Trading the Emotions

Have you guys ever wondered how much fun emotional banking would be? When I feel too happy I walk into the bank and deposit some joy. Happiness becomes credit and each time you are sad you can simply "debit" your bank account and get some happiness back. If you have ever been at that point where you see all your efforts go down the drain, when you look at all you have put into that business, into that friendship, into that boyfriend, into that job and you watch it all sinking away......times when you could just go into your wallet, take out that shiny emotional ATM card, insert it in a machine and get some little change just to get by for the now.

It makes me wonder how painful it must be for people who have lived and loved each other in a marriage ( and please 72 days does not qualify as one oh) for years, most especially when it is one party who is suddenly fed up and can no longer live the "lie" anymore. Picking up the pieces my dear friends is one of the most difficult things to do, it is one of those times in a person's life when you would like to say I am emotionally buoyant. Sometimes I wonder what actually hurts the most, is it the time? or the energy? ( I can hear some people shout BOTH!) or is it the fact that someone or something as the case may be you have shared you life with for the past years  is just about to go down the drain.

In the stock exchange that is human relationships emotions are traded everyday, sadly its is commodity with so many different variants and traded away all too cheaply. There are some who are masters by nature, they are talented, they put in little or nothing to get massive returns from others. Swaying the market in the bullish or bearish direction whenever they please. They play the less skilled who are foolishly lured to make investments that would yield big returns only for them to watch their time energy and money go down the drain just like that.

There is a large host of us though who sit back and study the market, or by chance came across some very good stock at the time. We sit and nurture it for years, watching every single candle burn with excitement and  even though they were some low shadows these stocks were always on the ascendency. Till that day comes when we make a silly mistake or for no fault of ours we watched as the stock went down, watched our years of suffering go down the drain just like that.

After days (or weeks or years) of mourning we realize once again that we have run low in emotional funds, and it is time to do the gamble again. We look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we would never make that mistake again for anything in the world, we look around find that stock that had all the qualities we think was missing in our previous portfolio and once again we delve into exchange market. Is it a game of chance or do the winners know how to calculate every move?
How well is your portfolio of emotions doing?

@il_enigma.

The Pursuit of Happiness........

Dear Future Wife,

I am sorry it has taken this long to find you, I have been busy trying to get myself ready to support the family financially and emotionally. Today though I take a break from trying to make my daily bread to write you this heart felt letter.

I am seriously beginning to think that I am on the wrong path to find you, growing up they said someday we would meet and fall crazy in love, we will get married and live happily ever after. Dont get me wrong I am not ready to get married now, but I need these next years to form a friendship with you and know that it is really you. However my experience thus far has shown me that is probably never going to happen, maybe they got the sequence wrong because now I am beginning to think that love before getting married is just a cocktail for disaster. Sounds crazy eh? Marriage as an institution has been abused and disabused so much these days and this is one of the fundamental reason, people who have chemicals running in their brains decide to tie the knot without actually plotting a graph of if their lives flow together or if they are totally apart.

Waking up this morning and looking at the mirror I could not help but shake the feeling that you are farther away from me today than you have ever been. Funke is fun but I know she is not you, she loves facebook and twitter way too much to even listen to the subtle messages I have sent all this while her about getting ready to be serious. Heck she is not even capable of seeing past her nose and her very next venture......alone I must say which makes me wonder.......does she think I would be sitting around here waiting for her? Needless to mention the countless times my trust has been betrayed, these days I dont even bother to check whats going on. That bridge is burned, if she does turn out to be you I'll be......

So now I have decided to apply a more scientific and thought out approach in my search for you, I will now focus on the qualities that make a successful relationship first before ever plunging into another crazy time wasting venture (God help me stop looking at hips and all those very good things a man likes to enjoy). For now all girls under the age of 24 are out of it, I am sure you are older than that now. Not that I have anything against that age group but if I am to increase my chances of meeting you I need to do a little bit of math. You see my experience has shown that 9 out of 10 girls in that age group do not even know what it means to have a man in their life talk less of keeping one. They are carried away by the beauty of their youth, they think men would toast them forever. My hope is that by eliminating this age group I would have come a step closer to finding you.

