If you’re that much of a neatnik, the cat hair would only be the tip of the iceberg of reasons you wouldn’t want to date me.
Not so much of a neatnik. My own house is clean, but it is cluttered. Pet hair on everything is just icky to me personally. Human hair, too, for that matter. Pulling a clump of hair out of a drain makes me want to hurl.
IAC, I’d never have dreamed of issuing any kind of “either Fifi goes or I do!” ultimatum. I was the one bothered by the hair. The ladies were content to live with it. It just made more sense for me to find somebody more like me than to try to force them to change.
Agreed. Whatever happened to compromise?
“Honey, I know you love Fluffy, but I’m really having trouble sleeping when he insists on sleeping on my face. Let’s set up a nice cozy bed for him in the basement rec room!”
“Sweetheart, I know how important your guns are to you, but they really scare me. How about you keep them locked up out in the shed, and I’ll take a gun safety course?”
“Snookums, your motorcycle is truly bitchin, but you’re spending so much money on its maintenance that we couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill this month. Is there a way you could bring a few extra bucks in to help keep up, or some other luxury you’d be able to cut back on?”
I mean, I know it’s not always as cut and dried as that but it does seem like a good place to start…
I think we all have our “deal breakers”. I think what’s so backwards here is that one can have gotten so deep into the relationship before discovering the problem. Did she hide the fact that she had a daughter for the first six months of the relationship?
I also have to say just looking at the picture that these two have a lot of the physical characteristics of heavy drug use. I think addiction is often a factor in people choosing a “relationship” over a child. They are really choosing availability of the crutch, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, whatever they’re addicted to.
Anyone who isn’t utterly thrilled at the presence of my daughter my life and completely respectful of the fact that her needs come first (note the word “needs”) can go . . .er . . . urinate up a rope.
Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,
For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.
We quarrelled about Havanas – we fought o’er a good cheroot,
And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.
…
Open the old cigar-box – let me consider anew –
Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
Light me another Cuba – I hold to my first-sworn vows.
If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for Spouse!
My opinion is that anyone who gives up something that brings them joy or is important to them because of a demand by someone else has little to no “self-esteem” (to use an overused and less than ideal term). They simply feel they are worth NOTHING without whoever it is they are seeking to hold onto, and, by extension, neither are their own children.
This happens too often to be dismissed as rare, as the article in that other thread seemed to do. Of course it is unusual, but rare? It is common enough to fall outside that definition imo. Of course, I am including the cases in which a mother effectively chooses a man over her children but doesn’t actively kill her children for his sake, but essentially allows him to.
A not too long ago case in Texas in which a single mom of a 3 yr old daughter who was raped, tortured, and murdered by her live-in, ex-felon boyfriend is a case in point.
This woman knew of this asshole’s incredibly violent history, yet she not only struck up a relationship with im, she allowed him to move in with her and BABYSIT her daughter! When she came home and found her baby dead with cigarette burns and other wounds all over her body and the evidence of her child having been raped with a pot handle at hand, what did she do? Why, she warned the killer to run away before he could be apprehended, then lied to police to protect him, THEN, after he was imprisoned for the crime, visited him and sent love letters regularly.
Sweet weeping Jesus.
There is simply no other explaination imo than women who have somehow arrived at a place where they place zero value on themselves or anything they value or produce, including their children. The only value they can ever feel is in relation to a man, any man.
As for why some ask/demand such things, same issue, I think; they display an over-inflated sense of self-worth which masks an underlying lack of self-esteem/worth/value. They demand such things in order to reinforce their shaky security.