| Why Guy Cheat and Women Cry?
Firstly, it has been several months since I last logged into my Xanga. Probably, I’m at the final stages of “Blog Amnesia.” For a moment, I almost forgot what my username and password was. If you are wondering, yes, I cheated on Xanga. Somewhere out there, I’ve got another blog but that one is totally non-personal. Almost like having a blogging affair!
Looking at the past year, it seems like more and more couples are breaking up or cheating on each other, especially in SMU. By the way, the longer I stay in SMU, the more foreign I’m feeling. For every passing year, the skirts seem to be shorter and the girls seem to be more and more liberal. SMU, the “Americanized pedagogy of teaching” and SMU students, “the Americanized liberal attitude spillover?” Somehow, such stuff got me to think about why men can’t stop looking at women and cheat on their girlfriend while women wear extreme short skirts and makeup but hates people staring at them. SMU is more and more like a huge flirting ground filled with raging hormones. Why do men cheat and women cry?
It feels like an awfully strange phenomenon especially when I’m entering into my 7th year of my relationship with my girlfriend (no seven year itchiness if you are wondering!) and after witnessing my grandparents’ more than 60 years together. So, why do men (and women, may I add) cheat? I think there is two possible answers (in using a nerd’s term, it is hypothesis) to this.
Rational Love = Irrational Breakups?
In the new age, we are surrounded by more and more temptations. Compared to my grandfather’s time, he probably only saw around less than 500 females during his teen years, while today, we probably seen no less than a 500,000 females thanks to media and the internet. The level of artificial temptations generated by media and internet is exponential high. At the back of our mind, men and women tries to justify why they should stick to their same spouse rather than seek for more beautiful or handsome creatures. After all, Sex and the City and sitcoms like Desperate Housewives said it is fine to cheat on your spouse!
I’ve only saw the first episode of Sex and the City and found a new term about guys: “Having sex like a man”. Basically, what this term means is that having sexual intimacy with your opposite sex and stranger with no emotional attachments. This is probably sometime most men can do and most women can’t do. This term also means that men are jerks that are ruled by their hormones while females are just emotional beings ruled by their hearts. When men cheat on women, it doesn’t mean that they don’t love their wife or girlfriend. It is just filling their “long journeys” with little thrills and spills. Yes, men are jerks.
Rationalizing love = Breakups?
If you are not a man, pretend that you are for the moment. Coming home to your spouse or girlfriend and found that she is most easily irritated by the slightest of things (in your own opinion) and even though it is not your fault, you are often at the receiving end of her rage. “Hell had seen no fury like women scorn.” And you begin to see her faults, her true temper, her erratic personality and her ugliness. Would you wonder to yourself, what happened to the loving and beautiful woman you once loved and got attached to? Would you wonder to yourself after a long and hard day’s work, why you have to put up with such emotional unhappiness facing endless pouting faces, grumblings and scolding for the slightest things you do or did not do? And you finally start to wonder why you have to put up with all these emotional torture. If you look hard and long enough, there are definitely better tempered women and prettier women than the one you are facing now. Perhaps, these are some of the question men faces everyday or contemplated before the decided to breakup with their partners.
When breakup occurs, men, no matter what the state of events is, will always be deemed in the wrong. Yes, many men are jerks, but not all men that break up are jerks. With all the hard work in the office and the worries of the men, coming home to an angry face is just as bad as it comes. We always like to think that we are always right but we are not and we have to accept that we are not. Sometimes, but not all the time, women are to be blamed too.
But in a very skeptical and sadistic tone, I think relationships are just a matter of mutual accommodation and acceptance. We all have faults, both men and women. If we see beyond the faults and still love each other, I think half the relationship is won. Every time after an argument, if we kept asking ourselves the questions that I stated above, breakup will eventually happen. Thus, my thoughts are that if you try too hard to rationalize your relationship to maximize your own utility and satisfaction, the more likely you will experience breakups. The best way, but a torturous way, just endure and don’t even consider the very notion that you can love someone else, other that your spouse or girlfriend.
In my 6 years plus of relationship with my first and only girlfriend, I can’t say that is always rainbows, butterflies and love. It is compromise that moves us along. Sometimes I do wonder about the questions that I asked earlier. In fact, today, I have thought about these questions again when my girlfriend displayed her ugliness again. Perhaps it is the hazard of her vocation as a teacher that led her to have this assertive and corrective tendency. But I am not her student. For 6 years, I have tried not to think about these questions but there are times when you are push to think about it and temptations from elsewhere pull you to a crossroad. Maybe I’ve did well enough to be labeled as a “closed-economy” by one of my friends for keeping a distant with any female friends. All closed-economy maybe pushed to open up the economy by internal and external factors.
Anyway, I didn’t intend this to be a long article. Neither do I want to ponder if my girlfriend now is the “one” for me. All I need to know is that I still love my girlfriend but hope that (rightly or wrongly) I would not be forced or tempted to ask myself the questions again. Valentine’s Day is three days away; let’s just hope there will be less breakups in this world. |
