On Sex, Concubinage, and Marriage

The Temptations of the Flesh

I have been reading James Wharram’s autobiography People of the Sea (the second one, really, his first book was titled Two girls, two Catamarans).

In it he describes his life and his… obsession seems too strong a word for the kind of guy I think he was, but certainly shall we say, lifelong interest, in sailing and, I think, being free.

It is a common enough sensation in those of us with an explorer’s heart. When I was 16, I wanted to get a yacht and just sail the world, maybe trading stuff from one port to another. Visiting exotic places in far away lands, seeing lands and people I was curious about, but also, for me at least, that mystic pull of the Ocean. There is something of the divine, and of the terrifying; the ancient, and fickle Gods of Odysseus,  but also the glorious beauty of God in the Ocean.

I moved to Cape Town with all my possessions in one car aged 19 to get away from my father mostly, but also because of the Ocean. On the day I left home for good, I received the most incredible letter from my grandfather, with whom I used to write. I had told him I was leaving home in a previous letter. I wish I still had that letter, but my family, every one of them, from my brother, mother and father, were never very good at keeping my possessions, even when I specifically left instructions to please care for this or that thing. Girlfriends and wives too, now I think of it. Present wife excepted. So my mother threw it out.

But I still remember his neat handwriting and the words. Telling me he lost his father at 19 and left to another city to make his way, and he had no doubts I would do well, too, saying at 19 I was like a young lion, forging ahead.

I loved that man. Still do. And one day I look forward to seeing him again.

Maybe it’s genetic. We are Venetians after all, and all my children love the Ocean.

I never did get to buy a yacht and travel around the world that way, but I certainly did travel a lot anyway. On planes mostly. And I have seen a fair amount of it all.

I understand the pull towards the unknown.

In my twenties and thirties and even up to forty, before I had a daughter, I would have jumped at the chance to travel to Mars. Risks and all.

And even now, if you told me I could have my family on a little antigravity ship… I would be tearing around the Galaxy to check everything out.

But I think now… what life would I have had on that yacht?

James Wharram wrote how he did his first Atlantic crossing, in a catamaran of his own design that he built himself, with two girls, with whom he was obviously having a sexual relationship. He had a child with one woman, who however committed suicide shortly afterwards. Apparently as a result of some long-standing trauma from the horrors she had seen in the second world war in Germany.

In this book, People of the Sea, which I am not even half-way through, he has already described how he made his living selling his boat designs and how he and five women build a much larger boat, Tahini. And it is fairly clear he also had a sexual relationship with all five women.

Aside the morality for a moment (we’ll return to it, it’s the main point of this post) you have to admire the man in some way. He essentially almost singlehandedly brought to life an old —but new in the West— style of sailboat, the catamaran, and took on a life that is without a doubt fraught with emotional tests few men can survive, and a real level of danger. He also sailed home-made boats in storms with an all female crew, which is nearly as trying as juggling a sexual relationship with four of five women in the confines of a yacht at sea.

Most secular guys would probably give a limb to live like that.

Maybe I would have wanted that life too if I had got the yacht, I certainly always had it as a go-to, that I would have liked a 70 foot Trimaran with an all female crew of masseuse trained supermodels, but in reality… I mean, I am certain that as a young guy with zero knowledge of any religion aside my basic zen-agnostic-stoicism blend, there is no way I would not have enjoyed the experience or at least delved into it deeply… but… reflecting on my life and the debauched side of it that I certainly experienced even if it did not involve all-female crews… I have to say that such an existence seems to me to be really quite lonely.

No, it’s not a typo.

I mean lonely.

Perhaps not if you don’t know anything else though, it’s hard to say.

I have certainly juggled multiple women at a time, and though it was not on a yacht and they were not with each other in the same space and the same time as with me —it was more of a rotating door type thing although they were aware of each other— the point was simply that I was passing the time. I was simply distracting myself from the monotony of life and pretty much everything in it.

It got to the point that I actually got tired of it. I remember the day precisely and it was a fully conscious decision. I had been in blissful solitude at home, doing nothing much, binge watching NCIS, and in a self-reflecting mood I realised that I was aware that I could have carried on into old age never settling on just one woman. I knew even if I lived to a hundred I would never be missing female company if I wanted it. But the very nature of the rotating door of faces, bodies, intimacies, got so that the thrill of a new body, or new initial rush, new sexual explorations, became… well… what they always were. Just a distraction. Like consuming tiktok videos instead of reading a good book. Or playing solitaire or candy crush on your phone instead of doing something —anything— better.

