Yeah, I was the annoyingly sentient one. The conversation went something like
I want you to do [thing].
Okay, but you know me. That’s really not part of my personality.
But you’re my girlfriend.
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot. But he wasn’t trying to be evil, he was just quite innocently incredulous and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the world.
Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person’s sexual and romantic needs since the partner can’t go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you’d made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it’s not a sexbot thing. One reason I’m careful not to date women who aren’t dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don’t want to be someone’s only boyfriendly recourse.
Yeah, I agree that there are circumstances in which this works out. 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.) Like the thought that he was asking me for way more stuff than he would be willing to do (and that there’s anything wrong with that) just never crossed his mind. So he was innocently confused and frustrated about why things weren’t going his way.
This also gets into the issue of manipulating language to sneak in blind spots into the meanings of words. “A girlfriend is someone who should make me happy, and not doing [thing] makes me unhappy, so it’s your fault I’m unhappy.” But again, the scariest part was that he wasn’t trying to be evil! He just did all of his reasoning in that kind of spotty language that was skewed in his favor. And then constantly couldn’t figure out why the territory … wasn’t.
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?
Yes and yes. But my whole point is that I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon! He was just a misguided kid with some questionable thought patterns. Like any of us!
Objectification is a cached thought and a weasel word away from anyone. So when someone gets offended about objectification, they’re not saying you’re an Evil Objectifying Narcissist Demon. It’s more like stepping on someone’s foot! It can happen to anyone! Accidentally! And you’d just say “oh, sorry about your foot,” and they’ll say “thanks for understanding.”
I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon!
I was merely referring to the medical definition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which your ex may or may not have had. And NPD people are notoriously hard to treat, precisely because not alieving that they are the problem is one of the main symptoms, and not just your garden-variety denial.
Yep, I understand and I actually think you may be right.
I was saying that using a word, any word, that you wouldn’t use to describe yourself is dangerous for thinking about stuff properly. That’s why I’m still waving this flag around! Sorry to be repetitive. I just don’t want people reading this and caching “Oh, I’m not one of those Nar-whatever people; that means I don’t objectify anyone.”
Tapping out now! Or I might feel compelled to continue flag-waving at a dead horse. =]
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.)
That doesn’t constitute asymmetry of the kind I think Eliezer was talking about. It would be asymmetric if he took you up on your invitation to look for other girls while expecting you not to do the same.
That would depend very much on what the terms of the relationship were, and to what extent asymmetry of the kind Eliezer was talking about was really present. One has to be careful about this, because if A allows her partner B to look for other girls to fulfill some desires of his that she won’t, it’s not clear that this creates an obligation for B to mirror that offer. Saying that there is “significant asymmetry” is language that sort of suggests that obligation is there.
I don’t think obligation is a very good way of framing the issue. Indeed, by far the most satisfying relationship I’ve been in was one where we both took the view “being in a relationship doesn’t obligate us to shit.”
The issue is not whether one person is imposing rules that they don’t want to follow themself, but whether one person has significantly more consideration for the other’s desires and is willing to go to greater efforts to accommodate them.
I didn’t downvote, but maybe it would be helpful to taboo “obligation”: recently I’ve had a feeling that in discussions like this (not just on LW) both parties are thinking something kind-of sort-of reasonable but each thinks the other isn’t because they are using that word with slightly different meanings and each is misunderstanding what exactly the other means by it.
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot.
Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]”. That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.
Again, I’m not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn’t come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.
Well no, it specifically comes out to “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happens to include [thing] even when those behaviors go against their personality”. So it’s someone that puts aside their personality and does things that feels weird and uncomfortable that they wouldn’t do otherwise because their “boyfriend” wants them to.
I think it’s closer to “someone who likes me enough that she’s willing to do things that (possibly mildly) go against their personality for me”. I don’t no what [thing] was so I don’t know how reasonable or unreasonable the request was.
It might also help if you tabooed “go against one’s personality”.
I don’t have a definition, but I have an example. Suppose you decide to start dating a really quiet person and you know that they’re really quiet before you ask them out, and they’re consistently really quiet throughout the time that you’re dating, and then you start bringing them to loud social functions. You wouldn’t expect them to suddenly turn extroverted and gregarious, just because they’re dating you, right? (So I guess one stab at a working definition is a very low-probability change in behavior given your evidence from all your previous interaction with them, usually low-probability due to difficult-to-change psychological states.)
What you’re describing is more like “Will you please go with me to these events? They’re really important to me.” The person might like you enough to do it, even if they’re a bit uncomfortable. The important thing is that the question acknowledges that you know what they’re like and you understand they have a choice and it doesn’t expect them to suddenly deviate massively from their usual behavior.
