All Good Things Must Come to an End

I started this blog exactly three years ago on August 2, 2003 with Everything Must Have a Beginning. So let’s bring it full circle:

When I started this blog I was recently finished with living part time in one house with two 20 year old women. Now I am about to live full time in two houses with one 30 year old woman. Hmm… is that progress?

But I’m still Asian. And I’m still a geek.

I am no longer renting a girlfriend, nor showing her off to high school friends (thereby classifying her as a vanity luxury item.) Or maybe I’m fooling myself and I’m still renting, but the currency has changed quite dramatically from pecuniary to emotional.

I am still a successful entrepreneur, still a liberal of convenience, and still an economic conservative.

I am no longer morally alone, although I still feel morally pretty unique.

But I can now say what the wildest thing I have ever done is… it’s living through these adventures in sex and relationships. Sure, I did not blog all of my adventures, and perhaps not even some of the wildest — I have to protect the guilty, you know. And some of the people that have stakes in this game are now readers. But the experiences have pushed my boundaries in new ways and has changed me in some others. But who is to say? Perhaps even wilder still is falling in love and making The Commitment to the long term relationship!

Interestingly, I no longer work nearly as hard at business — it seems too easy. Now I’m trying to work hard at a relationship, which seems more challenging. Let’s see if I can enjoy a similar advantage of experience or economy of scale there also. Let’s also see if I can make as much emotional return at it as I have made financial return elsewhere.

Yeah, that’s it. I guess I’m the same as two years ago, except I’ve switched currencies. I’m investing, working hard, and looking for returns on emotional currency. And perhaps if I’m a winner in that emotional lottery, I’ll be able to give away 80-90% of that emotional currency to others, just like I’ve done with the financial currency in the past.

Share the love, baby.

Or maybe I will fail big time and go back to what I know I can do. That is one of the dangers at being very good at something — that it is easy to give up on new things and go back to what you think you know. Success somewhere weakens the resolve elsewhere. Maybe that’s the real reason I keep switching careers. Maybe it isn’t attention deficit or risk taking behavior... it’s long term attention and risk avoidance!

In 2003 I wrote that the odds were stacked against me for success in relationships. Well, they still are, but I have come to realize that is the point to relationships. They aren’t natural or predestined like Disney would like you to think, no, they are chaotic and difficult, and dammit! yes the odds are stacked against success. And the point is to sometimes beat down those odds and spit on them — the Western approach — and sometimes to accept them and weave those odds into the fabric of yourself and your world — the Eastern approach.

Almost exactly two years ago I wrote:

My belief is the relationships driven by social expectations are least stable because there is so much social evolution and diversity. Relationships that are strictly specified (e.g. contractually) are stable, but short term. Relationships that are highly adaptable can have longevity.

So let’s say that we are looking for stable and long lived relationships. What then? I say that both specification (to achieve stability) and adaptability (to achieve longevity) in the context of a changing socioeconomic environment require abstraction. [Relationships, Back to the Future]

Although I have established abstractions I believe will work, they are not really in service of stability in the conventional sense. I have found that my view of security is not to be competent nor stable. Reviewing what I have written, I believe in an unconventional view that long-term security and stability are unrelated, and in fact are negatively correlated. In business I keep moving to ensure long-term security: moving away from competency and stability. And likewise in my attempts to secure a long-term relationship, I base it on fundamentally chaotic change, embrace destabilizing events and conflicts, and put my efforts into constructing a framework that can best weather changes in an unstable foundation by focusing on expectation setting and honesty. Perhaps due to my upbringing, or perhaps it is insight, but I do not trust so-called stable foundations. I evolved myself for change and adaptation, evolved ways to build organizations that way, and now am working on ways to build my relationships in the same manner. My only power tool? My brain, powered by my resolve and arrogance which, I am told, seem like infinite reserves of energy.

The risk is that a necessary part of this change and adaptation also includes switching partners. The challenge of fidelity — to my partner and to the partnership — this is a true risk. I see the pattern in myself and must be mindful to keep myself motivated toward an unnatural goal.

