A message for men who want to avoid women regretting having been sexual with them. (Daniel Schmachtenberger)

 This message is meant for men who have experienced a woman feeling badly about a sexual experience with them, and would like to prevent that type of experience in the future. (It may also be useful for women who want to avoid having sexual experiences they regret later.) There are some fairly simple guidelines to verify that she is making choices she feels congruently good about and is likely to feel good about later.

Practices:

1. Check in with her and make sure anything she is saying yes to is a clear, congruent, strong yes. If there is any hesitation in her about it, if its a maybe…that means at least some part of her is a no currently and you should treat it as a no. (That part is the part that can regret the engagement later.) She should feel the opposite of pressure. Don’t try to get her to feel comfortable with something she is not fully. Check yourself for even subtle manipulation and stay in full integrity.
2. Only take new sexual steps when you are both completely sober. If you’ve established comfort with a particular level of sexual connection, you can introduce intoxicants to that level of play. But you don’t want her to make a decision that she has never made before with you, that may later feel consequential, when her discernment is less than full. Eg, if you’ve been dating and having oral sex for some time but not intercourse, and you want to have oral sex again while high or buzzed, (assuming the intoxicant is familiar and handled well), thats probably fine. But if she feels open to having intercourse for the first time then, wait until she’s fully sober to make that choice.
3. If she expresses a limit, hold that limit for the duration of that interaction, even if she changes her mind. Eg, if she says she wants to make out but doesn’t want to have sex, then once making out, decides she is open to sex, say that you are honored and that if she still wants to have sex tomorrow night, you’d love to, but for tonight, you want to honor the boundary she expressed earlier. (Arousal can act like an intoxicant. If she still wants to have sex tomorrow, she will feel safer and more respected so the connection will be better and hotter. If she’s doesn’t still want to, so much better that it didn’t happen from the heat of a moment.)
4. Talk about what this act means to you both. What do each of you want it to mean and not want it to mean? And what does she expect and desire in terms of how you will relate with her after this? Find out her truth and share your own truth clearly. For instance, does having sex implicitly mean to her that she hopes you two are starting a romantic relationship? Does having sex for the 3rd time mean that you are now in a committed relationship? Does it mean you will be sexual when you see each other from now on? Do you want it to be just this time with no disappointment by her if you don’t connect intimately again? Its important to actually talk about these things clearly first. Make the implicit explicit. Make sure you are on the same page. Implicit, unspoken desires, that don’t get fulfilled, can be a basis for future regret.
5. Safe sex. Talk about this together and make sure that no one is exposed to any risk they aren’t fully aware of. Consent requires full knowledge of possible consequences so one knows clearly what they are consenting to.
6. Check in about her relationship status. If she’s in a monogamous relationship, you don’t want to be the guy she has an affair with. If she’s in a relationship transition and actively grieving and vulnerable, err on the side of holding an extra safe space for her. If she’s in an open relationship, ask about her other relationships, their agreements, how everyone feels about the agreements, etc. Better to err on the side of too much rather than too little communication about this.
7. Feel for congruency. If she says she wants the same thing as you and she is a full yes, but something feels off to you, don’t move forward. Take the time to find out what it is that you’re feeling. The feeling of incongruence is coming from somewhere and should be fully understood before moving forward.
8. Check in about trauma. If she has unresolved trauma that could get triggered, she could have a strong negative reaction that isn’t really about the current situation. This could be trauma around sexuality, around trust, betrayal, body image, previous relationships, etc. This is worth sensing into and directly inquiring about. Where there are traumas, you should only move forward if you are willing to process and hold space for whatever might arise.
9. Make sure you trust her. Ask her about her previous partners. If she speaks about them very negatively, thats a concern. Notice how she speaks about men in general. About people who have hurt her. Is she responsible with her emotions? Does she process her emotions without acting from them? Does she talk about whats going on for her? If you don’t trust her emotional maturity, you shouldn’t be sexual with her.
10. Respect her through your actions after any encounter. Keep her confidence - don’t talk about her irresponsibly. Check in with her afterwards. See how she’s feeling. Make sure that whatever level of vulnerability she goes to with you, is held with an according level of honor ongoingly. Only go as far in intimacy with her as you feel congruent holding with adequate tenderness ongoingly.

Recapping, make sure she is an emotionally mature and stable person. Make sure she is saying yes congruently, with full felt freedom to say no. Only go places you can both go congruently. Make sure the connection means the same thing to both of you and your expectations align. Respect her and communicate that respect through your words and actions.

Following these guidelines will only limit sexuality that shouldn’t have happened any way (high regret potential). The sexual connections that still happen are enhanced by these processes. When a woman feels respected and protected, her sexuality is more free.

If a woman has regretted being sexual with you previously, it doesn’t mean you definitely did something wrong. It probably does mean, at least, that you weren’t adequately careful.
This note is not to say that if a woman regrets having sex with a man it was his fault. It is saying that a man can take steps to make that type of experience very unlikely. Which is clearly better for everyone.

Notes:

0. Of course these principles apply for people being with people, of all gender types and directions. This was stated in the one directional, heteronormative men-to-women direction because it is by far the most common direction for sexual regret of this type. As far as hetero men regretting being sexual with women goes, while this does happen for his own reasons, it is most common that a man regrets being sexual in response to some emotional upset and/or behavior on her part, that most commonly happens from her feeling bad about having been sexual with him. So this is still the direction that has the most inflection potential. Regarding LGBTQ dynamics, of course its a good idea to factor all of these dynamics to ensure that everyone is making decisions that feel fully good about now and are likely to in the future.

