Don’t lose your relationship and your socks.

My parents in Holland, earlier times.

According to Alain de Botton, your smelly socks play a larger role in the permanency of your relationship than romantically floating on the Danube while immersed in a bath filled with rose petals. He confronts the hugely popular romantic notion of ‘falling’ in love and living happily ever after. I must say, it intrigues me no end how people can stay in a mono-relationship all their lives.

There are a few that we know but they are mainly in our direct family backgrounds of numerous brothers and sisters from both of us. Outside our own direct background the wedding gondola is listing dangerously and littered with corpses of failed relationships. Mind you, there is a new theory out that a relationship hasn’t necessarily failed just because one or both wanted out. Even so, when a relationship is at the start and still blindingly starry-eyed and way over the top, that most proclaim eternal love and devotion to each other. Psychopaths are seen as Saints. To fall in love is a most dangerous situation. Get out of it. Get real.

According to Alain de Botton; the banana skin on the doorstep of declared love is that we see in each other things that are just not there. We want to see them. Alas, it is all a fata morgana. The things that are there and real are not seen. We think the other is perfect and so does the opponent. The man forgives the woman who lingers longingly in front of the High Fashion shop and he feels it rather cute. The woman likewise, when he seems to swear at other drivers or watches football all the time. She thinks ‘boys are boys.’ We only see perfection and can’t understand nor are willing to see, how this notion of love is blind and certainly foolish.

Of course, blind love is fed by cinema and books. With us, even right from the beginning, any sign of romantic love and H and I bolt out. The first whiff of a lingering look of real love or a wafting of underarm brutish man, and we are out, running along Bong Bong Road to Woollies car-park, glad to have made it in one piece. By mistake we switched on the ABC News too early last night only to be confronted with the Nigella Lawson now famous sideway glance while cooking a sponge cake. No better example of false charm and allure.

The thing that Alain de Botton points out is that we are all imperfect. In fact, we are broken. We are the result of genes and our own imperfect parental upbringing, totally hopeless when confronted with relationship and marriage. Instead of seeking love we should really get an understanding of own faults first. Try and be the normal obnoxious self when finally confronting a suitable partner. Show her/him your true self. Be honest and don’t move your jaw or flex your pectoral. Hard as it is, don’t believe your partner is all that lovely either. Both are broken. Work on being happy and try and enjoy grey. Do things together and expect fights and making good. It is not for everyone. A good relationship is one that goes on regardless of itself. It is surprising how the years go by. You fight and love, and fight and love.
That’s the secret.

Here a few things from Alain de Botton on love.

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

Election, Rejection,Erection

Election, Rejection, Erection.

We are again at the threshold of a possible change. The election in September is what will dominate much of the media and news. The worrying thing is the contemplation that Abbott will get in. Can you imagine? The horror, the horror of it all.  And Pyne, oh the pain…That face so contorted with spitefulness formed by decades of anger and malice. What makes him tick, one wonders. Yes, having watched him on Q&A, I could not but push the off button. The man seems filled with anger or revenge towards anyone with a different opinion to his own.

I could not help but chuckle when someone yesterday on the ABC Drum described Abbott as ‘The Lance Armstrong of Politics’. I am unsure if he is even in that league, suspect he is much more lacking in imagination than Lance. After all, Lance was so convincing, the whole world remained spellbound by his lies for years.

I stood back in amazement when that scandal unfolded, never in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that a metal frame and two wheels and a man dressed tightly in Lycra akimbo on this contraption could possibly create such turmoil. On TV I sometimes noticed whole mobs of cyclists bent over their bikes going hell for leather trying to go as fast as possible to a mountain top. I could not help but think of the possible itches and rashes that would have to be growing just as fast between their Lycra enhanced speeding thighs. That thought made me switch off the TV with the remote pointing at those cyclists with some cheerful alacrity.

I sometimes think that Abbott’s fondness for cycling and his strange swagger through Parliament might well also be related to Lycra.  Mind you, sitting for hours in Parliament would give anyone an itch if not bouts of incontinence to boot.

With the ageing population I noticed the canny Aussie entrepreneurial spirit rising again. Many super-markets and chemists carry blatant advertising of nappies for the ‘more mature’.  One local chemist shop has an ad where a greying ‘more mature’ man dressed in nothing more than white underpants clearly showing a huge bulging nappy,  smiling defiantly while standing next to his Jaguar staring straight into the camera. What chutzpah, what nerve and male libbers. A standing ovation for the male please!

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/30/3678527.htm

I haven’t quite reached that stage yet but H is making encouraging noises by pointing out the mature nappy division at Woollies.  This brings me to the erection part of my tale. Was it a dream or factual but did I read recently that men lacking in ‘firm enough for intercourse’ tumescence are at higher risk of heart attack? I think it must be true because I have been a little anxious about my own firmness of late. What do they mean with the specification of firmness? Is it some kind of angle measurement? Is anything over ninety degrees (from the floor up)) firm enough? I wished I never read that article, am forever looking and waiting for erections to happen now, and hoping to delay or prevent a heart attack. I used to be so happy waking up and admiring the morning glory greeting me ever so cheerfully. This morning, possibly through that rotten article it was not ‘firm’, just half mast looking a bit chagrined.

It is not easy being a man. We carry a huge burden.