Some of you might know me as a sportswriter from my time at SBS, where I did a soccer column for The World Game and later got into a bit of biff with Les Murray.
However I’m going to talk to you about a different game altogether.
I’ve just written a book called Laid Bare: One Man’s Story of Sex, Love and Other Disorders, which is being published by Hachette Australia later this year.
It’s a story of my comprehensive marriage breakdown, my even more comprehensive mental breakdown, my sexual escapades here and overseas as an accidental but hardcore player, my quixotic search for love in the age of the internet, and most of all, repairing my fractured relationship with my daughter, who is now eight, but was four when I divorced from my wife.
During the writing of Laid Bare I became aware of something that was not only missing from my own life, but also seemed to be in danger of disappearing from all our lives.
It was patience. Forbearance.
We seem to have lost patience with everything.
We don’t read books like we used to.
We channel surf.
We move on if a webpage takes more than five seconds to download.
We throw away perfectly good things. It’s quicker to replace something than repair it.
We take our smartphones to dinner.
We no longer listen and absorb. We tweet.
Now to you, a group of marketing people, this new impatient world might seem like manna from heaven.
After all, people spend money on things when they lose patience and are dissatisfied.
It could be a TV, a car, a fridge, a holiday.
When you see something better than the one you’ve already got, the collective instinct now is to upgrade, as quickly as possible. Look at the ridiculous cults of the iPhone and iPad, for example.
The problem we have now as a society is that relationships – the bedrock of our society – are no different.
We’re beginning to treat them the same as everything else.
Facebook alone is blamed for one in five breakups in the US. One in three in the UK. Those figures are disputed of course, but right or wrong, they’re not too far from the truth.
That’s because our global culture of instant connectivity but perpetual distraction is destroying relationships and marriages.
We are living in an increasingly disconnected world when it comes to emotions. I’ve dated women who should have had their iPhones surgically grafted in their wrists.
And as we know, one of the most important things in any relationship is patience and forbearance.
Patience when times aren’t good is probably the most important.
I’ve never worked in advertising, but I imagine patience plays an important part in the creative process.
If it doesn’t it should.
The best ideas take time to reach their fulfilment.
HBO’s The Wire was given time. Its first season drew terrible ratings.
By season three, it was in danger of being cancelled.
But by being patient, and having faith in their product, The Wire went on to become an artistic and critical triumph for HBO and a huge seller on DVD around the world. It’s been shown nightly on the BBC.
President Barack Obama said it was his favourite show.
Season four, in particular, was some of the finest television I’ve ever seen.
A great and enduring work of art. And it will go on to be appreciated for its quality for years to come.
Marketing, of course, is about building emotional connections.
A large section of our community is trying to find love online.
I’m one of them.
I’m happy to confess that in the wake of my divorce, over a period of five years, I went on hundreds of dates because I was searching for someone to replace my wife and because it was easy and I was trying to outrun my pain.
Click and you’re on.
It didn’t work, of course. Because I had no patience.
I expected to be able to find something perfect out there. I went halfway around the world looking for the perfect woman.
I found the next best thing, ironically, just around the corner from where I live in Sydney and fell in love. But that relationship wasn’t to last either.
So for the most part I was miserable after my marriage breakdown and it was only when my daughter said something startling to me while driving in the car one day that my life changed.
I was stuck in traffic. I was bemoaning my life. Getting frustrated and pissed off. Clenching the wheel.
Then my little girl piped up from the back seat.
“You know, Dad, you could try a little patience. Then you might find life gets easier.”
My daughter is eight. And she was absolutely right.
Patience.
When I first met my wife it was 1996. She dumped me after two weeks but after some John Cusack High Fidelity-style stalking of her flat she took me back and we went on and had a ten-year marriage that produced a beautiful girl.
She took a chance on me.
But, as I say in the book, had it been 2012, “I wouldn’t have seen her again. She’d have put her picture on a dating site, married a Texas oil billionaire and blocked me on Facebook.”
So why are so many people breaking up in 2012? Why are divorce rates so high? There are 50,000 alone in Australia every year.
I would argue it’s partly because we have become so bloody impatient. We don’t persevere anymore.
Getting in and out of relationships is easier than ever because of mobile phones, emails, social networking and online dating.
It gets back to what Douglas Coupland coined in Generation X all those years ago: “option paralysis”.
