...idealization of the other...

Well, yes, this is the problem. The married man gets bored with his domestic situation and meets another woman to whom he is sexually attracted, then precipitously decides to end his marriage so that he can get together with the second woman, only to discover once the first flush of sexual enthusiasm has worn off that he is out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The Spitzer solution seems preferable, because eventually most of us reach a point in life at which the testosterone levels fall off and we have probably had all the sex we ever wanted, and we look back and wonder why the hell we did all the stupid things we did when we were young. And we are glad that we never left our wife 20 years ago for Ms. Cute-Derriere in accounting, who we saw only last week in the supermarket in one of those little scooters, weighing 300 lbs and lugging her portably oxygen supply.

To Amerigo: ... I take it that you are now surrounded by 20 year olds. Once I bring children up, I might like them to visit but maybe not to bring all their little friends.

You make too many assumptions. My wife's female friends are 21, 29, 33, 36, and 44 (birthday yesterday)respectively and the children who are running around the house are range from a 2-year-old to sixteen-year-old twins.

My wife has also signed up a deputy wife (unsure of age-about 35) who is renting the spare bedroom and helping out in the kitchen and sharing TV watching chores.

Click my name for more.

Wifey and I are going to work together on a little house improvement project tonight -- so that will be my last post. A pity, since I anticipate some quite interesting posts. I hope I will be able to react to them tomorrow, but if I won't let me tell all participants that I quite enjoyed the opinions I've seen here! My thanks to everybody.

I do think these two -- sex and erotic love, to use rough-and-ready words -- do have a link, but I agree it's not such a direct link as people often assume. I don't know if it's the most important cause for unhappiness in the romantic world--I tend to think that 'the ambiguities of trust' and idealization of the other ('s/he isn't what I thought!') are worse. But I see what you are talking about--many people think their hearts and their gonads will align, and when this doesn't happen they think they have to decide that one is right and the other is wrong. When in fact the decision should be a practical one (what will be the consequences if I follow my heart, or if I follow my gonads?), rather than an ethical one (is one of the two pursuits -- heart or gonads -- "intrinsically demeaning"?)

We should love people. We should also make love to them. These are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. And above all--we should respect people, unless they show us disrespect first. I guess that's the extent of my philosophy in this area.

Even to fake it?

To others: Thank you to all who have addressed post to me which I haven't had time to get to. However, I am now fighting another battle upthread and also must take books back to the library.

Carry on brave warriors!

To Amerigo: I did take a moment to look at your lady love who is indeed lovely, but I take it that you are now surrounded by 20 year olds. Once I bring children up, I might like them to visit but maybe not to bring all their little friends.

Is this a Pygmalion project? Or are you giddy with love?

I suspect the latter but that you are too into your cynical persona to admit it.

I think you're both oversimplifying the issue. Laurel apparently thinks that prostitution is a form of patriarchal oppression; Brightstar, that feminism is an elaborate con-artistry with the goal of reducing men to less than they are. The grain of truth in both views is that these things can causa suffering, but not in such a direct way, and you both dismiss the other side too quickly as being involved in some sort of conspiracy.

I recommend again the two sites that dh490311 mentioned in his post above-- http://lettersfromjohns.blogspot.com/ and http://lettersfromworkinggirls.blogspot.com/. They should make it clear that the psychological/social/cultural/personal reasons that men have to look for prostitutes, or that women may have for becoming prostitutes, are more complicated that has been claimed here thus far.

@ AKA Smith

I have to agree with something Amerigo (?--I think) said to you above -- men don't go to prostitutes simply because they want an orgasm, because that would be easy to get in other ways. There is, curiously, more to the male sexual drive than simply the urge to reach a climax; it is not as simple as that. There are other urges that may be hard to describe to a woman--I wonder if these are again among those 'men-are-different-from-women' things. The sight, the smell and the feel of a sexy woman, which men have to evoke in their heads or look at in pictures, is usually a sine qua non condition for successful self-pleasing. I remember reading a historical novel (actually, an alternate history novel) in which a 'lonesome cowboy' would mention going back to town everytime he got tired of his own right hand. This is quite a possible thing to happen--to become tired of single-handed masturbation, as it were.

I don't know of many studies about male arousal; there seem to be more studies around about female arousal and its causes than male arousal (see e.g. Mary Roach's delightful little book Boink). But I think suggesting that men could do just as well with their hands is like suggesting we could live forever with just rice and beans. In a sense it's true; in fact, a large number of Brazilians do exactly that for year after year. But is it really hard to understand those who would rather eat more than that?

I don't want to make men look 'sleazy'; every time people discuss male desire, this risk looms large in the background. I think the way male desire works is neither demeaning nor animal nor even really unpleasant, even if it happens to be different from the way female desire works. This, however, may be a different discussion.