To that end, my point above about attention and risk avoidance is important here as well: I switched from renting girlfriends to marriage because of risk avoidance. I was wrong back in 2003 when I claimed “renting” was less risky than “owning” — only by having one person and one commitment on the other side of the relationship can you build the stable three party framework that adapts to change and the embrace of conflict. If you have a changing set of partners, you have the chaos and the change, but no framework except self, no stable second party to give you context, and no third party to keep you two together. It is a way of becoming a lost soul. I have met such souls and seen their lives. There is a short-term and perverse desire to be them, but an objective assessment that it doesn’t work in the long run. Can I remain objective, patient, and favoring long term outcomes over short term rewards? This is merely one of many worries.

I also now believe that the mistress system fails to provide the stable framework I need, at least not as a standalone option for a relationship. I believe the mistress system can work as the third party that substitutes for the one that should be in a marriage... so oddly it requires a marriage to work. The downside is that it provides that third party benefit to the man and not his spouse; so it also requires his spouse to find an independent third party, a relationship of her own, her children, or something that anchors indirectly to the marriage. It is less direct than the three party system I advocate, and more fragile as these indirect anchors also weigh down and ultimately may tear apart the thing they anchor because they are independent. In other words, the third party is not shared between husband and wife. Perhaps as a second-best solution it is the right solution, but at the moment I’m not shopping for second best.

Particularly with the resources at my disposal in the resource-worshipping world today, with only self to manage expectations and honesty, I have seen where the path leads: to the decadent God-path I witnessed in Asia, Russia and the Bahamas, which I reject as a human member of this Planet Earth. So the only option appears to be a long-term relationship.

There’s the ironic conclusion to my hedonistic adventures in sex and relationships — it comes back to what, at the surface, appears to be the absolutely most default option! Think of the time and money I could have saved if I merely took the conventional path to the conventional destination!

But I still like to think my unconventional journey has given me better tools to cope with this conventional-appearing, but actually unconventional-in-fact, destination. Yes, when I read my post on marriage contracts, I realize how unconventional! And, by the way, I have raised quite a bit of money in the marriage fund.

You know, probability theory is misunderstood by 99% of the population, and even a majority of scientists (for an example of this, see the classic Monty Hall problem or the coincidental birthday puzzle) Generally the trick is to understand that probabilities are about discounting what is likely to NOT happen, rather than accumulating information about what is likely to happen. In that sense, I arrive at the conventional solution in the probabilistic rational manner — by removing what is likely not to work. Or more artistically, I embraced the Da Vinci view of sculpting — “the art of removing” — and all that removing of possibilities I’ve tried through my adventures in sex and relationships has left me with this relationship with Jenny. And as armless and broken or strange as it may appear to others, it is beautiful to me.

And dear readers, thank you for coming on this journey with me. I have seen a lot, experienced a lot, and thought a lot in my quest for meaning in relationships. I have by no means exhausted all the options, but I have perhaps thought of the parameters of most of those relevant to me. I am not confident enough to say there is any advice or wisdom in these experiences, but it has shaped me as surely as dating and life and love experiences have shaped most others.

As to the future of this blog, maybe there will be a new blog which will have some notes on my traveling and occasional notes on how the Petri dish is looking (and I may perform some corrections on the posts I hurried to post at the last moment), but I’m not sure. But I do know this:

This blog is done.

Trial By Fire, Cold as Ice

Originally I was going to post about my Fire and Ice tour, as promised. But that trip turned out to be more interesting than expected in a manner different than expected. I had thought that I would not be able to post about it, but discussions with Jenny have changed that.

On the mundane level the trip was for a little business. But what I was really looking forward to was driving a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S in the desert in Saudi Arabia at a factory-sponsored PR event, mostly for the benefit of some car enthusiast magazine journalists; then I would drive essentially the same car in Iceland in a separate event.

Fire and Ice.

