cools off substantially and your current wife decides to leave you for someone with whom she has better chemistry? Is your analysis still the same?
And more to the point: is it really tenable for people to base their marriages on sexual satisfaction, when all evidence points to the fact that we are not naturally monogamous over the long-term? It seems to me that in marriage, one GIVES UP some level of sexual satisfaction in return for more practical benefits: creating a family, wealth consolidation, security, social stability, regular (if not passionate) sex. In this way, the (typical) male perspective on marriage is simply more accurate than whatever visions of romance women have been sold by DeBeers and the wedding industry. And the solution is for us to adjust those skewed expectations of marriage, not to encourage people to divorce. Family dissolution is already a tremendous social problem; I can’t believe you’re essentially encouraging MORE divorce. Your arguments strike me as deeply socially destructive.
Alternatively, if we are going to continue to conceive of marriage as being primarily about romantic love, then we can expect to continue to watch it decline and eventually disappear. It’s simply not a sustainable model. It’s this simple: if marriage is about sex and romantic love, then marriage serves no purpose, since those things can be had freely without marriage. If, on the other hand, it’s about organizing and stabilizing familial relationships, legal obligations to family members, and ownership of property, then it might remain a viable institution. But social institutions that don’t serve an actual purpose don’t stick around for long. There is just as much (or more) love, companionship, and sex in my current relationship with my boyfriend as there was with my ex-husband. But the difference is that if I break up with my boyfriend, I owe him nothing, while breaking up with my husband meant I incurred weighty legal and financial obligations to him. So I am curious, just what do you think marriage is for?
In advocating for a hedonistic, personal-happiness-first model of marriage, it seems to me that you are actually advocating for the abolition of the institution altogether, since civil society would have no legitimate reason to be involved in regulating relationships with such goals.
What an incredibly honest, relevant, and potent response. In my humble opinion, this post has refuted not one, but every one of Hugo’s points of argument in this blog. I understand this entry is dated, but I find it unfortunate that this post did not receive a proper rebuttal from Hugo. As far as I’m concerned – this response is succinctly successful in unraveling the original argument.
Rain, what I had to cut to fit the word limit was a sentence I ought to have worked in to the effect that this phenomenon stood even when we’re talking about faithful, non-violent unions where there is a roughly egalitarian split in housework and childcare.
kryptogal, My ex wife didn’t leave me because we didn’t connect sexually. Our lack of sexual connection was a symptom of a deeper incompatibility. Sex waxes and wanes in any marriage. Flames grow weaker. But if the flame was never there in the first place, then trying to deny that “heat” is as vital as any other need shortchanges everyone.
There’s a word limit on the internet? That’s ridiculous.
” this phenomenon stood even when we’re talking about faithful, non-violent unions where there is a roughly egalitarian split in housework and childcare.”
Which phenomenon? Men not initiating divorce? How men and women are socialized differently? I assumed at first you meant the former, but I don’t see how you could possibly know. First there’s the problem of identifying and defining egalitarian splits in domestic labour. From the housework studies I’ve read about, something even “roughly” egalitarian is quite rare. Then of those egalitarian relationships, you’d have to find ones that have divorced. From those, you’d then be able to find out whether the man or woman initiated the divorce. I don’t think that kind of work has ever been done yet.
So I guess I don’t understand what you said there.
Maybe its because men stand to lose a lot more when they divorce (financially and otherwise — married men live longer)….
They don’t live longer, it just seems that way.
Hugo,
First of all, thank you for finding me and reading my HuffPost piece. I just stumbled upon your article while looking for another article in the GMPM; glad I did.
In reading what you wrote, it seems more an issue of marrying the wrong people than marriage=settling. Who would argue with “settling” with the right person? (Of course, when Lori Gottlieb suggested that in her book, “Marry Him!,” it got a lot of women upset). That’s choosing wisely, not “settling.”
In my article, I did take not of other reasons for divorce besides infidelity, as well as the fact that women cheat and behave “badly,” too (and for the record, the “bad behavior” was a quote from the National Marriage Project, not mine).
Still, I found this paragraph of yours telling:
“I begged her to reconsider. Sure, I’d noticed the lack of passion. Yes, I was unhappy about our sex life. But I was damn sure not going to cheat; after two disastrous failures, I took my marriage vows seriously. Elizabeth and I had a nice house, two nice careers, two nice dogs, many nice friends. At this point in my life, I thought nice was enough. Nice was worth settling for.”
Because taking your marriage vows seriously and doing the right thing would mean that if you were unhappy with the sex and passion, you wouldn’t cheat — you’d divorce first and then screw someone else. I’m not sure why people don’t understand that. Cheating never makes a marriage better (although, yes; for some people, it gets them to wake up and refocus their energy on their spouse. Lovely. But if that spouse should ever discover the betrayal, there will very ugly, unhappy repercussions).
Anyway, glad you found “the one.” Although I just wrote about multiple marriages (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-larson/once-mrs-twice-mrs-three-_b_814728.html); the divorce rate is very high.
Of course it’s complicated and there are lots of factors at work. Divorce is an event that happens a thousand times a day with people all over the country. But, I think the article is onto something about expectations going in to marriage. There’s a good argument to be made that women are generally likely to have higher expectations of marriage than men do, or maybe demand more from marriage than men do. Maybe for wives there is a bigger letdown after the honeymoon period than there is for men, so the disappointment hits them harder than for men. It may be that married women define themselves by their marriage more than their husbands do, so a larger part of their lives is affected by a bad marriage than it would be for their husbands.
In the end, it could just be that marriage as it is practiced in large numbers in the US today is something that works for men more than it works for women. There seems to be an assumption here that men and women experience marriage the same way and it’s just that women give up first, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Men are the victims of this feminist culture which places all the blame on men’s shoulders. Even women are waking up to this hypocrisy as this video proves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plkeKMTDM9g
I totally agree with you Hugo. Great article, and oh-so true.
I was in the same boat, and actually was very unhappy for years. I felt as if I was drowning, suffering and my ex played with my emotions. I initiated my breakup and mentioned divorce many times before I walked out with my daughter. This article really touches me because this was me. There was no passion, or heat, that was the worst feeling. I slowly felt like I was losing me and I did, for a while. Was I selfish; yes I wanted to be happy, did I harm my child; yes. I feel happy now and I would not want my daughter to see us slowly dying. That is not how relationships are supposed to work. You cant have a perfect relationship but I think that settling is signing your life away. My ex is so complacent and that what kills me, he seems to not want to reach for the stars and I do. I am finally rediscovering myself. The result of our continued union would be cheating, I was very close. I am a good mom and always be there for my daughter, and I seriously think this has made me a better woman. Thanks Hugo.
If I could do one thing to save marriage today, it would be removing all of the bullshit, Oprah-change your man crap is in the media. Don’t get me wrong, I love weddings and grew up in a religious conservative family that cherished marriage above all else but if you believe that walking down the isle is going to be the answer to all of life’s questions you are sorely mistaken.
A short time ago I saw the second twilight movie, and though it wasn’t all bad, I really didn’t like the bit at the end when the two guys sat there talking about their feelings for half an hour – guys don’t do that you see, it’s just a female pornographic fantasy, like the pizza guy who scores a 3-way in male porn.
All I’m saying is that it seems today that ridiculous female expectations of men are acceptable but most men know that porn is just fantasy. Until women start to realize that Oprah is completely full of shit and men haven’t changed in 100,00 years they are going to be on the hunt for the ‘perfect guy’ and miss out on decent, normal guys that come along.
Let’s keep heterosexuality going, it’s the reason we’re all here.