It’s a reasonable claim. We do appreciate the things that we earn, and we also appreciate people that don’t take relationships for granted.
I’m not sure why you would find it repulsive to not take friendships for granted. People don’t just become your friends through some sort of inaction on your part, they do so because they have something in common with you that enhances their experience when you are involved.
The idea that our relationships are just some sort of static entity, that is unaffected by the actions of those in them is what I find to be a fairly unreasonable claim.
How is this an anathema? What do you do to attract friends and build relationships? Do you just show up, and expect it to happen, or do you actually do work to make yourself an active and positive member of that relationship?
Do you actually expect that you don’t have to put in any work or effort in order to maintain stability in social environments? Do you think that any work that people do put into their relations goes unnoticed and unrewarded?
How is it a broad claim to say that people like feeling like they earned stuff? If I did a poll and asked “Do you enjoy feeling like you earned the rewards you get or are you repulsed by this very notion?”, do you really think most people would say they are repulsed? Or do you think most people would say something like, “I believe I value things more when I have to work for them. I like hand-outs and freebies, but I really look forward to seeing the fruits of my hard work.”
My statement was not actually “Humans really dig feeling like they earned their relationships”. This was an inference you drew all on your own. But help me understand why it is so repulsive for a person to see a relationship as a testament of their personal worthiness. A whole lot of people get self-esteem from relationships. Are such people bad, manipulative, calculating people? Are their relationships inherently inferior to relationships where the involved parties don’t feel any personal pride? What exactly is making you want to vomit?
Most people put in a lot of hard work to get a relationship to work. So it is only natural for people to feel like they’ve earn the fruits of that relationship…that it didn’t just come together because of good luck but because they did something to make it happen. It’s wonderful if you don’t have this mindset. Still, you haven’t posited a good argument for why this is such a horrible way of looking at things. All you’ve given me is very cynical and distorted caricature of what I have been saying.
It’s the least charitable and most hysterical inference. I didn’t imply it. You inferred it.
At first I thought maybe it would be helpful for me to rephrase what I said to see if maybe we can bridge this divide between us. But since I’m not even clear what you’re disagreeing with me about, I’m not even going to bother. If we can’t even agree that people in general like earning things in general, I don’t think there’s anything I can say to keep your gag reflex down.
I don’t like when someone takes a fairly innocuous and noncontroversial opinion of mine and acts like I’ve said something horribly disgusting. And then when that person seems to go even more out of their way to distort what I’m saying…sorry, I’m not going to be all lollipops and rainbows with them. I like you as a poster, Ascenray, but you’re kind of working on my nerves right now.
I am sometimes frustrated when my cat doesn’t comes to his name and he gives me the stink eye. But this capricious behavior makes me appreciate the kisses he plants on my nose and all the (rare) times he does come to his name. He shows love, but his love is sometimey enough to create the illusion that it isn’t blind. The kind of companion robot for me would be one that has some “sometimey-ness” programmed into it. Not just because that would make it a closer simulation of a human friend, but because unpredictable is more fun and interesting.
Firstly, the idea that taxpayer should buy you a sex doll is a good example of the sort of liberal over-reach that causes some Americans to misuse their franchise.
I noticed that when some Italian lads arrived in a California beach town, they attracted much female attention; I suppose the reasons included:
(a) any attachment wouldn’t be long-lasting. Girls like to have fun too!
(b) the exoticness of a foreigner might be enticing. The foreigner might even be considered peculiar in his home country, but the non-foreign partner might treat the quirk as exotic and cute.
(c) having the werewithal to fly in from Europe means the potential dating partner won’t start with a default assumption that [del]you[/del] the foreigner is a typical low-life jerk.
So: Save up and take a vacation.You be the foreigner. Budget it as though you were a party of two. If you can save, say $200 per week, after some months you should have enough for a cheap but nice 2- or 3-week vacation in some foreign resort. (Worst comes to worst, you can go to Tijuana?) You’ll use the vacation to relax, work on your social skills, have adventures, and maybe, maybe get laid. If you’re worried that getting laid voluntarily might be difficult, pick a country where option (3) above won’t be overly expensive. You’ll be paying about the same altogether as if you brought a home-country girlfriend with you on the vacation. Just the vacation has its rewards so account the cost of sex, if any, as zero.
