So? I don’t owe the world children, regardless of my IQ OR my ethnicity.
I so wish I could be that quick with a witty retort. In my defense, I honestly wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly, since I couldn’t imagine someone actually making such a statement.
Well, it’s women’s role in life to get married and have kids, no matter what their personal goals are. Or at least, this is what my family told ME. And if my personal goals conflicted with reproducing, I should give up my dreams. And I was assured that I would find happiness and real fulfillment in being a mother.
Oh, it’s disgustingly common - I heard it frequently through my 30’s. Now that I’m over 40 I’m being urged to adopted/foster. Because, I guess, my existence has no meaning and no happiness unless I’m surrounded by infants, toddlers, and other children. :rolleyes:
Which brings me to my contribution to this thread, heard shortly after I married my husband (who happened to be, and still is, disabled): “You need to divorce him and get a real man who can have sex and give you babies.”
:eek: :rolleyes:
I don’t even want to get started with Teh Wrong in that…
wait wut
That I should straighten my hair every day, because it looks better that way.
Er, no.
And, not me, but a coworker got this little gem from a customer:
“You should get an M.R.S. degree!”
When my wife of 17 years left because she “preferred the company of women”, a co-worker told me, “What you need is some good cocaine and a good street whore that will do anything you want. I know one and I’ll pay for all of it.”
he was deadly serious. :smack:
It’s insulting to tell me I am pretending to have the feelings I have.
Sorry, I didn’t see the request to stop with the pet thing and I didn’t realize so many people had gone off on this tangent. Apologies.
Thank you for that insight. I find threads giving relationship advice problematic because of the haste with which people villify either the advice seeker or their partner, but the suggestion that sometimes it isn’t actually due to a greater willingness to treat relationships as disposable, but rather to make the advice seeker think again is a useful one.
Even if some people are giving sincere bad advice.
When my son was 8, my parents told me to use “tough love” on him. He has ADHD, bipolar disorder and PDD.
I can’t hold a candle to the bad advice given in this thread. Worst advice I got was when I asked a friend of my parents which language to study in college - German or Russian. She had studied both. I asked which one is harder? “Oh, they’re about the same.” My experiences almost learning Rooski Yaziik are cataloged in this [post=10593523]post[/post]. :smack: :smack: :smack:
Seconded
I’m in grad school and multiple Chinese classmates suggest I should go to China to teach English.
Okay, it’s not as bad as the others, but still, not very smart for grad students.
That sounds like decent advice to me, provided you 1) have an interest in China, 2) don’t have obligations that require you to remain in the US (or wherever you live now) and 3) don’t get a job in your field soon after completing your graduate degree.
If this is how you feel, I sincerely hope you don’t own any pets. While I can’t compare the love of a pet to the love of a child because I don’t have children, I love my cats and they love me.
I’ve lost two cats in the last year, but it certainly doesn’t compare to how I felt when I lost my mother. To say such a thing is insensitive beyond belief.
A former co-worker suggested on multiple occasions - both during and after the time we worked together - that I, as a practicing Jewish person, would find fulfilment by joining Jews for Jesus. No amount of explaining that J4J is a Christian organization could dispel this notion.
We don’t speak now.
awright! out-n-out hostility! no passive/aggressive stuff THERE…of course, your dad should have taken up for you & seriously reconsidered his commitment to such a person. If not, cut ties with them. Don’t get together for holidays. Don’t call on birthdays. Don’t expect anything from them at all. Obviously your survival is more important than trying to have a decent relationship that just isn’t there. My psychiatrist said of my mother(who he’d met), “I hope you’re not looking for any validation there, because there is none. It’s like sucking on a dry tit.”
The psychology is what is relevant here, not which creature requires more responsibility or risk to love. A human being feels how a human being feels. As I stated before, yes, there are those who for whatever reason, can only (or mostly) feel love for their pets. I don’t know why, but from what I’ve seen and read, things like trust issues and so on. Who knows? But you’re questioning the intensity of their feelings as if you know what they truly feel inside. You don’t. Know one can, but you can see the evidence in how they behave.
Comparing the two doesn’t mock anything. Just because person A feels X units of love and loss when their loved one dies doesn’t preclude person B from **feeling **exactly the same units of love and loss when their pet dies. Whether or not it’s “wrong” or impossible, or not “dangerous” (really now?), or whatever according to YOU, doesn’t change how person B’s actual emotions work. And it doesn’t demean or cheapen person A’s loss.
Human emotions themselves are complicated, risky and fraught with failure. It’s not the object of the affections that make them this way. It’s quite possible for a human to transfer strong emotions to a pet (that arguably and according to you), more correctly belong on another human.
Sorry, didn’t see this 'til I’d already posted, could you delete mine?
Yeah, that’s kind of why this is just a borderline example for this thread. It was just that I put a lot of effort (and money) into learning accounting and though I like China and all, I wasn’t going to waste my education for $10 an hour teaching children their ABCs for the benefit of a rich school boss.
I’ve learnt from experience to never tell a Christian you have Jewish ancestry, no matter how remote.
Many of them care more about getting Jews to abandon their religion than to get atheists to accept theirs. :dubious:
Trust me, there are plenty of Christians who are OK with someone being Jewish, but not OK for someone to be anything except Christian or Jewish.
I’ve learned not to bring up my atheism IRL unless I can get away from the person quickly, if I need to.
ETA: Many Christians seem to think that atheists are Satanists. I’ve tried explaining that Satanists believe in a supernatural power, while atheists don’t. No good. What’s that old saying about using logic to convince someone from a viewpoint that he didn’t use logic to form?