I know I’ve been talking about idiots a lot lately. I’m sorry if I give the impression that I’m belaboring an issue that doesn’t need to be belabored. We’ve all had problems with idiots at some point in our lives. Most people know that they tend to complicate, obscure, and frustrate many productive endeavors in life. Anyone who thinks otherwise just hasn’t dealt with enough idiots.
Well, there’s still one last aspect to this issue that I want to touch on. I was going to talk about it in my post about how idiots affect our love lives and our sex lives, but I felt like it would’ve derailed the underlying point I was trying to make. For this particular issue, I want to focus on method behind the idiocy. Specifically, I want to apply that method to love.
That kind of insight matters to me, particularly, because I’m trying to be a quality erotica/romance. That means it’s not enough to just know how to craft meaningful love stories with plenty of sex appeal. I also have to be mindful of how these stories can go horribly wrong and the quickest way to do that is to mix idiots with love.
Make no mistake. Idiots can ruin love, sex, and everything in between just as they ruin so much else in life. It’s rarely pretty. It can be downright tragic. Most of the time, though, it’s just pathetic. People have a low enough opinion of the human race thanks to idiots. They way they can undermine love only strengthens that opinion.
So what are the specifics of idiots screwing up love and making life difficult for aspiring erotica/romance writers? Well, there are a number of dynamics at work, but they’re best summed up by this chart I found a few days ago while doing my other post on idiots and love. It’s as humorous as it is uncomfortably true.
It’s usually difficult to sum up complex subjects into a simple piece of clip art, but this comes pretty damn close. Sure, it’s a bit cynical in some areas, but the message is clear. Stupidity is not a key ingredient to meaningful love.
Let’s break down some of the dynamics at work. For the most part, it comes down to a mix of incentives and motivations. When a smart guy and a dumb girl get involved, there aren’t a lot of factors that would lay the foundation for a meaningful relationship.
A smart guy won’t be able to share deeper emotions with an idiot woman. She’d do more to frustrate rather than inspire his passions. She’d be immature, childlike, and annoying. Being an idiot, chances are she’d find a way to screw up contraception so the odds of her ending up pregnant would be pretty high.
The man, in this case, would have both the opportunity and the means to exploit the woman’s stupidity. It would be less about developing love and more about getting some easy sex from someone too stupid to know understand what was going on.
This kind of dynamic appeals to the kind of smart men who tend to be assholes. Even if they want to find love, they’ll jump at a chance for easy sex. It’s productive manifestation of their biological imperative. Sure, their offspring won’t benefit from having an idiot mother, but it’ll still put the smart man ahead of the game in terms of evolution.
A similar dynamic plays out with smart women and stupid men. Let’s face it, there are plenty of stupid men out there who don’t know a healthy romance from a wet fart. As a man, I freely admit that such stupidity can make for comically toxic romances that are even worse than the ones we see on “The Big Bang Theory.”
A smart woman may have an incentive to avoid having an idiot man’s stupid kids. However, she also has an incentive and means to extract as many resources out of him. Being smart, she could easily manipulate him into a situation where he marries her and is legally obligated to provide for her.
Some women are able to do this to smart and successful men. Just look at Anna Nichole Smith, may she rest in peace. If men like that are unable to avoid those kinds of legal pitfalls, then idiots don’t have a prayer.
Smart women will rope them into unfavorable arrangements that involve giving them a significant chunk of their income. Those same smart women will easily be able to outwit their idiot husbands into cheating with far smarter, more attractive men. If they’re really smart, they’ll even get the idiot husband to provide for a kid they think is theirs. When it comes to human biology, it’s basically a perfect win/lose scenario.
Again, this kind of dynamic depends on one part of the romance being kind of an asshole. Idiots are easily manipulated and doing so requires more than a few dick moves, to say the least. The kind of smart people who take advantage of these situations are, by and large, bullies on the same level as Biff Tannen from “Back To The Future.”
It’s not quite as tragic when two people who are equal idiots get together, but it’s just as inane. These are situations where two people are too stupid to understand what meaningful love is, the role that sex plays, and how to make something of it. If you want a perfect example of that, just watch a few episodes of “Married With Children.” That’ll tell you everything you need to know about how idiots approach sex and love.
If you need a real-world example, there is one clear sign that seems to come up often among those who may not realize that they’re being idiots. I’ve seen it happen a few times in my own life. I’m sure others have experienced it too in some form or another.
It often happens in a casual conversation with friends. It probably happens with women just as much as it does men, although I imagine the men are a lot more eager to jump into the realm of idiocy when given the chance. The conversation usually unfolds like this.
“So how are things going?”
“Well, I’m thinking about asking him/her to marry me.”
“Really? Um…why now?”
“We’ve been together for a while now. This is just what people do.”
Read over the last part a few times to get the full context of the idiocy. Even on the surface, the logic is shallow. Does just being with someone for a certain amount of time mean you have to marry or commit to them? Some may make appeals to tradition, but those traditions can sometimes be more excuse than reason, which can cause a whole host of problems.
I’ve heard real people make these arguments. They’re good people who sound smart most of the time, but when they make these kinds of excuses in their love lives, you almost want to hit them upside the head to restart their brain. It doesn’t help that sometimes they’re the only ones who don’t realize they’re in an unhealthy relationship. It’s tragic, but that’s what happens when you’re an idiot.
It gets even worse when you start to mix idiocy and sex. In this instance, I’m not talking about people who put themselves in bad situations that make them victims of serious crimes. That’s a whole other matter that’s neither sexy nor funny. Instances when people are just stupid with their sex lives are far more common and far less reported.
It’s not just men who don’t understand how a vagina works. It’s not just women who overestimate a man’s coordination when he’s horny. Idiots will eagerly have sex at the wrong times for the wrong reasons. It’s one thing to just have sex because you’re horny. It’s quite something else when you have sex to accomplish something stupid.
We’ve heard these kinds of conversations before. If you’ve ever been to high school or known someone who attracted all the wrong people, you’ve probably heard something along these lines.
“We’ll have sex and that’ll shut him/her up.”
“I’ll have sex with him/her to stop them from breaking up with me.”
“He/she wants to have sex with me and I’m not sure how to go about it. Should we break up?”
The people who have these conversations may not be drooling idiots, but their logic and understanding of a situation utterly fails. They treat sex as a means more than an end. They think it’s part of some unwritten rule that they don’t understand. It should be a general rule of them. If a rule is unwritten and hard to understand, then chances are it only applies to idiots.
Idiots having sex and falling in love can cause all sorts of problems. Sometimes, as is the case with “Married With Children,” it can be hilariously entertaining. Most of the times, though, it can be tragic and downright toxic.
That leads me back to the top of the chart I cited earlier, namely the part that identifies what happens when two smart individuals come together. They’re not idiots. They’re not making excuses. They’re together for the right reasons, sharing honest, meaningful emotions. That, my friends, is real love, the kind that makes for much hotter sex.
Idiots can fall in love. Idiots can have sex and make idiot children. Even when it’s comical, it’s still more a cautionary tale than a meaningful story. That’s why I leave those kinds of stories to the Chuck Lorre’s of the world. I’d rather tell stories about non-idiots finding and/or making love.
That’s the kind of love I try to pursue in my novels. I made a concerted effort to forge that kind of love in my latest book, “Passion Relapse.” Whether or not I succeeded is up to the reader. At the very least, I made sure the story wasn’t derailed by idiots.
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