B: Okay, but you know me, that’s really not part of my personality.
A: But you’re my boyfriend!
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive. You can be as introverted as you like—as someone’s partner in a monogamous relationship, you are expected to at least not always let them go out alone, and A is just expressing his/her displeasure at having that expectation consistently flaunted.
I also suspect you overestimate how serious people will take the “it’s not part of my personality” objection. It’ll mostly be taken as a cheap excuse unless you make very clear how much it would upset you. Yvain has an insightful post on his blog about this kind of thing, though since he has expressed some worries about having people he doesn’t know link to it, I don’t.
Edit: I realize that this was ridiculously unhelpful. In order to avoid linking directly, I should have pointed out that the blog post I had in mind can be found by googling for the string upset “theory of drama”.
I don’t think the conversation itself is particularly offensive, but it would be offensive if all conversations on the subject of going to parties followed this particular template and showed no evidence of converging at an understanding or compromise.
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive.
This is why I ended my first relationship.
Of course there’s going to be some give and take, but it involved exactly the sort of asymmetry jooyous described, where I was being expected to do things I didn’t really like, because that was my “role,” while I wasn’t trying to force her into doing things she didn’t like, because I don’t like doing that to people.
If filling a prescribed role is exactly what you want out of your partner, that might feel like a satisfactory relationship, but to a person who doesn’t, it’s going to feel like their partner isn’t really acknowledging them as a person.
(Now I’m reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven’t had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren’t having sex with her, then by definition she’s not your girlfriend; she’s just a friend”.)
As far as I can remember, something like “well, I can kind-of sort-of see her point, but on the other hand I don’t (say) kiss my friends on the mouth in public on a routine basis or implicitly promise each other to not hook up with anyone else, so assuming the caller does, I wouldn’t say that she’s not his girlfriend but just a friend”. But now that I think about that, that definition is broken, too (e.g. it doesn’t encircle open/poly relationships).
Seems like a total misreading of the situation to me. You understood “But you’re my girlfriend” to mean “you ought to behave like my sex slave”, whereas he meant “I expect you to consider my request as seriously as a GGG person would”. Unless, of course, you two already had this discussion and he is just being a jerk to revisit a settled issue.
Yeah, I was the annoyingly sentient one. The conversation went something like
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot. But he wasn’t trying to be evil, he was just quite innocently incredulous and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the world.
Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person’s sexual and romantic needs since the partner can’t go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you’d made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it’s not a sexbot thing. One reason I’m careful not to date women who aren’t dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don’t want to be someone’s only boyfriendly recourse.
Yeah, I agree that there are circumstances in which this works out. 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.) Like the thought that he was asking me for way more stuff than he would be willing to do (and that there’s anything wrong with that) just never crossed his mind. So he was innocently confused and frustrated about why things weren’t going his way.
This also gets into the issue of manipulating language to sneak in blind spots into the meanings of words. “A girlfriend is someone who should make me happy, and not doing [thing] makes me unhappy, so it’s your fault I’m unhappy.” But again, the scariest part was that he wasn’t trying to be evil! He just did all of his reasoning in that kind of spotty language that was skewed in his favor. And then constantly couldn’t figure out why the territory … wasn’t.
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?
Sounds pretty narcissistic of him. And narcissism is basically incurable, so hopefully you moved on.
Yes and yes. But my whole point is that I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon! He was just a misguided kid with some questionable thought patterns. Like any of us!
Objectification is a cached thought and a weasel word away from anyone. So when someone gets offended about objectification, they’re not saying you’re an Evil Objectifying Narcissist Demon. It’s more like stepping on someone’s foot! It can happen to anyone! Accidentally! And you’d just say “oh, sorry about your foot,” and they’ll say “thanks for understanding.”
I was merely referring to the medical definition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which your ex may or may not have had. And NPD people are notoriously hard to treat, precisely because not alieving that they are the problem is one of the main symptoms, and not just your garden-variety denial.
Yep, I understand and I actually think you may be right.
I was saying that using a word, any word, that you wouldn’t use to describe yourself is dangerous for thinking about stuff properly. That’s why I’m still waving this flag around! Sorry to be repetitive. I just don’t want people reading this and caching “Oh, I’m not one of those Nar-whatever people; that means I don’t objectify anyone.”
Tapping out now! Or I might feel compelled to continue flag-waving at a dead horse. =]
Are there still people like that? o.O
That doesn’t constitute asymmetry of the kind I think Eliezer was talking about. It would be asymmetric if he took you up on your invitation to look for other girls while expecting you not to do the same.