Permit me a moment to describe this vehicle, which is something of an engineering experiment gone to excess. A monument to those B-movies of the 1950’s where you had oversized everythings: giant ants, giant squid, giant leeches, giant women, whatever (by the way, here’s an article for why giant creatures don’t make sense). Or perhaps the late-arriving bastard child of the wretched excess of the 1980’s that spawned investment bankers, Big Gulps, and SUVs (oh, and here’s an article about how the 80’s are coming back). It is, in short, a 520 horsepower, 530 foot pounds of torque sport utility vehicle. By comparison, the Ford Explorer, the most popular SUV in America, in its most popular configuration has 210 horsepower and 254 foot pounds of torque. Wretched excess personified.

And that’s the main reason I went on this trip. Jenny and I had driven it in Germany essentially on a track, but this promised to be more fun. But alas, my experience with the vehicle is not the part worth blogging.

No, the story worth blogging is about my first great temptation to stray. Here’s the story:

During the course of the trip I passed through London to perform some of the sacrificial finance rituals required to appease the real estate dieties. While there I met the granddaughter of a business acquaintance, I’ll call him “Duke.” Duke was the entrepreneurial founder of a company in the US that, through various mergers and acquisitions, was now a Fortune 500 company. He had a good start coming from a bona fide Social Register family. He had long since retired to an ex-plantation in the middle of nowhere, but his dabbling in investments had crossed paths with mine. I hadn’t remembered that Duke had a granddaughter, but a message had come out of the aether asking me to meet her and to introduce her to a mutual friend of ours. This mutual friend I’ll call “Clovis.” His family is in Burke’s Peerage and he works in the finance industry. Duke and Clovis go way back, Clovis having been the banker for several big transactions during Duke’s rise in fortunes, some great-to-the-n-th grand relatives in their families having been business partners, and, as I heard it, even some, um, genetic material exchange between families.

The plan was that I would pick up Duke’s granddaughter at her hotel, have lunch one-on-one to discuss the introduction, do the introduction at Clovis’offices, sit in on the meeting, take her to dinner at Clovis’ country estate, and then drop her off back at her hotel.

An uncomplicated social obligation. Simple.

Ah, but at lunch I found Amy to be exceedingly charming — dangerously charming, in fact. She was all of 24 years old, but already a cosmopolite in the best way. She had lived in three countries in Europe growing up and spoke four languages, three fluently. She had run away from the family at 14 during a troubled adolescence and put herself through engineering college in the United States at the age of 16. She loved hiking and reading, but was highly experienced at public events giving her the grace, manners and style befitting a scion of wealth. She had worked at a startup company in California, then started her own company with her own financing, and built a small real estate empire — all in five years. She had just come to London from a vacation in Honduras scuba diving and playing in shark cages.

Amy was a no-nonsense, confident, plain speaking, massively self-educated, extremely competitive woman, armed with a very wicked humor and sharp intellect. She also was the most ardent female believer in self-actualization and the value of economic rational actors I had ever met. A true student of Milton Freedman with a little bit of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche thrown in for good measure. She believed in rational economics, but beyond that it was all Darwinian rules — survival of the fittest, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. A little scary.

And Amy was very beautiful. When I first saw her in the lobby I thought she was a model — she wore a fitted Dolce and Gabbana black silk pencil skirted suit with her locks flowing with just a touch of disarray over a pure white blouse. She wore hardly any makeup and no perfume, but she looked and smelled divine. She was the most physically attractive engineer and the most intellectually attractive socialite I had ever met. She had modelled and consulted to help pay for tuition in college. Amy had a dangerous combination: the mind of an old-timer geek in the body of a nubile young model.

Being with her was actually uncomfortable.

Of course Fate played a dirty trick as well. A very scandalous event occurred in a foreign country involving Clovis’ financial institution, and he had to get involved in damage control. I offered to cancel the introduction meeting, but Clovis insisted that he would still meet in the afternoon and fly out afterwards. He insisted that we keep the dinner since his estate was only opened that day for this occasion and it would otherwise go to waste. He made it awkward to say no. The damned social networks were acting more like fishing nets here — entrapping Clovis into meeting Amy and entrapping me into chaperoning her one on one.

