Letters to the Editor
Gwool
Published Letters: 366 Editor's Choice: 40
-
I can understand that
[Read the article: I want to carry a child for my sister]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a man, I can appreciate fully the husband's reservations. Nature's ability to get women to forget just how miserable they can be during pregnancy is as important a factor in procreation as the pleasurable feelings associated thereto that my wife calls "mother nature's cruel joke."
A standard joke for me when people ask how long I have been married is to say, "In human years or dog years, because a couple of them were real dogs, like every goddamn pregnancy." There were four of those, by the way.
So this guy is thinking he is done with all of that shit. Done with emotional ups and downs. Done with a wife in desperate need of sleep. Done with the late trimester sexual shutdown followed by the post partum recuperating period. Who knows if there were emotional issues, too. Perhaps the LW does a Yates woman impersonation?
Likewise, the LW is no spring chicken conception wise. Yeah, women can conceive at 40 albeit at lower percentage rates than when younger, but that's a lot of strain on the body. Our IUDidn't baby came onto the scene when we were both 39. My wife admits it was a bigger strain on her than the three prior ones in her late 20s and early 30s. She was also off the wall much more with the last one.
Those are all the selfish reasons why I can see the husband objecting to the surrogacy. It will ruin his sex life, turn his wife into a bloatfish, potentially cause her harm, and more than likely make her emotionally volatile and therefore tougher to live with. Jeez. Sign me up for that living situation.
Or it could be a moral resistence. We spend countless thousands of dollars to make babies on the one hand while we have kids in foster homes. Throw in abortion and the fact we can also do in vitro surgeries to safe fetuses around the same age some get aborted, and we have a huge cauldron of moral dilemmas when it comes to the applicaton of science to our procreative abilities.
That, of course assumes he is thinking with his big head rather than the little head in his pants. My bet is on the little head doing the talking with respect to his resistence to this surrogate pregnancy, as it SHOULD be.
Oink.
-
Sing it Sister
[Read the article: Old school]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am the same age as the author, but I pee standing up. Still, I can relate to her vitriol. I cannot abide being associated with the self absorbed baby boomer generation, being on the tail end of it.
I have also slowly come to realize I am closer to being old than I am removed from being young. It's time to slow down on a few things, take better care of my body, and start worrying about the end game.
It doesn't mean I am ready to sit on a couch and do jigsaw puzzles. It just means I have to lay off the booze, give up the butts, watch what I eat, and realize sexually I am no longer a vending machine capable of handing out snacks in rapid fire succession. It doesn't mean I am sitting in a shawl. It just means I have to pick my spots for hedonism and plan my sexual menu a little better.
So yes, let your hair go gray and stop worrying about looking anorexic. Self assurance has incredible sex appeal.
-
Have we found the missing link?
[Read the article: I want my fiancée's exes to die violent, painful deaths]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I read the LW's rant with detached bemusement. My initial reaction was to hand him a banana and check to see how badly he's injured his knuckles from dragging them on the ground for so long.
Having been married for close to a quarter century, my recollection of those early years could be called fuzzy. One thing I do know, however, is that my wife wound up having three former girlfriends as roomates for her last semester of college. Anytime I stayed at that apartment resulted in the three of them asking all sorts of questions about my sexual technique in the morning. "Did he do X? I hope you did Y, he loves that. Do you still love that?"
It was uncomfortable, to say the least. We have stayed in touch with two of those three women to this day.
Once ensconsed in our own apartment living in sin my wife was invited to a party by an ex boyfriend. I let her go alone and she managed to come back absent rug burns. Later on my high school sweetheart wound up going to grad school in town and called the house.
That one didn't go over too well. My not as yet wife felt threatened, so I let it drop and did not meet up for lunch or a night out shooting the shit. (I am now e-mail buddies with that high school sweetheart and my wife is fully aware of it.)
This LW has a jealousy that from this untrained eye looks to be incredibly unhealthy. It conjures up the soundtrack of saturday night fever, a T-Top Camaro, blow dried hair poofed up and parted down the middle, and toothpick hanging out of his mouth while he flexes his muscles in the mirror from which he cannot tear himself away for very long.
Fast forward about 10 years and you have a nice beer gut and a wife beater T with some spaghetti stains. He still can't stay away from the mirror for very long, however.
This fucking guy has problems. My greater concern happens to be for the woman. Hopefully this possessive piece of shit doesn't have anger management issues to boot, or else this situation could be even uglier.
The LW's fiance has my heartfelt sympathies. Hopefully she'll bail and he winds up with some gum snapping bimbo who thinks irrational jealousy is cute, and they can scream away at each other through to their declining years.
With any luck one or both of them will be sterile.