It might not be the same sort of asymmetry Eliezer was talking about, but do you really think it’s not a significant sort of asymmetry?
That would depend very much on what the terms of the relationship were, and to what extent asymmetry of the kind Eliezer was talking about was really present. One has to be careful about this, because if A allows her partner B to look for other girls to fulfill some desires of his that she won’t, it’s not clear that this creates an obligation for B to mirror that offer. Saying that there is “significant asymmetry” is language that sort of suggests that obligation is there.
I don’t think obligation is a very good way of framing the issue. Indeed, by far the most satisfying relationship I’ve been in was one where we both took the view “being in a relationship doesn’t obligate us to shit.”
The issue is not whether one person is imposing rules that they don’t want to follow themself, but whether one person has significantly more consideration for the other’s desires and is willing to go to greater efforts to accommodate them.
I’d appreciate it if the people downvoting this would offer an explanation.
I didn’t downvote, but maybe it would be helpful to taboo “obligation”: recently I’ve had a feeling that in discussions like this (not just on LW) both parties are thinking something kind-of sort-of reasonable but each thinks the other isn’t because they are using that word with slightly different meanings and each is misunderstanding what exactly the other means by it.
Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]”. That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.
Again, I’m not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn’t come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.
Well no, it specifically comes out to “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happens to include [thing] even when those behaviors go against their personality”. So it’s someone that puts aside their personality and does things that feels weird and uncomfortable that they wouldn’t do otherwise because their “boyfriend” wants them to.
I think it’s closer to “someone who likes me enough that she’s willing to do things that (possibly mildly) go against their personality for me”. I don’t no what [thing] was so I don’t know how reasonable or unreasonable the request was.
It might also help if you tabooed “go against one’s personality”.
I don’t have a definition, but I have an example. Suppose you decide to start dating a really quiet person and you know that they’re really quiet before you ask them out, and they’re consistently really quiet throughout the time that you’re dating, and then you start bringing them to loud social functions. You wouldn’t expect them to suddenly turn extroverted and gregarious, just because they’re dating you, right? (So I guess one stab at a working definition is a very low-probability change in behavior given your evidence from all your previous interaction with them, usually low-probability due to difficult-to-change psychological states.)
What you’re describing is more like “Will you please go with me to these events? They’re really important to me.” The person might like you enough to do it, even if they’re a bit uncomfortable. The important thing is that the question acknowledges that you know what they’re like and you understand they have a choice and it doesn’t expect them to suddenly deviate massively from their usual behavior.
What would you say about the following discourse?
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive. You can be as introverted as you like—as someone’s partner in a monogamous relationship, you are expected to at least not always let them go out alone, and A is just expressing his/her displeasure at having that expectation consistently flaunted.
I also suspect you overestimate how serious people will take the “it’s not part of my personality” objection. It’ll mostly be taken as a cheap excuse unless you make very clear how much it would upset you. Yvain has an insightful post on his blog about this kind of thing, though since he has expressed some worries about having people he doesn’t know link to it, I don’t.
Edit: I realize that this was ridiculously unhelpful. In order to avoid linking directly, I should have pointed out that the blog post I had in mind can be found by googling for the string upset “theory of drama”.
I don’t think the conversation itself is particularly offensive, but it would be offensive if all conversations on the subject of going to parties followed this particular template and showed no evidence of converging at an understanding or compromise.
This is why I ended my first relationship.
Of course there’s going to be some give and take, but it involved exactly the sort of asymmetry jooyous described, where I was being expected to do things I didn’t really like, because that was my “role,” while I wasn’t trying to force her into doing things she didn’t like, because I don’t like doing that to people.
If filling a prescribed role is exactly what you want out of your partner, that might feel like a satisfactory relationship, but to a person who doesn’t, it’s going to feel like their partner isn’t really acknowledging them as a person.
prescribed?
Yes, edited.
(Now I’m reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven’t had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren’t having sex with her, then by definition she’s not your girlfriend; she’s just a friend”.)
What’d you think when you heard it?
As far as I can remember, something like “well, I can kind-of sort-of see her point, but on the other hand I don’t (say) kiss my friends on the mouth in public on a routine basis or implicitly promise each other to not hook up with anyone else, so assuming the caller does, I wouldn’t say that she’s not his girlfriend but just a friend”. But now that I think about that, that definition is broken, too (e.g. it doesn’t encircle open/poly relationships).
Seems like a total misreading of the situation to me. You understood “But you’re my girlfriend” to mean “you ought to behave like my sex slave”, whereas he meant “I expect you to consider my request as seriously as a GGG person would”. Unless, of course, you two already had this discussion and he is just being a jerk to revisit a settled issue.