1. Regarding new sexuality, its only a yes if its a hell yes. If its a maybe its a no. Thank you KamalaDevi McClure and Reid Mihalko for this principle.
2. It should go without saying that including intoxicants of any type needs to be explicitly discussed and agreed upon before hand.
3. From a selfish point of view, having her leave the experience feeling turned on, respected, protected, and wanting more...is infinitely better than her feeling any degree of regret about the decision. While these are ethical guidelines, they also lead to better sex.
4. Going further here, find out what she wants relationally in her life. If she is looking for her life partner and to start a family, and you want intimate but uncommitted sex, its probably not a good idea. If she wants a monogamous relationship and you want to be open, also probably a poor match. Take time to have the conversations about alignment before moving forward into sex and attachment that might be attachment that isn’t actually wanted.
5. Safer sex is a better term as the STI risk even with condoms, tests, and conversations is still not zero. The risk should be clear and held by both people as mature adults. Like driving or any other risky behavior that we choose to engage in thoughtfully. Also, the safer sex talk is for her clear awareness and consent in the context of this note being about avoiding her regret, but should be for your own safety as well. This is a topic worth getting well educated about and comfortable with. If you are not comfortable enough with her to talk about safe sex, you should not be having sex with her.
6. Open relationship can work but takes a whole set of skills and training since society didn’t teach us how to do it and it goes against massive programming. If you are just starting to interact with someone in an open relationship, or want to explore this, educate yourself. It is an almost certain fail without training.
7. Feel for congruency means on top of talking explicitly about all of the areas listed...feel for incongruence even if the words line up. This is in addition to explicit communication, not a replacement for it.
8. Trauma is pretty ubiquitous. When triggered, it takes us out of being calm rational adults and back to the place where the trauma happened, usually childhood. Most interpersonal issues are at least partially the result of unresolved traumas.
9. I trust someone based on how they behave during their most triggered states. That is the floor they set on their behavior, below which they wont go. I need to go there together to know what I can trust.
10. Ensuring that she avoids regretting being sexual with you, means ensuring that she feels good about the encounter enduringly. Long past when the high of the encounter has worn off. Only deep and real and demonstrated respect for her will achieve that.
11. Making sure you will feel good about the decision to connect enduringly as well is also your responsibility.
12. Practicing holding these guidelines consistently requires impulse control. If you don’t trust yourself to have the impulse control skills for a particular situation, avoid that situation until you develop those skills.
13. Hopefully this is obvious, but following these tips won't make you a good partner or lover. They just help avoid a few unnecessary sources of suffering. These are the very clear don’t do’s. What to do is a much richer story that starts on this foundation.
14. This whole note is about empowered responsibility - taking full responsibility to create what we care about. This is not about thinking of women as unclear or incapable of making good decisions or taking responsibility themselves. Written for men who want to create the reality of sexual interactions that are experienced as positive in the moment and into the future...and avoid women regretting sexual experiences with them... These are guidelines to help make that desired reality more likely. While explicit communication is necessary, it is often not sufficient for this purpose. This is why the additional sensing for congruency. Having conflicting parts of self that lead to future regret, or wanting something to be good so biasing in the direction, or wanting to please someone, or being affected by past traumas...are not female issues. They are human issues and happen to all types of people. They are associated with women here because of the topic of the article and the intended audience. The deeper phrasing is that for anyone, in any type of relationship, to trust others, we need to trust our own sensing first...that we are good at telling who we can trust for and with what. And for anyone, wanting to create anything meaningful to them, the more responsibility they take, not just for their own action but for the result they care about and all they can do to support it, the more empowered they will be to create that reality. Empowerment is proportional to responsibility.

Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy

written by Bradford Tuckfield

Jesus said that the poor would always be with us. Despite the best efforts of philanthropists and redistributionists over the last two millennia, he has been right so far. Every nation in the world has poor and rich, separated by birth and luck and choice. The inequality between rich and poor, and its causes and remedies, are discussed ad nauseam in public policy debates, campaign platforms, and social media screeds.

However, the relentless focus on inequality among politicians is usually quite narrow: they tend to consider inequality only in monetary terms, and to treat “inequality” as basically synonymous with “income inequality.” There are so many other types of inequality that get air time less often or not at all: inequality of talent, height, number of friends, longevity, inner peace, health, charm, gumption, intelligence, and fortitude. And finally, there is a type of inequality that everyone thinks about occasionally and that young single people obsess over almost constantly: inequality of sexual attractiveness.

The economist Robin Hanson has written some fascinating articles that use the cold and inhuman logic economists are famous for to compare inequality of income to inequality of access to sex. If we follow a few steps of his reasoning, we can imagine the world of dating as something like an economy, in which people possess different amounts of attractiveness (the dating economy’s version of dollars) and those with more attractiveness can access more and better romantic experiences (the dating economy’s version of consumer goods). If we think of dating in this way, we can use the analytical tools of economics to reason about romance in the same way we reason about economies.

One of the useful tools that economists use to study inequality is the Gini coefficient. This is simply a number between zero and one that is meant to represent the degree of income inequality in any given nation or group. An egalitarian group in which each individual has the same income would have a Gini coefficient of zero, while an unequal group in which one individual had all the income and the rest had none would have a Gini coefficient close to one. When Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett walks into a room, the Gini coefficient of the room shoots up.

Some enterprising data nerds have taken on the challenge of estimating Gini coefficients for the dating “economy.” Among heterosexuals, this actually means calculating two Gini coefficients: one for men, and one for women. This is because heterosexual men and heterosexual women essentially occupy two distinct “economies” or “worlds,” with men competing only with each other for women and women competing only with each other for men. The Gini coefficient for men collectively is determined by women’s collective preferences, and vice versa. If women all find every man equally attractive, the male dating economy will have a Gini coefficient of zero. If men all find the same one woman attractive and consider all other women unattractive, the female dating economy will have a Gini coefficient close to one. The two coefficients do not directly influence each other at all, and each sex collectively sets the Gini coefficient—that is, the level of inequality—for the other sex.

A data scientist representing the popular dating app “Hinge” reported on the Gini coefficients he had found in his company’s abundant data, treating “likes” as the equivalent of income. He reported that heterosexual females faced a Gini coefficient of 0.324, while heterosexual males faced a much higher Gini coefficient of 0.542. So neither sex has complete equality: in both cases, there are some “wealthy” people with access to more romantic experiences and some “poor” who have access to few or none. But while the situation for women is something like an economy with some poor, some middle class, and some millionaires, the situation for men is closer to a world with a small number of super-billionaires surrounded by huge masses who possess almost nothing. According to the Hinge analyst:


On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa).

Quartz reported on this finding, and also cited another article about an experiment with Tinder that claimed that that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” These studies examined “likes” and “swipes” on Hinge and Tinder, respectively, which are required if there is to be any contact (via messages) between prospective matches.

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Another study, reported in Business Insider, found a pattern in messaging on dating apps that is consistent with these findings. Yet another study, run by OkCupid on their huge datasets, found that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium,” and that this 80 percent “below-average” block received replies to messages only about 30 percent of the time or less. By contrast, men rate women as worse-looking than medium only about 50 percent of the time, and this 50 percent below-average block received message replies closer to 40 percent of the time or higher.

If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in “likes” and “matches” credibly measures the degree of inequality in attractiveness, and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.

Social commentators today are very interested in “gender gaps,” especially the alleged difference in pay between men and women who do the same work. There are other notable gaps, including a “libido gap” that is well-documented in scientific literature (with men desiring sex much more frequently and intensely than women on average) and also an “age gap” in which younger adults are described as more attractive on average, with an especially large age disadvantage for older women. The Gini coefficient gap indicated in these studies is something like a “sexual inequality gap” or “attractiveness distribution gap,” less obvious but potentially even more socially significant than some other better-known gender gaps.