I hope by now you would be mature enough to control yourself and know how to set the priorities in your life. I loved computers, heck I still do but you see my dear I knew that my chances doing that in school would not give me that job you think I ought to have especially here in Nigeria. I put my head down and did something I know would feed me and I can tell you now I can afford all the gadgets I want.  So when we do meet, please do well to humour me about your dreams to be a Victorias secret model, but let it stay as it is just a dream. Do well to tell me about your dreams to have a charity and help motherless babies all around the world, but also do well to tell me you would do anything for your family when you have one even if it means sacrificing these things. You see my dear all I am trying to say is let your dreams be in syntax, when you see that I am ready to settle in two years do not say you want to do a 4 year PHd first, your certificate can always come later in life. What is certain is that I would not wait around.

I have and I am still working hard to make sure that life is comfortable for me, you and our kids. My ambition is enough to send a kite to the moon so please if you are that ambitious too, please kindly tone it down. Your time would come and I would gladly seat back and watch you trot around everywhere but that not until you and I have tried our very best to give our kids all the attention they would need to be successful in life. In return for this which you would give to me I pledge to try and make you the happiest woman in this world, with all the respect that you deserve as the mother of my kids and my wife.

Honestly though I am very close to crossing the Rubicon, I would wake up and try one day as a time as I have been doing now. Try not to keep me waiting longer.

Sincerely Yours,
Your Future Husband.

Rules of Engagement

Life my dear friends is a war, sometimes its hard to swallow because we are all brought up thinking we have to be nice and we have to carry other people along that we tend to forget that our primary instinct is to survive. One of the biggest and the most fought war fronts since the history of man is in our "romantic" relationships, personally over the little time I have spent in this world I have found this war to be very ferocious and fought with so much passion but with very little tactical awareness. The main reason is that most of us ignore the main rule of warfare which is know thyself and thine enemy, today that enemy is the Man and we are going to try and understand how this man fights his "romantic" battles.

You see a man is a very straightforward creature, if men were to be a programming language we would be a basic machine level language that understands just zeros and ones, a man does not need a valid reason to want to have sex with another woman aside from the fact that she looks "hot" on a very basic level. A man does not need to do any permutations and think is she good enough or is she smart enough? Maybe to have a real relationship or to settle down with yes he might consider that, but in a very basic and primal way  a man is moved by what he sees. So when I hear ladies say "what I cannot stand is cheating, if he does it once I will kick his ass to the curb" , I ask is that what the real problem is? During one of these spats recently I asked my friend which scenario she thinks would hurt her the most:

- You find out your boyfriend went to strip club with his friends and ended up having sex with a hooker
- You find out your bf has been secretly having lunch with his EX  for the past month

Nine out of ten times they have a damascus moment and realize that it is emotional betrayal that is much more important than a man having sex, but she says, why is it that when a woman goes out to a club and ends up sleeping with a guy she is called names? Well that is because women usually have to cross that emotional barrier first before it gets to sex. I like to look at it from an evolutionary point of view, you see a woman's child is always her child, and as such her own issues are things like will this man be able to take care of this child, provide food and shelter for us or is he just going to run a way ? In that light a woman has to be a lot more careful and scrutinize who she is getting into bed with. The man on the other hand has a bigger dilemma, he does not always know for sure if a child is his own, so he wants to "try as many times as possible" to make sure that his own genealogy continues to exist.

Now like I said I know this is probably hard for some of you to swallow and some might look at this as a justification for a man to cheat but it is really only an explanation of how a man works. No amount of wishing away would change the fact that men will cheat regardless of what the stakes are, Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, JFK, Tiger Woods.........the list is endless. The trick is to know when the man crosses the emotional line and from then onwards the gloves come off, protect yourself as much as you can, betrayal is the real pain in any heart break.

I am a staunch believer that a relationship is 40% love, 40% commitment and 20% of sacrifice, as a man I often remind myself of this and it keeps me from straying. This does not mean that we should hide how we really see things, I think embracing who you are and comparing it viz a viz what you want from life or what you have committed yourself to goes a long way in dealing with this "demon" we carry inside. The world is fast changing and one of the big tenets of evolution is the specie that fails to adapt ultimately goes extinct.

In the words of the famous Sun Tzu:
1. Therefore, I say: Know your enemy and know yourself; in a
hundred battles, you will never be defeated.
2. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your
chances of winning or losing are equal.
3. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to
be defeated in every battle.
As always I appreciate your comments. Have a nice weekend guys.