Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Nirpal Dhaliwal - Watch Part Twelve.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven.
God look at all that. It all started last August with Nirpal telling us how men rock and how the cock is king. Oh look, it's last Sunday's newspaper, let's just have a quick read... < rustle > What's this?
Woe is me & Ms Jones ; Chronicle of a divorce foretold ++ Their marriage was played out in their newspaper columns. Now comes the split.
She is Liz Jones, the uptight, neurotic former editor of Marie Claire, whose fame is down to her ober-confessional musings about her younger, feckless, selfish, serially unfaithful husband.
He is Nirpal Dhaliwal, 11 years her junior, a man who even on their wedding day - a £20,000 gig at Babington House paid for by the bride - preferred to get drunk with his mates. Together, they are Britain's most talked-about media couple, locked in mutual loathing as their diatribes against each other both enthral and repulse the readers of their columns. It is an arrangement that has been financially beneficial to both.
Are they really 'Britain's most talked-about media couple'? God that's the most depressing thing I've heard since the news that 'Peter Andre was recovering'.
Now, though, this fairy tale is at an end. After seven years together the pair have finally split. She has booted him out of the marital home, and served him with divorce papers. The reason? His adultery, of course.
"Yes, he has been pretty shit," Ms Jones, 44,
Heh, do you remember the first episode of Absolutely Fabulous when Patsy was distraught because a newspaper printed her real age?
said this week. "We are going through with the divorce. I think my readers will be relieved. The little fur babies - no, he's not going to take them with him, they voted to stay with Mummy.
Oh God.
He was a very good cat- monitor, let's just say that."
I think there's a typo here as I'm fairly sure Liz constantly complained about him either nearly sitting on the cats or not feeding them.
This is a typically Jonesesque reference to the mercifully childless couple's cats, the one aspect of their life together that they both seemed to enjoy.
Mr Dhaliwal was unusually reluctant to discuss the break-up. "Nice try, but I won't be changing my mind," he said. "I'd rather not do an interview right now, it's just a bit too soon." His column in the Evening Standard revealed they broke up while on holiday earlier this month.
He wrote a couple of years ago about how the couple were reunited after one of his numerous extramarital forays. "My wife threw me out after discovering I've been cheating on her. On the night we got back together, I made strong, passionate love to her. I needed to keep a sense of self and not allow her to mire me in guilt. At the height of passion, I asked her, 'Who's the boss?' The question threw her. Initially, she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. 'You are,' she finally gasped. 'You are!' "
The couple met in 2000 when Ms Jones was editor of Marie Claire and married three years later. But if ever there were two people with more spectacularly different views on sex, relationships and household chores, they have yet to be found.
He was so unhappy that his weight ballooned to 17 stone, yet supposed her friends must be jealous because she had such a handsome spouse. She hated having to pay for everything, that he could never keep anything tidy, and never bought her a present.
Ms Jones wrote about all this in columns for three newspapers. She also managed a book. He was out of work at first, but was given his break to respond to her constant carpings with a newspaper column and also became a novelist.
So what was the fascination? Oliver James, a psychologist and author of Britain on the Couch, said the couple's columns revealed a type of "demented control-freakery" in both of them. He argued: "It is a form of exhibitionism and we all read it because we are interested in the ups and downs of any relationship, particularly the downs."
Following the comments of Tory MP Patrick Mercer at the start of March about the Army and soldiers from ethnic minorities Nirpal got a few commissions, such as this one from the Guardian. However, the spate of teenagers being killed in March allows him to share abgout the time he took a knife into school because he was sure a bully was going to go after him. Then we get to the 21st of March, and a familiar theme re-emerges...
Why busy women drive each other crazy
Evening Standard (London); Mar 21, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 12
A TEACHER friend of mine recently joined a school where he was the only male member of staff.
Being gay, he was automatically designated the role of shoulder to cry on, as each woman took him aside to bitch about the others and whine about their lives in general.
He was unnerved by how much they complained about being busy and overworked. He did the same job as them, but wasn't nearly as stressed as they were. The complaint of busyness was just a charade, a frenetic pantomime, as the women competed with each other to seem more committed and indispensable than their colleagues. Women compete with each other over everything. Bearing in mind their insane constant politicking, it's difficult to take them seriously when they opine about their fraught modern lives.
