Ever Find Out Something You Didn't Like About Your SO?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Ugh.

I’m bored at work and decided to be slightly stalkerish and google my bf.* We’ve been together six months, we’ve lived 2 hours apart for most of our relationship.

He only has a couple listings for his name that are actually him. I googled him once before around the time we first met. So haven’t done it in months.

Today I find a new one that has to be him, based on location and not too comon name - a profile for some meetup website or something, and his only meetup group is in support of Ron Paul.

IMO, screw Ron Paul. He’s way too socially conservative - he is very pro-life, quite anti-gay marriage, too into allowing church + state to happen possibly, and too into letting states control basically everything. I can only dig him on not liking the Iraq war. Most of the things he is in favor for are the opposite of what I think is right.

Everyone’s got the right to their own opinion, but I’m so staunch about those few things that I have a hard time seeing the other side. I haven’t talked to the bf yet, but it hurts me to know someone I love is supporting a candidate who I share no morals with. We never really talk about politics - he knows I lean dem/green especially socially, he knows my gay friends, etc. so I don’t know if he agrees with Ron on these things or just demolishing the federal govt and the other more economical sort of positions. But if he does, I can’t hang with that. He’s never done anything to make me think he’s socially conservative, but I am a bit worried. You can’t always agree with candidates’ positions on everything, but certain things are absolute dealbreakers. These are it.

I thought I loved everything about this guy, but if it turns out he really thinks abortion is evil, gays don’t deserve the same rights, etc, this will have to end. I’m probably worrying about nothing because he’s never alluded before, but the fact that he supports this guy and goes out of his way to meet others who like Ron Paul has me uneasy.

Anyone else find out anything about their SOs that didn’t sit too well, at least at first?

*please don’t give me crap about googling him, okay? you know you’ve all done it at least once.

2

Heh! Your post reminds me of a screaming fight I had with a college boyfriend about why it is wrong, under any circumstances, to vote for David Duke. I knew the BF was socially conservative, but what I found out was that he was not aware that voting for a KKK grand wizard type was beyond the pale, regardless. (IMHO, of course, but sheesh!) This was in Louisiana when there were bumper stickers supporting Edwin Edwards that said “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important.” We didnt’ last long after that. I do think I raised the guy’s consciousness a little bit though.

Right now we have new next-door neighbors whose two cars, SUV and Jaguar, are amply decorated with Ron Paul bumper stickers. I have decided not to talk politics with them.

3

Well, my husband is a pretty liberal guy–pro LGBT equality, pro universal health care, anti-bigotry, green as can be, etc-- but I wasn’t too thrilled to find out that one of his ‘‘borderline’’ issues is abortion. He stops short of wanting to deny any woman the right to choose, but he views abortion as the killing of a human being, possibly murder.

One of my greatest moral guidelines is capacity for suffering. I do a cost-benefit analysis on which situation would create the most suffering, and work from there in order to make decisions. Generally, I determine that the capacity for suffering is greater in the adult female than it is for the embryo. He doesn’t really agree with that line of reasoning. He’s not remotely religious and hardly conservative, but his moral perceptions tend to be very fixed, whereas mine are more flexible. I dislike moral imperatives, and he is comforted by them.

Fortunately, regarding abortion, I can’t bring myself to be really outraged about one position or the other, and I’m not personally comfortable with the idea of myself ever personally having an abortion, nor too broken up about other women having them. Our difference of opinion will really have no bearing on how we face any decisions in the future, since I will never have an abortion and we are both pro-choice–and we’re lucky in that regard, because I can see how in other circumstances it would be a problem.

It’s just always weird to think you’ve known where someone stood an an issue for a long, long time, and one day discover you were just making assumptions. At any rate, it’s led to a lot of fascinating conversations.

4

I wasn’t going to say anything about you googling him ‘because you were bored and decided to be slightly stalkerish’ until you assumed we are all like that.
Some of us think this behaviour will lead to trouble and have never done it.

5

Yep. This falls under my guideline, “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”

6

And also “Don’t piss off loved ones by assuming they have something to hide.”

7

We were two weeks into the relationship when I discovered that he owned The Sweetest Thing on DVD. We haven’t spoken since.

8

I wasn’t meaning to imply that simply Googling someone you know’s name is stalkerish - it isn’t. If you weren’t supposed to do it, we wouldn’t have google. So maybe I was mistaken as labeling my actions as stalkerish - he is my bf so it’s not like he’s some unfamous stranger I have some compulsive need to know more about and spend lots of free time obsessing over. I don’t think the act of typing in someone’s name into google is a stalker behavior.

And I think that “don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to” can be, at least sometimes, a bad way to think about it. Some things that you would like to know about someone aren’t always positive, nor should they be (seems impossible), but you’re better off knowing.

Please let’s try not to derail this thread over my little aside. It wasn’t the point of my OP, the point was I may have learned something I might not like about my SO.

9

You should have known, ending the OP with “please don’t take me to task over X thing I mentioned doing, it’s not the subject” would have likely got respected. Ending it with “please don’t take me to task over X thing I mentioned doing, you know you do it too” was going to cause those who do NOT do it to protest.

