I think the thing that galls me more than anything else about Alfie’s whole line on that podcast is that all those thoughts and impulses he describes are normal. It is normal to find babies tiring and be ambivalent about having more of them. It’s normal to still have sexual urges toward other people once a committed relationship has moved into a settled phase (more frequent and intense in men on average but still largely universal). It’s normal to secretly feel some subversive thrill at the idea of a guilty transgression. None of these things are especially good, but they are not unusual or exciting or exceptional. They are just base impulses, and part of being a responsible adult and trustworthy romantic partner is accepting them as a likely reality and just getting over yourself and suppressing them so that you don’t wound your partner and screw up your family. There are no great unsayable truths in anything he said, no revelations, no edge. He might as well have spent six minutes talking about how he’s decided he’s going to start scratching his anus in public. Man in “arse sometimes itchy at awkward moments” shocker.
There are some things we accept tacitly as a society. People will sometimes make unorthodox arrangements to accommodate these needs, most will try and stick to the status quo and just try and accept no extramarital shenanigans as the price one pays for one’s partner extending them the same courtesy. Inevitably sometimes people will fail, and sometimes their partner can overlook it and sometimes they can’t. But it’s so vicious and base to air this stuff gleefully in the public square. What purpose does it serve? None. It’s not awareness-raising, nobody benefits from its “normalisation”. Its only function is to draw attention to him and to humiliate Jessie and by extension the children.
What a baby. I hope he gets gout.
There are some things we accept tacitly as a society. People will sometimes make unorthodox arrangements to accommodate these needs, most will try and stick to the status quo and just try and accept no extramarital shenanigans as the price one pays for one’s partner extending them the same courtesy. Inevitably sometimes people will fail, and sometimes their partner can overlook it and sometimes they can’t. But it’s so vicious and base to air this stuff gleefully in the public square. What purpose does it serve? None. It’s not awareness-raising, nobody benefits from its “normalisation”. Its only function is to draw attention to him and to humiliate Jessie and by extension the children.
What a baby. I hope he gets gout.
