Monkeys

The latest book I've been reading ends with a story about monkeys.

A researcher attempted to see if monkeys would use money, so came up with some unique, Chinese-style coins, demonstrated to the monkeys that they could be exchanged with humans for grapes and other treats, and found quite quickly that the monkeys were just like humans. They bartered, and adjusted their purchases according to current prices (spending all the coins they had, one way or another). They made decisions based on the fear of loss (trading a coin for one grape, rather than gambling with a coin to get either two or none). They stole (a bold monkey took a trayful of unintentionally unguarded coins). They traded sex for money (a coin gathered up by a male after the theft was given to a female, sex ensued, and the coin then traded for a grape).

Behavioural economic research can be interesting in the hands of a good storyteller.

My morning self-analysis was inadvertantly triggered by this story.

I've never gone to a prostitute. I've never tried marijiuana. Yet I believe that both activities are fine. I have no moral imperative to control other people in that regard. I look at them from a perspective of relative harm.

I also don't drink terribly much. It used to be not at all, but I found that in dating it was easier to have a glass of wine once in awhile than have to ensure a discussion came up where I could explain my reasons for self-prohibition, rather than having my date assume I had been an alcoholic.

My reasons for not drinking are also from the perspective of relative harm. My mother's boyfriend committed suicide when he was kicked out of the house for a tendency to bring financial disaster upon us. It didn't have to be the end of the relationship, but after a fair bit of alcoholic consolation, he decided it should be the end of his life. Waking up to find someone has parked in front of your house and blown the top of his head off tends to make one want to avoid the cause. (Side thought - did this also have an impact on how I deal with relationships? Probably. Something I haven't explored to date).

Sex that deviates from the norm is also fine with me, assuming it is consensual and not physically damaging. I probably won't ever get into a group situation, for example, but I don't share in the societal myth that people need to be judged based on who and how they have sex.

So the short summary of this long story is that I can act like a puritan for non-puritan reasons, and like a sinner without committing much personal sin.

The dark-haired girl was a good match for me in the outward lifestyle - frugal with exceptions for favorite things (clothes and shoes for her, electronics for me, gifts for each other), light alcohol intake, no recreational drugs. The underlying cause for the behaviour differed, though, and it also resulted in our painful mismatches - the money and parenting arguments, the kissing like two planks of wood being pressed together, basic sex that excluded even touching breasts and oral interaction, social opportunities being avoided by one of us while hoped for by the other (our roles in that statement were reversed sometimes), and so on.

At the end of each relationship, I ask myself the same question, with the answer assumed in advance to be "no":

Will I ever find anyone that is compatible with me?

The intellectual answer differs from the emotional answer.

I also often ask myself if I've been too quick to end relationships. Which seems unlikely given my history, but if you focus on the wrong things you can make a bad decision. And nothing is more complicated a thing to make a decision about than a relationship you want to see continue to the end of your life.

So, the real question is whether or not I will recognize that person when I get to her, that "one". I can't go back and change past mistakes in that decision-making process, but can I somehow learn to answer the question with some certainty in the future?

Or am I more like a monkey than I can admit?