There are no villains in this story. Nobody can or should be blamed for his or her honest preferences, and if women collectively believe that most men are unattractive, what grounds does anyone, male or female, have to argue with them? We may pity the large majority of men who are regarded as unattractive and who have few or no romantic experiences while a small percentage of attractive men have many. Just as much, consider that we live in a monogamous culture, and so the 20 percent of men who are regarded as attractive can only be in committed relationships with at most 20 percent of women. We may just as well pity the rest of the women, who are destined to be in committed relationships, if they pursue a relationship at all, with someone who they regard as unattractive. The only villain in this story is nature, which has molded our preferences so that this tragic mismatch of attraction and availability occurs.

To those who study nature, the various gender gaps in romantic life will not come as a surprise. Evolutionary biologists have seen these types of patterns many times before and can explain each of them. The relative perceived attractiveness of younger women vs. older can be explained by the higher fertility of younger adult women. The libido gap can be explained by the different mating strategies instinctively pursued by the distinct sexes.

As for the different Gini coefficients consistently reported for men and women, they are not consistent with a monogamous social structure in which most people can pair with someone of comparable perceived attractiveness. However, this is not surprising: monogamy is rare in nature. The revealed preference among most women to attempt to engage romantically only with the same small percentage of men who are perceived as attractive is consistent with the social system called “polygyny,” in which a small percentage of males monopolize the mating opportunities with all females, while many other males have no access to mates. Again, this will not come as a surprise to scientists. The evolutionary biologist David P. Barash wrote an article in Psychology Today titled “People Are Polygynous,”citing extensive biological and historical evidence that throughout most of history, our species has practiced “harem polygyny,” a form of polygamy.

There are many animals of all kinds that practice polygyny in one form or another, including many of our primate relatives like gorillas and lemurs. For animals, social structures are not an object of reflection or systematic attempted reform—they just do what their instincts and upbringing dictate. But it is the destiny of humans to constantly fight against nature. We light fires for warmth, build air conditioners for cooling, invent soap and plumbing and antibiotics and trains and radios in an effort to conquer the constraints of nature. But when we turn on our smartphones built on ingeniously developed transistors that show we can overcome nature’s entropy, we log on to dating apps and enter a world that is built on shadows of the social structures of our primeval savanna ancestors. Technology has not enabled us to escape the brutal social inequalities dictated by our animal natures.

This is not to say that we haven’t tried. The institution of monogamy is itself a “redistributive” type of policy: like capping the income of billionaires, it caps the total allowed romantic partners of the most attractive, so that unattractive people have much better chances to find a partner. The marriages that we read about in historical accounts that are based on prudence and family arrangement make more sense when we realize that basing marriage on mutual attraction leads so many—both men and women—to be unsatisfied with the outcome, since most women find most men unattractive. All of the world’s great religious traditions have extolled chastity as a great virtue and taught that there are higher goals than sexual satisfaction—these teachings add meaning to the otherwise “poor” lives of the majority of people who are regarded as perpetually unattractive.

Even in centuries-old fairy tales like The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast, we see our culture’s attempt to come to terms with the paradigm of a woman regarded as attractive pairing with a man who she regards as unattractive. The differing Gini coefficients faced by men and women guarantee that this will be a common—or even the most common—romantic pairing in a monogamous culture. In these fairy tales (depending on which version you read), the beautiful woman first accepts or even loves the hideous man. The sincere love of a woman transforms the unattractive man into something better: more handsome, richer, and royal. Allegorically, these stories are trying to show men and women a way to relate one-on-one even though most women find most men unattractive; they are trying to show that sincerely offered love, and love based on something other than sexual attraction, can transmute ugliness to beauty and make even a relationship with unmatching attractiveness levels successful.

As Western civilization declines or at least frays at the edges, the ways our culture has developed to deal with the gap in the attractiveness distribution are receding and dying. Young people enter the equality-inducing institution of monogamy later and later or not at all, spending more time in a chaotically unequal polygynous dating world. Monogamy itself is weaker, as divorce becomes easier and even married people often report encountering “dead bedrooms” in which one or both spouses feel no obligation to give a partner who they do not regard as sufficiently attractive access to sexual experiences. Religious belief is in constant decline, and with it declines the belief in the dignity of celibacy or the importance of anything other than hedonism (sexual or otherwise). Even fairy tales that for centuries helped us understand how to live charitably with each other are disavowed and cultural tastemakers like Time Magazine and the BBC denigrate them as sexist.

The result of these cultural changes is that the highly unequal social structures of the prehistoric savanna homo sapiens are reasserting themselves, and with them the dissatisfactions of the unattractive “sexually underprivileged” majority are coming back. It is ironic that the progressives who cheer on the decline of religion and the weakening of “outdated” institutions like monogamy are actually acting as the ultimate reactionaries, returning us to the oldest and most barbaric, unequal animal social structures that have ever existed. In this case it is the conservatives who are cheering for the progressive ideal of “sexual income redistribution” through a novel invention: monogamy.

As always, the way forward will be difficult. It may be impossible to revive the religions, behaviors, institutions, and norms that have recently governed the world of love and sex but are in retreat around the world. The future of Western civilization may need brave new institutions and brave new ways for men and women to fruitfully relate to each other. Whatever rules govern the future of dating and sex, they should find a way to deal with the polygynous instincts that our species has historically possessed and that show up in the present day in the statistics of our dating apps, or else be willing to accept the risk of sexual conflict and war that have historically accompanied high inequality. Technologies and institutions and even religions come and go, but the evidence indicates that sexiness inequality is here to stay and that we will ignore it only at our peril.


Bradford Tuckfield is a data scientist in New York.

Humberto Maturana: “Los seres humanos no somos monógamos”

Ricardo Olave


29 ENE 2019

Desde la percepción del científico chileno, la sexualidad es un aspecto esencial en la convivencia entre seres humanos, la cual se manifiesta en la expansión de la sensualidad y la ternura como pilares del bienestar.


Esta entrevista, perteneciente a la extinguida revista APSI del año 1991, estuvo enmarcada en un especial relacionado al erotismo y la sexualidad. Es en este contexto que el Premio Nacional de Ciencias tuvo palabras para analizar a los chilenos, quien desde la emoción, desprende el lenguaje de la biología del amor.


-¿Usted considera que la monogamia es el orden natural del ser humano?


