Red All Over

Jenny and I attended the Armani RED party in London in late September, during what is called Fashion Week. It had rained in the afternoon but cleared up nicely at night. In fact the weather was about as nice as you could wish for in London at that time of year.

The event is a charity event for Bono, the U2 lead singer who, often in partnership with Bill Gates (go figure that!), has been an outspoken champion of third world issues including AIDS, for which Time Magazine gave them “People of the Year” last year. They are absolute magnets at the World Economic Forum, for example, which I am sure surprises the women who spurned them in high school, not that there are many cheerleaders at Davos.

Of course Jenny and I felt honor-bound to wear Armani clothes. We like Armani. In fact one of my favorite suits is an Armani, but it is several years old.
Horrors!

Jenny felt we should upgrade. My administrative assistant felt we should upgrade. My concierge in London felt we should upgrade. My driver felt we should upgrade. Apparently so did everybody in London around this time, because the Armani store was swamped.

Of course, it was Fashion Week.

Usually I avoid major cities during their Fashion Weeks. I was reminded why.

A party invitation guaranteed VIP treatment at the stores. This made things more tolerable. We picked outfits that garnered the most effusive praise from the sales-model-robots without blowing my mind on wasteful spending. One nice thing is that there were no tags to remove.

(Hmm... as I write this, I guess I am now thinking I cannot remember the last time I had to remove a tag from clothing. So somebody must have been removing them before I get to them. But I can remember being annoyed in the past about it...)

Anyhow, we “arrived” at the party in my chauffered Audi, one of about which rated the visible disdain of the most junior valet in the presence of all the Maybachs, Rolls, and Bentleys afront Earl's Court (interestingly, some sponsor, maybe Audi itself, provided what appeared to be three or four dozen Audi A8 cars for the event). I have to say that you could not rent a Ferrari or Lamborghini in London around this time, not that I'd want to drive one around there. But I am certain the pockmarked young chap at the bottom of the valet totem pole who had to open my door would have preferred one.

I usually never attend events of this kind because I find them a waste of time. Shallow parties full of mostly shallow people is not my idea of fun. Even if there are deep thinkers in the crowd, there is no opportunity for a meaningful conversation. This is a “be seen” kind of event and I hate being seen. But I thought a few events like this would be interesting for Jenny: the RED initiative was announced at the World Economic Forum this year. I did not attend Davos but after hearing about it from a friend I mentioned it to Jenny. In fact, even Jenny did not enjoy this kind of event very much; in reality this was about bragging to her girlfriends. And that is a responsibility that a girl’s man has… to help her brag to her friends, right? As long as I get quid pro quo...

So I guess I should also place a thanks to American Express for getting me in. They've probably made enough on fees from me to buy me a boat, so two passes to these shindigs was letting them off cheap.

Speaking of shallow, the big news was that Giselle was the spokesperson for RED and Leo DiCaprio gave the opening. Are you as excited as I am about this? From a branding strategy the move might be sheer genius – to make third world issues sexy rather than smart. Indeed if that was the concept, Giselle and Leo were the ideal vehicles. They come across as people with a great body with a not-so-great brain. Make no mistake, not all models and actors are vacuous. But certainly some are. Or maybe I am merely jealous. Yeah, that must be it.

So we obtained nice clothes, or at least something we were told was nice, bought it under the RED system that donated some part of the proceeds to the charity, and did all the silly, stupid celebrity charity event stuff that one does. Including trying to figure out where to put all the giveaways.

The good news is that the paparazzi pay little attention to me when Real Stars are out. We had a few junior photographers snap some half-hearted shots at us, just in case we turned out to be somebody famous in an obscure Asian country, but mostly because digital film is cheap and maybe Jenny wasn’t wearing underwear. And I was mistaken for a waiter only twice.

Jenny's highlight was obtaining an autograph from Kevin Spacey and our exchanging about six words with the man. Oh, and Beyonce, whose music I have never really appreciated, had an excellent performance. Even I could tell. The event itself was very well run and I liked the space (they had cozy booths). Kudos to the event managers.

That night we were too tired for sex. Jenny just wanted a shower, foot massage and bath. I do not know how people have fun at these events. I think they always seem better in hindsight. But we left London happy with our ability to do the things that others expect rich young couples to do, whether we liked it or not.

Monogamy: Risky Business

I have done a lot of startups. Many early stage venture capitalists believe that once they fund a startup, the probability of long term survival is in the neighborhood of 10% and 20%. Tough neighborhood.

Of course that's just the ones these guys fund. And given that venture capitalists are relatively risk adverse (I have only done one venture-funded company, three if you count ones where the VCs pile on AFTER success is obvious), the real odds are certainly worse.

But let me tell you, although I have experienced hundreds of naysayers and critics to every one of my crazy startup ideas over the past many years, I have never seen as much skepticism, smirking disbelief and sheer incredulity as has greeted my latest project: monogamy. Even the most aggressive VCs and private equity people I know are skeptical.

It is almost disheartening. If it were not so motivating!

