The new world of marital relations according to Catherine Hakim

Decided to read Catherine Hakim's book entitled The New Rules; Internet, Playfairs & Erotic Power. Found it on sale secondhand and considered it a bargain.  I had heard mixed reviews and decided to find out for myself whether her argument, that the rules of marriage are changing, is convincing.

 

Basically, she is suggesting, from the social research that she has undertaken, that the Internet is creating a whole new landscape for married people who wish to have extra marital relationships.  Her research is not concerned with what might be termed an 'asymmetric affair', that is one wherein there is some notion of the misery for the unmarried woman who has fallen in love with a wealthy man and is convinced that the wife will be dumped for her. (There is no discussion about those affairs where there is no wealth to cushion the misery of being the other woman.  She cites the work of Sarah Symond in her book 'Having an Affair' who believes that there must be financial benefits to compensate for the distress of the disappointed mistress. Perhaps this is another piece of research?) 

 

Instead, Hakim is interested in what she terms the symmetrical or 'balanced' affair where both parties are married and intend to remain married.  In fact, these affairs can be considered to be a help to the marriage as long as they remain private and never intrude on the spouse.   "Accounts of married men and women who have affairs show that few are indeed hoping for an escape route out of an unsatisfactory marriage, but the majority are complementing a stable marriage with the additional excitement and novelty of an affair or brief fling" (p64).

 

For individuals who seek this type of relationship the Internet may be changing the way we behave.   Firstly, we are living much longer and there may be valid reasons not to expect to only have sex with your spouse, and secondly the Internet provides a very wide pool of opportunity to those who would wish to ensure total discretion by dating someone unknown, out of the area, also seeking extra marital relations.

 

So, this is going on now.  Hakim is not suggesting that this is how it should be, but that  this is how it is, and it does not necessarily require a knee jerk response of  disappointment, disbelief or disgust.  If completely discreet and the spouse never finds out, might it be a perfectly acceptable behaviour?  Does the English response to adultery need to reflect a more European stance?

 

Well, I'm of the opinion, call me old fashioned if you will, that morals play an important role in our behaviour and no matter what opportunity may present itself you can still believe in the sanctity of marriage.  I think an open marriage is totally different.  If two people, married to each other agree to extra marital relations then this is just consenting adults doing what they think is the best for them.  However, when I consider the cuckolded spouse I am conscious of the lies and deceit that are part of the turf of this type of behaviour which in turn destroys trust, the bedrock of any meaningful relationship. 

 

It may not be possible to remain with one person for life, but might it be possible to learn to navigate marital difficulties openly and honestly and if necessary, split up.  It seems to me that the betraying spouse is keeping all their options open at the expense of their spouse who has no control over what is happening because they have not been told the truth.  Equally, what about the suspicions that the betrayed spouse feels?  When confronted with these doubts does the unfaithful spouse just deny them.  This all seems so wrong.  Rather than new rules,  perhaps what is required is simply a more laissez faire view of what being married means but both partners need to share the view.

      

 

The Joy of Reading Books 

Am I just old fashioned or is there something universally wonderful with being able to enjoy reading books?  I have to admit to a life-long love of doing so, therefore am totally biased. When it comes to personal and professional development I believe that finding the right books at the right time is a wonderful route to take for individual growth.

 

I'm not saying that a good precis or a comprehensive synopsis is not valuable, indeed, they can be essential when seeking information quickly.  However, when it comes to developing new ideas or perspectives on habitual ways of thinking, I think the book format with its clear beginning, middle and end provides the necessary opportunities for engagement that shorter pieces don't. 

 

Obviously poetry is different.  I think of poetry as I do orange cordial; it needs diluting to be enjoyable.  For poetry you need the time to add your own feelings, thoughts and experiences to the written word just like you add water to cordial.  Book writing on the other hand furnishes you with everything you need in order to grasp the communication as long as you grant the time to the extended writing. 

