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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the fundamental importance of the character trait of trust or trustworthiness in a marriage?
Rick Rosner: Ok. So, various factors go into the longevity of a marriage. And I can mostly talk about the aspects that have gone into mine. We’ve been married for 30 years. Low self-esteem helps maintain a relationship. There are two types of people in terms of relationships and self-esteem. People with high self-esteem, pricks and bitches can behave cavalierly because they think that they can get into another relationship with ease if they fuck up this one. Carole and I don’t have the highest self-esteem, and that’s been helpful. There are cultural anchors, like religion, that it’s essential to stay married. Neither Carole nor I have those religious anchors; we’re not Catholic.
There are things like bad examples from my past. My mom was married twice, and my dad was married three times. It seems like less work and more rewarding to stay married to put the work into staying married. Carole and I could go into couples counselling about once a month for, I don’t know, more than twenty-five years. I have excellent insurance, which facilitates that. I’m working on the relationship now as far as trust goes; I can’t lie very well to Carol. I can lie about little things like, “Did you feed the dog?” But about big things, I can’t. And really, I haven’t had to; I haven’t murdered anybody where I’ve had to cover that up. But for the most part, I find it easier not to lie, not to be put in a position where I have to lie.
But again, I’m in an excellent position not to have to lie because I have no game with women, and I don’t want to go out and have sex with other women. Which isn’t to say, I wouldn’t. But I’d like to try having sex with some other woman. But not within the, “I’m unmarried.” I’m not going to do that. A, because I have no game. And B, I was beating off for a solid 10-plus years before I lost my virginity. And it makes no sense for me, at least, to go out and try to scuttle the marriage by fucking around, especially since I suck at it. I could buy a hooker, I guess, but I suck at that too. I tried purchasing a hooker when I was in my primary days. It takes me a long time to have sex, maybe, because I was beating off for ten years before I lost my virginity.
But, the whole logistics of being with a hooker didn’t work in 1980. And it certainly wouldn’t work forty-one years later. But the deal is, if I feel like cheating, I can just beat off. And you’re a fucking idiot if you have a reasonable libido close to average libido and you think you’re not going to be beating off even in a settled relationship. I mean, maybe, you’re the fortunate person in a relationship whose libido is as high as yours. And with somebody who continues to make you horny, or you continue to make each other horny. But, in that situation, you may be paid for the other person’s high libido. In different ways, that person might be a crazy pain in the ass another way. ]
Elvis maybe didn’t have to beat off, but he probably did. But there’s almost nobody outside of a sex cult who isn’t going to be beating off sometimes, and you just need to fucking get used to it. And if you resign yourself to having to beat off – you don’t have to phrase it that way, with the pleasure of beating off. And, set aside all the ridiculousness and the potential damage of trying to hook up outside of marriage, you’re saving yourself a lot of pain and misery. So that whole deal where I find it highly unreasonable for me to go look for sex means that that’s one fundamental area where my wife can trust. As far as money, I’ve been lucky enough to have an excellent job for much of my life, so we have savings, so I don’t have to lie about money.
What I’m saying is we’re lucky enough that most of the areas that leave the people in a marriage to lie to each other aren’t areas that are too much of a risk for us. As far as, can you have a relationship where trust is regularly violated? I would think so. Like, if you have a marriage between two beautiful fucking people who can easily fuck other people, maybe that works for them. For much of the 20th century and before, it was, I think, assumed that there was a strong possibility of lying in a marriage. In the first half of the 20th century or say just in America, and probably the world, was just rife with prostitution, it’s perhaps up through the 70s. My dad took the family to New York City when I was a kid around 1970, and we walked through Midtown Manhattan, and there was a little cluster of hookers on every fucking street corner.
If you did the math on that, you’re talking about hundreds of streetwalkers, of street prostitutes, just walking in the streets of Manhattan on a typical night. I first came to L.A. in 1980. There were street prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard, Women on Sunset, and Santa Monica had the boy whores. Now it’s all moved online, I’m sure. But, like, I still think it’s enormous. A hundred years ago, 80 years ago, I think there was a certain level of acceptance that as long as the husband didn’t bring home a venereal disease; it was a possibility that when the husband went out of town on a business trip, that shit might happen, and that’s a significant violation of trust. But I think it fucking happened a hell of a lot.
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Authors[1]
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.Douglas.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
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Rick Rosner 