A new book, CrazyBusy by Dr Edward Hallowell, tells us how we're all fatally overworked. Lo and behold, women have shot off the mark to say he doesn't appreciate the importance of being busy. As Anne McElvoy remarked in this paper yesterday, "I feel particularly irked by being told by a man that excess activity is Not Good For Me and that I would do better to sit down and contemplate the finer things in life".
Women actually equally two women as far as I can tell, one of whom wrote for two seperate papers. So obviously most of the sisterhood had a problem with their post in March. As far as I can tell this book is about how ALL of us are overworked, everyone on every point of the gender spectrum, I suppose it could be argued that because it's only two journalists that have written about this book and women at that that Nirpal is justified in concentrating on one sex and how they fulfil the criteria of this book.
No man will ever appreciate the turbocharged nature of female existence. Men don't whip each other into frenzied anxieties about our weight, outfits, choice of partner (or the lack of one), homes and tastes in decor, holidays, children (and their schools, clothes, activities etc), and so on and so on.
So, this would rather suggest that Nirpal doesn't believe that men are ever busy and that's because they don't do trivial things like bring up kids or the washing up. This makes amusing reading when you consider Liz's complaints about how little he does around the house. Maybe he thinks sloth is the man's greatest virtue?
Men compete with each other, but only in cases where we know we have a chance of a clear and outright victory: a specific goal at work, say, or the seduction of a particular woman.
Some women might feel seduced by not having to do all the work perhaps, while her husband sits on the sofa. Oh well, it's easy to be wise after the event.
Like a fantasy figure in a martial arts movie who parries thousands of arrows directed at him, modern women are in a constant fight to fend off the ceaseless volleys of barbed criticisms that may come their way.
My wife can be described as crazybusy. She strives to ensure that our beautiful house is immaculate and that its interior is up-to-speed with fashion; her wardrobe is never out of date; and she stocks the cupboards with exquisite trendy foodstuffs.
But to maintain this pristine glossy-magazine lifestyle, she must work like an ox on amphetamines.
She complains of being overworked, but won't admit that this is the price she pays to live beyond the reproach of other women.
When my wife, a former anorexic, says that she doesn't care what other women think of her, I don't believe her. She did, after all, starve herself to meet a female standard of perfection. Today's women do live at an exhausting pace, but it's only because they continuously flog each other to do so.
Yep, according to Dr Nirpal, if any woman feels tired it's the fault of other women. But then we seem to have a month of radio silence, except for:
WHY MEN AND WOMEN HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON ( EXCEPT SEX) ; A BRAZENLY PROVOCATIVE BLAST THAT WILL ENRAGE BOTH SEXES
Daily Mail (London); Apr 17, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 26
'Enrage'? This all reads like the greatest hits of Nirpal Dhaliwal, men just want sex and, unless they're a straight-talking guy like Nirpal they'll put up with completely unreasonable demands from women (such as not behaving like an arsehole) to get it, women want men to be arseholes and treat them badly and any woman who says otherwise is lying, Nirpal is great in bed and a lot younger than his wife, all the old favourites.
HAVING an afternoon drink with a friend last Sunday, we found ourselves sitting beside a trendy twentysomething couple whose conversation we could overhear all too clearly. Actually, it was just a monologue by the young woman, who spelled out each of the banal uninteresting problems and worries that plagued her life.
All of her mind-numbing anxieties - about work, her friends, what to buy someone for their birthday - were articulated in excruciating detail over the next two hours in a grating, whining voice.
God, aren't women annoying with their 'empathy' and 'actually giving a shit for what other people think and feel'?
Her companion gazed empathetically into her face from across the table, listening intently as he stroked her hand to comfort her. He was paying her the sort of devoted, patient attention that only a man in desperate want of sex can manage.
Hah! The faggot!
Any other guy would surely have found her blathering unbearable. From the tension in his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed as his hand slid ever upwards along her bare arm, it was obvious there was only one thing on his mind.
And he was prepared to listen to two hours of her garbage in the hope that he would get it.
Does anyone else think this is actually describing how Nirpal and Liz met?
In their idiotic way the couple exemplified a fundamental truth about men and women. We exist in two different time zones. Men want to be happy right now, today, preferably in the company of a beautiful woman. Tomorrow can wait.
Women, on the other hand, are constantly concerned with the future, and with their prospects financially, emotionally and sexually.
