Thoughts by Richard Bleil
Now it’s official. According to an article written by Borraz-Leon and Rantala published in Science Direct (2020), narcissist and psychopaths are perceived as more attractive and have more sexual partners. It’s been suggested that their self-confidence and aggressive nature to go after what they want are the reasons they are more attractive. They’re also more likely to display the type of aggression associated with rape and the use of coercion tactics to have sex with a woman.
They’re the bad boys.
When I was an undergraduate in college, I was paired up with a student who had the coercion down, and yes, he ended up with many sexual partners. Women loved him the first time they met him, and frequently let him take them to our room to keep me awake all night long. The second time they met him, they realized that it wasn’t an act and didn’t want to have anything to do with him any longer. He would sometimes call a female student and say, “are you ready?” When asked what he was talking about, he would claim that she promised to go out with him, which of course they didn’t, and they’d usually give in because they didn’t want to break a promise they never made and end up spending the night with him.
But I think the law of averages tends to kick in eventually. I graduated from college a virgin, and was barely sexually active through graduate school which, let’s be honest, are our prime years for finding somebody and settling down. I don’t know what happened to him, but there’s a good chance he found somebody for a longer relationship or even marriage, and is probably in a relationship today (again, pure speculation). With more partners, even if most are extremely short (the proverbial one-night stands), eventually they’ll end up with somebody who will want a long-term relationship with him. And me? Here I sit at two in the morning, writing a blog about how lonely I am.
This is a double jeopardy. Recently, it’s been suggested that oxytocin, the “love hormone” that is released when one is in a relationship, has been shown to stimulate stem cells to develop into cardiomyocytes, the muscle cells involved in heart contractions. These can repair even the damage done by a damaged heart such as in a heart attack, like the one that I had. Not only am I single, but apparently, my lack of sexual activity is literally killing me.
Figures.
Perhaps the problem is one of instant attraction. I’ve heard it said that a woman will decide if she will sleep with a man within the first few minutes of meeting a man. There’s still a kind of tradition that says that a woman shouldn’t sleep with a man until the third date. Of course, this in and of itself leads to problems as men come to expect that, well, it’s the third date of so of course you owe me sex. The reality is that there is no hard and fast rule. A woman will sleep with you when she’s ready, but there is a certain wisdom, in my personal opinion, to waiting.
My wife was a gorgeous woman when we first met. She was just stunning. The interesting thing is that, now that I know her better, I don’t find her attractive at all. Her personality has overwhelmed her looks in my mind, and I’ve found women far more attractive after getting to know them than when I first saw them. I wonder how successful narcissists and psychopaths would be with meeting sexual partners if it was more common to wait to get to know somebody before letting him sleep with her. As a society, we’ve (in my opinion) lost the joy of anticipation. When I was a child, I used to get gifts on my birthday and at Christmas, but that was all. You had to wait until one of those two days to see if you received what you wanted. These days, I tend to buy what I want, often as an impulse. It’s just not the same thing. The anticipation is lost, as is the sudden thrill when I did get what I wanted.
Ultimately, I’m more ashamed of the women that I have slept with than not. I have a few former lovers that I’m truly happy I was with, but given the chance to do it over again, I would have far fewer lovers. I wonder how many of those women my roommate brought home are happy with having slept with him, or if they would have slept with him if they had just waited until another date or two. I don’t really like giving advice in my blogs, but maybe it’s something worth thinking about.
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