Sexcapades

This past week the news has been dominated by sex scandals—some of them of an (alleged) illegal criminal nature and some of them not. What they have in common is that the men involved in all cases risked their marriages, personal lives and reputations to live out their different sexual fantasies. Again, I have to ask the question, what were these men thinking? But I know I won’t get a satisfactory answer. Or I’ll get the standard wisecrack answer—they weren’t—it was their second brain that was doing the thinking.

This time it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who ‘took full responsibility’ and stepped up to the proverbial plate to inform us about his extramarital affair with one of his household staff members and the resulting love child. The news was apparently kept secret even from his wife Maria Schriver, who when she heard it from him apparently a few months ago, promptly moved out of the house. They are currently separated and will likely divorce. When I first heard the news I thought, yet another male politician who couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Really, what is the world coming to, I ask you? One politician after another caught up in the arms of sleaze—affairs with household staff/servants (Schwarzenegger and a few of our country’s founding fathers), dabblings with prostitutes (Eliot Spitzer), oral sex with congressional pages and sex with nightclub singers (Bill Clinton), adultery with women sneaked into the White House (John F. Kennedy), adultery with an Argentinian girlfriend (Mark Sanford) and adultery with other (healthy younger) women while their wives struggled with cancer (Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, and a few other men I know of who are not politicians). The latter especially is distressing to read about if you own an iota of empathy, because you know that the news that your husband is fooling around or having children with another woman while you battle cancer cannot be anything other than immensely stressful precisely at the time when you need little to no added extra stress. And how sad to leave this life knowing that your husband was a ‘rotter’ as my mother would have called these types of men. What a thing to forgive, and can you really? What a betrayal—the ultimate betrayal. Even if you did live, could you trust a man again? Again I find it hard to believe that men can behave this way. Of course I know that there are two sides to every story. If I didn’t write that here I’d be reminded of it by some well-meaning person. And I agree, there are two sides to every story. But it’s hard to find equivalently awful stories about female politicians who behave in this way toward their husbands. I’d like to know about them, I really would.

I have been witness to some strange male (and female) relationship behavior during the past thirty years, so I know that bad behavior does happen. I know of married men who traveled under assumed names to meet their lovers so that their wives wouldn’t find out, I know of men who were on message boards and internet dating sites passing themselves off as single when in fact they were married, I know of men who were fooling around with their current wives while their soon-to-be ex-wives were succumbing to cancer, I know of men who strung women along for years telling them that they would marry them and then dropping them the minute they found the woman they ‘wanted to marry’. I know of swinging couples and wife-swappers; of men who lied to women about being ‘separated’ in order to get a woman to sleep with them. I know of men who travel on business who pick up prostitutes and call girls when they are in another city. I know of married men who offered to be sperm donors for single women and whose wives would probably not have appreciated the offers had they known about them.  I also know of women (married and single) who have contacted the wives of the men they have decided to seduce, to tell the wives that they and the husbands are very attracted to each other and that if the husband hadn’t been married they would be together. I know of women who pursue married men on social network sites, by email, and via text messages. I know of women who worked for men who told them at the outset that they’d like to be their mistresses, who ended up being so, and who ended up marrying them after causing hell for the wives involved. In Norway alone, infidelity in marriage occurs in one of two marriages according to what I hear from other people and from news reports; I have no way of knowing whether this is true, since most people would never talk about this honestly. In turn, I know of wives who fought back and told some of these women off and told their husbands off at the same time. I know of some women who divorced the louts they were living with. I know of some wives who really fought back—when their husbands went to live with the other women and the scorned wives made their lives a living hell. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. You bet. And maybe it’s good that it is that way at least in some cases. But sometimes I believe in divorce as the solution to painful hellish lives. I’ve seen a number of abusive and depressing marriages during my growing up—drunken men who hit women, eternal flirters and skirt-chasers who were never happy with the women they had at home, or men who always had to have the last word—who controlled their wives and families with an iron fist. And this took place/takes place in Westernized society. So every time people say to me that women have it so much better in our neck of the world, I remind them of this, and then we come down a few notches on the ‘everything is great for women in our society’ scale.

Which brings me to the men and women I know who are unsung heroes in my book. The men and women who have stayed married through thick and thin without cheating, without abuse, without carping. Who start each day with a smile and who never cease to amaze me with their cheerfulness and helpful spirits. Who are loyal and kind to their spouses and children. Who have probably been tempted to leave a few times in their lives, but didn’t, because they put the happiness and needs of their spouses and families ahead of their own. Who stuck by spouses in times of sickness—the true test of love. I’ve seen what sickness in one or the other partner can do to relationships, so I know it’s not easy. Loyalty is underrated in our society these days. But it is what makes marriages and friendships last. Without it, there can’t really be much trust. You have to be able to see into the future and ‘know’ with your gut that the person you share your life with will be there for you when you are sick, when you need help, and vice versa. No one said it would be easy. Maybe you’d like to run at the first sign of trouble. But maybe you didn’t; maybe you wrestled with your doubt and anxiety and temptation and stayed put. These are the people who impress me. You don’t need to climb Mt. Everest or practice extreme sports or any of those things to impress me. ‘That don’t impress me much’, as Shania Twain sang a few years ago. What does impress me is longevity and the ability to be positive and cheerful in a marriage. I’m not saying that all people should stay together for an entire lifetime; I’ve already argued for divorce as a solution to hellish relationships. But if after some years of being together, an otherwise decent marriage loses a bit of its luster and temptation comes one’s way, maybe one should take a closer look at what one has before tossing it away for a sexcapade. It is possible to stay faithful, and I know couples married for forty or more years who have been faithful to one another. They say so, they are still in love with their spouses, and they are my heroes. 

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.