-No. Los seres humanos somos moderadamente polígamos. La monogamia nos puede durar toda la vida o no. Una cosa no niega la otra. Pero si usted me pregunta cuáles son los pilares de una familia larga, permanentemente, yo pienso que es la ternura. Porque la sexualidad, es un modo de ternura. Cuando uno habla de sexualidad, escucha solamente el acto sexual. Y éste es solo un momento en esta relación sensual hombre-mujer. Donde están la caricia, la atención, el cuidado, el juego: todo lo que es encontrarse con el otro en su legitimidad.


En la convivencia, son el control y la exigencia los que generan la angustia: mi impresión es que mientras más se controla la monogamia, más se destruye. El problema es la exigencia y el control. Si la pareja vive en la ternura y la sensualidad, y por lo tanto en la armonía sexual, ni siquiera se tiene que preguntar por la fidelidad. La fidelidad surge como pregunta cuando se perdió la sensualidad y la ternura.


-Usted ha dicho que la felicidad está en la armonía del presente. ¿Cuál es la relación que usted ve entre sexualidad y felicidad?


-El problema con las exigencias es que siempre interfieren con lo que exigen. Se fundan en que no está lo que se exige: usted exige cooperación y no la tiene, porque para que haya cooperación tiene que darse un fundamento distinto, que es la aceptación y el respeto, y el deseo común. Empieza a exigir cuando estas condiciones fundamentales no existen…
La armonía sexual


-Parece ser que estamos mal educados para convivir.


-Yo creo que sí estamos mal educados, porque pertenecemos a una cultura que piensa o que actúa como si la armonía y el orden surgiesen de la exigencia y el control. La armonía no surge de la exigencia, sino de la coincidencia de propósitos, de la coincidencia de deseos; lo que yo llamo la ‘con-inspiración’ en el vivir.


Humberto Maturana acota que él se ha preocupado de estos temas desde un camino distinto de la psicología y la filosofía: desde la biología. “Mis preguntas han sido en general sobre las condiciones constititivas que le dan origen a las experiencias, más que lo que pasa con ellas”.


-¿Pero es una biología integrada a la ética?


-Yo nunca me interesé por la ética hasta que la biología me la mostró.


-¿Hay ética en la naturaleza?


-No, pero en el ser humano sí. Y surge del amor. La ética tiene que ver con la preocupación por el otro. Con tratar al otro como legítimo otro en la convivencia. Pero la preocupación ética nunca va más allá que el dominio social en que surge…


-En Chile en estos momentos, mientras más se “ve” la gente, se siente con mayor status. Y esto, asociado a una sexualidad lo más reprimida, posible, ¿no?


-Yo creo que todos los seres humanos necesitan vivir una vida que tenga sentido. Una vida en la cual su quehacer sea armónico y congruente con un espacio más amplio que su vida individual, y ese sentido históricamente se daba desde lo místico. Eso se ha ido perdiendo. Ahora la religión propone un espacio de integración social. Y usted se va a encontrar con que los que viven en conciencia social, los que sienten su quehacer como parte de la comunidad, están menos amarrados a lo religioso. La religión está -demasiado, para mí gusto- centrada en las exigencias y en las normas. Pero lo que la persona busca es esa integración. Quiere que su quehacer tenga sentido y a veces lo confunde con las normas, que es lo que usted señala cuando dice status: si cumplo tales y tales reglas, pertenezco a una comunidad, soy acogido por ella.


-Hay una inseguridad “típica” o básica de los chilenos que explicaría, entre otras cosas, algunas formas distorsionadas de vivir la sensualidad y la sexualidad.


-Claro, pero la inseguridad nace de una mala integración a la comunidad a la que uno pertenece.


-Y también hay un malestar con el cuerpo…


-Bueno, pero todo eso va junto. Por qué tengo yo incomodidad con mi cuerpo, si no es porque estoy mal integrado a la comunidad a la cual pertenezco. Y por qué estoy mal integrado a la comunidad si no me conecto con ella adecuadamente en ser aceptado, en aceptar, en que mi quehacer tenga sentido en ella y que ella me acoja en mi quehacer.


-Usted comentaba que los seres felices son los que han sido aceptados por la madre, ¿será que los chilenos no han sido muy acogidos por sus madres, si es que podemos generalizar?


-No podemos generalizar. Yo creo que debe haber muchos chilenos felices (se ríe). Pero creo que tenemos problemas con el futuro. Nuestra cultura se hace cada vez más exigente en el competir, en el éxito. Y la mamá piensa que tiene que estar preocupada por el éxito de su hijo o de su hija en el futuro. Entonces no se encuentra con el niño o la niña. No lo ve. Le regala un juguete porque lo prepara para el futuro, no un juguete que tenga relación con el jugar solamente. Lo manda al colegio para que se prepare para el futuro y para el mercado profesional y no se escucha la queja del niño o de la niña en relación a cómo está viviendo su vida cotidiana en el colegio. Eso crea una tensión y una distancia, y por lo tanto una inseguridad en el niño. Porque el niño está en el presente, no en el futuro. A mí no me importa si el colegio en el que estuve era el mejor o el peor, lo único que me importa es si mi relación con mi mamá y con mis compañeros era armónica.
La muerte no es una novedad


Cabe destacar que a inicios de los años 90, Chile era un país desinformado respecto a las consecuencias del VIH, siendo un tema tabú y una enfermedad marcada por los prejuicios. El profesor Maturana, encontró palabras para comprender este fenómeno desde la contemplación.


En ese sentido, si bien los tratamientos actuales permiten mantener una vida tranquila controlando el virus, Maturana tuvo visión para pensar que esta enfermedad tendría cura en tiempos en que el miedo no permitía encontrar una respuesta.


-Hay una realidad que cambia, para los niños de hoy, la película del futuro: el sida…


-La película cambia hasta que haya un remedio contra el sida. Optar por vivir el presente no significa no hacerse cargo del futuro. La revolución sexual fue en realidad una revolución contra la hipocresía adulta. Surge con el movimiento hippie en Estados Unidos, como una reacción contra la guerra de Vietnam. Y contra la vida adulta que es mentirosa. Y entre otros aspectos de la vida adulta, contra la restricción de la sexualidad. Pero la gente tendrá que llegar a vivir su sexualidad como polisexual o como monógamo, no en contra de la restricción, sino en la armonía de su vivir.


– O sea que todo no se ha perdido, a pesar del sida.


-Por supuesto que todo no se ha perdido: el sida es una interferencia seria, y muy grave para mucha gente, pero se encontrará el remedio; si es como la sífilis. Mientras no se tenía el remedio contra la sífilis, era igual el sida…Antes la gente se moría de tuberculosis. Esto de estar cercano a la muerte no es una cosa nueva. Lo que pasa es que el sida tiene que ver con la sexualidad. Entonces uno tiene que preocuparse de su pareja: se puede ser monógamo o polígamo ordenado.


