Love, sex, marriage, and relationship observations

Through life we all have experienced, to varying degrees, how high ideals don't survive the encounter with real life. To put it another way, life is unfair and despite noble sentiments otherwise, some things are true even if they shouldn't be true.  I've always been a very social person and one to talk to people about all kinds of things (which shouldn't be surprising since I started a blog site).  I've been running BBSes, bulletin boards, forums, chat channels, you name it for the past 17 years straight.  Like many of you, I'm just really interested in people. What they think. What they do. And why.

So here is a list of things I've found to be true about people that are arguably not fair but nonetheless are generally true. In some cases, I feel the same way as the "norm", in others, I don't.

1) Women who have many sexual partners are "sluts". Men who do are "studs". It's not fair but it is true.  Personally I think it awful (at least in the sense that guys should not take pride in how easy they are either). But like it or not it's something we have to deal with. But at the same time, men are still generally compared by their earning potential. That's not fair either. Reading through the various blogs it's pretty apparent that many women are operating on the belief of how life should be rather than how it actually is. Be careful who you share yourself with. Put thought into it. Try to think ahead.  When you're a teenager or young adult it is difficult to realize that you still have your whole life ahead of you and that the teen years will be relatively unimportant compared to the rest of your life. But the decisions you make then can still have long lasting damage. Girls/women who are "easy" decrease the pool of "good" men that they will later have access to or will create significant problems for themselves later in life. 

One night stands and general promiscuousness may not seem to do harm at the time but from what I've seen over the years, it comes back to haunt women much more than men.  Men get off the hook on this kind of behavior for some reason but women are permanently marked as being "slutty".  But like I said, at the same time, it's pretty apparent whether people like to admit it or not that women are much more attracted to men who seem to be financially well off.  There have been many studies over the years demonstrating that when it comes to love, women are the ones who are much more practical and men much more emotional. Pretty ironic eh?

2) Being on time matters. When it comes to first impressions of any kind, being punctual really is a big deal in the United States (and UK). In other societies it doesn't matter as much. Generally speaking, you can't go wrong by simply making your appointment, meeting, date, whatever on time.  This is regularly understated as someone being "casual" about their appointments but in terms of success, particularly in business, punctuality matters a great deal.

3) Tell the truth. Both men and women regularly fall into the belief that it is easier to tell someone what they think they want to hear rather than the whole truth. Eventually the truth will slip out. Obviously it's easier to just not do things that you are ashamed of to the point that you need to be dishonest about them to your friend, boss, co-worker, spouse, significant other, etc.  But most people at times do do things they are ashamed of and honesty really is the best policy. Take the short term pain of telling the truth. Because if the issue is significant, it will come out and the longer that truth has been hidden (or longer the lie has been perpetuated) the more damning it will be.

4) Listening matters. If you find yourself doing most of the talking (/me looks down at the floor embarrassed) then you should probably put some effort into becoming a listener. This is particularly true if you are a man. Men of few words are almost always considered more attractive and more commanding of respect.  Don't confuse shyness with being a listener. They aren't the same. Someone who makes eye contact and is clearly self confident but has chosen to listen to your words carefully is going to gain the respect of others much more completely and faster than the person who just seems to talk to hear their own voice.  (of course, knowing this and being able to act on this knowledge are two different things...)

5) High school sucks for most people. People who say that those years are the best years of their lives should be flogged or pitied. One or the other. I thought I was the only one who hated high school and felt terrible being told that these were the glory days and I should be enjoying them. But as I got out into the world and talked to others it became clear that most people I talked to hated high school. The challenge is getting through it without doing any long term damage to your future. 15 to 21 year olds should just say to themselves "none of this will matter much in 10 years, I'll just do the best I can."

6) First loves are probably not true loves. The problem with being a teen or young adult is a lack of perspective. You have nothing to compare your experiences to. Hence many young adults make the mistake of over-committing to their "first loves". What they feel is new and stronger than anything they've felt before. Very true too. But it's all relative isn't it?  My "first love" was in early high school and I was certain that it was "real love". But there is little that can compare to the quiet intimacy of sitting on the couch watching a favorite show or movie or whatever knowing that you've been with him or her for a decade and know everything about them while your children play in the background. And even then, there are probably greater levels of intimacy than that that I simply don't know of yet because I'm still young too. 

7) More than intelligence, more than ambition, self-discipline is the key to success. And for those warm fuzzy people who try to define success out of existence, I mean success in the sense of having accomplished concrete goals. Success doesn't have to mean money, though money in our capitalist society often goes hand in hand with any kind of significant accomplishment, success has to do with having goals and making those goals a reality.  With success comes self-esteem and often happiness and joy and contentment. And often times getting to a goal simply is a matter of finishing it. Most things aren't fun to do all the time but sticking with them ad finishing those things is what self-discipline is all about.  My own success and wealth boils down to this - I am not a great programmer but I had one trait that most other developers working purely on their own don't have -- the discipline to actually finish what I started.   Self-discipline can be applied to almost any endeavor.

8) Recognize that men and women are different.  Duh right? Yet we live in a society that increasingly tries to blur that distinction.  Men want to provide solutions. Women want to provide understanding. Single men are driven to try to "conquer" as many women as possible. The men who don't are either unable or are mentally strong enough to fight those urges (either from a sense of personal conviction or from a moral point of view). Less scrupulous men have figured out what women want to hear: Women like being made to feel special. Since most men are clueless about this, the guys who have figured out this magical secret can ruthlessly exploit it.  Ask a girl who has been with guys (often a lot of them) why she did what she did and she'll say "They made me feel special". That doesn't mean women should be thinking every bouquet of flowers or serenade or poem or whatever is some ploy to get them in the sack, but remember this - being made to feel special isn't about individual deeds. Being made to feel special comes from the day to day treatment. If the guy you are with treats you poorly on a day to day basis but you find yourself forgiving him because of individual deeds of valor, beware!

On the other hand, where women are guilty of degrading themselves into being "sleazy" due to having their self-esteem manipulated, guys are more guilty for going off and marrying the first girl they date. I suspect many reading this have seen this. Guy meets girl. Girl is kind of nasty. Girl gets guy to quit seeing his friends and isolates him. Girl and guy get married and you never hear from the guy again. Guys - beware of girls who try to isolate you from your "Support network".  While more common for girls to do this with guys, it happens to women as well and in those cases it can be outright dangerous.  Men may not try to isolate their wives/girl friends from their support network as often but when they do, they are often in the case of abusive men.

So either way - the right person for you is going to access your friends and family for who they are. And if they can't, then you're probably not right for each other.

So there are 8 observations I've made.  Maybe you totally disagree with them. But they are things I have found to be true even if I wish they weren't or in many cases strongly disagree with them.