Chapter 57

The Marxian Dilemma:

A few years ago as I, how shall I put it, matured, I realized that I was beginning to face the Marxian dilemma.
At first I ignored it and carried on with my life as though nothing had changed. Everyday interactions carried on as though nothing had altered but deep in my psyche a niggling awareness of something greater was disturbing me.

Suddenly, about a year ago, with a blinding flash of cognisance I realized just exactly what was happening. Simply put, as I got older and my sex drive abated, I found that the energy expended in pursuing females was taking its toll on my slowly waning powers. I just didn’t have the same energy anymore.

So in order for it to be worth the effort then the source of attraction needed to be ever more desirable. But therein lies the rub, as it were, for as one gets older one is likely to be less desirable to members of the opposite sex. So the number of opportunities for dalliances will slowly decrease.

The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss predicted, quite accurately, the time of his death by noticing that he was sleeping more as he got older. He reasoned that when he got to sleeping all the time he would be dead.

In a similar way I reason that I should be able to calculate when I will have to give up sex altogether. It will be when the amount of effort required is more than any, and I mean any, incredibly pretty girl can induce me to provide.

In other words no beautiful girl will look at me twice and, of course, no un-incredibly beautiful girl will turn me on at all.

This leads me to the Marxian dilemma. Marx commented that he would not wish to become a member of a club which would have low enough standards that it would admit him. (yes, yes, Groucho not Karl).

The dilemma is clear. Should one lower ones standards and join, or maintain them and keep to the moral high ground?

To make the obvious extrapolation, I would not wish to sleep with a girl whose standards were so low that she would sleep with the aging old wreck that I am slowly turning into.

So what is to be done?

I am still romantic enough to believe in love and its importance but here in Phuket I see the negation of all of the important values which make love a useful paradigm.

Erich Fromm (yes I Know I keep quoting him but he is very good) very elegantly explains why Thai/farang relationships very rarely work. Not that he’d ever been to Thailand, I think, but his concepts are very relevant.

Fromm distinguishes between immature love and mature love.

Immature love is that love which depends on need. Like a baby loves its mother.
Mature love is the converse of this. It is needing someone because you love them.


Most Thai/ farang relationships depend on need. The Thai girl loves the farang because she needs his money and the farang loves the girl because he needs sex.

Hmm! how immature can you get. And where is it likely to lead?

I quizzed a Thai girl who I know very well about this. She has had a relationship with a farang, as his mistress, for close on twenty years (He is married to an English lady).
She agreed that it was not the best way to conduct affairs, as it were, but suggested that in some cases the participants attitudes can grow into a more mature pattern. She agreed that this was very much the exception.

This leads me to believe that these relationships should come with a government health warning.

Like cigarette smoking the likely outcome can be pretty disastrous.

But to get back to Marx or there abouts.

What is to be done?

Here in Phuket, of course, one can acquire a partner for the night for a few hundred baht. I am not totally immune to their charms but to wake up next to someone whose name I don’t even know is not really my scene.

Sex is great but I want so much more than that.

I would rather be with a person I love, with no sex, than have sex with a person I don't love. That is quite simple really except that it is not neccesarily attainable.

There are many farangs here of my age and older who try to pretend that they are still desirable when, in fact, the only thing desirable about them is the size of their wallets. It is often said here that Phuket is not the place to fall in love. That is probably sound advice. I have noted a considerable number of cases where a farang has been stripped of his money and the Thai lady has obtained riches beyond her wildest dreams as she waved goodbye.
This is the unpalatable truth about this place.
On the other hand I have met farangs who are conning local girls into providing sex and then disappearing.
That is the other unpalatable truth here.

I have met some wonderful people here but sometimes I do despair just a little.

So perhaps now is the time to renounce all the sins of the flesh and become a Buddhist monk.

Hmmm!

Trouble is I really hate sleeping on my own!