A Pixelated Mind

Yeah, well that is generally what these feel like.

Indeed.

My ex-girlfriend Jayna concluded that Sex and the City had a negative, permanent affect on the women that watched it.

I miss Jayna, I truly do.  Sadly, that may have been my most successful relationship ever.  I say sadly because we kept it hidden the entire time and we lived across the state for 3 months of it.  But I would drive down every other weekend, so it wasn’t the worst possible situation.  I truly cared for the woman with all my heart.

She broke up with me because she’d gotten a job in another state and didn’t think there was any way for us to work out.  I held out hope for so long, even going to visit her a few times on my ways across the country.  She would always be extra distant and skeptical about whether I was amounting up to anything.  I say that in a mean way, but at the time I was unemployed with no prospects and I didn’t care.  I’m sure it must have seemed insane to a person who was settling down and finding it hard to make ends meet even with a steady income.  She married a few months ago.  I hope she’s happy.  I hope that someday, I, too, will be happy.

Anyway, she claimed that all of her friends– that had begun watching Sex and the City had ended up turning into ends-driven, callous, materialistic women that cared little about the emotional damage that they inflicted on those around them.  She gave constant examples of SatC-watching friends who had cheated, slept around, or led strangers on for no good reason.

I never gave it much credence that Sex and the City caused such behavior, but it definitely made me think twice whenever I ran into women that claimed to love the show.  They would defend it as a form of women’s liberation and I wouldn’t doubt it, but I would still keep it in the back of my head. As a prude, I find the show repulsive and so find I end up running into problems with people I know that like it. Inevitably it spoke to their character in ways that they didn’t realize and in ways that I tried to be cautious toward.

So I’m working out some stuff right now.  And… well you get to suffer.  It’s been a long time since I cared about my audience on this blog, so.  Whatever.  But, if my plugin works right, 99.6% of people won’t be able to read this anyway.  My only audience is people who use an IP address that begins with 96– verizon customers.  So, ha.

Anyway, I’m trying to understand why women think that emotional cheating is worse than physical cheating.  The way I imagine it is that they think that there’s still room to return to a partner if there’s been physical cheating, but not if they are emotionally cheating.  That is: it’s hard to win someone back who doesn’t want to be won back.

That makes sense insofar as I can see.  But I run into problems when I realize that it’s not a dichotomy.  There’s any number of things that you can do that are not emotional or physical cheating.  You can cheat on your taxes or in a board game.  You can also talk to the person.  Or you can just not cheat.

It seems like I’m making a silly point, but it’s important.  Because I can see myself messing up in a relationship in any number of ways.  I can see myself accidentally leading someone else on or going out on an ambiguous date.  I can see myself talking an inordinate amount of time with another girl or fanticizing about someone I’m not supposed to.  I can even see myself being kissed and making out with someone.

But I can’t see myself just sleeping with someone.  Not because I wanted to, not because I was drunk, not because I just wanted to see what it’s like.  No, I can’t see myself just sleeping with someone because I’m not the kind of person that fucks people I’m not in love with.  Actually, that’s a little too extreme.  But I’m not the kind of person that could sleep with someone I wasn’t already emotionally invested in.   So in my world, I would never physically cheat without emotionally cheating first.  And I would never get to physically cheating without being completely honest with my partner about it.  Which is to say I would never cheat.  At least not like that.

So when I talk to people that don’t see it this way, I come away confused.  I don’t know what they mean.  Did they just skip to the endgame because they were bored or didn’t think the person was the type of person they would want intimacy with?  But then why do it in the first place?  Are they not satisfied with their life?  *sigh*