I’m alternately amused and annoyed by the problem pages in newspapers. On the one hand many of the letters and emails are so trivial or half-witted you can’t help but laugh at the idea that a real person could end up in such a predicament. Then on the other hand I get annoyed with the way things are described or phrased in the problems.
One phrase that commonly shows up is the idea of person X “finding” themselves in bed with person Y. Another variation is person X before they know it kissing/cuddling/doing the monkey with Person Y.
I can’t see how it’s possible to “find” yourself in bed with someone. To find something implies to me that it was lost beforehand. The only way I can conceive that someone could “find” themselves in bed with someone is through the liberal use of roofies, but that’s a whole other situation. I accept and acknowledge that in the heat of passion things can move fast, but not so fast or out of control that the people involved lose all perception of themselves and what they’re doing. Surely if they blacked out as the phrase almost suggests they wouldn’t remember any of the “mind blowing sex” or the “amazing lover” that they’ve been with. The simple fact is that in a rush of sex hormones, and inflammed passion and the evolutionary reproductive pressure of a million years of evolution weighted the decision to one side. I belive however that the decision was still there to be made. It might have been a split second thing, maybe as long as it takes for your pants to hit the bedroom floor, but ultimately you made the decision.
Fundamentally I suppose this is about how I perceive the world. I’ve always believed in free will, self determination and personal responsibility. Put simply I have a fundamental belief that human beings have free will, and that everything that happens to us is as a result of those choices. To say that you “found” yourself in bed with someone implies that you had no control over the situation. It’s not an attempt to convey the passion of the situation, but instead is an attempt to excuse yourself from taking responsibility for doing what you shouldn’t have been doing. Let us be honest here, if you’re writing to a problem page about this you’re either boasting about the whole thing or you’re suffering from a level of guilt about the situation.
I suppose that some of you will disagree with me, and maybe even point out that human beings are not machines. That they can’t be expected to think logically in the heat of passion. Well sorry, but thinking and logic are what seperates us from animals in the first place.
I’m not saying that people can’t have regrets about their actions, and the effects of their actions. Regret is one of those things that you have to learn to live with as you grow up, but so is responsibility, and that’s what this is all about.
Now sorry if I appear to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I truly believe that fully half of the so called “problems” that seem to grace the problem pages in a given week could be simply solved by people taking responsibilty for their lives, making the correct choices and thinking, for even one nano-second, about what the reprecussions of their actions could be.
Or maybe I am a robot after all…?