Yet this man was quite clearly sublimating the desire for sex that Nirpal assumed he had to some future point in time, because he was sitting there listening
While this girl prattled on about her vague hopes and worries for the future,
Or does maleness contain an elastic concept of 'now' that is centred on 'today', while femaleness exists up to an uncertain point in time in the far future?
her boyfriend was anchored by his carnal desires into the immediate here and now.
They exemplified what I've come to realise over the years: that men and women have almost nothing in common, other than the desire for sex and, if they have any children, a shared concern for their wellbeing. Besides that, we have very little interest in each other.
I haven't read the rest of this article yet, so I'm just going to go and check... yep, he does actually manage to get through the article without using the metaphor of the praying mantis.
The reason, I believe, is that we are fundamentally selfish beings, only really interested in ourselves.
Nirpal, you're supposed to be looking into the abyss, not a mirror.
Some people claim to be lovingly entwined with their partners. They're deluded or lying. I'm in my mid-30s and have met no such couple.
And you've met everyone have you? When did you meet my parents? Or my aunts and uncles? Or my married cousins? Or the myriad of Patrick's relations?
I've known couples of all races and ages, some of them in arranged marriages - all of them simmering with tension and dissonance.
Yep, that's usual. When my Mum calls upstairs that dinner's ready and she get's no response there's a bit of simmering going on there, it doesn't mean that she feels the need to denounce her marriage as a sham when Dad comes down to the dinner table.
I've never met a couple I've envied. I don't feel sad admitting this.
Why should you? It's a good thing not to be envious.
I feel liberated.
You better not be coming to Pride this year.
I no longer cling to the myth that relationships create happiness, and I don't feel guilty or alone when feeling dissatisfied in my marriage.
Oh, so you are married then? Well, I suppose the paperwork can't get done in a few weeks.
Everyone else feels this, whether they admit it or not.
Men and women speak two different tongues. We can barely even get to know each other, let alone make each other happy.
OK, the next sentence doesn't follow on from the last, so either Nirpal had a mini-stroke in the writing of this article or my source has lost some text.
It held the booking receipt for the country house she'd gone out on her own and hired for the wedding.
Though I hadn't been informed of this, I wasn't upset. I had, after all, proposed to her.
Women generally drive the direction of relationships, partly because most men are happy just to be laissez-faire, but also because women are natural control freaks, simply because they have an inbuilt paranoia that their lives are going to go horribly awry.
For example, no intelligent man spontaneously asks a woman to marry him.
She will let him know well in advance via hints, leading questions and outright nagging that she wants to get hitched.
She might squeal with mock surprise when he offers that ring, but she'll have been nudging him to do it for months if not years.
One man I know proposed on one knee to his long-term girlfriend in their room at a country house hotel.
Even as he began his spiel, she began shaking her head violently.
In the end, she had to tell him this was not the kind of place she'd always imagined would be the setting for her proposal. Only a windswept hillside would do. She, you see, had been planning for this moment in her mind for years.
Now I come to think of it, I think my Mum did something similar, turning my Dad down a couple of times because he didn't ask properly. Though it wasn't an issue of there not being any 'windswept hillsides' in South London.
Similarly, men become fathers having never really thought about it. In my experience, they are often swayed by the desires of their partners. Very few women get pregnant by accident; they generally know exactly what they're doing. The fathers I know have admitted to being crestfallen when a girlfriend first told them she was pregnant. It was a shock end to their independence they'd never properly contemplated. But they feigned jubilation and made the usual offers of support.
It generally takes the arrival of an unplanned child for a man to start scrupulously practising safe sex.
One of the ironies of this gulf between the mindset and aspirations of the sexes is that a woman's cloying need for certainty often drives men to be unfaithful.
Here we go again, it's Liz's fault that Nirpal couldn't keep his dick in his pants, and it's her issues that need sorting out, not that he should be required to be monogamous.
The oppressive intimacy they force onto a relationship - always wanting reassurance, and always wanting to know what he is thinking and feeling - has the effect of making him seek a cheap ego boost elsewhere.
Men cheat to re-establish their sense of independence, to carve themselves a brief space with someone else that doesn't involve their partner.
You have to wonder why, if he was that concerned about his precious independence, he didn't divorce her?