Fortunately most of these naysayers tell me that they disbelief the concept, not the person implementing it. I suppose I should feel a little better about that. At least they are not saying that they feel I am uniquely unqualified for monogamy. Still, it is commonly mentioned that the bane of monogamy is alternative opportunities, and such opportunities are very easily available to me due to my lifestyle and travel. Perhaps not as much as to a media star, but still…

One interesting side effect of declaring monogamy is that it has effectively flushed out a lot of historical, um, quarry. There are a surprising number of married or otherwise paired women – women who I could have never guessed had an iota of interest in me – who have suddenly told me that they were interested in me in the past. Gee, thanks. Now that I have sworn to monogamy, it is like there is an open license to tempt.

So the pool of temptation is enlarged. This expanded dataset has enabled some new observations. For example, many female acquaintances now seem to fall into one of three categories:

First, there are those who are happy that any man is trying to be monogamous. I call these the Wishful Thinkers. They want to believe in a world where a man can be monogamous, but in general they tend not to feel that it is common. So they are kind of rooting for me, I think, and yet they are not really rooting for ME but rather a concept. They are the romantic antithesis to the private equity naysayers I noted above. The most skeptical subset of these women, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprises former or current sex workers. They are constantly exposed to men who stray, so this seems natural. They either have a healthy and open attitude toward sex, or a resigned attitude. The most romantic of these women wish me well, but seem very skeptical. These are the Wishful Skeptics. Thank goodness that they are not the population that tries to tempt me to stray!

Next, there are the women who feel that it is their mission in life to ensure that no man who makes such a foolish declaration shall survive to make it so. Some of these women are bitter. Others have more complex motivations that I fear to unravel. These are the Zero Sum Gamers.

Lastly, there are women who now see me as a safe friend, being “taken,” and have opened up to shocking confidences. Sometimes it is with Jenny that they open up in this way, to her great discomfort. These are the Little Sisters.

Of course there are other behaviors, but these are the three (and a half) interesting ones because they are all predatory in some way, however slight.

I expect they will be a threat factor in my monogamy quest, something to keep an eye upon, and therefore areas to proactively develop some defenses.

Take My Advice: Don't Take My Advice

I almost never give advice. That is because the devil is in the details, and most of the details are in the context. Context is not rapidly appreciated by an advisor because it is very rare that any two people experience the same context. Similar, yes, but not the same. It is in our nature as humans to over fit our experience to that of others. We see similarities and assume self-relevance where there is none. “Yes, that seems very familiar. I know that situation!” This lets us interact with other humans and it allows us to generalize, which are powerful social and cognitive survival tools, and yet it can also lead to prejudice and pseudoscience. But I'll write more about that later.

So when I serve on advisory boards, I merely point out possibilities or analysis that can enlighten. I rarely advise. Perhaps that is why my tenure on advisory boards is short. Many people just want to be told what to do. It disheartens me why they don’t want to think more for themselves.

I say this because I may say things in this blog that people interpret as advice. It is not. I don't know you. And even if I did, I am highly unqualified to give advice to you. At the very least, consider that my situation is fairly unique: among other things, I have more money and freedom than 99.9999% of the population. So that makes me an outlier.

Another reason to take advice here with a grain of salt: I am posting anonymously. This automatically means you should mistrust what I have to say. I will distort certain events to preserve my anonymity. I might even make things up! So, caveat lector!

Phoenix Rising

Hello, I am Sigmund, and welcome to my new blog.

I am a successful entrepreneur who spent several years exploring relationships in what people tell me was an unusual way. I documented some of my adventures in a blog entitled, “Adventures in Sex and Relationships.” These adventures ranged from group sex to blind dates, from adventure travel to luxury travel, from an orgy with American porn stars to sex games with Japanese geisha, from being stalked to stalking genius women, from rehab to resorts, from paid sex to paid-for sex, interspersed with a lot of analysis about what it all meant to me.

After several years of this I found a stable point in a woman named “Jenny.” We plighted our troth last year in an agreement that included certain aspects of sexual faithfulness as well as uncommonly brutal honesty; as such it seemed inappropriate to continue my blog on sexual and relationship adventures, so I shut down the blog.

Now I am starting a new but related blog to address perhaps the greatest and most dangerous adventure in sex and relationships of all: monogamy. A friend and worldly American courtesan gave me the idea, noting that so much is written about infidelity and much less about long term monogamy. Many romantic stories imply monogamy but conveniently conclude with the ride into the sunset before the relationship has matured. Some, like The Notebook, imply monogamy, revel in the glory of the romantic beginning, but gloss over the perhaps more mundane details of the in-between day to day banality. Still other treatments deal with coping strategies; such media is usually found in the self-help section next to various books on psychotherapy, weight loss, cancer management, and addiction treatment, as if monogamy and its converse are to be treated as diseases.

Are there no lessons to learn about monogamy? Is it too challenging? Is success too difficult to define?

I hope my analytic approach will represent a new viewpoint even if it is only analyzing the outlier that is my life. And even if, perhaps, I fail in this adventure may it be of value to somebody, even if only as entertainment or, better yet, food for thought.

So here it is.