Rock Solid

This falls under the heading of Rattle of the Sexes.  Be prepared!

Once again, the network news folks are all aflame over a sexual affair.  It happens rather frequently, wouldn't you agree?  Really?  Human beings having sex?!  How absolutely horrible!

But what I intend to address here is a new look at extra-marital sex, as practiced in our modern world.

Tom Brokaw was saying in a news commentary that families are far different from the way they were in his youth.  He covered briefly the fact that he, as others in his generation, typically grew up, left home and had only casual contact with parents - no more than weekly at best.  Then with his own offspring there was some adjusting to a more open togetherness and contact was a little more frequent as the kids became adults.  But he pointed out that today's families are far more inclined to share much more as kids grow up and more adults nowadays are living with parents, and not just for financial reasons; they are more involved with one another in their personal lives.

I found these comments by Mr. Brokaw quite perceptive and also a bit surprising.  Families are perhaps more open to sharing life and personal intimacies.  But at the same time, it seems to me that people are less likely nowadays to split up over such indelicacies as casual affairs.

The highly publicized, nationally shocking affair involving the four-star General who has been the head of the CIA until resigning ignominiously last week, has everyone excitedly talking.  Well, at least it's a big deal that has excited the news people who need things to talk about.

Interestingly, one reporter commented, along-side video of nondescript activities going on with the folks involved, that the two who committed this indiscretion were both married and that their marriages seemed to be rock solid.  Now think about this.  Human beings are nothing like rocks!  A woman may gush that her husband or significant other is "my rock," but that expression, while meant as complimentary, does not really describe another human.  No one wants a mate who is actually a rock!  The very large difference between hard, cold, unfeeling, inanimate rocks and real human beings is what has always kept humans interested in (maybe even excited by) other humans.  To date, no news has reached me about any wedding between a human and a rock.  Yes, I have known some humans who seem to be the children of such a marriage, having rocks in the head, but the concept is purposely being approached here as a silly way to make a point.

My point?  No marriage, no relationship of any kind is impenetrable.  We are not rocks.  Vows, promises, expectations, societal norms - all are constructs of the human condition, all aimed at protecting family and emotions while conquering fear of being lonely.

In today's world that continues to adjust to new norms and expectations, perhaps even beyond what Tom Brokaw has observed, some of the rigidity of rocks has maybe lost popularity.  Did everyone notice the attitudes of the people mentioned above, the subjects of today's Affair-of-the-Month?  After the big, explosive revelation precipitating the Earth-shaking resignation last week, the wife of the offending 60-yr-old General stated that she may have been partly to blame for the slip-up by her husband, and reporters said that the 40-yr-old other woman took off on a vacation with her husband.

No one can say how any of this blow-up will shake down between the individual parties and their mates, but to me, there seems to be some equanimity being expressed here.  Maybe these particular mates who are expected (by all of us and our excited news hounds) to be incensed and potentially violent - or at least litigious - are accepting the reality that they are not married to rocks.  Maybe these couples are talking things over calmly and just maybe their marriages are as sound and comfortable as they ever were prior to the world's knowledge that the participants were not made of stone.  Maybe there is coming to pass in our zany world, a recognition that within our agreements to live together in the new & improved world of marital understanding (or friendship sharing arrangements) that humans are fallible.  And fallibility can be fun!  Just maybe today's bonds of marriage are made of more elasticity.  Just maybe people are less concerned today with a partner being a rock and more into understanding how simply human it is to get your rocks off.

Just maybe we are entering a brave new world in which reasonable people will force society to become more adaptable, more forgiving, more realistic.  Personally, I find it more exciting to live with a warm human who can make mistakes than with a cold rock which can not.