Real Joe

Evidently, we’re not so different from women when it comes to our jealousy reactions to infidelity. Makes sense to me. We’re not as ‘emotional’ as women on the surface, but we hurt pretty much the same underneath.

… women were twice as likely as men to break it off if their partners cheated.

I wonder why that is?

The findings also demonstrated that the majority of the couples broke up over the infidelity

Jeez. Makes me grateful. In my 28 year marriage to Robbie, I remember rocky times when I could have easily had an affair but there didn’t seem to anyone around to have one with. At other times, when the temptations were strong, I was lucky enough to be in a good enough place with her so that it didn’t happen. So it was mainly luck that we didn’t have to deal with infidelity in our first 20 years. And in the last 8, it’s been mainly work — work on the relationship — that’s prevented it.

One problem I do have with these short reports on ‘cheating’ spouses, though, is that there’s seldom reference to the 50-50 nature of the couples’ problems. ‘Cheater’ implies one spouse behaving badly and the other spouse as the victim. ‘Tain’t so.

Enron execs, priests, a pharmacist, a judge:

• Boston Priests Doubting Cardinal After Sex Scandal
  
• Judge charged with stealing $300,000 from woman’s trust
  
• Pharmacist Pleads Guilty to Charges
  

Ok, so he broke a couple of the Ten Commandments — VI: Thou shalt not steal and VIII: Thou shalt not kill. Not good. But it was really Numero Uno that did him in: Thou shalt have no other gods before me, which in the Book of Real Joe is the false God of vanity… in his case, the image of being a wealthy contributor to his church. I wonder what his family situation is and how that plays into this story? I wonder what how his church is handling this?

The team’s conclusion was that girls were, in fact, just as aggressive as boys, though in a different way. They were not as likely to engage in physical fights, for example, but their superior social intelligence enabled them to wage complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging relationships or reputations.

Great piece, not only if you have a teenage daughter, as I do, but it has implications elsewhere, too. Both my wife and sister-in-law have their radar up around my mother because of how sophisticated she is with her zingers… something my sister’s known for years. For me, it tends to go in one ear and out the other without my even noticing it.

It has male-female implications, too. I remember as a little kid, after a particularly nasty fight between my parents, asking my dad “Why are you so mean to mom?” He went into some detail about all the ways in which she was subtly mean to him. It wasn’t till I was in my twenties before I began to see it, caught in the triangle as I was.

The headline is more accurate than several of the paragraphs and quotes:

Men surf sex-related Web sites mostly out of boredom and a craving for impersonal sex, but women look for relationships and support, suggests an online survey out Tuesday. “It’s just like offline. Men pursue sex for a lot of different reasons, like recreation and relieving stress. Women are more focused on intimacy,” says psychologist Al Cooper, director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre in Santa Clara, Calif.

When you look at the percentages, the differences are not all that dramatic. For example:

Some 45% of women have participated in cybersex, and 30% took the relationship offline; 38% of men had cybersex, and 26% met their partners.

But those numbers are pretty amazing, when you think about it.

I find that the more, um, fun my wife and I are having and the more connected we’re feeling, the less I tend to even think about looking.

Ah, nothing like responding to a dare to inspire the boys. This is probably not going to happen anytime soon with a woman coach of a girl’s team, but I could be wrong. Sports do funny things to people.

The good news is that according to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, God is on our side in the war on terrorism…. The bad news is that Ashcroft is again off on a holy war of his own.

Well, this is not inconsistent with his boss’ thinking. It’s just a childish view of God and religion, and most Americans see it pretty much the same as Ashcroft and W.

I doubt that very many people, even fundamentalists, use the Ten Commandments as a moral compass for living their daily lives. So I suppose this fight is more a symbolic one. A while ago I came across “Ten Moral Suggestions” in Timothy Miller’s book How to Want What You Have. I’ll revisit those to see if they’re a decent alternative to the Ten Commandments.

The director of ‘Dragonfly’ talks about children’s spirituality, intuition, and what’s real about near-death experiences.

I’m going to have to see this movie. I saw the trailers for it during the Olympics and dismissed it as fluff. But after reading this interview, I’m intrigued. This guy’s done considerable reading and doesn’t seem to be a flake.

Why do white American women line up in large numbers to subject their faces to knives and hypodermics filled with poison? Why are they willing to spend approximately $400 every few months, risking drooped eyelids and frozen features, for a four-month sabbatical from wrinkles? The answer is simple: power and anxiety. Aging women are among the least powerful segments of the population.

Well, part of it is that women know we’re hard-wired when it comes to female beauty: Study finds beauty affects male brain like food, drugs

But men are lining up for Botox nights now so if image has become a cultural disease, I’d argue that we’ve caught it, too.

A member of the U.S. Olympic ski team was disqualified from competition today when it was learned that he did not have a sufficiently compelling human storyline to exploit on the NBC telecast of the worldwide sporting event.

The bastard!