-Pero la cultura impone a las enfermedades una carga simbólica, metafórica, dice Susan Sontag. Se buscan “culpables”.


-Las enfermedades son pasares de la vida. Si el sida contiene una manipulación, usted no tiene por qué vivir esa manipulación. Es que toda la historia evolutiva del hombre tiene que ver con la sensualidad y la ternura. Por eso su negación es tan distorsionante.


-Usted dice que ser monógamo o polígamo son dos opciones legítimas. El problema es que la sociedad solo acepta una posibilidad como legítima.


-Esta sociedad, pero no todas. Hay otras culturas en las cuales no es así. Note usted que si las enfermedades venéreas y el sida se propagan como se propagan es porque no somos monógamos. Eso tampoco quiere decir que tengamos una estructura de gente perversa. Los seres humanos no somos monógamos. O no lo somos toda la vida. A lo mejor somos polígamos, y esa poligamia tampoco significa necesariamente promiscuidad.
El derecho a cambiar de opinión


“Es interesante lo que usted ha escrito sobre los errores”, mencionaba la periodista Mili Rodríguez, a lo que Maturana responde:”Para darnos cuenta de que comentemos errores, el error tiene que ser legítimo. Si el error no es legítimo, no lo podemos ver ni superar”.


Es aquí, donde la periodista de Apsi nota que el biólogo cuenta con una copia de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos, documento en el que tiene anotado bajo los 30 artículos de la Carta Fundamental, tres acotaciones: 31: Derecho a cometer errores, 32: Derecho a irse y 33:derecho a cambiar de opinión.


-Son artículos fundamentales. Si el error no es legítimo no puede ser comprendido ni superado. El derecho a cometer errores y el derecho a cambiar de opinión los agregué yo. El derecho a irse, lo pusieron mis alumnos.


Tras el término de la conversación, la periodista y el científico ven un pequeño pizarrón que dice: “Silencio. Palomas entrenando”. Maturana, al ver esto, explica que “las palomas vienen a la universidad a aprender y después son liberadas. Todas las palomas ven colores. Nosotros les pedimos que nos digan cómo los ven”.


El amor es fundamentalmente ‘ver’ al otro. Es decir, que bajo su concepto, el amor no es ciego registró revista Apsi.

La salvación de lo Bello. Byung - Chul Han

LA INFIDELIDAD PUEDE SER LA MEJOR TERAPIA PARA SALVAR TU RELACIÓN DE PAREJA

¿Ha dejado de ser el adulterio una tragedia?


Cada vez son más los terapeutas que la recomiendan...


Marian Benito - 01/06/2018

Los incesantes devaneos sexuales de Don Draper, uno de los mejores publicistas del Nueva York de los 60, marcan cada capítulo de Mad Men.


La ecuación que une sexo y salud parece sencilla de armar. Veamos. Practicado una vez por semana, ayuda a regular el sueño y también el apetito. Si duplicamos la frecuencia, fortalece un 30 % el sistema inmunológico. Tres veces por semana, mejora el ritmo cardíaco y la circulación sanguínea. Quien llegue a cuatro veces notará un rejuvenecimiento casi instantáneo de su piel. ¿Cinco? Buen humor y mayor rendimiento laboral. A diario, el sexo sería un fabuloso regalo para nuestro cerebro. Oxigena la sangre, nos dota de nuevas neuronas, libera endorfinas y reduce los niveles de ansiedad y depresión. Son conclusiones refrendadas por diferentes investigaciones científicas, como la del neuropsicólogo David Weeks, del Hospital Royal Edinburgh (Escocia), que asegura que los encuentros sexuales, si son regulares, incrementan las defensas y ayudan a detener la vejez. Pero la realidad podría hacer añicos tales alegrías: a partir del tercer año de relación, las parejas no pasan, según las estadísticas, del 1,1 encuentro sexual por semana.


Y a pesar del mal dato, todavía cabe confiar en una solución para lograr mantenernos sanos a partir del sexo: buscar un amante. La psicóloga Deborah Taj Anapol (EE.UU.), una de las impulsoras del poliamor, alega una razón de salud para defender la infidelidad como fortalecedora no solo del sistema inmunitario, también del matrimonio.


Sin orgasmos, la salud se resiente


En su libro Poligamia en el siglo XXI, plantea que el sexo puede prevenir la enfermedad e incluso curarnos de ciertas patologías, y relega el matrimonio a una simple institución reproductiva “sin cabida para experimentar el lujo del romanticismo y la pasión”. Su trabajo como terapeuta de parejas le hizo llegar a la siguiente conclusión: “La ausencia de sexo en la relación acaba acelerando el envejecimiento y perjudicando la salud, ya que la acumulación de tensión sexual debilita las defensas del sistema inmunológico. Es preciso acceder a más de una pareja para educarnos en el arte del amor y acceder a todo nuestro potencial sexual”.

Los británicos no creen que acostarse con un robot sea infidelidad, pero no les gustaría ver a un amigo en ese trance


A Anapol le aleccionó su propia experiencia: “Una vez que dejé de lado la identidad de la monogamia, atraje a una serie de amantes que reflejaban diferentes partes de mí misma. Sin poliamor, me habría perdido la sensación de libertad”. Sus pensamientos ponen patas arriba las reglas básicas del matrimonio. “La cuestión no es –escribe en su libro– un amante, muchos o ninguno, sino rendirse a la dirección que el amor elige en lugar de rendirse al condicionamiento cultural, la censura o la presión de grupo”. En su trabajo, aconseja y ofrece alternativas para alcanzar la plenitud sexual, teniendo en cuenta que el sexo fuera del matrimonio es el que permite dejar de reprimir y de ignorar el deseo sexual para verlo como una práctica de goce. Su propuesta más polémica es que difícilmente se puede liberar el apetito sexual sin superar la monogamia, a no ser que se tenga la suerte de tener una pareja especialista en sexo tántrico o con una maravillosa educación sexual. Solo hay, según ella, dos obstáculos que frenan el poliamor: los celos y el tiempo. El primero tiene difícil solución, pero para el segundo sugiere que la cura es trabajar menos para disfrutar de más momentos de intimidad. Y, por tanto, vivir de manera más saludable.