When you return from the vacation, you may use your new-found confidence and social skills to have a livelier attitude. Or, you may immediately start saving for your next vacation in the arms of Mária or one of her friends.
We may need pricing information for the robot and details of the vacation plan before we help you make a financial choice. You’ll have to tell us whether the state-of-the-art sex robot is preferable to a H. sapiens woman. If both sex holiday and robot are too expensive, I hear Sally Fivefingers offers diligent low-cost service.
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She told her husband she wanted a divorce. She told me some time later that she really didn’t want the divorce. I can’t think of a better way to describe it than to say that she was keeping her real desires secret. I shouldn’t refer to it as making him “jump through hoops”; I can’t say that she did it maliciously, or deliberately, or if she was even aware of the contradiction at the time. Whether she had told him earlier in the marriage that she needed him to be more proactive (what a dreadful word) is beside the point. Which statements was her husband supposed to take literally, and which ones is he supposed to know have a hidden subtext?
In his place, I can see myself doing what he did, and giving her the divorce. When I love someone, I want to make them happy. If she tells me that her path to happiness doesn’t include me, that’s it. It would kill me inside to lose her, but if she’s happier without me I would have to let her go. I’d be heartbroken. But if you don’t think that that’s doing some emotional work, or is a demonstration of love, I don’t know what to tell you.
It started with monstro’s description of programming a companion robot like a video game. That just strikes me as the wrong way to look at it. I know there’s an idea that men love challenges, and women should provide a challenge to keep men interested, but I just don’t buy into that for relationships. I do like some challenges, but I find enough of them in my life already. I want someone who’ll look for ways to help with the challenges I already have (and me with hers), rather than someone who’ll try to be one more challenge.
Even if we had the technology to make a convincing companion robot, the best way to program one would be a spectacularly difficult problem.
Although I recognize that this idea may sound crazy, I’m willing to defend it. If we as a society can recognize that people can suffer from a lack of income, and use redistributive tax policies to remedy that problem, is it really that far of a stretch to use tax dollars to provide relief from those who suffer from lack of sex?
I’ve considered sex tourism. But I think in the long run I’ll get more “bang for my buck” (pun intended) with a sex doll/robot. I’m a person of modest means, so I can’t really afford to just hop on a plane every time I get horny.
I don’t know why you’re assuming there was any hidden subtext. Without knowing what she said to him leading up to the the end or how he even felt about the relationship, we can’t know whether there was any subtext or missed hoops or anything else. And for this reason, I think you probably should not extrapolate anything from this story.
Being heartbroken is not emotional work, sorry. .
Emotional labor is saying to your spouse, “I’m sorry you want to bail, babe. But I’m blindsided by all of this, and I think we need to talk about it some more. Let’s go to therapy and see if we can unpack these feelings. Let’s see if we can save this relationship. We can separate if we can’t make things work, but I really want to try first. Because I love you, babe. I’m not ready to call it quits.” Emotional labor is actually doing all the hard work that goes into saving and restoring relationship. It’s losing weight and fixing the snarky attitude and washing the dishes without being nagged about it. It’s stepping up your romance game and making more quality time. Emotional labor is not surrendering to the feels. Actions are superior to feelings.
You’re making it sound like you think people “try” to be challenging just for the sake of being challenging. I think it’s more like people are naturally challenging because people are naturally complicated. You aren’t going to find someone who doesn’t complicate your life and only adds benefits to it, because everyone wages a cost of some kind.
This is why I have absolutely no interest in forming intimate relationships. Even just close friendships make me weary. The closer people get to me, the more stressed out I get. Being with people requires putting up with hard, sometimes unpleasant things, and I like having a life with minimal hard and unpleasant things. But I know I’m not an innocent. I know I’m not an uncomplicated person either, so I don’t blame someone for not wanting to deal with the headaches I might bring.
I’ve had some good laughs with my old pal Cleverbot. So I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
Some good points there. I never knew the husband terribly well, so I don’t have his perspective on any of this. And even my friend may have been remembering things as she wished them to be, or with things she’d learned in hindsight.