Now here was a disaster waiting to happen. Amy was the ideal temptress from my commitments to Jenny — Amy was so much like myself at that age, young and brimming with potential, entrepreneurial, independent, self-actualized, and so on, and she was also extremely attractive.

But it gets worse.

We had the meeting with Clovis where she showed off her charm, grace, wit, style, and business acumen. I could tell that Clovis was smitten and wanted to hire her on the spot. He threw a half-dozen business cards of associates at her, scheduled a follow up meeting, and turned on the sell charm, which she masterfully managed. It was watching art in action. I confess a certain mesmerism. Hell, I wanted to hire her, too. Or something. In a room filled with captains of industry with more business acumen than most Fortune 100 companies, young Amy was in complete control. Shades of my adventure with Sanura, but this was reality.

I weakly attempted to salvage some protection by asking Clovis if there were an executive in his office who could substitute for his presence at dinner. Alas, there was not.

The ride out to dinner took a while. More time to chat. The meeting had excited Amy. She was very pleased, although she described it as “turned on.” It came out that she had tried her hand at being a mistress for about a year in Europe at the ripe age of 22, but decided it wasn’t for her. It was a mixed mistress-mentorship and she had learned a lot on both sides. Keep in mind that this had ended only about a year ago. Amy was experimental: she had her own interesting stories of sex and relationships — from a very different almost converse perspective to mine since sex was so easy for her and business was more difficult — but at the root of it, she had a similar journey to mine the last three years, but without the “happy ending.” She had discovered much about her sexuality (aggressively submissive) and her relationships with men in general and the world at large, and had developed her own personal philosophy about it all.

Great. All of this was looking grim and grimmer. I was finding the car ride a kind of velvet torture. I was quite sexually attracted to her. Thoughts of ownership and submission, mentoring and conquest, passion and intellect, all these mixed in my head and was turning my brain into an organic smoothie. It was 3 AM in Asia, not the ideal time to call for moral support. I text messaged some love notes to Jenny to shore up my defenses, but even so, I longed to know what Amy would be like to touch, to kiss, and how we would make love. It was irrational desire.

Dinner was outside on the west terrace. Of course this patio was about an acre in size and looked over nearly infinite gardens of the kind that only the English can maintain, and perched atop a world-class wine cellar about forty feet below. And at this fantastic dinner at this fantastic castle over a glass of 150 year old Port, Amy pulled the coup de grace on my will: she confessed that she was very attracted to me. More attracted, in fact, than any other man she had ever met, she said.

Nothing turns on a man more than a woman who is turned on by him.

And because Amy is so no-nonsense, she just went for my soft exposed jugular.

There are certain defining moments in any crisis when time stops and the world seems to rotate for your consideration. It can be when one of your chocks pops out on a cliff face and you start that slow sickening fall to infinity, or it can be when your wheels lost grip on a slick track and you start spinning without control, or when you finally know your startup has failed to make payroll. At that moment there is a kind of crystal clarity where you feel like you are connected to everything and can see all the factors lining up around you. Suddenly you know the condition of the rope and the placement of the protections that might save you; you know the nature of the road surface and the position of the objects around you; you know the state of your company and the mental state of its financial backers. This is probably when your life flashes before your eyes, although my flashes have always been more solutions-oriented.

Well, this was one of those moments.

A billion thoughts rushed through my head, experiences, factors, considerations, scenarios. And clearly Amy had a number of them running through her head as well, as she outlined — in slow motion — several acceptable ways in which we could establish a relationship, learn more about each other, and gradually manage the personal and social risks involved as she would submit herself to me totally.

I guess I can’t really express the temptation I felt. After all, I had only known the woman for a day, how much could I be tempted? But perhaps that shortness of the exposure made it even more animal and therefore difficult. And physically I was half a world away from Jenny, in a private castle, completely aroused. More time may have illuminated more flaws upon which I could build my defense, and more time to rationally consider what I was doing. But for a moment Amy seemed so... ideal.