Danièle Flaumenbaum, ginecóloga francesa, respalda la teoría de Anapol y ahonda en esa idea de que la energía que libera el encuentro sexual contribuye a curarnos de ciertos achaques y enfermedades y también a prevenirlos. “El sexo –dice– ayuda a mejorar la salud física y el bienestar mental, alejando muchas de las patologías afectivas, emocionales y psíquicas”. Se trata de una convicción cada vez más presente en la sociedad. Cuando, hace unos meses, Gleeden, un portal de encuentros extraconyugales, sondeó entre sus usuarias qué les hace felices, la respuesta fue casi unánime: “Un amante”. Curiosamente, las entrevistadas compartían, según Silvia Rubies, portavoz en España y Latinoamérica de este servicio, una peculiaridad: “Aman a sus maridos, ni siquiera atraviesan una crisis de pareja, pero necesitan savia nueva para nutrir la relación oficial”.


Alicia Walker es socióloga estadounidense y autora del libro The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure (La vida secreta de la esposa infiel: poder, pragmatismo y placer), un trabajo que destaca que el concepto de infidelidad no es igual para todos. Para unos implica carne, para otros basta con deseo. ¿Es infidelidad pagar por sexo? ¿Mirar pornografía? ¿Coquetear con el vecino? La línea se mueve tanto que la horquilla en las encuestas es gigantesca. Ese es el motivo por el cual distintos estudios de EE. UU. afirman que la infidelidad femenina oscila entre el 26 y 70 %, y que la masculina va del 33 a 75 %. El dato lo recoge la psicoterapeuta Esther Perel en su libro The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (La situación de los amoríos: repensando la infidelidad).


Las ventajas de un amante terapéutico


Sean cuales sean los números exactos, lo incuestionable es que se confiesa más. En comparación con 1990, las mujeres afirman tener amantes un 40 % más (o, al menos, lo manifiestan), mientras que entre varones las cifras se han mantenido. La igualdad llega a todos los rincones de la casa, y la alcoba no iba a ser menos. Con el equilibrio, surge también otra manera de mirar la infidelidad.


Anapol (gurú del poliamor): "La ausencia de sexo en la relación acelera el envejecimiento y debilita el sistema inmunológico"


“Estamos ante un nuevo modo de ser infieles –afirma el psicólogo Antoni Bolinches–, en el que desaparece el tono de traición o dolor que ha acompañado usualmente a este acto”. Autor del libro Sexo sabio, él sugiere que “existe una infidelidad compensatoria que consigue salvar el equilibrio emocional de muchas parejas y garantizar su perdurabilidad. Son personas que se llevan bien, con un proyecto y unos intereses comunes, pero la rutina les ha llevado a la habituación uno del otro, rompiendo la erótica definitivamente”. Es el caso de Laura Soto, una de las usuarias más veteranas de Gleeden. Su testimonio, plasmado en su novela Las pasiones ocultas de Jade, es revelador de una infidelidad como opción sexual cada vez más aceptada socialmente de cara a mantener la estabilidad matrimonial. También Isabel Allende, cuando, en 2015, presentó El amante japonés manifestó: “¡Las veces que he tenido amante ha sido rebueno!”.


Es posible amar a tu pareja siendo infiel


Infidelidad no implica necesariamente desamor. Es una idea que empieza a ser palpable en la terapia matrimonial. En Nueva York, Perel atiende en su consulta a un número cada vez mayor de parejas que se aman, se llevan bien, pero han dejado de practicar sexo. “La infidelidad abre en la pareja un diálogo honesto y profundo sobre los intereses y preocupaciones de uno y otro”, defiende. Su fórmula es pactar una nueva libertad que permita conciliar la vida conyugal con la realización de los deseos de cada uno. Es el mismo planteamiento que expuso Juan del Val en la presentación de su último libro, Parece mentira. “Si existe la base imprescindible del amor, la fidelidad tiene una importancia residual”, declaró. Fidelidad o infidelidad, ¿qué más da? Ambas son opciones válidas, aunque deja claro que la primera le produce claustrofobia. En su caso, dice, hay amor y atracción física, pero también espacios donde cada uno tiene su mundo y el otro no se inmiscuye. Tanto Del Val como su esposa, la periodista Nuria Roca, han confesado en televisión que mantienen una relación abierta que les permite crecer, evolucionar y madurar.


Ashley Madison, otra de las páginas para personas casadas, proporciona un dato muy elocuente: el 48 % de los usuarios considera que es posible amar a tu pareja mientras eres infiel. “Tienen claro que sería estúpido romper una relación que funciona solo porque falla en un punto”, indican en su nota de prensa. Aún hay más. El 64 % de los hombres y el 78 % de las mujeres reconoce que la infidelidad ha tenido un efecto positivo en sus matrimonios. Y solo el 19 % de los hombres y el 7 % de las mujeres a nivel mundial siente culpa después de un encuentro con su amante. En Gleeden, el 27 % de las usuarias confiesa también que “son momentos de libertad que ayudan a mantener en pie el matrimonio”.


Además, quienes frecuentan las páginas para adúlteros no descartan la posibilidad de aprender algo nuevo que quizás puedan aplicar después en su pareja estable. Es una de las ideas que se desprenden de la encuesta realizada por el portal de citas Second Live, en la que más del 85 % de los usuarios confiesa que las fantasías prefieren confiárselas a un amante. Y si es una aventura de una sola noche, mucho mejor. Son apetencias que por miedo, vergüenza o culpa cuesta compartir con la pareja oficial. “Siempre resulta más cómodo con un extraño, sobre todo si lo que se desea no encaja en ciertos estándares”, explica su portavoz, Matías Lamouret. Hasta los besos son más y saben mejor en un encuentro extraconyugal, según los datos recogidos entre casi 16.000 mujeres y hombres europeos por Gleeden con motivo del Día del Beso, el pasado 13 de abril. El 72 % se excita con un beso de su amante, casi el mismo porcentaje que dice que raramente le sucede con su cónyuge.


Mayor inteligencia sexual


También en parejas homosexuales la infidelidad, lejos de ser señal de debilitamiento del amor o de la convivencia, puede resultar una experiencia positiva, tal y como concluye una investigación llevada a cabo por el escritor Dan Savage y los psicólogos Justin Lehmiller y David J. Ley. En este caso, más que la emoción de lo prohibido, atrae la posibilidad de personalizar sus necesidades y deseos sexuales, algo que puede ser muy ventajoso para vivir juntos muchos años. Incluso desde el punto de vista tradicional –o sea, entendiendo la infidelidad asociada al dolor y a la traición– puede resultar beneficiosa, al menos a largo plazo, según un estudio de la Universidad de Binghamton con 5.000 personas abandonadas de 96 países diferentes. Craig Morris, antropólogo biocultural y responsable de la investigación, destaca que, después de un periodo de dolor, esta mala experiencia aporta una inteligencia de pareja superior que le ayudará a detectar mejor las señales que indican que un posible compañero no es el adecuado. “A largo plazo, gana”, señala.