10

Ouch. I figured that someone would say that they found pictures on the web with their significant other at an orgy face down in a bucket of cocaine but I didn’t anticipate something like that. Words aren’t enough.

11

Well I am sorry I erred here, it was half-serious (the please don’t give me crap part) and the rest was intended to be more joke-like, not accusatory really. I figured someone would call me out on googling him, hence my disclaimer. I didn’t know anyone would take it seriously enough to feel the need to protest that they never google anyone.

Back on track, I found out my ex loved anime after we’d been together for awhile. Like, really really loved it. And he also really really loved MMPORGs or whatever, the old school AOL chatroom style. #roll 87539875 sided die and all that. Wizards and spells and swords and intensely thought out characters galore. I have less than 0 interest about any of that stuff. The longer we were together more I realized we had absolutely nothing in common. Found out dude didn’t even own any CDs or mp3s even - he didn’t care enough about music to go out of his way to hear it.

12

This whole thread reminds me of Elaine Bennis. (Not one but TWO Seinfeld episodes- the “Puddy is a Christian” one & the “Elaine’s new bf is anti-abortion” one). :smiley:

Mine was- that she’ll never get over being a problem drinker, and related to that,
that during a good bender, she can go from 39 years of straightness to a gay experience in 10 minutes.

13

Anyone else thinking of Weird Al’s “Close But No Cigar?” The breaking point on one of his relationships was her owning a DVD of Joe Dirt.

14

I googled a guy I was just getting to know and found out he had made some message board posts that made him sound stupid (and I really do mean stupid - as in, lacking in basic common sense about how to function in society, not just expressing opinions I disliked). It made me a bit more skeptical of him, but I gave him a chance until he had proven himself to be an idiot while interacting with me personally. :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t consider finding out a guy had different political views than I do to be a horrible discovery, personally. If you could co-exist happily for six months without it becoming an issue (or either of you caring enough to ask about the other’s views), I don’t see why it really matters. James Carville and Mary Matalin are still getting along fine as far as I know. :slight_smile:
Having similar views on what you would do if you got pregnant unexpectedly, or how you would treat a kid of your own who was gay…yeah, I could see those aspects of the issues being relevant in a romantic partner. But I’ve known and loved plenty of folks who merely voted differently than I do.

15

There were a few things, and once in a while something will pop up. But we talked about it, and I was either a.) enlightened or b.) agreed to disagree.
When we first got together I was politically very left, as time rolled on I’m very right. Though a lot of things socially we are more leftist. But at the start, I would try to have political debates with him (he’s always been staunchly Republican.) and it just didn’t work. You aren’t going to change anyone’s mind, even the love of your life.
You have to either learn to live with it and not discuss it, or move on because you can’t deal with the difference.

16

No offence taken. :slight_smile:

Although you misunderstand my general position. I have googled plenty of people!

However I don’t google friends or loved ones, unless they ask me to.
What did you expect to find?
How are you going to tell them what you find, without being acused of snooping?
What happens if they find out you did this before you tell them?

17

I google my wife, and she googles me.

(That sounds dirty.)

18

I wasn’t seeking out anything in particular. I know when I google my own name, nothing that is actually about me pops up. My job is to sit at a desk and wait for someone to ask for help, which doesn’t happen much on Sundays, so I was beyond bored. Just seeing if anything that was actually him came up. I know he’s googled me before because he sent one of the matches to me as a joke, asking if it was me (for a massage site). And I think he’s mentioned Ron Paul once before, but I didn’t know he cared/liked him enough to sign up at a website for the express purpose of discussing and meeting others that like Ron Paul.

19

I googled my husband once, and found out that he has his own cyber stalker! Some fundamentalist Christian woman he’s never met who is determined that he’s single handedly leading the students at his university to hell. She shows up on all these Christian message boards and websites - even has her own dedicated to revealing Those Who Walk Among Us or some shit, where she has periodic “Professor ____” sightings, reporting on his recent panel or lecture at a conference or class listings in the school catalog. She exhorts her reader to send letters to the Chicago cardinal and even the Pope, asking them to intervene at the University and get him fired (probably with real fire). Her vehemence is alternately sad and amusing.

While I’ve never found anything out about him by Googling (I already new he taught classes on occult history) I still, after 8 years together, occasionally find things out in conversation. I was gobsmacked when he suddenly started talking football out of the blue one day. “But you don’t like football!” I said. “Uh, yes I do,” my ivory-tower anti-athlete academic said. “I’ve never seen you watch a single game, Mr. Genre TV!” “Well, I don’t watch it, but I like it.” Totally gobsmacked. I despise football, viewing it as a grotesque modern day equivalent of gladiator trials, with the horrific health and lifestyle sacrifices for our entertainment. Plus, it’s boring.

20

:eek: Golly.

We’ve been married for about 12 years and there’s nothing surprising I could find out about my husband on the Web–old discussions about video cards and stuff, mostly. Same for me. But we still surprise each other every so often, of course. [stupid anecdote] Just the other day I looked at him and said “You and I have completely different ideas about what a mantlepiece is for, don’t we?” [/stupid anecdote]