My own adulteries - which occurred a couple of years ago on a long trip abroad
And, depending on whether you believe her, more recently, as detailed in your soon-to-be-ex-wife's column IN THE VERY NEWSPAPER YOU'RE WRITING THIS FOR!
- were driven by the need to escape the overbearing intimacy of married life.
Why the fuck did you get married in the first place? Why didn't you divorce your wife yourself to get this freedom that you claim you were denied?
Women will hate me for doing this and not being coy when admitting it. But I know very few men who've been faithful to their partner. The only men I've discussed sex honestly with who've never strayed are both gay.
I'm not the greatest husband material going,
And the winner of the award for greatest understatement of the year is...
but it hasn't cured my wife's compulsion to seek permanence with me. AFTER she uncovered my misbehaviour we separated briefly, but got back together
...and after I sexed her with my amazing penis...
and decided to make a fresh start in a new house. I had nothing to contribute to the deposit and my wife arranged the mortgage, yet she insisted that I sign the deeds.
I didn't feel remotely entitled to it and explicitly told her many times.
But signing was her precondition for continuing our relationship. I guess she felt it would be a clear sign of commitment from me, and also put me in debt to her morally.
I, naturally, did not analyse this event in terms of a long-term emotional power struggle the way a woman would. I simply noted that my infidelities had resulted in making me the co-owner of a fourstorey Georgian town house.
Figure that out.
The only reason I can give for why my wife hangs onto me is sex.
If you read her columns Nirpal you'd realise it's not that at all. It was her neurotic fear that if she got rid of you she'd never find another man to be with and would die old and alone.
She fancies me. That's it. Within the emotional turmoil of the female mind is the primal force of sex.
Though they waffle about their need for empathy and sensitivity, women are actually far more libidinous than men.
So, does this contradict the example of the man and the woman you were talking about at the start, or does that mean that women can sublimate their desires even more than men?
God created sex for them. He gave them a body that is one big erogenous zone, and a taste for myriad erotic nuances. Male sexuality is blunt and lumpen: no man is aroused by the thought of warm breath against his neck.
But a woman's body is made for sex. The female orgasm makes the male climax seem a pathetic nonevent by comparison, and is proof that women enjoy sex far more than men do.
'So I did rape that woman yr honour, but I would only say that due to biology she got a hell of a lot more out of it than I did, so I think it should be considered an act of charity on my part, perhaps worthy of a medal and a statue in one of the National Parks.'
In my early and mid-20s, I had a series of liaisons with older women (one of which developed into the marriage I'm in now). I was then penniless, and had no status and nothing noteworthy to say.
No comment.
Yet accomplished and intelligent women in their 30s and 40s happily took me to bed. I knew then that women, like men, are driven by narrow, selfish agendas, be it the desire for security, money, or a healthy young body.
It's amazing how Nirpal manages to make 'looking attractive' appear to be some sort of crime.
Having sex with those women, I'd watch them lose themselves in the animal intensity of it, becoming oblivious to my presence.
Again, no comment, though I dare say it wasn't just restricted to their moment of climax.
I was nothing. They said they liked me because I was 'sweet' and 'funny', but those qualities would have been meaningless if I wasn't up to scratch in the sack.
I recently had a frank chat with a female friend, and she admitted that women address a man's qualities as though they are scanning his CV with a view to employing him.
Above all, they want a man who turns them on. Failing that they settle (in descending order) for a man's money, his ability to entertain them, and his willingness to do the dishes.
Damn evil conniving women and their desire for someone with which they would have some compatibility!
Her words confirmed my belief that men and women are incapable of a genuine spiritual union.
Hang on, a few paragraphs ago you wanted your freedom, now you want a 'genuine spiritual union'?
We're too dissimilar even to understand each other, let alone combine in harmony, so we just grasp what we can from our relationships.
That's why, when a woman does meet a man who flips her lid sexually, she isn't going to let him go. Men and women are held together by biology, not by love.
Love isn't powerful enough to overcome the tremendous contradictions between us. Genetics isn't a recipe for happiness - but then our genes don't exist to make us happy. They exist to keep us alive.
So yes, I believe men and women do exist in different times zones in emotional terms. We find mutual satisfaction in sex, but that aside we must remain strangers.
Wow, well all that has quite exhausted me and robbed me of much of the will to live. I'll try and get round to watch Liz has been up to in the last few months some time in the next few days...