But only for a moment.

And it passed.

The attraction and situation had built a stage of opportunity, but when my mind pulled aside the curtain, there was nothing there. No script, no actors. No third party, no history written, no future plan. Only a Greek chorus sharpening their knives of moral judgement.

And as difficult as it was for a person such as myself, I turned myself cold. I would pass this trial by fire by being as cold as ice. Rude, in fact. Not because it helped me to be rude, but because it made it easier for her to be offended and to mistreat me back. And that would in turn help me be colder. And, I am ashamed to say, I treated Amy about as badly as I have ever treated another human being.

The staff at the castle probably wondered what had happened, what was the argument. The driver burned with curiosity at the absolute silence in the car. Later, Clovis asked what I had done. And her grandfather had nothing good to say to me. And I know all of them wondered why on Earth a person with my reputation would reduce such a marvelous woman to tears.

The answer is simple.

It’s because I love Jenny... and our relationship.

Money and Power, and Relationships

I have posted about money and power in a variety of indirect ways. First let me say that I have not distinguished between the two very well. Almost any post where I have mentioned the effect of money, I have really been talking about some ineffible cross product of money and power. In this post I want to set a framework for discussing them in the context of relationships, but in particular to use relationships as a mirror in which we might observe the complex interplay between money and power.

Many people, whether in the course of ordinary life or in scientific research, have noted the relationship between relationships and power. In particular from the 1960's onwards, there was an intense interest in the power dynamics in relationships that have a sexual component. Famously, over the past 40 years research findings related to sex and power have evolved in a manner that often reflected the current psychosocial and cultural mores (oppression, exploitation, governance, economics, game theory, compensatory effects, genetics, memes, whatever!), making the research papers in this area a favorite whipping boy for critics from the post-modern science and relativism circles.

Money is a resource that can be converted into many things. That is the essence of its value. In the long run, nothing else has this power. As long as it has existed, it had the power to change resource ownership, and ownership is a fundamental biological motivator hardwired into our brains. In more modern times money stimulates technology, which is the tool by which we control all physical, biological and emotional aspects of our lives, the way we have increased our personal power beyond what we can achieve with our unassisted bodies. It used to be impossible to imagine the money would effectively compete with nature or chance in our physical looks, emotional happiness, or biological longevity, but now it seems like it is just a matter of time before technology will allow us to control those dimensions also. And money will, in turn, control the technology that will control those dimensions from longevity to beauty.

But I do not want to get into a discussion of super humanity or the meaning of humanity and what happens when it becomes so tightly associated with money. Let us confine ourselves to the here, now, and myself.

I have blogged about the effect of money and power on relationships and an interpretation of luxury. In a way this entire blog is a testament to how the money-power equation can affect the choices available to me in relationships, from rented girlfriends to marriage. I have compared my views of the absolute economics of relationships, but that analysis is deeply within the context of a certain level of power I am perceived to have in the world, and in particular the power that my partner perceives me to have in her world. Why? Because power translates into privilege, no matter how unasked for. Humans just have something about power that hits their hindbrain and changes their behaviors. And I have noticed wherever they see some of it, they seem to see more of it everywhere: incidents are legion where just because a person sees a glimmer of power they tend to assume I am hiding a supernova somewhere.

I used to think that I wanted neither money or power. Both were liabilities to personal freedom. Does that sound foolish and idealistic? Perhaps. At first this idea was about the loss of freedom to try silly or antisocial activities, but I quickly realized that liability was attached to neither money nor power but rather to popularity and iconification. Still my instincts were very wary of money and power. Now with many years of wealth behind me, now I can refine my original thought:

Money and power put my happiness into the hands of an unnatural self-discipline.

Humans evolved in a Darwinian environment. By its nature, long-term changes were for the purpose of improved mating selection or long term viability (or totally random). In that sense, most of our behaviors reflect the environments in which we evolved, which were, for the most part, resource scarce. So our desire to play, hoard, relax, work, and have relationships are generally molded by resource scarcity.