 

For fiction you can suspend disbelief altogether for a while and enter a completely new world; possibly an alien one.  You can enter other peoples' heads and lives without leaving your armchair.  But you have to be convinced.  Non-fiction needs to convince as well, but not in the same way.  Instead the argument or main proposition needs to be convincing.  In either case, if you are convinced it can be transformative, almost as if you had had the experience yourself.

 

Finding the right book could not be easier now that we have the Internet.  Being introduced to new authors and ideas has never been easier. A Google search (or whatever you use) will take you to the well and then you can select from there.  However, it always helps to be guided by others and I have found the Brain Pickings blog and website truly amazing.

  

http://www.brainpickings.org/

Not just for books, but I find their book lists invaluable and I have located some absolute treasures.  Earlier this year I wanted to know more about writing and found that Brain Pickings could point me in the right direction with their new year list: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/09/best-books-on-writing-reading/

 

One of the books on that list was Anne Lamott's book "Bird by Bird; some instructions on writing and life".  I had never heard of her previously.  I bought the book second hand and it has proved to be a delight.  She summed up how I often feel; "All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves".  As a reader I am indebted to all the writers that have transported me to different times and places and shown me fresh ways of looking at my life.  Taking liberty with Anne's words for my own usage I can say that I have often closed a book with a sense of relief and triumph knowing that I have made contact with another precious human being.

 

Lots of things can grow out of books; they can be food for our souls. 

 

 



    

 



 

 

Learning from Literature

The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles (First published 1949)

I have just read this book.  It's the second time.  I also saw the film of the book many years ago.  I think that being older I have found stuff in here that just passed me by earlier.  Is it because life just gets more complex or is it that my life at the moment is changing my perspective?


It's a harrowing read that makes you confront your own sense of reality and mortality through the tale of Port and Kit, husband and wife on a journey to North Africa.  Maybe the familiar deceives us?  Makes us believe that we belong. Take the familiar away and discover an alien landscape.  Take away the sky above us and let us perceive the abyss. What discoveries might await us?

Are you a tourist or a traveller in your life?  If you are a tourist, then you will always hurry back home to the familiar whereas as a traveller you don't feel that you belong in any one place more than any other.  For Port, he found it easier to make objective decisions about his life when en route from one place to another.  However, once, when awakening from a dream he hears a voice tell him that "the soul is the weariest part of the body".  This suggests to me that the geographical journey is not as demanding as the landscape of existence itself.  However, to access that landscape requires a fissure of sorts to knock us off our day to day balance and sense of security.

Do you ever have the sense of foreboding?  Do you perceive omens?  Can you decipher whether they are good or bad? Are you prompted to act in ways directed by these omens? Kit Moresby, the character that stands out the most for me, struggles with her omens. "There were days when from the moment she came out of sleep, she could feel doom hanging over her head like a low raincloud". A great part of her life was spent categorising the omens that she noted and when, through doubt, she was unable to do so,  "her ability to go through the motions of everyday existence was reduced to a minimum".  She often felt that "she was pushing against her own existence".  Kit was frustrated by the feeling of hope.  "If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope.  But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction.  One could not even give up hope".  Kit's inner thoughts seem to exhaust her and affect her moods negatively.

However, later in the book she meets a character who suggests reading the omens differently.  "The mistake you make is in being afraid.  That is the great mistake.  The signs are given us for our good, not for our harm.  But when you are afraid you read them wrong and make bad things where good ones were meant to be".  The sense of responsibility that Kit feels for the direction her life takes is overwhelming.  "What delight, not to be responsible - not to have to decide anything of what was to happen! To know, even if there was no hope, that no action one might take or fail to take could change the outcome in the slightest degree - that it was impossible to be at fault in any way, and thus impossible to feel regret, or, above all, guilt.  She realised the absurdity of still hoping to attain such a state permanently, but the hope would not leave her".

