Opinionated Lovers and Sex
Dear [Mentat],
Oh, and as far as mates having opinions being preferable goes, yes, I suppose it’s good if people have lots of them in a union. Maybe. To a small degree. But often, beliefs, particularly when strong or radical and inflexible, can diminish a relationship much more than bolster it. It’s great when mates have opinions — that they generally share. But when attitudes are too wide, too refined, too numerous, or too varied, getting through the day without irritating our lovers gets difficult.
I’d argue that indeed, the more opinionated we are, whether informed or not, the more otherwise-potential mates will turn from us. Could you imagine being married to someone like [an ardent] feminist [...]? Now this lady is poised, well read, very attractive, and perhaps even loving. Most of her arguments she supports well, and her message will hopefully help reduce the sorts of discrimination that keep women from realizing their dreams. She [says] what really [needs] saying, though I bet it’d be hard for a man to be in a relationship with her. She’s very dogmatic and reactive, blaming the male-dominated power structure for about every injustice ever put on females whether at work, out on the town, at church, at home, or in the bedroom. How could most men ever truly relax around someone as fired up as [she], knowing that anything they did, she’d see through her filter of the female-wronged-by-men? She may construe their actions as non verbal disagreements with her many strong opinions and either argue or leave. Thus while it’s true that a healthy debate can be fun, much like the arguments you, Parker and I had at McKee Place, I think that strong opinions in a relationship have great potential to do more harm than good. So while I agree with the value you place on her having opinions of her own, so long as she offers them tentatively and with humility, they can help her lovers grow and I’d enjoy that. But if a lover offers them to me as dictates, and puts me down for not sharing them, I can do without the opinions.
I’d also say, as I think we’ve discussed before, that the closer a lady is to a perfect ten, the more easily we can overlook her mental shortcomings; whether those be strong or weak opinions, excess or inadequate intellect, overly vast or vastly limited knowledge, or whatever measure of mate incompatibility you’d care to mention. When a lady is truly gorgeous, much to [our feniminist's] chagrin, the “noise” personality traits, which contribute nothing to what makes her a perfect ten, [...] don’t matter as much as they might for less attractive people. [...]
Now I don’t mean to say that no parts of a lady’s personality affect how attractively we perceive her. In fact, I’d argue that elements of her personality, more than sheer body shape, strongly influence the perfect-ten assessment. They affect how she talks and how she walks, how she sips a cup of tea and the grace with which she enters a room. In general, her personality drives the animated qualities that differentiate her from a heated mannequin. But as long as she demonstrates mental traits that make our mate-detectors perk up and say yes, yes, yes, then her other mental traits, those having little to do with passion-arousal, become notably less meaningful. We can tolerate an overly opinionated lady [...], even if she slams us often for our “ignorance” as long as we think that she’s worth it, as long as the pleasure we get far outweighs the pain. We can even enjoy the uneducated musings of an airhead as long as her perfect-ten electricity flows through our beings. And we’ll most definitely think she’s worth it, if we perceive her as a perfect ten, because perfect tens produce the greatest pleasures and so, are the most likely to produce enough pleasure to overpower any of their pitfalls in the minds and loins of the men they attract.
Now we both suspect that [Olga] is [not] perfect ten. But if she were a ten, if she were the ripest apple of the eye, if absolutely no imperfections could be detected, then it could be that her bedroom allure would never diminish even after years of nightly [love making]. Such long-lived passion is not uncommon among couples. The problem you cite of how to keep the relationship interesting once the bedroom time grows boring would be academic for quite a while if you indeed picked a perfect ten to begin with. Unless something radical happens, perfect tens usually stay perfect tens for decades. Certainly [First Love] did for me.
Plus, if your goal is not to have the same partner until death do you part, but only to have one as long as it’s gratifying, then your problem is solved by pulling up the stakes and moving on to the next girl if the first one ever gets too boring. Now I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. But I’m sure you’ll be able to distinguish my serious points from the humorous ones.
