Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness

 

How to find out what you really think

 

If you cheat on your partner, it’s probably about more than just sex

Phillipa Perry in The Guardian

According to a study published this week, the likelihood of people cheating on their partners rises if they are financially dependent on them – and especially if they are male. From the research carried out by a Connecticut sociology professor, Christin Munsch, it seems that men still expect to be breadwinners in the family, and that they can still feel emasculated when their female partners make more money. Old scripts die hard, it seems.

Babies and toddlers, as anyone who has lived in close proximity to one will know, are not always terribly good at articulating what they feel, but they are very good at acting out their emotions: they bite, they scream, they lie on the floor and beat their fists and generally try to squirm out of situations that don’t appeal to them. We adults do our best to put into words how they are feeling so that they will eventually learn to talk about their emotions, which in therapy-speak we would call “processing feelings”. If you don’t learn how to process feelings, you tend to carry on “acting out”. We don’t dispute that when a baby throws his toys out of the pram, he is actually doing his best to show how he feels.

A man or woman who has an extramarital fling is also very possibly doing their best to manage their feelings by acting out and having an affair. It can be hard to start a conversation with a spouse who is doing their best to provide for the family about how dissatisfied you are with the lack of meaning in your life, about your envy, or your boredom. You don’t want to appear ungrateful. You don’t want to rock the boat.

When unpicking the fallout of affairs in couples counselling, quite often the person who has had the affair says things like, “it just happened”, “it didn’t mean anything”, “it wasn’t anything to do with you”, “I was drunk”, or “it was just a one-night stand”. The financially dependent party might wish they didn’t feel how they feel, and try very hard to push what seem like ungrateful feelings away. But even if they do try to process how they are feeling with their partner, that partner might find it understandably hard to listen to and easy to dismiss. Feelings don’t go away just because we want them to, and unconsciously we look for a way to deal with them.

So when a distraught couple is in the counselling room and the so-called guilty party is saying “it didn’t mean anything”, the counsellor might try to help them find out what it really did mean. It’s probably true that the straying partner does not prefer their one-night stand to their long-term lover, but it might mean that they do have unresolved issues with their partner, that they could not find a way to articulate or have heard. And the so-called innocent party may have even contributed to the event by not being sufficiently open and sympathetic to their partner’s feelings. Too often people in a relationship do not want to listen to their partner’s woes because they feel that means they are to blame, or that they have to fix them, but actually, being heard non-defensively and sympathetically goes a long way to restoring equilibrium.

 An affair is often an enactment of some deep, pushed away resentment. The fling can seem to temporarily cure feelings of an imbalance or a lack of meaning. This is but one explanation for something complicated that probably has many determining factors. It may be that the stay-at-home wife or husband is someone with attachment issues. For example there are people who seem to always need to have a lover as well as a partner because they dare not rely on just one person in case that person abandons them. This situation may be heightened if they are financially reliant on their partner. Such a situation can arise from early attachment issues with their first primary caregiver. Likewise some people feel they need secrets, otherwise they fear merging with their spouse. This feeling may be heightened when their spouse seems to have a stronger identity than they do.

There are probably as many reasons for why people act out in the form of an affair as there are people, but Munsch’s research does show us that inequality between partners can be a problem, and it’s something worth considering in any relationship.

The Most Important Question You Can Ask Yourself Today

Mark Manson

 Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a care-free, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everybody wants that -- it's easy to want that.

If I ask you, "What do you want out of life?" and you say something like, "I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like," it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything.

Everyone wants that. So what's the point?

What's more interesting to me is what pain do you want? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives end up.

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence -- but not everyone is willing to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, with the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship -- but not everyone is willing to go through the tough communication, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder "What if?" for years and years and until the question morphs from "What if?" into "What for?" And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, "What was it all for?" If not for their lowered standards and expectations for themselves 20 years prior, then what for?

Because happiness requires struggle. You can only avoid pain for so long before it comes roaring back to life.

At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.

"Nothing good in life comes easy," we've been told that a hundred times before. The good things in life we accomplish are defined by where we enjoy the suffering, where we enjoy the struggle.

People want an amazing physique. But you don't end up with one unless you legitimately love the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not. Some people are wired for that sort of pain, and those are the ones who succeed.

People want a boyfriend or girlfriend. But you don't end up attracting amazing peoplewithout loving the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It's part of the game of love. You can't win if you don't play.

What determines your success is "What pain do you want to sustain?"

I wrote in an article last week that I've always loved the idea of being a surfer, yet I've never made consistent effort to surf regularly. Truth is: I don't enjoy the pain that comes with paddling until my arms go numb and having water shot up my nose repeatedly. It's not for me. The cost outweighs the benefit. And that's fine.

On the other hand, I am willing to live out of a suitcase for months on end, to stammer around in a foreign language for hours with people who speak no English to try and buy a cell phone, to get lost in new cities over and over and over again. Because that's the sort of pain and stress I enjoy sustaining. That's where my passion lies, not just in the pleasures, but in the stress and pain.

There's a lot of self development advice out there that says, "You've just got to want it enough!"

That's only partly true. Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something badly enough. They just aren't being honest with themselves about what they actually want that bad.

If you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the six pack, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten.

If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe you don't actually want it at all.

So I ask you, "How are you willing to suffer?"

Because you have to choose something. You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses and unicorns.

Choose how you are willing to suffer.

Because that's the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have the same answer.

The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?

Because that answer will actually get you somewhere. It's the question that can change your life. It's what makes me me and you you. It's what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.

So what's it going to be?