God look at all that. It all started last August with Nirpal telling us how men rock and how the cock is king. Oh look, it's last Sunday's newspaper, let's just have a quick read... < rustle > What's this?
Woe is me & Ms Jones ; Chronicle of a divorce foretold ++ Their marriage was played out in their newspaper columns. Now comes the split.
She is Liz Jones, the uptight, neurotic former editor of Marie Claire, whose fame is down to her ober-confessional musings about her younger, feckless, selfish, serially unfaithful husband.
He is Nirpal Dhaliwal, 11 years her junior, a man who even on their wedding day - a £20,000 gig at Babington House paid for by the bride - preferred to get drunk with his mates. Together, they are Britain's most talked-about media couple, locked in mutual loathing as their diatribes against each other both enthral and repulse the readers of their columns. It is an arrangement that has been financially beneficial to both.
Are they really 'Britain's most talked-about media couple'? God that's the most depressing thing I've heard since the news that 'Peter Andre was recovering'.
Now, though, this fairy tale is at an end. After seven years together the pair have finally split. She has booted him out of the marital home, and served him with divorce papers. The reason? His adultery, of course.
"Yes, he has been pretty shit," Ms Jones, 44,
Heh, do you remember the first episode of Absolutely Fabulous when Patsy was distraught because a newspaper printed her real age?
said this week. "We are going through with the divorce. I think my readers will be relieved. The little fur babies - no, he's not going to take them with him, they voted to stay with Mummy.
Oh God.
He was a very good cat- monitor, let's just say that."
I think there's a typo here as I'm fairly sure Liz constantly complained about him either nearly sitting on the cats or not feeding them.
This is a typically Jonesesque reference to the mercifully childless couple's cats, the one aspect of their life together that they both seemed to enjoy.
Mr Dhaliwal was unusually reluctant to discuss the break-up. "Nice try, but I won't be changing my mind," he said. "I'd rather not do an interview right now, it's just a bit too soon." His column in the Evening Standard revealed they broke up while on holiday earlier this month.
He wrote a couple of years ago about how the couple were reunited after one of his numerous extramarital forays. "My wife threw me out after discovering I've been cheating on her. On the night we got back together, I made strong, passionate love to her. I needed to keep a sense of self and not allow her to mire me in guilt. At the height of passion, I asked her, 'Who's the boss?' The question threw her. Initially, she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. 'You are,' she finally gasped. 'You are!' "
The couple met in 2000 when Ms Jones was editor of Marie Claire and married three years later. But if ever there were two people with more spectacularly different views on sex, relationships and household chores, they have yet to be found.
He was so unhappy that his weight ballooned to 17 stone, yet supposed her friends must be jealous because she had such a handsome spouse. She hated having to pay for everything, that he could never keep anything tidy, and never bought her a present.
Ms Jones wrote about all this in columns for three newspapers. She also managed a book. He was out of work at first, but was given his break to respond to her constant carpings with a newspaper column and also became a novelist.
So what was the fascination? Oliver James, a psychologist and author of Britain on the Couch, said the couple's columns revealed a type of "demented control-freakery" in both of them. He argued: "It is a form of exhibitionism and we all read it because we are interested in the ups and downs of any relationship, particularly the downs."
Following the comments of Tory MP Patrick Mercer at the start of March about the Army and soldiers from ethnic minorities Nirpal got a few commissions, such as this one from the Guardian. However, the spate of teenagers being killed in March allows him to share abgout the time he took a knife into school because he was sure a bully was going to go after him. Then we get to the 21st of March, and a familiar theme re-emerges...
Why busy women drive each other crazy
Evening Standard (London); Mar 21, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 12
A TEACHER friend of mine recently joined a school where he was the only male member of staff.
Being gay, he was automatically designated the role of shoulder to cry on, as each woman took him aside to bitch about the others and whine about their lives in general.
He was unnerved by how much they complained about being busy and overworked. He did the same job as them, but wasn't nearly as stressed as they were. The complaint of busyness was just a charade, a frenetic pantomime, as the women competed with each other to seem more committed and indispensable than their colleagues. Women compete with each other over everything. Bearing in mind their insane constant politicking, it's difficult to take them seriously when they opine about their fraught modern lives.
