Why affairs happen – a sad tale of percentages.
Someone asked me why men are so fickle and why we can’t keep our peckers in our pants. I knew the glib answer would be “Because we can” but I quickly recognised the hurt in her eyes and said , “It’s because of the 85 – 15% principle.”
All human beings want to belong, to be able to love and be loved in return, but what seems so simple in theory is so hard to live. You see, our basic human needs can never be fulfilled by a single human being, and the “white picket fence and living happily ever after” is a fantasy created by children’s story books and Mills and Boon novels. Normal is seriously non-evident and I still stick with that great philosopher Paul Hogan who says, “The whole world is insane except you and me, and half the time I’m not sure of you”. Perhaps the world is an asylum run by the inmates.
Knowing where we are, who we are, who we want to be and where we want to go in life seems so inexorably complicated and confusing to men and women. Getting what we need from our partners is even more elusive and seemingly impossible. The pressures of modern life and the demands of work, families, relationships have somehow overwhelmed us and so many people are just simply bored with life.
It is the boredom and a need for challenge that seems to drive people to find solace in the arms, hearts, minds and beds of someone other than their partner. Often it has something to do with a perception or feeling of fantasy “love” (love by definition is something which tickles the heart and buggers the brain!), but most often it has to do with recognition. Recognition by definition in this context is somebody who “cares” enough to ask me how I am, what I am feeling, and who values my opinion as my valid perception of the world.
We most often get between 80 and 85% of what we need from our partners emotionally, physically and cognitively, the rest we get from friends, family and our children and our community. No single person is able to give more, and we really should not expect more of them. People make lousy gods, yet we worship them unnecessarily despite the fact that they will disappoint us at times. The problem essentially lies with the remaining 15% and who gives us what we need to make us more feel more “whole”.
Wholeness is found in peace, often in solace and in a feeling of being together in mind, heart and spirit. Being the “thinking, feeling, acting and spiritual beings” that we are, we strive somehow to find balance and harmony between the different elements of ourselves. A solid sense of balance often goes hand in hand with maturity and learning form the lessons given by the University of Life. The confusing, hectic, all-demanding lack of humanness in the world around us can very often lead to a sense of disconnectedness and alienation. We need to feel we have a place in this world, we desperately desire believing in something – in essence, having a cause, a reason to be. It is when we do not feel like this, when we feel alone or lost that we are at our most vulnerable.
Imagine this: A man or women in a relationship that is not ideal nor perfect nor completely satisfying at a financial, social or intimate level due to the pressures of life. Along comes somebody of the other sex who simply finds a small (say 2 or 3%) place in the other person’s world. That small percentage is definitely missing at home and suddenly finds a “legitimate” place, or a foot-hold if you like. Once any person feels recognised, attraction may soon follow, more time is spent with them and the 3% percent very quickly becomes 5, then 10, then 15%. I don’t think I need to spell it out to you, but once a 20% threshold happens, the affair blossoms too.
The original partner no longer gets the time and emotional attention that the new 20% person gets now, and the older relationship fades in significance. Very quickly the new relationship by force of human nature has to take on the 85% , whilst the expectations of both new partners is an unrealistic 100% (the full 85% and the new 15%). It is for this reason that men and women in this situation seem to lose focus and abandon friends, family and children during this phase. So many affairs that lead to break ups in marriages do not lead to satisfying relationships and most times they fall apart too. Unfortunately, one hundred percent is more that any person is capable of giving to another, the pressure builds and that all powerful element of trust is brought into question (“if you could do it with me, you can do it with someone else”) immediately causing new issues of its own.
I guess that many people by choice have sporadic meaningless sexual encounters with other people when they are married, and human libido is what it is and may, at times, determine what we do. We do, however, have a conscience, we have available to us a set of standards, a personal moral code if you will that is ultimately determined by ourselves. Being laws unto ourselves, however, is a privileged and precarious place to be, and with it comes awesome responsibility. There is no condemnation here, just observation.
So much that is significant in this beautiful world is reduced to numbers. We are identified by our unique ID Number, everything we do is scrutinized and reduced to figures and sometimes meaningless statistics. At school we achieved passes or failures based on percentages, and we work with numbers all the time as a measure of success or defeat. If you are contemplating an affair, think about the numbers before you slip into, or slip her out of, that sexy little number.