What I see in it is the potential for two people who both wanted, on some level and to some degree, to be together, but wound up apart. What I extrapolate from it is that people don’t always communicate in the same ways, they don’t always say what they want, we don’t even always know what we want.
Why is it on him to suggest all those things? Why doesn’t she come to him and say “there’s something I need from you that I’m not getting. I need you to start the emotional conversation sometimes, not just answer me when I start it. I need you to tell me you’re there without me having to ask.” Or maybe when she asked for the divorce he assumed that she’d already done the work of unpacking her feelings and had made up her mind. Suggesting therapy and all the rest could be seen as him being committed to the relationship, and willing to put in the effort, or it could be seen as infantilizing and suggesting that she didn’t know what she wanted. There are two ways to look at all of it. As a guy, I’m probably more inclined to see myself in his position. I’ve said that I don’t think either of them was wrong.
As for actions being superior to feelings, granting her request for a divorce was an action; one that may have been devastating to him, but was what she said would make her happy.
I’ve heard the advice to women to be deliberately challenging, although not recently. I don’t know if it was ever taken seriously, or if it ever worked with other guys. I don’t think it would work with me.
Believe it or not, that part in bold is what we’ve actually been talking about. Since the words “reward” and “challenge” seem to be tripping you up, maybe think of a robot girlfriend in terms of what you state above.
What would be more emotionally satisfying in the longterm?
A robot that only talks about what you want to talk about, is always in a contented, docile mood, never says “no”, and never expresses any negative feedback no matter what stimulus you throw at it? Or
A robot that, like a person, has the ability to talk about the things it wants to talk about, might occasionally have a bad mood that you could cheer them out of, can say “no” if its programmed to do so under certain circumstances, and can express displeasure if you’re rude and unloving towards it.
I think the second robot would make a better companion than the former, specifically because it would encourage more of the give-and-take behaviors that typify a normal relationship. For example, my husband is not a moody person in general, but sometimes stress will get him down. Those are the times I have to put aside any selfish, inward-focused tendencies and give him what he needs: a listening ear, reassuring words, pleasant distractions, etc.
In the moment, do I like having this “challenge”? Of course not, because I have my own stesses to manage. But I also know that caretaking moments are actually the stuff that keeps us bonded. If I ignored him and left it up to him to fix his own mood, then not only is that depriving him of love but I’m actually depriving myself of the rewards that come with showing love: his gratitude, his smile, his improved mood, and the intimacy that comes with him sharing his feelings.
Does what I’m describing seem unreasonable to you? Would having to respond to a partner’s emotional suffering in a nuturing manner be too much to expect of you in a relationship? Or is it something that you accept when you sign up for a relationship?
I agree completely, but take that too far and it’s the “what’s wrong?” “if you really cared about me you’d know” cliché. I’m looking for that kind of relationship. I’m willing to put in the effort to make it work. Just don’t withhold the information I need to do it well.
Broader than that, more like 80% of womens “first choices” in mates are only 20% of the dating pool and vice versa.
OK Cupid has a blog where they regularly dive into the stats. I attribute much of my success in personal ads to playing to favor some of the stats their data mining reveals.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here that I just can’t join you on. You are assuming she didn’t have plenty of conversations with him already, and you are also assuming that he was as heartbroken as you imagine yourself to be. Could be he wanted a divorce and was more than happy to get out of there.
And she had her regrets and will have to live with them for the rest of her life, while he gets to put the whole thing behind him and find someone who accepts him for him. You seem to think this story is necessarily sad. I think it’s just one of those things that happen when people get married when they shouldn’t have.
Girls do get schooled on the art of playing hard-to-get, if that’s what you mean. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing it cool and not letting someone think you’re so desperately thirsty you’ll do anything to be with them or you’ll put up with anything. They are more likely to take you for granted if you have this attitude.
I’ve never heard anyone advise a woman to be deliberately challenging. However, we are told to find men who will give us what we want/need and not settle for someone who says he loves you but doesn’t do much to show it. I think Madonna said it best:
Long stem roses are the way to your heart
But he needs to start with your head
Satin sheets are very romantic
What happens when you’re not there?