Kit does not embrace her aliveness until completely on her own in an alien desert landscape.  Port has died and she has left the town that they were staying in. "Swiftly she walked along, focusing her mind on that feeling of solid delight she had recaptured.  She had always known it was there, just behind things, but long ago she had accepted not having it as a natural condition of life".  She learns to let go.  "There was part of her mind that ached, that needed rest.  It was good merely to lie there, to exist and ask no questions".  When confronted with circumstances outside any previous perceptions Kit is finally released from reading her omens.  "instead of feeling the omens, she would now be them herself.  But she was only faintly astonished at her discovery of this further possibility in existence".

Once she had found this possibility she did not want to go back to seeing things how they were before.  Confused, lost and alone, when confronted with a return to America she seeks to send a telegram 'CANNOT GET BACK'.  She had a vague sense that she needed to add something but knew not what.  What she was aware of was "she had betrayed herself; established contact with the other side... they would spare no effort in seeking her out, they would pry open the wall she had built and force her to look at what she buried there".  This, she knew, would destroy her. So, once she experienced these new possibilities of existence there was no going back for Kit but I'm not sure that there was anywhere that she would want to be.  Was she at the end of the line?

Tunner, another character in the book who has an illicit fling with Kit, also demonstrates a life not fully experienced.  He reminds me of someone I know.  Likely an only child, he "was the type of person to whom it would only occur with difficulty that he might be being used.  Because he was accustomed to imposing his will without meeting opposition, he had a highly developed and very male vanity which endeared him, strangely, to almost everyone".  However, his attraction to others demanded an unattainable aspect as he is an "essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp".  So was what was fully understood by Tunner discarded by him in favour of the unknowable?  Is it best to keep seeking rather than knowing? Does this provide a less complicated existence?

But is knowing an illusion also?  Are there times when rationality is not enough?  Experience had taught Port that reason could not always be counted upon.  "There was always an extra element, mysterious and not quite within reach, that one had not reckoned with.  One had to know, not deduce".

Time meanders throughout this book both as a vast expanse and as practically non-existent.   Port, whose time is finite in the book is perhaps the most sensitive to its vagaries.  "One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time".  Equally, "Because neither she (Kit) nor Port had ever lived a life of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent.  One year was like another year.  Eventually everything would happen.

"It takes energy to invest life with meaning" 

One haunting passage in the book serves as a gentle reminder to us all.

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life.  It's that terrible precision that we hate so much.  But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.  Yet everything happens only a certain number if times, and a very small number, really.  How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't conceive of your life without it?  Perhaps four or five times more.  Perhaps not even.  How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.  And yet it all seems limitless. 

34 things I've learned about life & stuff!

I follow AndHeDrew's blog Tough Love Self Help and yesterday he blogged about 34 things that he'd learned about life and people.  AndHeDrew  Now, it just so happens that he had been prompted to do this via a blog he follows by Chris Guillebeau Chris  Guillebeau who had created his own list of 34 things to do with life and adventure.  The number 34 is associated with Chris' birthday.

Something about this prompted me to take action and have a go myself.  No agonising as this is not what blogs are supposed to engender,  I have created my own list.  It's not as easy as I initially thought.  You'd think that over a lifetime's accumulation of learning, 34 would be an easy number to articulate - but this is not what I found.  You need to have a go yourself to see what I mean.  Let me know if you find it a breeze ;-)

Health is our most precious possession closely followed and not unrelated to time.

Learning has the potential to transform lives but the wrong kind can stifle potential.

The simple things in life are often the most pleasurable.

Other people's lives can be awfully difficult but they don't let on.

Life is unfair.

Rich, dishonest people are often treated better than poor, honest people.

Human growth occurs when we move out of our comfort zone.

Being loved and loving others is the foundation for peace.

Being innovative often is a struggle to live with.

Good food is a joy.

Red wine always helps.

People can surprise you.

Smiling helps.

The Internet and worldwide web are truly amazing and we all need to contribute towards the change that this is creating.

