I know it's hormones and neurotransmitters all brewed up in an evil cocktail of malaise, but that doesn't make my mood any easier to handle. So if you don't want a dose of angst, feel free to click on another node right the fuck now.
Hawaii was wonderful, and I'm having the same sort of post-wonderful experience thing going on that I used to get after great sex with a stranger back when I had great sex with strangers. It's post-travel depression, and I am sure it's in the same malignant family as post-coital depression or post-divorce misery. Post-anything-good is pretty assy, as far as I can tell.
Since I've been home I have had no fewer than four conversations with men over the age of 40 who are unhappy in their marriages. It's amazing to me, actually. None of them hate their wives. They just feel as though something important is missing. I listen and ask questions, and the more I listen and ask questions the more puzzled I get.
I wonder if all men are in pursuit of The New.
A woman can be many things. She can even re-invent herself to a degree. But no matter how she tries, she will never be what she was the first night she met her husband - she will never again be The New. I can't help thinking, after talking to these unhappy men, that what they really want is more of what they already have - just with someone else. Someone new.
I know I'm going to get jumped for saying this, but women get an occasional hunger for The New as well. The difference is that women can almost always satisfy that upstart desire with a brownie or a pair of un-sensible shoes or a moisturizer that smells like mangos or a candle that smells like cut grass. Once men run the gadget gamut (TiVo, iPod, new computers, better car, satellite TV), their wives can pretty much kiss job security good bye.
Maybe it's a fear of getting old. You're only as old as the woman you feel, and all that. Fear of mortality is the great leveller; it certainly seems to level its share of relationships. If the source of all this male angst is a fear of getting old, I think that's very sad. Bathing in the blood of a virgin may have more anti-aging properties than sticking one's dick in a 22-year-old.
Fuck Viagra. Someone could make billions on Relationship Ritalin.
None of this means anything. It's just a late night ramble, a stream-of-consciousness nod to the fact that no matter how attractive we women try to stay, no matter how scintillating or intelligent or hot or wrinkle-free we appear to be, none of it matters once our men hit the end of the old attention span.
I read the other day that men don't pay whores for sex, they pay them to go home. There's a lot more truth to that than I wish there was.