It's not like the morals of any given society puts a stop to such behavior, but gee, as a corruption defense for the acceptance of pricey gifts? The title of the book that Judge Judy wrote comes immediately to mind--don't pee on my leg and then try to tell me it's raining.
The Crush Defense is a hoot, really. People in good committed relationships, married or not, have crushes on other people from co-workers to celebrities all the time but it never gets to the big-bucks gifting level, and that sort of thing never estranges a serious partner, either. Unless we're talking about the case of the Appalachian Trail in Argentina, perhaps, but that's not something you could call a crush. That's actual cheating.
(There's been an update on the Sanford situation via McClatchy.)
Mark Sanford, in doing what he did, undoubtedly caused his own grief because why would any worthwhile woman even trust a guy who would do that kind of thing in the first place? After something like that, he'd be under suspicion every minute lest the next distracting pretty young thing comes his way and off he goes again. Good people just don't do that to other good people, and it's clear that religion is no guarantee that the believer is a good person.
But using a Cheating Spouse Defense to explain pricey gifts due to some crush, well...that just takes the ever-lovin' cake. I'm gonna keep following developments on that mainly because it looks promising as a source of many laughs.
Seriously, though--human beings, being human animals who are usually in denial of their animal side, will think they've settled in comfortably with a loved one they'd like to grow old with for the rest of their lives and yet they'll still get turned inside out by somebody who comes along that makes 'em feel like they're 18, even though they're miles beyond menopause and they thereby consider this event to be something of a miracle (so there ya go, kids--that''s how grannies turn cougar, during that time of life when the term YOLO takes on a certain urgency). Religion doesn't stop that from happening no matter how moral you claim you are, cuz the brains stop paying attention at that point--it can hit a person pretty hard. Reason has nothing and never ever has had anything to do with it.
I tell ya, ladies, if any of the guys my own age looked anything like this, I just *might* take a second look at 'em...
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| RrrrrrOWWWWWRRRRrrrrrrrrr |
This week on on Charlie Rose's show a sculptor who admitted that he and his partner had fallen totally in love with each other, but under the glaring cold reality of marriage practicum, it still didn't work out well and ended in divorce. And I'll bet Mark Sanford has already found that out, or is about to.
Crushes and infatuations are one thing; a good solid relationship standing the test of time is quite something else, so if the McDonnells have been married for a long, long time while actively involved with each other every step of the way, what this Cheating Spouse Defense will look like is just another instance of marital teamwork. Huge irony, that.
But speaking of ironic--it may be counter-intuitive, but being in a solid, reliable relationship does permit the loving of other people because your view of the world isn't as cynical as the view of a person who isn't in one. What's reliably solid just isn't threatened. Being a former flower child of the 60s rather augments that aspect as well, to be sure. But among those I love, it's important to me that I be regarded as someone people can trust, too. I am reliable, and I want the respect of the people I love as someone who can be trusted.
Okay--I just went back to Facebook after posting the above (and yeah, I got those images from today's Facebook circulation, too. Qismat.) --and a lighter side of this topic just came down the pike. Too good to not share.
(A nod of thanks to Joey Mas on Facebook)
It's on YouTube under the name "All About That Bass" by Meghan Trainor.UPDATE:
Boy, it sure didn't take long to get blowback on this post. Alright alright alright, it's the rule not the exception that women who think they're in solid reliable relationships wind up getting cheated on and feel blindsided by that. Yeah, I get it. Well, even though Ronald Reagan was a crappy president, he still had a good principle called "trust but verify". A guy who fails honesty verification will fail again and again. And again. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night.
The blowback on the last video is along the lines of how it's suggestive but is rife with child toys and dress, also suggesting a pedophelia flavor. Au contraire--the point that I got with the reference to children was that girls in particular are conditioned for what society considers proper beauty standards, equated with desirability for a future marriage partner, which often ends badly in bulimia or worse, and the video is a tacit attack on bringing up children of both genders with air-brushed ideals that just ain't real. This sort of upbringing has been a tradition ever since human beings dared to call themselves civilized.
Boys have always been given toy soldiers instead of dolls to play war with and girls have always been given baby dolls to pretend to be mommy with instead of toy soldiers, even though both toys are dolls, and both genders got roundly disciplined when they decided to play with the "wrong" dolls. The whole point of Boy Scouts in its inception was to establish a means by which boys could be trained to play at doing what Dad did. We might regard as charming the early history of the Scouts where learning Indian style tracking and camping and trapping were concerned, but here's a reminder that the trackers of Indians back in the day was the military. And then there's Barbie. The endowments of Barbie strongly suggests she's no baby. If you wanna chew somebody out about mixing childhood with adulthood, start with Mattell.
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| Veritas and a half. If by happenstance I find that I have your heart in my hands, you can rest assured that it's in good hands. No worries. |
And yet, as a person closes in on the sunset of life, there's this...
UPDATE 2:
Speaking about showing my age, this just happened on Facebook:
I didn't have the heart to tell Kevin that if he's talking VIC 20, he doesn't know from "giant floppies" cuz he's talking about a 5 1/4 incher. Dynabyte modular computers as well as latter-day mainframes used 8" floppies when they weren't using reel-to-reel tape or punchcards. By the way, "Sinclair" and "Timex" are referring to the same machine, but in shorthand. In longhand, it's the Timex-Sinclair 1000.
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| The Timex-Sinclair 1000 with manual, CPU unit, and, plugged in back, an extra memory module. It didn't save programs each time you powered down and you had to save them to an audio cassette tape, from which you had to re-load them each time you turned the switch back on. Unless you were planning to write a new program in BASIC...which you still needed to save to audio tape. |
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