No, but I doubt that’s what buybuydandavis was talking about.
One particular tactic is called “gaslighting,” in which you get your way by causing your partner to doubt their own sanity. I personally was argued into staying in an emotionally abusive relationship for three years after I tried to leave it. I just… couldn’t think of a good enough argument for why I should be allowed to leave. After all, I had already stayed for quite a while. Maybe I should trust my revealed preferences over the preferences I felt on introspection (which we all know is terribly unreliable, after all)...
Often in relationships things do not come down to “better” or “worse” decisions, but rather whose preferences count. If I want to cut my hair, and my partner wants me to keep it long, who gets their way? Whoever has the intellectual edge and can keep arguing until their opponent gives in.
Often in relationships things do not come down to “better” or “worse” decisions, but rather whose preferences count. If I want to cut my hair, and my partner wants me to keep it long, who gets their way? Whoever has the intellectual edge and can keep arguing until their opponent gives in.
This is why I prefer BDSM relationships, where “whose preferences count” becomes an explicit problem to discuss and solve. (The answer is never simply “mine, obviously”—but the BDSM community, for all its flaws, has come up with some pretty good contextual frameworks for negotiating / discovering an answer that satisfies everyone’s meta-preferences).
Often in relationships things do not come down to “better” or “worse” decisions, but rather whose preferences count.
Well said.
Life is about choices and preferences, not problems and solutions, but most people are so accustomed to rationalizing everything, and so mesmerized by language, that they think these choices are determined by logical analysis. And it is precisely in a situation of such conceptual confusion that the person with greater verbal agility has the greatest advantage, though as you add, the will to power and the determination to fight for it matters too.
Decius wrote:
Is it abusive to be smarter and to make better decisions and to have those decisions implemented because they are better?
Better, by whose values? And what makes you believe that the “better” decisions routinely win in joint decisions in a committed relationship? The excellence of the solution wins out over the dominance hierarchy? Not likely.
No, but I doubt that’s what buybuydandavis was talking about.
One particular tactic is called “gaslighting,” in which you get your way by causing your partner to doubt their own sanity. I personally was argued into staying in an emotionally abusive relationship for three years after I tried to leave it. I just… couldn’t think of a good enough argument for why I should be allowed to leave. After all, I had already stayed for quite a while. Maybe I should trust my revealed preferences over the preferences I felt on introspection (which we all know is terribly unreliable, after all)...
Often in relationships things do not come down to “better” or “worse” decisions, but rather whose preferences count. If I want to cut my hair, and my partner wants me to keep it long, who gets their way? Whoever has the intellectual edge and can keep arguing until their opponent gives in.
This is why I prefer BDSM relationships, where “whose preferences count” becomes an explicit problem to discuss and solve. (The answer is never simply “mine, obviously”—but the BDSM community, for all its flaws, has come up with some pretty good contextual frameworks for negotiating / discovering an answer that satisfies everyone’s meta-preferences).
Well said.
Life is about choices and preferences, not problems and solutions, but most people are so accustomed to rationalizing everything, and so mesmerized by language, that they think these choices are determined by logical analysis. And it is precisely in a situation of such conceptual confusion that the person with greater verbal agility has the greatest advantage, though as you add, the will to power and the determination to fight for it matters too.
Decius wrote:
Better, by whose values? And what makes you believe that the “better” decisions routinely win in joint decisions in a committed relationship? The excellence of the solution wins out over the dominance hierarchy? Not likely.