When we are faced with too much resource, a wholly new set of largely non-evolutionary behaviors come to dominate and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, managing these in a moral manner takes a different attitude. Behavior is no longer governed by what you must do, but what you want to do. And aligning what you want to do, when those wants and desires were forged by evolution in a resource scarce environments, takes quite a bit of self-discipline. After all, you are fighting a million years of evolution with just a few kilograms of grey matter.

Evolution gave us both competitive and cooperative behaviors to deal with resource scarcity. We are social animals. But in this weird world of plenty, both competition and cooperation have created largely irrelevant behaviors. Extended family cooperation, for example, was a survival trait. But we've largely dispensed with that. Consider, for example, that children used to be raised by a large group of mostly-related family members, distributing the child rearing role over a larger population versus the pressures of trying to raise a child in a nuclear or even single-parent family today. Even less-familial social loyalties can be dispensed with when you are resource rich. Who cares? What do you have to lose?

This has been a challenge for me. Relationships of all kinds can be broken with money and power. People will give me a lot of latitude. “Oh, he's busy,” they will say. Or perhaps I will be tempted to smooth over a break with gifts that are within my power to grant, from jobs to money to other forms of assistance that ultimately serve to distance us from the real elements of friendship or love. Society looks at helping others as altruistic, but often charity is merely paying off the demon that took your soul, buying the salve that saves your self-worth.

But I’m not complaining about having money and power. Back when I suffered massive sticker shock from my first seven figure US tax bill, my accountant told me, “Hey, it’s not a bad problem to have compared to the alternative.” And he was right, I have the freedom to give it away, a freedom I have exercised several times.

The most nefarious danger of money and power is that it changes one’s own metrics of happiness. The notion of ever-escalating stimuli is well-understood, but this pertains not only to the satiety of pleasure, but also the activities that generate pleasure. Without this unnatural self-discipline, without embracing this strange and counter-intuitive cult of self-denial, one cannot achieve the nirvana many associate with essentially limitless wealth and power. Partly because human imagination and thus ambition exceeds any quantifiable limits of money and power, and partly because we’re built that way. Several psychology studies link discipline to happiness and unhappiness to a lack of boundaries. Maybe there is a little sheep in us all.

Now allow me to have a caveat here. Your mileage may vary. I know some people who can achieve a state of happiness not from self-control or discipline, but from built-in limitations. I have acquaintances who achieve moderate wealth, then retire and do nothing. They are content. Unfortunately these limitations are not always discernable until you have surpassed certain monetary limits.

Fortunately I am a big believer in self-awareness and self-discipline. But relationships have been a great learning tool. Suffice it to say that had I not been so intensely interested in analyzing relationships, I probably would not have discovered half of what I know about money and power. Other people are the ideal mirror in which you can see the effect of money and power upon yourself, the other person, and the relationship itself. This applies to work relationships, friendships, and, yes, sex and romance. It can have negative consequences, for example losing faith in oneself and the world and always questioning why a person is in a relationship with you. The age-old question of “is it me or my money” has yet to find an empirical solution, but ultimately there is no answer. Since wealth and power are largely alienable, you can always test this by discarding them, but it seems better to merely accept the wealth and power as a part of yourself instead of a part of your insecurity.

It is perhaps ironic that I use relationships to define the limits of my money and power. By the tenor of my relationships I know when it is time to shed money and power or, for that matter, to make more. Even the balance between money and power, another topic worthy of discussion, can be achieved by analyzing my relationships. Is that an odd barometer? Maybe, But since the major negative effect of too much money and power is to change ones relationship with society, relationships probably are the only appropriate measuring device to use. Similarly, I use money and power as one (of many) measures of a relationship. Does a relationship change my perception of money and power, or alter their balance? Do I feel more compelled to trade money for power or vice versa? These are also indirect indicators of certain relationship factors, as well as the evolution of a relationship in the eyes of society. Such factors are not always positive or negative, but always fascinating to see. Money and power are rarely discussed, but always felt. As such any indirect meter is an interesting topic of study.