Creativity is an incredible human gift but is seldom recognised or developed.  It has fallen off the curriculum.

Old age is not respected.

Human dignity can be easily neglected.

Politeness really matters.

Class remains an issue.

Don't be afraid to ask for people's help.

Flowers lift the spirit.

Life is more meaningful if you can find something to believe in.

Plans often don't work out.

You need chutzpah.

Life rewards action.

Self reflection is a valuable exercise.

Believe that you can rather than you can't.

Sometimes you have to let go - of things; of people; of emotions.

Do not be afraid of dreaming or imagining.

Aspirations need scaffolding.

Most people are lovely.

Being a parent is a wonderful and rewarding experience.

Losing a loved one is devastating.

You realise that as you write them there are contradictions and the trivial sits alongside the profound, but I guess that that is the nature of life.



  

Chutzpah Classes

I've been giving a bit of  thought lately to what gift you could give to someone who was considering building or growing their very own 'career creation'    This is work/employment which does not fit the standard model of study hard, get a good job, maybe a couple more and then retire with enough money to live modestly well!

The writing seems to be on the wall with regard to large employers and their work practices.With the wonders of the Internet and the WWW,  I was able to spot an article by NY reporter Ashley Milne-Tyte writing in the alumni magazine of the University of Phoenix.  (Don't ask :-/)   She discusses Allison Hemming's forthcoming book about the future of work.   It seems uniform behaviour now for large companies to outsource all non-core operations.  This echoes Camrass & Farncombe's analysis in their book 'Atomic'.  This reduction in staffing has arguably created the need for small start ups to address the local gaps that then occur in the market. The skill set needed for this is claimed to be "how to be a business by yourself”.  Able to make enough money to sustain yourself, sometimes by turning several skills into income streams.

Now, whilst this might appear to be nonsensical if you are currently in a decent full time job, it may appear to be a promising alternative to those of you currently unemployed and fearful of finding a suitable job or to anyone in a job that doesn't offer much in the way of self development or fulfilment.  Equally, it may be of interest to anyone who has been made redundant or who has taken early retirement and needs additional income (for the odd cappuccino or two).

OK, so if it's not the same as selling your labour to an employer via a resume and interview, how difficult can it be eh?

You are talented.  You have skills.  You have experience. You have energy and enthusiasm.  You want to work.  You feel that you have something to offer the world.  But.... there is no job to apply for!  So, who you gonna call?  No, NOT ghost busters! Not yet anyways ;-)

Firstly, there are some steps you can take which will take you quite a distance down the 'how to' road.  To be honest, I've been doing a fair amount of research in this area and have many books and resources to recommend, but trust me, it doesn't look like rocket science. (If there still is such a thing!) However, there is a  gigantic shift from the thinking about it to actually doing something about it.  It's daunting I think and takes most of us into uncharted territory. Somewhere along the line you are going to have to approach people to see if they would want to pay you for what you can do for them.  How's that gonna feel?  Who do you pick?  How do you approach them?  What do you say exactly?  Then what?  What if they don't want to buy?  Oh no!,  you just may have to cope with rejection.  Then you might want to give up because this is all just too challenging and not what you've been taught to do!

This is where you need chutzpah in great big boxfuls!

It's no good having talent and no chutzpah to take yourself into the market place! CHUTZPAH -  I love this word! It's a Yiddish word that sort of means audacity but with a splash or two of humour mixed in. Cheeky!  Cambridge on-line dictionary define the term "unusual and shocking behaviour, involving taking risks but not feeling guilty".  For me this is a wee bit too negative.  Perhaps it could be taken to this extreme but I do agree that it's about an attitude towards taking risks and living with the consequences. You do need a strange mixture of confidence to expect to succeed whilst at the same time enough personal resilience and strength to accept failure.  Look, Walt Disney thought Mortimer Mouse would make a good talking animated cartoon.  He needed chutzpah to walk into the first bank and ask for the money he needed.  As it happens it needed quite a lot of it because the first bank thought he was nuts.  The 303rd gave it a go!

