Earlier this week a friend told me about two male acquaintances of his. They both had the same experience of finding out their marriages were over.
The men were in their thirties, with young children. They arrived home from work to find their wives sitting at the dining table with a strange man.
"I have something to tell you," the wives said. "This is (the other man's name) and we have been together for eighteen months. Our marriage is over. I'm with (him) now."
One of the guys related that the next time he remembers anything, it was three hours later, and he came to standing in the same place. That sounds like a classic symptom of shock.
I'm not interested in the fact of the infidelities. That is an equal opportunity sex failure. What does interest me is the reactions of both of the cuckolded guys. They (predictably enough) sought solace in booze or drugs or both. One of them didn't turn up for work for three weeks, and when he did, told the boss to Get Fucked. When asked what was up, he burst into tears and spent four hours telling his story.
The other guy went to hard drugs, and took a lot of dead-end jobs. After a few months he left his town, and went to California. My friend hasn't heard of him in ten years.
These are unremarkable tales, sad and dispiriting. Unfortunately they are played out every day, everywhere. So I wonder why men so regularly make the women in their lives the centre of those lives. Because relationships go wrong, having a sense of perspective about onesself and the people in one's life is an important skill. Shit happens. Finding a way to understand and deal with the bad days is an art foreign to many men, including me.
We're supposed to be the strong sex, but I think not. What we are is the delusional sex, often living in a bubble of make-happy of our own creation. The world can be cruel, and having a way to deal with that without drowning ourselves in whisky or dope or sex would be a big step forward.
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