El debate ético y emocional sobre la fidelidad está ampliando sus límites y la pregunta que estaba por llegar ya acaba de formularse. ¿Acostarse con un androide es infidelidad? La lanzó hace unos meses HBO en una serie de marquesinas de Madrid a propósito del estreno de la segunda temporada de la serie Westworld. En las imágenes, una desafiante Lili Simmons (Clementine Pennyfeather) dirige su insólito mensaje a quien espera en las paradas de autobús. La inminente integración de robots en nuestras vidas cotidianas ha empezado a expandir las posibilidades sexuales humanas. Ahora bien, ¿sería infidelidad?


El 40 % de los británicos que contestaron a una encuesta realizada por la plataforma digital NOW TV cree que no. Uno de cada tres consideraría esa posibilidad y el 39 % está convencido de que en el año 2050 será una realidad. No es menos paradójico el dato de que al 30 % le horrorizaría ver a uno de sus amigos en ese trance. Y si, llegado el momento, fuese el robot el que pidiese practicar sexo con otro ser humano, ¿sería eso infidelidad?


¿Por qué escoger si pueden ser dos?


Aun siéndolo, de acuerdo con esta nueva percepción del adulterio, transcurriría sin conflicto, sin la disyuntiva de tener que escoger, porque el vínculo con la pareja estable se mantiene intacto. Como dice Bolinches, “una infidelidad bien gestionada puede ser una medida de choque para convertir una relación decadente en duradera y saludable. Mucho más pernicioso que un escarceo o un enamoramiento extramatrimonial sería frustrar un deseo o una emoción inesperada por respeto a la pareja. Esta sí sería una represión que desestructuraría de manera irremediable la relación”. La duda ahora es cómo manejarla sin estrés. ¿Cómo gozar del sexo extramatrimonial sin que se tambalee la pareja oficial? “No olvidemos –recuerda el psicólogo– que el 95 % de las parejas son cerradas. Esto no significa que haya que tabicar el deseo, sino simplemente entender que hay goces que solo te los va a proporcionar una aventura”. Su primer consejo es la discreción. Esto fue lo que perdió a Don Draprer, protagonista de la serie Mad Men y adúltero compulsivo. La infidelidad, demasiado obvia en su matrimonio, pasó a ser dolorosa solo cuando su esposa descubre que los demás conocían lo que ella no había querido ver. Don llegó a su última temporada incapaz casi de hacer un recuento de amantes. Una maestra, su vecina, una prostituta, jóvenes solteras, casadas maduras... Hasta entonces, y mientras pudo mirar hacia otro lado, ella no se había sentido humillada.


Un tercero en escena.

¿Qué es lo ocurre en nuestro cerebro?


Cuando aparece un tercero o una tercera, la química del cerebro es similar a la de hacer puenting. Y, además, genera adicción. Lo explica el neurofisiólogo Eduardo Calixto González.


El deseo gana a la razón. El sistema límbico (donde gobierna el deseo) gana a la corteza frontal (sede de la razón). El cerebro registra menor actividad en esta última y un incremento en las estructuras límbicas, lo que le lleva a abrirse a nuevas experiencias y a un mayor deseo sexual.


Las hormonas te emborrachan. El cerebro se inunda de dopamina, un neurotransmisor que aumenta la sensación de placer, euforia y energía. También de oxitocina, hormona del apego asociada Además, hay mayor secreción de endorfinas, que multiplican ese efecto placentero. Además, hay mayor secreción de endorfinas, que multiplican ese efecto placentero. Más testosterona y con ella más apetito sexual. Otras sustancias químicas reducen la atención y llevan a la falta de control.


Niveles altos de cortisol, la hormona del estrés, ante la presión por mantener en silencio la aventura. Pueden derivar en problemas de memoria. Aumento de la hormona vasopresina (asociada a la búsqueda de emociones). En algunas personas esto se relaciona con el gen RS334.

Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?

One of the paradoxes of the dating game is that we know that by coming across as enthusiastic at an early stage – if we ring them the next day, if we are open about how attractive we find them, if we suggest meeting them again very soon – we are putting ourselves at a high risk of disgusting the very person we would so like to get to know better.

It is in order to counter this risk that, early on in our dating lives, we are taught by well-meaning friends to adopt a facade of indifference. We become experts at deliberately not phoning or sending messages, at treating our dates in a carefully off-hand manner and in subtly pretending we don’t much care if we never cross their paths again – while privately pining and longing. We are told that the only way to get them to care about us is to pretend not to care for them. And, in the process, we waste a lot of time, we may lose them altogether and we have to suffer the indignity of denying that we feel a desire that should never have been associated with shame in the first place.

© Flickr/Petra Bensted

But we can find a way out of the conundrum by drilling deeper into the philosophy that underpins the well-flagged danger of being overly eager. Why is detachment so often recommended? Why are we in essence not meant to call too soon?

High levels of enthusiasm are generally not recommended for one central reason: because they have been equated with what is a true psychological problem: manic dependence. In other words, calling too soon has become a symbol of weakness, desperation and the inability to deal adequately with life’s challenges without the constant support of a lover whose real identity the manically keen party doesn’t much care about because their underlying priority is to ensure that they are never alone without someone, rather than with any one being in particular.

But we should note that what is ultimately the problem is manic dependence, not high enthusiasm. The difficulty is that our cultural narratives have unfairly glued these two elements together with an unnecessarily strong and unbudging kind of adhesive.

Yet, there should logically be an option to disentangle the two strands: that is, to be able to reveal high enthusiasm and, at the same time, not thereby to imply manic dependence. There should be an option to appear at once very keen and very sane.

The ability to do so depends on a little known emotional art to which we seldom have recourse or introduction: strong vulnerability. The strongly vulnerable person is a diplomat of the emotions who manages carefully to unite on the one hand self-confidence and independence and on the other, a capacity for closeness, self-revelation and honesty. It is a balancing act. The strongly vulnerable know how to confess with authority to a sense of feeling small. They can sound in control even while revealing that they have an impression of being lost. They can talk as adults about their childlike dimensions. They can be unfrightening at the same time as admitting to their own fears. And they can tell us of their immense desire for us while simultaneously leaving us under the impression that they could well survive a frank rejection. They would love to build a life with us, they imply, but they could very quickly and adroitly find something else to do if that didn’t sound like fun from our side.

© Flickr/Pedro Ribeiro Simões

In the way that the strongly vulnerable speak of their desire for us, we sense a beguiling mixture of candour and independence. They don’t need to play it cool because they have found a way of carrying off high enthusiasm which sidesteps the dangers it has traditionally and nefariously been associated with.