A new book, CrazyBusy by Dr Edward Hallowell, tells us how we're all fatally overworked. Lo and behold, women have shot off the mark to say he doesn't appreciate the importance of being busy. As Anne McElvoy remarked in this paper yesterday, "I feel particularly irked by being told by a man that excess activity is Not Good For Me and that I would do better to sit down and contemplate the finer things in life".
Women actually equally two women as far as I can tell, one of whom wrote for two seperate papers. So obviously most of the sisterhood had a problem with their post in March. As far as I can tell this book is about how ALL of us are overworked, everyone on every point of the gender spectrum, I suppose it could be argued that because it's only two journalists that have written about this book and women at that that Nirpal is justified in concentrating on one sex and how they fulfil the criteria of this book.
No man will ever appreciate the turbocharged nature of female existence. Men don't whip each other into frenzied anxieties about our weight, outfits, choice of partner (or the lack of one), homes and tastes in decor, holidays, children (and their schools, clothes, activities etc), and so on and so on.
So, this would rather suggest that Nirpal doesn't believe that men are ever busy and that's because they don't do trivial things like bring up kids or the washing up. This makes amusing reading when you consider Liz's complaints about how little he does around the house. Maybe he thinks sloth is the man's greatest virtue?
Men compete with each other, but only in cases where we know we have a chance of a clear and outright victory: a specific goal at work, say, or the seduction of a particular woman.
Some women might feel seduced by not having to do all the work perhaps, while her husband sits on the sofa. Oh well, it's easy to be wise after the event.
Like a fantasy figure in a martial arts movie who parries thousands of arrows directed at him, modern women are in a constant fight to fend off the ceaseless volleys of barbed criticisms that may come their way.
My wife can be described as crazybusy. She strives to ensure that our beautiful house is immaculate and that its interior is up-to-speed with fashion; her wardrobe is never out of date; and she stocks the cupboards with exquisite trendy foodstuffs.
But to maintain this pristine glossy-magazine lifestyle, she must work like an ox on amphetamines.
She complains of being overworked, but won't admit that this is the price she pays to live beyond the reproach of other women.
When my wife, a former anorexic, says that she doesn't care what other women think of her, I don't believe her. She did, after all, starve herself to meet a female standard of perfection. Today's women do live at an exhausting pace, but it's only because they continuously flog each other to do so.
Yep, according to Dr Nirpal, if any woman feels tired it's the fault of other women. But then we seem to have a month of radio silence, except for:
WHY MEN AND WOMEN HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON ( EXCEPT SEX) ; A BRAZENLY PROVOCATIVE BLAST THAT WILL ENRAGE BOTH SEXES
Daily Mail (London); Apr 17, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 26
'Enrage'? This all reads like the greatest hits of Nirpal Dhaliwal, men just want sex and, unless they're a straight-talking guy like Nirpal they'll put up with completely unreasonable demands from women (such as not behaving like an arsehole) to get it, women want men to be arseholes and treat them badly and any woman who says otherwise is lying, Nirpal is great in bed and a lot younger than his wife, all the old favourites.
HAVING an afternoon drink with a friend last Sunday, we found ourselves sitting beside a trendy twentysomething couple whose conversation we could overhear all too clearly. Actually, it was just a monologue by the young woman, who spelled out each of the banal uninteresting problems and worries that plagued her life.
All of her mind-numbing anxieties - about work, her friends, what to buy someone for their birthday - were articulated in excruciating detail over the next two hours in a grating, whining voice.
God, aren't women annoying with their 'empathy' and 'actually giving a shit for what other people think and feel'?
Her companion gazed empathetically into her face from across the table, listening intently as he stroked her hand to comfort her. He was paying her the sort of devoted, patient attention that only a man in desperate want of sex can manage.
Hah! The faggot!
Any other guy would surely have found her blathering unbearable. From the tension in his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed as his hand slid ever upwards along her bare arm, it was obvious there was only one thing on his mind.
And he was prepared to listen to two hours of her garbage in the hope that he would get it.
Does anyone else think this is actually describing how Nirpal and Liz met?
In their idiotic way the couple exemplified a fundamental truth about men and women. We exist in two different time zones. Men want to be happy right now, today, preferably in the company of a beautiful woman. Tomorrow can wait.
Women, on the other hand, are constantly concerned with the future, and with their prospects financially, emotionally and sexually.