Someone asked me why men are so fickle and why we can’t keep our peckers in our pants. I knew the glib answer would be “Because we can” but I quickly recognised the hurt in her eyes and said , “It’s because of the 85 – 15% principle.”
All human beings want to belong, to be able to love and be loved in return, but what seems so simple in theory is so hard to live. You see, our basic human needs can never be fulfilled by a single human being, and the “white picket fence and living happily ever after” is a fantasy created by children’s story books and Mills and Boon novels. Normal is seriously non-evident and I still stick with that great philosopher Paul Hogan who says, “The whole world is insane except you and me, and half the time I’m not sure of you”. Perhaps the world is an asylum run by the inmates.
Knowing where we are, who we are, who we want to be and where we want to go in life seems so inexorably complicated and confusing to men and women. Getting what we need from our partners is even more elusive and seemingly impossible. The pressures of modern life and the demands of work, families, relationships have somehow overwhelmed us and so many people are just simply bored with life.
It is the boredom and a need for challenge that seems to drive people to find solace in the arms, hearts, minds and beds of someone other than their partner. Often it has something to do with a perception or feeling of fantasy “love” (love by definition is something which tickles the heart and buggers the brain!), but most often it has to do with recognition. Recognition by definition in this context is somebody who “cares” enough to ask me how I am, what I am feeling, and who values my opinion as my valid perception of the world.
We most often get between 80 and 85% of what we need from our partners emotionally, physically and cognitively, the rest we get from friends, family and our children and our community. No single person is able to give more, and we really should not expect more of them. People make lousy gods, yet we worship them unnecessarily despite the fact that they will disappoint us at times. The problem essentially lies with the remaining 15% and who gives us what we need to make us more feel more “whole”.
Wholeness is found in peace, often in solace and in a feeling of being together in mind, heart and spirit. Being the “thinking, feeling, acting and spiritual beings” that we are, we strive somehow to find balance and harmony between the different elements of ourselves. A solid sense of balance often goes hand in hand with maturity and learning form the lessons given by the University of Life. The confusing, hectic, all-demanding lack of humanness in the world around us can very often lead to a sense of disconnectedness and alienation. We need to feel we have a place in this world, we desperately desire believing in something – in essence, having a cause, a reason to be. It is when we do not feel like this, when we feel alone or lost that we are at our most vulnerable.
Imagine this: A man or women in a relationship that is not ideal nor perfect nor completely satisfying at a financial, social or intimate level due to the pressures of life. Along comes somebody of the other sex who simply finds a small (say 2 or 3%) place in the other person’s world. That small percentage is definitely missing at home and suddenly finds a “legitimate” place, or a foot-hold if you like. Once any person feels recognised, attraction may soon follow, more time is spent with them and the 3% percent very quickly becomes 5, then 10, then 15%. I don’t think I need to spell it out to you, but once a 20% threshold happens, the affair blossoms too.
The original partner no longer gets the time and emotional attention that the new 20% person gets now, and the older relationship fades in significance. Very quickly the new relationship by force of human nature has to take on the 85% , whilst the expectations of both new partners is an unrealistic 100% (the full 85% and the new 15%). It is for this reason that men and women in this situation seem to lose focus and abandon friends, family and children during this phase. So many affairs that lead to break ups in marriages do not lead to satisfying relationships and most times they fall apart too. Unfortunately, one hundred percent is more that any person is capable of giving to another, the pressure builds and that all powerful element of trust is brought into question (“if you could do it with me, you can do it with someone else”) immediately causing new issues of its own.
I guess that many people by choice have sporadic meaningless sexual encounters with other people when they are married, and human libido is what it is and may, at times, determine what we do. We do, however, have a conscience, we have available to us a set of standards, a personal moral code if you will that is ultimately determined by ourselves. Being laws unto ourselves, however, is a privileged and precarious place to be, and with it comes awesome responsibility. There is no condemnation here, just observation.
So much that is significant in this beautiful world is reduced to numbers. We are identified by our unique ID Number, everything we do is scrutinized and reduced to figures and sometimes meaningless statistics. At school we achieved passes or failures based on percentages, and we work with numbers all the time as a measure of success or defeat. If you are contemplating an affair, think about the numbers before you slip into, or slip her out of, that sexy little number.
