Random acts of kindness.

Indian Grandmother raised an excellent question in the comments section of the second part of the post on interviewing a prospective wife.

in my many years of experience with regards to male-female relationships, it is more often than not the WOMAN’S “sexual needs” that go un-fulfilled rather than the man’s in a partnership.

A very important question for a woman to ask a man is if he is willing to spend the amount of time (and that can be considerably long in some cases) it takes for her to achieve mutliple orgasms and thus be truly “satisfied”….. or would he rather her just “fake it” like most women do so he can roll over and go to sleep?

I should probably create a standard disclaimer explaining that when I’m offering advice to a man or a woman, it doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t think that same advice could apply to the opposite sex.  So comments like this are very appropriate, but please understand that I’m not trying to diminish the needs or feelings of one sex or the other at any given time.  For the purpose of clarity and brevity, focus is extremely important.  Along those lines I think one could take my advice on choosing a spouse to men and women and re-tune each to work for the other sex.

In response to her specific question, I agree with what I believe to be her core point which is that women have legitimate needs in this area too.  A husband has an obligation to do what he can to satisfy this need for his wife just as a wife does for her husband. Part of marriage is forbidding the other from fulfilling this need elsewhere, so this comes with an obligation to not leave the other party unfulfilled. Rolling over and going to sleep when she is saying “what about me?” is astonishingly insensitive and obviously inappropriate.  Leaving your spouse frustrated and/or unsatisfied is cruel.  The same goes for using sex as a bargaining chip or power play, etc.

My personal inclination is to stop the conversation here, at a hard clear rule.  But I do understand that the world is a big place, and there can be corner cases.  However, I think the immediate jump to corner cases when discussing obligations & duties is one of the biggest problems we have in our society. If I say;  “it is wrong to rob a bank, and worse to kill a teller in the process”, without fail someone will think of an example where the teller is a serial killer who the police can’t convict, and the bank robber’s dying child needs the money for medical care so they can live and become healthy enough to act as a rare blood donor to save an entire village of nobel peace price winners in Africa.  Not so easy now is it Dalrock? But that isn’t the game I want to play.

Having covered the obligation aspect of the question, I think there is another side to this which is often lost.  If you are doing marriage right, bringing pleasure to your spouse is one of the greatest joys you can experience.  I think it is essential to spell out the clear obligations people have, and not look for some loophole to get out of them.  But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take great pleasure in fulfilling these duties.  Hopefully this is totally obvious to everyone reading this.  But I at times think feminism has so poisoned our society that the first instinct is to bristle at the thought of having to do anything for someone else.

When your child is sick, you have an obligation to care for them.  But the right way to look at this is the honor that you have in being the one who can ease their pain.  When my wife was 7 months pregnant our daughter caught a stomach bug.  I made my wife promise to stay away while I held our daughter’s hair back, cleaned up the mess, etc.  I ended up sick for over a week with this bug, but my daughter got well quickly and just as important my wife was spared an extremely uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situation.  And I was truly glad to be able to do this.

On a more mundane level I take great pleasure in making coffee each morning for my wife.  I’m pretty picky about my coffee, and she has grown to prefer this over anything she could make or buy.  She raves about my coffee, so much so that my daughter comments on it to strangers:  “Mommy can’t live without daddy’s coffee!”.  This is a very small thing.  But it is a great pleasure in my day.  The same goes for the opportunity to ease her pain if she has a headache or back ache.  Often I can see that she is feeling this before she is consciously aware of it.  So I rub her neck or back, etc.  She is the same way with me in a long list of ways.

My point is that Random Acts of Kindness shouldn’t be something reserved for strangers.  And taking care of your family shouldn’t be categorized in your mind as a chore or a quid pro quo.  If you aren’t taking pleasure in fulfilling your obligations, you aren’t doing marriage right.

Edit 7-23: I’ve just learned that Indian Grandmother is a troll who posts under multiple identities, and was already banned by another site.  But the point of the post remains unchanged.