Yet this man was quite clearly sublimating the desire for sex that Nirpal assumed he had to some future point in time, because he was sitting there listening
While this girl prattled on about her vague hopes and worries for the future,
Or does maleness contain an elastic concept of 'now' that is centred on 'today', while femaleness exists up to an uncertain point in time in the far future?
her boyfriend was anchored by his carnal desires into the immediate here and now.
They exemplified what I've come to realise over the years: that men and women have almost nothing in common, other than the desire for sex and, if they have any children, a shared concern for their wellbeing. Besides that, we have very little interest in each other.
I haven't read the rest of this article yet, so I'm just going to go and check... yep, he does actually manage to get through the article without using the metaphor of the praying mantis.
The reason, I believe, is that we are fundamentally selfish beings, only really interested in ourselves.
Nirpal, you're supposed to be looking into the abyss, not a mirror.
Some people claim to be lovingly entwined with their partners. They're deluded or lying. I'm in my mid-30s and have met no such couple.
And you've met everyone have you? When did you meet my parents? Or my aunts and uncles? Or my married cousins? Or the myriad of Patrick's relations?
I've known couples of all races and ages, some of them in arranged marriages - all of them simmering with tension and dissonance.
Yep, that's usual. When my Mum calls upstairs that dinner's ready and she get's no response there's a bit of simmering going on there, it doesn't mean that she feels the need to denounce her marriage as a sham when Dad comes down to the dinner table.
I've never met a couple I've envied. I don't feel sad admitting this.
Why should you? It's a good thing not to be envious.
I feel liberated.
You better not be coming to Pride this year.
I no longer cling to the myth that relationships create happiness, and I don't feel guilty or alone when feeling dissatisfied in my marriage.
Oh, so you are married then? Well, I suppose the paperwork can't get done in a few weeks.
Everyone else feels this, whether they admit it or not.
Men and women speak two different tongues. We can barely even get to know each other, let alone make each other happy.
OK, the next sentence doesn't follow on from the last, so either Nirpal had a mini-stroke in the writing of this article or my source has lost some text.
It held the booking receipt for the country house she'd gone out on her own and hired for the wedding.
Though I hadn't been informed of this, I wasn't upset. I had, after all, proposed to her.
Women generally drive the direction of relationships, partly because most men are happy just to be laissez-faire, but also because women are natural control freaks, simply because they have an inbuilt paranoia that their lives are going to go horribly awry.
For example, no intelligent man spontaneously asks a woman to marry him.
She will let him know well in advance via hints, leading questions and outright nagging that she wants to get hitched.
She might squeal with mock surprise when he offers that ring, but she'll have been nudging him to do it for months if not years.
One man I know proposed on one knee to his long-term girlfriend in their room at a country house hotel.
Even as he began his spiel, she began shaking her head violently.
In the end, she had to tell him this was not the kind of place she'd always imagined would be the setting for her proposal. Only a windswept hillside would do. She, you see, had been planning for this moment in her mind for years.
Now I come to think of it, I think my Mum did something similar, turning my Dad down a couple of times because he didn't ask properly. Though it wasn't an issue of there not being any 'windswept hillsides' in South London.
Similarly, men become fathers having never really thought about it. In my experience, they are often swayed by the desires of their partners. Very few women get pregnant by accident; they generally know exactly what they're doing. The fathers I know have admitted to being crestfallen when a girlfriend first told them she was pregnant. It was a shock end to their independence they'd never properly contemplated. But they feigned jubilation and made the usual offers of support.
It generally takes the arrival of an unplanned child for a man to start scrupulously practising safe sex.
One of the ironies of this gulf between the mindset and aspirations of the sexes is that a woman's cloying need for certainty often drives men to be unfaithful.
Here we go again, it's Liz's fault that Nirpal couldn't keep his dick in his pants, and it's her issues that need sorting out, not that he should be required to be monogamous.
The oppressive intimacy they force onto a relationship - always wanting reassurance, and always wanting to know what he is thinking and feeling - has the effect of making him seek a cheap ego boost elsewhere.
Men cheat to re-establish their sense of independence, to carve themselves a brief space with someone else that doesn't involve their partner.
You have to wonder why, if he was that concerned about his precious independence, he didn't divorce her?
