But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he’d get mad if I was talking to another guy.)
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated). If he carefully refrained from talking to other girls, then we have a big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work and a probable breakup recommendation, but not an asymmetric non-negotiated demand.
Sorry for being pedantic in my definitions, but while this sort of thing may not in fact be relevant to your case, the general rule may prove important to others.
I think I’m going to have to drop this particular example. I kind of rushed into it blindly because I thought it was really important to point out that the thinking from the original comment wasn’t a straw man. And I do think it’s important to fill in this other information, but unfortunately it’s making me remember a bunch of stuff in more detail that I’d like, oops. (He did think he was allowed to talk to other girls. Also a lot of his behavior was characterized by this type of surprised frustration at very predictable things.)
Being pedantic in definitions is awesome! I think that failure is what gets people into this mess in the first place. If we were really thinking “I’d like you to put away your personal preferences whenever I find them inconvenient,” we wouldn’t have too much trouble realizing our thoughts were evil. But I also think that a non-evil
big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work
can be really damaging anyway and I think it’s easier and more productive to identify the potential for damage rather than establishing watertight evilness after the fact. Which is what I think the people that get mad at that “get a girl” type of rhetoric try to do.
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated).
Even without an asymmetry, the idea that when one is in a relationship one should refrain from talking to about 50% of the population sounds so preposterous to me that it’s not even funny. (Or is “talking” in this context a euphemism for something else?)
The fact that the parent and this comment were both downvoted makes me guess that such a position is not as indefensible as it naively sounds; but… Why? What am I missing?
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated). If he carefully refrained from talking to other girls, then we have a big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work and a probable breakup recommendation, but not an asymmetric non-negotiated demand.
Sorry for being pedantic in my definitions, but while this sort of thing may not in fact be relevant to your case, the general rule may prove important to others.
I think I’m going to have to drop this particular example. I kind of rushed into it blindly because I thought it was really important to point out that the thinking from the original comment wasn’t a straw man. And I do think it’s important to fill in this other information, but unfortunately it’s making me remember a bunch of stuff in more detail that I’d like, oops. (He did think he was allowed to talk to other girls. Also a lot of his behavior was characterized by this type of surprised frustration at very predictable things.)
Being pedantic in definitions is awesome! I think that failure is what gets people into this mess in the first place. If we were really thinking “I’d like you to put away your personal preferences whenever I find them inconvenient,” we wouldn’t have too much trouble realizing our thoughts were evil. But I also think that a non-evil
can be really damaging anyway and I think it’s easier and more productive to identify the potential for damage rather than establishing watertight evilness after the fact. Which is what I think the people that get mad at that “get a girl” type of rhetoric try to do.
Even without an asymmetry, the idea that when one is in a relationship one should refrain from talking to about 50% of the population sounds so preposterous to me that it’s not even funny. (Or is “talking” in this context a euphemism for something else?)
The fact that the parent and this comment were both downvoted makes me guess that such a position is not as indefensible as it naively sounds; but… Why? What am I missing?