And so I thought I’d try getting married (again) and having children. And of course, my method for selecting a (second) wife was predicated on my experience, so… it had quite a bit to do with the sex side of things, the external look, and the agreeability.

All of which was a rather superficial perspective on things and for which, I ignored definite hints of red flags. Because hey, no one is perfect right… so yeah…

That went spectacularly wrong and the only good thing of it was my daughter, who after her first birthday I missed the next eight years of, but now she has been living with me for three years, and I can’t ever have that time back, but still, she is here, she chose it, and made it happen too, which is pretty incredible, but in that in-between time, I also married again, and my daughter was one of the only people I told it to at the time. There wasn’t anyone else really in my daily life that mattered that much. Or hers I guess. We went away and got married in Belgium, with two strangers as our witnesses in a Church in a smallish town.

Then I had more children, but also my life with my third (and final!) wife has been pretty intense from the start. 7 years later it feels both as if we just met a few months ago and also as if we’d been together 20 years.

It’s only with reflection and appreciation of intangibles that you realise things that are hard to put into words.

For example:

Is my life harder, less comfortable and less free now? Yes. Absolutely.

Do I miss my more comfortable, more free, much easier life of before? No. Not at all. The only thing I miss of it is the money I was making then compared to now, and I also know getting back up there is harder given the far more onerous and static things I have to deal with. But the only real concern I have is for the chance to give my children enough opportunities to at least give them a decent start in life, though, the way things are going, maybe reading the wind, knowing about ballistics, and how to make a fire in the wild, might be as good as it gets.

And I’d like my wife to feel more comfortable, but hey, she too has (more grudgingly than me I think) understood that there are more important things. But women do tend to have a tendency to look at the past with melancholy more than men. Pillars of salt and all that.

While the best approach of course is to neither live in the past nor the future, but live right here and make it as good as you can, because the past is gone and the future is not written yet, no matter what you might imagine.

Anyway, as I work in the olive grove, trying to do the job on my own that usually a team of men would do, back aching, my elbow acting up again, and my deviated septum making breathing more difficult than it should be, I also find myself contemplating life and what matters.

Children matter.

Family matters (not always the one you were born into, especially if you had boomer parents!)

Marriage matters.

The latest iphone does not.

In fact even phones in general may not matter that much.

TV DEFINITELY does not matter.

Reading good books does.

Logic and reason matter.

The natural rhythm of life, of nature, of seasons and plants and animals matters (and we are busy destroying it, but not like they tell you. Chemtrails matter. Climate change does not. HAARP matters. Electric cars matter only in that they are impossible on a global scale and terrible for any kind of non-polluting concept.

Being free to THINK whatever you want matters.

Offending stupid people doesn’t (I mean they may kill you for it, it’s probable even, but those fucking NPCs really don’t matter anyway).

Not having another human decide what you can eat, think, watch, do, believe, explore or look into matters.

Justice matters. Laws that don’t serve justice don’t matter.

Honesty matters.

Dishonest people matter; they make everything worse.

Your health matters.

Love matters. Actual Love, not the horse-trading “you be nice to me so I can be nice to you” most people do.

Sacrifice matters.

Beauty matters.

Beauty is the most subtle and possibly the closest to the divine of all virtues.

And in this ongoing and infinite list of thoughts of what matters and what does not…

Does having sex with five different women at will, like in a harem —presumably a happy one in which no jealousy exists even, however utopic that sounds— matter?

As an experience? Perhaps… but compared to what?

Compared to not having sex at all? Sure, then I’d say it does matter.

Compared to having a wife and children and a happy family? No. No, it doesn’t matter at all.

And so I started to sense, not just think or intellectualise about being married and having children. Which is what most men do today. Especially younger men. Intellectualise, I mean.

They may say they want a proper wife and marriage and children, but it is a little bit like a young boy, having read about the Illiad, wanting to find, make, or have a bronze armour and a Hoplon shield and plumed bronze helmets to go to war for the attentions of the mythical Helen.

It sounds good, or cool, or right. But it’s really just an intellectual thing.