However, chutzpah is not on the curriculum.  Perversely, "in terms of career choice formal qualifications may create more attractive opportunities for waged employment than pursuing a career in entrepreneurship.  Consequently, it may be that there are links between low-levels of education attainment and 'necessity' entrepreneurship."  (ESRC Project Income from Self-employment: Development of an Innovative Life Course Model - Paper 10 Jones, O & Jayawarna, D)

So, do we need chutzpah classes?

Master Isolated Images

pronunciation of chutzpah

Creative Careers?

Working, as I do in education, I am perplexed by the continued perceived need for it to meet the needs of what employers say they want from their employees. Increasingly, I am starting to believe that education, in a world defined by change, would be more coherent if it aligned itself to what our future workers will need.  Or maybe, and more radically, what the future of work may be.

Currently, the educational system is one built around the needs of what was the Industrial Revolution.  Is it possible for this same model to remain in place for a future which we can only guess at?

Is there going to be a return to the economic prospect of a job for everyone?  Jobs which match individuals' education, skills and abilities?  Are there going to be wages that permit people to live comfortably above the poverty line? Is the default position for earning a living going to remain the selling of one's labour to a company or organisation?

Or, is there going to be a shortage of these types of jobs? Might the technological revolution that is replacing people not provide enough new work?  Are jobs going to be so scarce that unethical management practices start to be used more universally to abuse the work force? And amongst this depressing backdrop is there to be a return to Victorian values where poverty is seen as a result of lack of individual responsibility, laziness, fecklessness and overall lifestyle choices?    

Metaphorically speaking, we seem to have an educational system which seeks to transform people into a master key that will comfortably turn in a number of ready made locks.  What if these locks change beyond recognition or disappear completely?  How is education to serve the best interests of all society?

I would suggest that we need to be thinking about creative career management.  This would require a shift from thinking about getting a job to thinking about ways in which to earn a living.  It would need to start with the gifts that the individual possesses; what they are naturally good at.  These may need to be discovered and nurtured but infants' school might be a good place to start.  I speak to many adults who are unable to articulate what gifts or qualities that they possess.  I fear that many may have been told that they didn't have any!  A creative career would also need to consider the individual's passion; what things consume their interests and activities.  These are often linked to their gifts and a tell tale sign is often detected in the hobbies that people have.  Finally these two things; gifts and passions would need to be aligned to a purpose - an identified need in the world.  Otherwise there will not be an income stream.

So, by comparison to educating people to meet what employers say they want, as if they are a monolithic block of demands, educating for a creative career is much more difficult and demanding.  Equally, what people really want, when they have the freedom to really choose may not meet the expectations of the status quo.  "Systemic change cannot occur without a shift in the ruling paradigm of the day, no matter how well it is defended by the stalwarts whose lives - and above all livelihoods - are so often protected by it" (Nick Jankel 2012 http://bit.ly/xQqz7f ) Maybe a person centred education which focused on what individuals required to lead a life worth living might encourage people to become more interested in politics because the personal, as I discovered many moons ago, is political. 

A creative career supports entrepreneurialism which as discussed by Tim Faley in the FT last week  http://on.ft.com/wingf0 requires more than what is currently being taught in HE institutions.  As it stands entrepreneurial education is incomplete. A business should not start with the business but with the individual and his or her capabilities.  Using the metaphor of the Titanic he suggests that what is important in innovation lies below the water line.  In my experience peoples' gifts and passions often remain well below the water line.

Perhaps a good start to creative career management would be to support and guide individuals in developing their own personal brand rather than building a standard resume that aligns to employer demands?

Do learners need to learn to listen to the sound of their own drum?

I spent yesterday with my family in central London and had an experience which has got me thinking about learning, passion and motivation/drive and the relationship between them all.
 

