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By Alexandra Penney: How to keep your man monogamo
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
How To Keep Your Man Monogamous
By: Alexandra Penney
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TWO
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THE SEX EQUATION
"What," Flashed Oprah Winfrey, " Do women
really want?"
"Men," I shot back, and she grinned.
If I hadn't been on a television show, I would have sat
back and pondered all sorts of aspects and issues that
relate to that primal Freudian query before spilling out
an answer. On the two-hour flight back home, I did
some hard thinking, and I landed with the same conclu-
sion: Yes, I believe what women really want is men.
We want a great many other things in addition--Children,
career, a spiritual and intellectual life--but I believe that
a majority of women would agree, probably not publicly
though, that a man is first on the list.
Obviously, we want and need men to propogate the
human race. But there was more to my answer than
that. There is a requisite that women possess that I Be-
lieve is beyond biological and Oedipal--and only
men can fulfill it: Most of us want, need, and depend
on love and emotional and physical intimacy from men.
A significant amount of research confirms this
idea. New psychological studies are focusing on the area
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of intimacy as it pertains to women and their relation-
ships with men. Surveys substantiate that the closest
kind of association, the deepest kind of loving contact,
the revelationof our true nature and the reception of
another's--in a word, intimacy--is crucially important for
a woman's psychological well-being.
For a woman, monogamy is integrally entwined with
that kind of connectedness and intimacy. The men with
whom we allow ourselves to be truly intimate have our
complete trust and love. We believe that we have en-
tered into a physical and emotional bond with them that
is inviolable. That bond of monogamy is the establish-
ment of an emotional trust fund upon which we feel we
can draw safely for the rest of our days. If a man breaks
a physical union, we feel he has also broken the emo-
tional one. The market has crashed. The trust fund is
empty. The intimacy that is so central to our existence
has vanished. We are emotionally bankrupt, frighten-
ingly alone.
What do men want? Men too, want and need inti-
mate relationships. It's just that they see them through
very different lenses than ours. " A relationship is vital
to most men, but it is the central theme for most wom-
en's lives, and I believe the majority of members of both
sexes would agree with this assessment," days a Man-
hattan psychoanalyst.
A vast divergence exists between men and women in
the realm of intimacy, relationships, and monogamy.
When you talk to hundreds of men, you realize just how
differently the opposite sex thinks, feels, and fanta-
sizes about relationships, love, sex, and monogamy.
Both men and women give lip service to the idea that
the genders are very disparate in these areas, but in ac-
tual relationships we often tend to blithely ignore this
vital fact because we like to believe that our partners
think and act exactly the way we do. But, as all my
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interviews attest, men are very, very different from you
and me.
Sex is perhaps the clearest example of this cleft in male/
female thinking. Traditionally for men, sex meant chal-
lenge, conquest, and a variety of women. For a woman,
sex meant intimacy, belonging, and security. A spate
of surveys indicate that this division still holds true today.
Traditional values have not changed. The attitudes about
sex translate into two seperate equations.
For most men
Sex equals sex plus sometimes love.
For most women
Sex equals love.
Suzanne, a twenty-two year old manicurist from Carls-
bad, California, sums it up when she says, " I believe
in love. If you're going to be with someone sexually, it's
love and he shouldn't be with anyone else. I don't be-
lieve my boyfriend could ever be with another woman
in bed and also love me."
Her boyfriend, she added reluctantly, disagrees.
Intimacy is another prime example in which males and
females branch out in opposing directions. Men differ
from women in amount or the degree of emotional inti-
macy they expect from each other, according to Dr.
Ted Huston, a psychologist at the University of Texas at
Austin, Who has studied 130 couples intensively. His
findings were reported in The New York Times (April 1,
1986). Women, Dr. Huston found, expect more inti-
macy and are gravely disappointed when they don't get
it.
In addition, men are confused about what intimacy re-
ally is because they have had very little practice in con-
nection on a deep emotional level. The "Average" man
feels he is relating to a woman through external re-
sponsibilities. Very often men consider doing chores or
sharing activities as an immersion in Intimacy. We love
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and appreciate haveing the dishes washed, but this is a
far cry from the kind of emotional connectedness that
women crave and need.
A third significant area of Male/Female divergence lies
in what each of the sexes finds meaningful and signifi-
cant in a relationship. Dr. Robert Sternberg, a well-known
psychologist at Yale, has studied a group of men and
women from seventeen to sixty-nine years old, some of
His conclusions were reported in the New York Times
( April 1, 1986 ), and show marked differences between
the sexes in what was important to them in their inti-
mate relationships.
Women rated fidelity and ties to Family and friends as most
important in their marraiges, while men listed a wife's
ability to make love and the couples shared interests as
priorities.
In short: Monogamy was number one to women, sex
was number one to men.
Why do men and women see the world from such dif-
ferent perspectives? In particular, why are intimacy and
monogamy so natural for most women and so difficult
for a mojority of men?
Current psychological thinking is based largely on
Carol Gilligan's brilliant work at Harvard over the last
decade that has it that a girl's earliest experiences lead
her to connection with others while a boy's direct him to
Independance and autonomy. In her Book, In a different Voice
(Harvard University Press, 1982) Gilligan explains that as
she matures, a girl must learn to detach just as a boy must
be educated to connect. Thus, as adults, women find them-
selves uncomfortable with seperateness while men are wary
of intimacy.
This female need-for-connectedness and the male need-
for-sepereateness theory is, I believe, the most basic ele-
ment in the drama of the development of the differences
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between males and females in the significant areas of
their lives. But other factors can play leading roles as I
found out from thoughtful men I interviewed.
A high-profile cosmetics executive who specializes in
marketing fragrances to women is given to introspec-
tion about the strife between men and women. He makes
this cogent observation: "Most men grow up in a sports
atmosphere. this submerges their individual needs and
desires and subordinates them to the team. Most of the
metaphors in a business are about sports and keep women
at a distance. It's easier for a man to deal in a group
situation--or to be totally alone--rather than intimate
and monogamous." However, he adds. " Todays girls are
on the teams, so that there's hope they can be treated
more as equals and that this will help them to under-
stand the 'traditional' male mentality of competition and
conquest and will make it easier for both sexes to close
an undeniable gap."
"My own experience of women," observes a man who
is thirty-seven and has had a monogamous marriage for
six years, "is that they're incredibly afraid of their own
sexuality. Monogamy must be more intense and more
important for them. If a woman really lets go, she
usually needs to do it in a monogamous situation,
whereas a man can experience sexual abandon with a to-
tal stranger. I do believe that men and women see sexual
relationships from two sides of a wide river. What she
needs in order to cross that river is love, and for him
the bridge is sex."
A research assistant in clinical psychology asserts it is
logically very difficult for men to be monogamous. "If
one of my primary masculine acts is seperation," he
pointed out as we discussed Carol Gilligan's ideas, "Then
it's going to be very hard for me to attach--especially to
one woman."
These few remarks give an idea of the kind of think-
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ing that I heard from men about relationships and mo-
nogamy. For the vast majority of women, monogamy is
essential; it is a deep and abiding need for our sense
of security and well-being in a relationship.
Men aren't against monogamy or intimacy; It's just that
they percieve these aspects of life in a very different
style. When you read what men say about monogamy
in the next chapter, you'll begin to see exactly how un-
comfortable and confusing the subject is for them.
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