When given so many choices, you make none.
Or you make one, but there’s no satisfaction.
Supermarkets in the 1990s had about 6000 to 8000 line items on the shelves. Today, there are 20,000 to 30,000, and yet research suggests that shoppers are no more satisfied by this quadrupling of choice. We’re still unhappy and demand more bang for our buck. Limitless options. Overburdened with choice.
Those hundreds of internet dates fall into the same category.
And for the committed pantsman, and for a time I was a bad one, Facebook and dating sites like RSVP are just one big vagina catalogue.
Why settle on one when you can have hundreds? Why get married when you can date a different girl every night of the week?
Formerly happily monogamous men like me have become dreadful bounders because of the internet.
It encourages men – and increasingly women – to play around. In fact women, I find, are becoming just as callous and predatory as men. The checklist mentality is given free rein on the internet.
And because of that traditional relationships are under siege, families are under siege.
And even people who are in committed relationships are thinking about getting out.
Some do. The unhappy ones that don’t console themselves with internet porn, gambling and hanging out in the shed.
Everyone is spoiled for choice. Distracted. Impatient. Dissatisfied.
It’s easy to send a picture of an erect cock or a naked rack on your phone.
You can fuck on Skype.
Porn has changed what we all expect in the bedroom and if we’re not getting it we start looking elsewhere, using the internet, smartphones, dating sites, GPS-based hook-up apps.
I put forward the hypothesis in my book that relationships have “effectively suffered the fate of porn movies: been reduced to ‘scenes’, designed for short attention spans and instant gratification rather than rewarding patience”.
I truly believe this is a bigger social problem than we think and perhaps your industry can be at the vanguard of a new sensibility of patience rather than instant gratification – to encourage your clients and their customers to look for and cherish things that provide lasting value, or at least shared happiness.
Patience is the bedrock of any relationship. The time you spend riding out those periods when things aren’t so good makes the periods when things are going great so much better.
The verb “to love” – the action of love, showing love, giving love – is just as important as the feeling of being “in love”.
In this overconnected world, we’ve collectively forgotten what a true connection really means.
And that is tolerating what it is that makes us human. Not thinking of each other as faultless avatars on a computer screen.
It all starts with a little patience.
This is the edited transcript of a speech delivered at Circus, The Festival of Commercial Creativity, in March 2012.
8 Comments
Couldnt agree with you more Jesse.
I am a person who prides myself with having a lot of patience….
Patience of riding out a what was basically a one-way loveless marriage for 20 years until I realised that if I was going to be true to myself I had to leave…
Patience in seeing a void and establishing a tv show Full On Football that promote all branches of the round ball game in South Australia and nationally….
Patience in continuing with that endeavour for 4 years racking up 100 shows ….
patience in continuing to try to break through with the governing body to work together with them as a resource with my filming of local games – to no avail…
patience in reporting on the round ball game with a dedicated football newspaper for 6 years to find it got me no further in gaining employment within the game then from the first day I started…
patience with trying to understand why someone who professed their undying love for me would then leave in the blink of an eye,
patience with trying to get through a hugely stressful and depressive time of having a loved one commit suicide…
patience with bringing up 3 children only to be forced to make the massive decision to have to leave them to get away from their father…
patience in waiting to see them going long periods of time not having contact with them…
patience to have to ride out 20 years of having a hip injury that gave me pain each day and forced me to walk with a limp until finally someone was able to fix it…
patience to finally build up enough confidence to trust a man to accept his love and start over again…
Yes i agree….the world has no patience in this day and age…..everything has to be at your fingertips, quick in responding and on standby ready to go, drive through, take away….
But those that have no patience do not realise that SLOW is the go….
Like a great wine that takes years to develop a magnificent body, a cheese that matures to get that great taste, a sapling that grows into a beautiful tree over years and years…
Humans need to slow down, take notice of their surroundings, go out into nature and walk not drive, talk to their neighbours, find out what makes their friends tick and throws their arms around their family and kiss them with love and say….
Thank god Im alive and living and live each and every precious moment as time itself passes by quick enough!
Wow what a surprise to open your site and find the above written. I think we can all relate in this day and age as we have all to one degree or another suffered some of the same feelings. I had a break up that was particularly painful and only by booking a trip around the world and enjoying some meaningless but fun times with women I met along the way did I start looking forward instead of back. Then living overseas for a while I met the lady who is now my wonderful wife and mother of my two fantastic boys (Messi and Maradona I hope).