Walking towards Oxford circus tube station via Argyle Street last night we began to hear some loud drumming and as we got closer to the sound, saw a crowd of people who had gathered around two young men who had set themselves up on the pavement; one sitting at what looked like a proper drum kit, the other, younger one, playing a set of pots and pans and plastic up turned buckets.

They were very good indeed.  So entertaining.  Their energy and the excitement of the beat was stopping most people in their tracks.  We stopped for a while, amazed at the scene in front of us. 

I had no idea who they were.  I had actually wondered if the guy with buckets had just arrived impromptu and decided to improvise!  However, thanks to the sign on the front of the drums that said www.idrum.org.uk  and the magic of Twitter I can tell you that they were Dan Abbott on the drum set and Jon Onabowu on the pots and pans. I managed to take a video from my iphone.  Not a particularly good image and from my position Jon is somewhat obscured in the bottom right hand corner.

I once heard Pavarotti say in an interview that he didn’t own his voice but that the voice owned him.  I got the sense of that with the drumming last night.  It was like the drumming had an energy and life force all of its own.  Naturally it takes more than being a receptacle of talent.  Their drumming would have required hours and hours of practice and dedication: perhaps when they'd rather have not bothered or found it difficult to make the time.   Equally, it was cold last night and it can’t have been easy to schlep all their stuff and move from one location to the next (I understand that they had been in other locations in London during the day).  I imagine that the police move them on.

So my question is: How does it all come together?

Learning; in this instance, learning to play the drums.  Can anyone learn to play as well as this or is it just that some people are predisposed to certain talents and gifts?  Andrew Miller @TheAndHedrew, who writes a blog aimed at helping people to live more creatively and intentionally, thinks that we are all artists as long as “you care enough and are awake enough to love what you do (whatever it is)”.

Dan Abbott is not on his own.  I am advised of another guy whose bicycle turns into a drum kit when turned upside down. 

I think that what these drummers have in common is that they love what they are doing.

So loving what we do creates a passion but is this enough?  Ken Robinson, a man enthused about education and creativity thinks not. In his book The Element; How finding your passion changes everything, he suggests that that there also needs to be a natural aptitude. For him, what I saw yesterday was two people who have discovered their element: “the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together”.  “The element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion".

I like the idea of this and would suggest that the element is where our drive or our motivation resides.  Keeping to a disciplined practice schedule; carrying a drum kit and having the confidence to just sit down and play wherever the fancy takes you requires drive.  However, this is where I think that we may get our wires crossed because we mistake the spark that keeps us going as financial reward when in fact it is has as much to do with purpose.   Those drummers last night may have earned some money from passers by – and why not indeed, they earned it. However, I don’t believe that that was their primary aim. 

Daniel Pink in his book Drive; the surprising truth about what motivates us, throws out the behaviourist understanding of the carrot and stick theory of motivation and replaces it with a paradigm which suggests that the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. For him, the three elements of motivation are:

1. Autonomy - the need to direct our own lives
2. Mastery - the desire to get better at something that matters
3. Purpose - A need to be part of something bigger than ourselves

I find myself returning to education and the current model which although is presented as student centered is curriculum driven. Does it allow us to work out what it is that we are good at, what we enjoy or what gives us a sense of purpose?

I can’t help but feel that we should be helping people to find out what they love to do and have an aptitude for.  Do we ever wonder if our learners are listening to a drum that we are not familiar with? Can this not be nurtured and encouraged? It may not be able to provide enough income (it’s another story having an income from what you love to do) but it may well offer satisfaction in life and contribute to the world we live in in ways that we couldn’t imagine.

I’m reminded of a boy who I was at school with who was deemed to be unteachable in the classroom. Always in trouble, never doing the work required.  By chance I visited the local dog track and found him keeping a book. The mental arithmetic and speed at which he kept his odds favourable was incredible.  I know now that he was in his element.


I learned a lot from watching and listening to those drummers last night and at the same time was hugely entertained - how good is that?