What is offputting is never in fact that someone likes us; what is frightening is that they seem in danger of having no options other than us, of not being able to survive without us. Manic dependence, not enthusiasm has only ever been the problem. With this distinction in mind, we should learn to tell those we like that we’re really extremely keen to see them again, perhaps as early as tomorrow night, and find them exceptionally marvellous – while simultaneously leaving them in no doubt that we could, if the answer were no, without trouble and at high speed, find some equally enchanting people to play with and be bewitched by.

What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity

By KARIN JONES APRIL 6, 2018

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CreditBrian Rea

I’m not sure it’s possible to justify my liaisons with married men, but what I learned from having them warrants discussion. Not between the wives and me, though I would be interested to hear their side. No, this discussion should happen between wives and husbands, annually, the way we inspect the tire tread on the family car to avoid accidents.

A few years ago, while living in London, I dated married men for companionship while I processed the grief of being newly divorced. I hadn’t sought out married men specifically. When I created a profile on Tinder and OkCupid, saying I was looking for no-strings-attached encounters, plenty of single men messaged me and I got together with several of them. But many married men messaged me too.

After being married for 23 years, I wanted sex but not a relationship. This is dicey because you can’t always control emotional attachments when body chemicals mix, but with the married men I guessed that the fact that they had wives, children and mortgages would keep them from going overboard with their affections. And I was right. They didn’t get overly attached, and neither did I. We were safe bets for each other.

I was careful about the men I met. I wanted to make sure they had no interest in leaving their wives or otherwise threatening all they had built together. In a couple of cases, the men I met were married to women who had become disabled and could no longer be sexual, but the husbands remained devoted to them.

Continue reading the main story

All told I communicated with maybe a dozen men during that time in my life, and had sex with fewer than half. Others I texted or talked with, which sometimes felt nearly as intimate.

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Before I met each man I would ask: “Why are you doing this?” I wanted assurance that all he desired was sex.

What surprised me was that these husbands weren’t looking to have more sex. They were looking to have any sex.

I met one man whose wife had implicitly consented to her husband having a lover because she was no longer interested in sex, at all. They both, to some degree, got what they needed without having to give up what they wanted. But the other husbands I met would have preferred to be having sex with their wives. For whatever reason, that wasn’t happening.

I know what it feels like to go off sex, and I know what it’s like to want more than my partner. It’s also a tall order to have sex with the same person for more years than our ancestors ever hoped to live. Then, at menopause, a woman’s hormones suddenly drop and her desire can wane.

At 49, I was just about there myself, and terrified of losing my desire for sex. Men don’t have this drastic change. So we have an imbalance, an elephant-size problem, so burdensome and shameful we can scarcely muster the strength to talk about it.

Maybe the reason some wives aren’t having sex with their husbands is because, as women age, we long for a different kind of sex. I know I did, which is what led me down this path of illicit encounters. After all, nearly as many women are initiating affairs as men.

If you read the work of Esther Perel, the author of the recently published book “State of Affairs,” you’ll learn that, for many wives, sex outside of marriage is their way of breaking free from being the responsible spouses and mothers they have to be at home. Married sex, for them, often feels obligatory. An affair is adventure.

Meanwhile, the husbands I spent time with would have been fine with obligatory sex. For them, adventure wasn’t the main reason for their adultery.

The first time I saw my favorite married man pick up his pint of beer, the sleeve of his well-tailored suit pulled back from his wrist to reveal a geometric kaleidoscope of tattoos. He was cleanshaven and well mannered with a little rebel yell underneath. The night I saw the full canvas of his tattoo masterpiece, we drank prosecco, listened to ’80s music and, yes, had sex. We also talked.

I asked him: “What if you said to your wife, ‘Look, I love you and the kids but I need sex in my life. Can I just have the occasional fling or a casual affair?’”

He sighed. “I don’t want to hurt her,” he said. “She’s been out of the work force for 10 years, raising our kids and trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. If I asked her that kind of question, it would kill her.”

“So you don’t want to hurt her, but you lie to her instead. Personally, I’d rather know.”

Well, maybe I would rather know. My own marriage had not broken up over an affair so I couldn’t easily put myself in her position.

“It’s not necessarily a lie if you don’t confess the truth,” he said. “It’s kinder to stay silent.”

“I’m just saying I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be afraid of talking honestly about my sex life with the man I’m married to, and that includes being able to at least raise the subject of sex outside of marriage.”

“Good luck with that!” he said.

“We go into marriage assuming we’ll be monogamous,” I said, “but then we get restless. We don’t want to split up, but we need to feel more sexually alive. Why break up the family if we could just accept the occasional affair?”

He laughed. “How about we stop talking about it before this affair stops being fun?”

I never convinced any husband that he could be honest about what he was doing. But they were mostly good-natured about it, like a patient father responding to a child who keeps asking, “Why, why, why?”

Maybe I was being too pragmatic about issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment and fear. After all, it’s far easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it. But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family.

I suppose I would hope his needs would involve fishing trips or beers with friends. But sex is basic. Physical intimacy with other human beings is essential to our health and well-being. So how do we deny such a need to the one we care about most? If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilizes us but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy somewhere else. Should we?

I didn’t have a full-on affair with the tattooed husband. We slept together maybe four times over a few years. More often we talked on the phone. I never felt possessive, just curious and happy to be in his company.

After our second night together, though, I could tell this was about more than sex for him; he was desperate for affection. He said he wanted to be close to his wife but couldn’t because they were unable to get past their fundamental disconnect: lack of sex, which led to a lack of closeness, which made sex even less likely and then turned into resentment and blame.

We all go through phases of wanting it and not wanting it. I doubt most women avoid having sex with their husbands because they lack physical desire in general; we are simply more complex sexual animals. Which is why men can get an erection from a pill but there’s no way to medically induce arousal and desire in women.

I am not saying the answer is non-monogamy, which can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements. I believe the answer is honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Lack of sex in marriage is common, and it shouldn’t lead to shame and silence. By the same token, an affair doesn’t have to lead to the end of a marriage. What if an affair — or, ideally, simply the urge to have one — can be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?

What these husbands couldn’t do was have the difficult discussion with their wives that would force them to tackle the issues at the root of their cheating. They tried to convince me they were being kind by keeping their affairs secret. They seemed to have convinced themselves. But deception and lying are ultimately corrosive, not kind.

In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether: hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier, after all, to set up an account on Tinder.

Karin Jones writes the Savvy Love column for Erotic Review Magazine in Britain. She is working on a memoir.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2018, on Page ST6 of the New York edition with the headline: What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe