The mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom recently confessed to having an affair with the wife of a very close friend and co-worker.
Now first of all, this is DELICIOUS news!
Secondly, what was the mayor doing dating a woman in SF? Didn't he know he was in ... well.... SF.
OK, climbing above the belt, for the next couple of days I listened quite a lot to radio talk shows discussing this topic. What I heard was interesting. The pattern was that 90% or more of the female callers were sympathetic to the mayor as against maybe 30% or less of the male callers. The statistics are based on maybe 60-70 calls over two days.
Very interesting!
For some reason, I was expecting the opposite, that women would be less forgiving of illicit affairs. Apparently not.
What do I think about it? Well, first of all let me state the obvious, relationships are complex. Very complex. What attracts two people to each other is hardly formulaic.
On a side note, I was watching this documentary on KQED where some social scientists were trying to predict mutual attraction between copules in a speed-dating session. Needless to say, they were mostly off the mark. Some of the participants were members of the London Seduction Society had lots of tricks uptheir sleeves to seduce women, by using negative hits, projecting themselves as dominating alpha males, etc.. and even more needless to say they didnt fare any better. Actually most of the women just plain hated them and wouldnt go out with them if they were the last men on earth!
Which leads us into my point: if you cant define the attraction, or what will cause it, the corollary is, that it is some phenomenon involving so many unpredictable variables, that no matter how exhaustive a predictive system is, it will fail. And if the forces are so incomprehensible, how does one fight them?
What it boils down to is self control versus giving in to forces we dont comprehend. I guess its easy to be self-righteous and claim that we ourselves stick to our relationships becaue of ideals, trust, faith and all those grand cookups. But lets think about it for a minute. Drop the mask that society enforces us to wear. Get rid of your persona, as Jung would put it. And reevaluate. What if, hypothetically, your dream partner who you thought wouldnt let you anywhere within 10 feet within him/her were to come BEG you to be with them, make love to them, no questions asked, no reasons given and no one in the world would come to know if it. Would you stand by the ideals?
Even that most saintly of politcial figures (I love that oxymoron) the world has known, Gandhi, was not sure if had everything under control. What he ended up doing wad sleeping with his adopted garnddaughter Manu, naked, to test if he could keep his control. My experiments with truth, blah!
It might seem like I am setting the stage to defend Gavin here. But thats not what I am trying. I am trying to play devil to my natural instinct, which is how can the public trust a man who doesnt have any self control. This was a sexual temptation, what if it was a monetary one, would he/she still succumb? Put his private interests before the public's?
Not sure.
Anyways, the women callers were pretty cool about it. One said that she had been in a similar situation and its just not black and white, its well .. complex. Most of the others wanted to separate the public life from the private But what do you do when your public and private masks collide? Who prevails? Do you give in to your animal instincts or stick to your human ones?
One could argue that being a good mayor is totally orthogonal to your private life. What goes on in the confines of your bedroom has no correlation to how you govern a city. Thats a rational argument. But, if you could betray your own personal friend, what about the impersonal, distant public who has placed trust in you? Are trust standards simlar across different domains or can they be contained within certain dimensions of your life?