My own adulteries - which occurred a couple of years ago on a long trip abroad
And, depending on whether you believe her, more recently, as detailed in your soon-to-be-ex-wife's column IN THE VERY NEWSPAPER YOU'RE WRITING THIS FOR!
- were driven by the need to escape the overbearing intimacy of married life.
Why the fuck did you get married in the first place? Why didn't you divorce your wife yourself to get this freedom that you claim you were denied?
Women will hate me for doing this and not being coy when admitting it. But I know very few men who've been faithful to their partner. The only men I've discussed sex honestly with who've never strayed are both gay.
I'm not the greatest husband material going,
And the winner of the award for greatest understatement of the year is...
but it hasn't cured my wife's compulsion to seek permanence with me. AFTER she uncovered my misbehaviour we separated briefly, but got back together
...and after I sexed her with my amazing penis...
and decided to make a fresh start in a new house. I had nothing to contribute to the deposit and my wife arranged the mortgage, yet she insisted that I sign the deeds.
I didn't feel remotely entitled to it and explicitly told her many times.
But signing was her precondition for continuing our relationship. I guess she felt it would be a clear sign of commitment from me, and also put me in debt to her morally.
I, naturally, did not analyse this event in terms of a long-term emotional power struggle the way a woman would. I simply noted that my infidelities had resulted in making me the co-owner of a fourstorey Georgian town house.
Figure that out.
The only reason I can give for why my wife hangs onto me is sex.
If you read her columns Nirpal you'd realise it's not that at all. It was her neurotic fear that if she got rid of you she'd never find another man to be with and would die old and alone.
She fancies me. That's it. Within the emotional turmoil of the female mind is the primal force of sex.
Though they waffle about their need for empathy and sensitivity, women are actually far more libidinous than men.
So, does this contradict the example of the man and the woman you were talking about at the start, or does that mean that women can sublimate their desires even more than men?
God created sex for them. He gave them a body that is one big erogenous zone, and a taste for myriad erotic nuances. Male sexuality is blunt and lumpen: no man is aroused by the thought of warm breath against his neck.
But a woman's body is made for sex. The female orgasm makes the male climax seem a pathetic nonevent by comparison, and is proof that women enjoy sex far more than men do.
'So I did rape that woman yr honour, but I would only say that due to biology she got a hell of a lot more out of it than I did, so I think it should be considered an act of charity on my part, perhaps worthy of a medal and a statue in one of the National Parks.'
In my early and mid-20s, I had a series of liaisons with older women (one of which developed into the marriage I'm in now). I was then penniless, and had no status and nothing noteworthy to say.
No comment.
Yet accomplished and intelligent women in their 30s and 40s happily took me to bed. I knew then that women, like men, are driven by narrow, selfish agendas, be it the desire for security, money, or a healthy young body.
It's amazing how Nirpal manages to make 'looking attractive' appear to be some sort of crime.
Having sex with those women, I'd watch them lose themselves in the animal intensity of it, becoming oblivious to my presence.
Again, no comment, though I dare say it wasn't just restricted to their moment of climax.
I was nothing. They said they liked me because I was 'sweet' and 'funny', but those qualities would have been meaningless if I wasn't up to scratch in the sack.
I recently had a frank chat with a female friend, and she admitted that women address a man's qualities as though they are scanning his CV with a view to employing him.
Above all, they want a man who turns them on. Failing that they settle (in descending order) for a man's money, his ability to entertain them, and his willingness to do the dishes.
Damn evil conniving women and their desire for someone with which they would have some compatibility!
Her words confirmed my belief that men and women are incapable of a genuine spiritual union.
Hang on, a few paragraphs ago you wanted your freedom, now you want a 'genuine spiritual union'?
We're too dissimilar even to understand each other, let alone combine in harmony, so we just grasp what we can from our relationships.
That's why, when a woman does meet a man who flips her lid sexually, she isn't going to let him go. Men and women are held together by biology, not by love.
Love isn't powerful enough to overcome the tremendous contradictions between us. Genetics isn't a recipe for happiness - but then our genes don't exist to make us happy. They exist to keep us alive.
So yes, I believe men and women do exist in different times zones in emotional terms. We find mutual satisfaction in sex, but that aside we must remain strangers.
Wow, well all that has quite exhausted me and robbed me of much of the will to live. I'll try and get round to watch Liz has been up to in the last few months some time in the next few days...
Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal
