One important thing to keep in mind is this. My profile on Tribe is for amusement & fantasy purposes only. That being said, I enjoy having some online fun with people. I also have had a few affairs, though none recently, offline. We will save those savory details for an entirely different conversation!

I have grown increasingly aware that the 'affairs' of the flesh do very little to satisfy the affairs of the heart. I believe that woman are not likely to detach their sexual feelings from emotional feelings and love. ON the contrary, men seem to be able to take part in sexual acts that have nothing to do with love or emotional feelings. However, sex is extremely important to men's overall sexual health.

So, without going into religious aspects which of course trump anything and everything I am talking about, I will give you this food for thought. I absolutely love my wife. We have no children. I would never want to hurt her and we have completely different sexual interests. In retrospect some would say why didn't I take this into consideration before marrying her. Perhaps that's true. But I loved her from the start and don't believe that my love for her is sexually motivated. Also, my personality is not one that views sex as an integral part of what is love. This is important. You have to decide for yourself how important sex is to you in the context of love.

My parents had a wonderful relationship. Today, such relationships are rare. I notice many relationships are troubled, very often due to sexual or financial issues. I view neither sex or finances as having anything to do with why I love my wife. Whether I continue having affairs or not, it is a function of my appetite for sex and my weakness in the flesh. While I'm a christian, I accept my weakness only because I believe it would be stressful for me to deny it. However, I do my best to learn from it and honestly I have grown to find I need it less and less because I realize at the end of the day it does not satisfy me emotionally and rather takes away from whom I really am...of course I could go into much more detail on this.

There are no clear cut answers. Life is a journey. I do believe the best advice I can give is that you stay true to yourself but also evaluate yourself. Because if we don't like who we are, we can always change. No one else can change us but others can influence us to change. So are your actions keeping you where you want to be? I find it interesting that the word EVAluation is so close to EVOlution. I honestly believe we cannot evolve or grow if we do not evaluate ourselves...and we should do so often!

If you have stayed true to your wife and children it is because you must feel that is being true to yourself. I believe that is noble. NO man cannot be attracted by pretty women. But whatever they have to offer, does it move you toward your goals in life? When we are most clear as to where we are going in life, the distractions along the way are much more fleeting and temporary. If we have no motivation, then anything can distract us down the wrong paths. While those distractions can feel like pleasure for a moment, if they do not lead us closer to our ultimate goal, we end up on some remote island feeling very empty because we have allowed ourselves to move further from whom we really are meant to be.

I experienced that struggle for a while when I did well in business but not so well in my relationship with my wife (that should come as no surprise I'm sure after reading my profile...lol)> This happened not because I don't love her as some would think. I turned my attention to pleasures, fantasies, that I felt were still unfulfilled in my life. So I proceeded to go and fulfill some of them with great pleasure indeed!

The difficult task, as humans, is for each of us to come to the understanding of whom we are meant to be, why, and how that can bring us happiness or more precisely, a state of bliss. The concept of happiness means something or someone makes us feel content. The concept of Bliss is a state of mind we have arrived at where we feel that contentment, regardless of what anyone does, and regardless of what we may or may not have. We humans have many distractions, not the least of them being that we do not meditate ever enough on what's important to reach that state of Bliss.

So whether it is your religion, your upbringing, your tradition or just your own thoughts, all these things contribute to bringing you to the state of mind you now possess. The greatest thing we have as humans is the ability to evaluate all these things and act on them. The greatest tragedy we have as humans is how little understanding we often have of them.

This all sounds very deep, but I keep a great sense of humor about it all because I do believe God has given us a sense of humor to keep all this mystery in perspective. I'm not even sure how I just came up with all this but it sounds so good, I think I will post it for others. Hope you don't mind me sharing.

Thank you for your causing me to think of all this. No I don't just come up with this alone!

Never feel like you are alone, never feel that your state of mind is so unique, because you are in fact in a very predictable cycle that the Universe has created countless times. You only need to stop allowing the waves of time to sweep you up and decide to build your own boat so you can at least direct your path to some extent.

Some of us never do so, some of us build a canoe, some build a yacht, and others build a battleship....

Max :