I manage a lot of people in my career and one thing I notice now is that lack of patience with people and their desire to have something now and even if they do get it, they then move on to something else. They don’t want to work hard and earn things and don’t value what they do have. Yes a mass generalization but not too far from one that holds true amongst most.
I find that while your views on football are often opposed to mine, not necessarily in terms of what we like, or what we hope will be achieved, but perhaps in how we go about it and who is best to achieve that,but I do enjoy your writing. It is opinionated and in your face, but those are your views and you don’t play politics or beat around the bush, I respect that. I also think I will enjoy reading your book…thanks.
Oh and get off Facebook, it is pure rubbish and a place fo people who want instant acceptance of their inane comments and where they can pretend their life is full of fantastic activities all the time instead of the mundane and just enjoyable family moments that won’t seem to exciting to anyone else. I moved several barrow loads of bricks today and filled a large bin with garden waste, my 5 year old helped and we had a fun day…you never see Facebook personas do something so unexciting yet fulfilling fo me and enjoyable for my son to be outside helping his dad.
Hey Jesse,
So good to see this written. You are so right. It is such a frustrating society we live in. We have created our own problems. We have done this in our desire to make everything easier, quicker. We are fatter, dumber, lazier and less motivated than our predecessors. Oh, how this piece needs to be heard, and lived.
I also believe, with patience, must come commitment, unconditional love, and forgiveness. Can people live this, without learning & having respect for others, relationships, commitment?? Society’s mindset that we have been evolving to is, ‘ALL ABOUT ME’….. and NOW!!!!!
Can we change and become patient? Committed? and respecting one another in life/relationships, to be able to have unconditional love for the long term? Seems self control has been given up alongside patience …. in our quest to make ‘me’ happy.
Great story. Beautifully written. Thank you. xx
I think one of the biggest problems of the A-League is that it started in this era of instant gratification, as opposed to the 1900s or thereabouts. Other codes were able to get rusted-on support in the days of loyalty that have carried through to today, but many A-League supporters seem to have ditched their club when the going got tough. Even more perplexing if the supporters that refuse to turn up because it’s not the best football in the world (because every other country where football is popular must have the best league in the world) – with no patience for better technical skills to develop and be integrated into the league. Well it certainly won’t happen if supporters stay home.
Furthermore, how often do we see coaches sacked after failing to deliver results after half a season? As a Melbourne Victory supporter, I’m all to aware of it. Is it wrong for a football team to lose? Is it so unbearable to wait while a team goes through transition, or a young team develops?
As a dentist, I also cop it sweet from this new sensation. I’ve often been asked if I can provide an entire course of treatment in one visit, sometimes before I’ve even seen the patient and have been able to chart their treatment. I’ve been abused by at least one patient when I told him he couldn’t have most of his treatment in one session. Others seem to lose enthusiasm when I explain that their new smile will take several sessions – a tooth that needs root canal therapy prior to the provision of a crown means the patient could be in the chair for at least six treatment sessions (that is if they want good treatment and not haphazard rubbish treatment that will fail after two years). Amazingly, there are also those who would seek to simply remove all of their teeth to replace them with dentures, an instant result in their minds, but something that I know will lead to even more problems later in life, as well as reduced chewing function.
I guess the final example is gingivitis – people often come to me complaining about bleeding gums, but the only thing they like to focus on is what I can do about it. When I explain to them that the prognosis for their condition is actually mostly dependent on their home care routine (brushing and flossing), they seem taken back. When I offer to show them how to brush or floss to check their technique, they decline. It’s as if the onus is on me to produce the result in an instant, with as much discomfort as a haircut and beauty treatment – you won’t believe how abusive some people get when the scale and clean produces some expected discomfort.
Hopefully, there can be some arresting of impatience and instant gratification before society really starts to suffer – if it isn’t already!
Now you’re talking.. thank you..
I don’t recall agreeing with anything you have ever posted, however I respect the courage of your conviction. Look forward to reading your book.
A little self indulgent, but possibly therapy for the modern male living amongst the also-impatient women.
Bravo to you for baring your vulnerabilities to the masses, and I hope you achieve the relationship you aspire to have with your daughter.
Impatient or not, time always brings out our truths.