You deserve the best in life
So if the time isn’t right, then move on
Second best is never enough
You’ll do much better, baby, on your own
This cliché comes up a lot in r/relationships, usually from the side of the person “witholding” the information. Through these stories, I’ve learned why it’s so frustrating to have to explain to a person YET AGAIN why what they said or did was hurtful. There’s only so many times you can say to someone “I don’t like when you do X” before you start to feel like they don’t care, so what’s the point?
Or let’s say it’s your birthday. You aren’t a big birthday person, although your SO is and you’re always doing it up royal for him on his special day. But a milestone birthday is coming up and you expect your SO to do it up royal for you for a change. You’ve told your SO this on a couple of occasions. You’ve even come up with a list of things you’d like to do to make it easy on him.
But instead of getting you something nice, your SO gives you some wilted flowers he obviously picked up from the gas station on his way home from work. And you’re expected to cook dinner, just like it’s a normal day. No card, no cake, no nothing.
Hell yeah, I’d be angry if my SO expected me to tell him why I’m salty over this situation. Why wouldn’t he be able to figure it out on his own?
Anything can be taken too far; I’m talking about what is typical. But understand that people aren’t always going to hand you a step-by-step manual when they are need of caretaking, even if you ask for one. Like knowing to run out of a burning house, some things you will be expected to know on your own.
I have sympathy for you and the other people here who have shared their stories. But that’s not enough for me to support issuing personal robot women to Incels, which is what you’re recommending. That is not going to happen.
Sure. I didn’t mean to suggest that this particular relationship was perfect and should have been saved, but it’s an example that’s stuck with me of making things harder than they have to be.
That sort of thing, yes.
Yeah, but I want someone who wants to be with me, and is willing to admit it. If I wind up taking her for granted, that’s on me. If she just assumes that I’ll take her for granted before she even knows me, that’s on her.
I was seeing someone a few years ago that I was completely crazy about. The last time I saw her was when we exchanged Christmas gifts. I got her a book. Not terribly sentimental or romantic, but it was on the same subject as a museum exhibit we’d gone to and that she had enjoyed. I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t as personal or extravagant as she’d hoped for. The thing is, I can’t always find the perfect gift at the perfect time for the perfect occasion. During the time we were dating, I also baked cookies and a pie for her to take home and share with her family, but I didn’t wait for some special day to do that. I’d rather do small things for someone all the time than stake everything on some grand gesture for the holidays. Maybe she was the other way around, but if she was, I wish she’d have said something.
No offense, but I don’t know how this relates to the hypothetical birthday situation. For one thing, you’re kind of making it sound like she didn’t appreciate your gifts and that’s why things didn’t work out with you, when it’s more likely there was some other reason. In the situation I relayed, it was clear that someone wanted something special and even gave their SO some ideas, but they were straight-up ignored. That is absolutely nothing like what happened between you and the woman you were seeing.
Can you not understand why someone may not want to have to spell everything out all the time? Wouldn’t you be exhausted by someone who can’t intuit what you want based on what they know about you and always needs step-by-step instructions to keep them from doing something you don’t like? Cuz I think that would wear me out.
Since you provided this story about gifts, if your lady friend had told you that she puts special emphasis on big gifts on holidays, how would that have shaped your behavior? Would you have continued giving her little gifts and shrugged your shoulders when her birthday rolled around because, hey, you baked her some blueberry muffins the week before? Or would you have tried to focus your generosity on those days that meant a lot to her and tried to give her things that you knew have special and sentimental meaning for her, even if they seemed silly and pointless to you? Because if you would have adjusted your behavior to cater to her preferences, then that means you’re like 90% of humankind–willing and able to be with someone who is somewhat challenging and makes their partner do a little work. But if you wouldn’t adjust your behavior because it’s too stressful for you, then yeah, a sex robot will probably be the only entity that will give you want you need.
I would have adjusted and tried to communicate how much I cared about her in a way that was important to her. I’d also hope that she’d adjust a little bit, too, and appreciate that small gestures at random times were one of my ways of expressing affection.
I’m not asking for step-by-step instructions. I just want someone who’ll tell me honestly what she thinks so we can work together to meet somewhere in the middle.