I know two gay men, now together. Each got married to a woman first and each had one daughter.
Their now ex-wives were and still are batshit crazy. And not the fun, lifes an adventure kind. Well, you can figure out my theory as well.
Except arguably it isn’t marginal to the point of the thread. To some of us, being in a committed relationship with an “significant other” carries obligations that do not attach to a person you are not related to (like a roommate) or related to only distantly (like an adult competent aunt or uncle).
levdrakon describes this person in a way that makes her (her?) sound like she’s not all there mentally, may be damaging herself at least financially, but he doesn’t really give a shit. He also is not particularly respectful in how he talks about her – doesn’t even sound like he likes her, in fact. He has “future plans” that apparently don’t include her. All those attitudes are completely understandable if he’s talking about a roommate, but they are pretty damn heartless if he’s talking about a real SO.
It’s not excessive snoopiness to ask him to clarify the terms he’s using so the people he’s addressing know what the hell he’s talking about.
It is excessive snoopiness if he has not chosen to make his relationship with this person the actual topic of the thread. For the purposes of understanding what’s being said in the OP, it shouldn’t make a difference to you whether he’s “pretty damn heartless” or something else.
I’m more worried about the “I’m a gay guy and I’m pregnant”.
A horrifying thought just occurred to me - is the phrase “woman sperm” going to come up?
Regards,
Shodan
Well, surprise! It does make a difference to me, because without that information I don’t know how to take the OP, much less how to respond to it. If this is basically a roommate relationship, then his lack of concern and respect are understandable and excusable, IMO. If this is a relationship with a true SO, then they aren’t. So maybe that’s not an important piece of information to you, but you don’t get to decide what is or is not important to me or to anyone else.
If I start an OP about how I burned a house down, whether or not I own the house is a relevant piece of information for others to have when deciding how to respond. It doesn’t become less relevant if I “choose” not to make it the “actual topic of the thread.”
Obviously, the OP isn’t interested in responses about his personal life. He’s decided to share a “mundane, pointless” story about a intellectually challenged person he knows and nothing more. Posters on these boards don’t owe us explanations of their lives or even the truth about their personal arrangements just because you think it’s somehow relevant to how you think you should feel about him. He didn’t ask us for our opinions about his character or his life.
Nobody owes anyone anything in cyberspace. But on message boards sometimes you get things you didn’t ask for – including requests for further information so that people know what the hell you’re talking about. Those requests are not unreasonable nor particularly snoopy; they are the natural reaction of people who are seeking to know the context of what is being said to them in order to decide whether to respond, or how to formulate a response. That’s the give-and-take of a message board, where responses are expected if not presumed. If IYO opinions are only to be offered when asked for, then allow me to point out that in this thread no one asked for yours.
Here it’s not just that your opinion hasn’t been asked. He’s said rather clearly that he’s not interested in offering a full explanation of his relationship. Isn’t that enough of a signal to back off?
Not really, because how is anyone supposed to have an in-depth discussion of a topic when the discussion’s originator is uncooperative and self-contradictory? It’s so bizarre that it’s kind of interesting just to speculate. On separate occasions so far, we have seen that the OP:
- has a female “SO”
- has a male “SO”
- has a wife, who may or may not be the same person as the female SO described in this thread
- is a pregnant gay guy
- has “buns in the oven” which are not children
Now looking at this information, compared with the fact that one of these characters got suckered into an everyday run-of-the-mill Nigerian scam, I’d say the former is far more fascinating.
I wasn’t responding to him, I was responding to you:
“It’s ridiculous to hold the OP to some kind of legal definition of a term that was marginal to the point of the thread.” – Hyperbolizes what has been asked for (“ridiculous”), overstates what people were asking for (“some kind of legal definition of the term”), and dismisses why “what is meant by ‘SO’?” matters by misconstruing it as “marginal to the point of the thread.”
When you identify yourself as a gay man married to a “ditz” but with long term plans that don’t include her, then you can expect people to have some questions. He doesn’t “owe” anyone a full explanation of anything, but that doesn’t mean that people were unreasonable or “snoopy” to ask him to clarify what he means by the terms he uses in his own OP.
“I found a first edition book at a yard sale. They didn’t know what it was worth, so I totally stole it!”
“What do you mean by ‘stealing’?”
“Hey, back off! I’m not interested in defining that.”
He’s this guy!
