A torrid affair with my pen

Last night I got the chance to go out for coffee with Star, one of my favorite people in the worlld who I don't see nearly enough of. However one of the many things that came up over an evening of excellent conversation struck me as worthy of comment here.

One of the best things about meeting a new friendship or falling in love is the experience of coming to get to know someone intimately. Those long conversations that leave you smiling as you talk about deep ideas and beliefs. The surprises of unexpected traits like the burly football quarterback's love for smultzy romance. That the discovery of who this person really is could be one of the most invigorating experiences you can have in life.

However as time passes we fall into these confortable routines with our friends and loved ones. That our relationships, while immensely satisfying, tend towards predictability and being low key. What Star suggested is that the biggest appeal to the idea of having an affair is the experience of getting to know someone. The sinking deep into their personality and the passion that it brings to have the uncertainty and newness to this relationship. However slowly our lives fill up those limited hours that we get and we find that we simply don't have the time to get to meet new people anymore. Affairs seem perfectly designed for this purpose - they get all the passion of the new relationship and have built in reasons to break them off later to avoid the life clogging entanglements.

What this got me thinking was that while the idea of going outside of a relationship is at best distasteful to me that I have much the same attitude, just focused through a different outlet. For me both roleplaying and writing satisfy that desire to get to know people. When I start writing a character I have nice basic outline of who I think they are. However as I keep going they take on a life of their own and start doing things that I don't expect. At the same time these actions seem perfectly natural and anything else in that situation would be wrong. So I start exploring the reason and it's as if the character were taking over and telling their own story. Then eventually I reach the end of the plot and I can put it aside - sometimes I'll go back and read it later but our relationship has come to an end.

Much better than an affair I think since I have something real to show for it at the end. Plus the satisfaction is much better than the uncomfortableness of guilty sex.