Now I have lived it a few years, and I look back at myself when I was 16, alone in a small room in Stratford-Upon-Avon, thinking about life and how I had ended up in England to study because of a friend being there, far from my family and siblings… and pondering what it all meant and what made sense… the feeling was the same. I really was always just after one girl that would fit with me.

The monologue voiceover the character played by Sean Penn in the film The Thin Red Line, does at the end of the film resonated with me deeply as a 20-something year old. It was pretty much how I had always thought. Still is in a way, except…

We, my generation, were raised in a completely deracinated, degenerated society, composed of our baby boomer parents, that if we survived their abortions of us, basically shat in everything that came before them and taught you only their way and that only their absurdly egotistical philosophies were good and real and true. All else was lies and bad.

And now I know better. A whole LOT better. And mine is not second-hand information.

I went to dig and find out the truth myself. Like a man obsessed, because in truth I am. Always have been.

I understand Wharram’s wish to explore, to be free… but above all, I wish to know the highest truth it is possible to know.

Wharram may have looked at the stars to navigate, and his women for their varied characters and ways to love.

But even if I were sailing, and looking at stars to navigate, part of me would still wonder about those planets far away, and the space between the stars, the vast enormity of it, and how it would feel to sail there… in that eternal emptiness punctuated by beauty so vast…

And I have known plenty of women, beautiful and sexy and interesting and varied and kind or cruel and everything in between, but ultimately, I only need and want one. And a lifetime might just be enough to explore really and truly every part of her, and her of me, and see, in the thrill and the danger and the excitement and the fear and the alarm and the reckoning and ultimately the love, of it all, of her, of me, of us, if we can reach that point of unity, that blends us so, that even the words of the Bible are not enough to really give a sense of it… the “one flesh” it mentions marriage is… but how many actually experience it?

Men and women have died looking for it.

They all spend their life waiting for it.

Hoping it really exists and finds them.

And then, even when it does, if it’s too uncomfortable, or unexpected, or it hurts, or is too much, they run away from it and lie to themselves about what it was.

But I ask you, reader, what kind of life is it if you are not seeking that at the very least? However imperfectly and weakly and frightened you might be, what else could possibly matter more when compared to that?

I put it to you, that ultimately, it really is true:

Love conquers all.

And for me at least, that entails a depth of intimacy that goes well beyond the sexual, though, of course, it cannot exist either without it. And I just don’t see you can have that with multiple women at once.

I know you can have a thrill, a sensation of excitement, like a rollercoaster ride that is really fun. Sure. But that doesn’t compare to a rally through a continent or three.

And while the rally through a continent or three is almost guaranteed to have some pain, sweat and tears in it, which do you think will mean more to you at the end of it?

A rollercoaster ride, or even an endless sequence of them, or that rally across deserts, snow, rain, forest and jungles, cities and highways, and everything in between?

I know I cannot explain to you the beauty of marriage.

Hell, I been married three times and I’m only just figuring it out, but I can try. I must try.

Because the entire world around you is lying to you.

Podcasts like whatever, and even supposed religionists like Andrew Wilson and his wife, even if they claim to be fighting “for” “traditional values” (whatever that is), are really all presenting the undertone of marriage being a terrible idea.

Because laws, and secular powers, and feminism and, and, and…

Well, you know what? Marriage to the wrong person really IS a terrible idea! (Insert 1990s, badge with written on it “Ask me How!”)

Marriage to the right person?

It’s tough. It can really suck some days.

It may make you ponder if life is just one cruel joke some days. Yeah. That’s marriage to the right person. But you know what? When those days pass, you also have days where you realise the truth of things, the truth of what actually matters in life, really matters…

…and then you’ll want to fall to your knees to thank God because you feel the Grace he has given you might be some mistake, bad accounting by St.Peter, or something.

And you look at your children and know they will cause you endless pain in their lives. But they also will make you cry with how much you love them and their unique, awesome, and funny souls.

So, I know maybe you have been listening to that fake: Andrew Tate; and you think fast cars and a harem is what life’s about; or maybe another fake, some “Pastor” from a heretic pretend-church, telling you some screwed up puritan version of what a marriage should look like; but listen, at the most crude: reproduction serves the continuation of humanity.

But if there is no higher truth, no higher love, then why bother, right?

On the other hand… if there is a God, then marriage and making children and raising them as best you can is the point.

The entire point.