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Honestly, if my wife said I wasn't the number one person in her life then I would find that pretty disrespectful. She is my number one after all. It seems lik

by ragnot 3y ago

Honestly, if my wife said I wasn't the number one person in her life then I would find that pretty disrespectful. She is my number one after all. It seems like we've failed a whole generation of adults with good examples of what a relationship should be like.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
I grew up in a religion where I am expected to love my wife to the point of torture and execution if it would protect her from harm (or at least, that’s the ideal). I doubt any “platonic life-partner”…
- abosherid 3y ago
  May I ask what religion?
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Traditional Catholicism. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it.” Doesn’t take more than a minute of reflection to figure out why we interpret it this way. Edit @avar to your question ("posting too fast"): https://gist.github.com/gjsman/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543535 https://gist.github.com/gjsman/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543...
    - avar 3y ago
      I'm an atheist, but this is an honest question: does it? My understanding of catholic doctrine is that Jesus was part of the holy Trinity and knew it before he sacrificed himself. Therefore when he sacrificed himself for humanity he wasn't in the sort of personal danger or at risk of eternal damnation that a mere mortal in his shoes would be. I've always understood that as God making a grand gesture of some sort, not that Jesus was in personal danger comparable to that of a mortal in his shoes. Of course being tortured for days before being guaranteed a seat by God's side in heaven upon death would royally suck in the short term. But I'd think an internally cotsisconsistent interpretation of doctrine would call for a personal sacrifice short of that of Jesus in his last days from a mere mortal, the odds being stacked in the deity's favor. No?
      - nemo44x 3y ago
        Catholics don't really take the bible as literal as many protestant religions do. Some fundamentalist Catholics do but the Catholic Church (capital 'C') does not and has not for a very long time. Pope Benedict XVI in 1993 when he was a Cardinal: “Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by "literal interpretation" it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development… The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem… Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.” So because of that it isn't really necessary to logically evaluate it unless you want to poke holes in a Protestant and Fundamentalists cheery picked parts. I want to be careful to not run into a "No true Scottsman" thing here, but Catholics by and large have tried to adapt the Bible to modern problems, not dissimilar to Reform Judaism.
        phd514 3y ago
        Unfortunately, Benedict is conflating fundamentalism with literalism here. It's a common mistake (and "fundamentalist" has become essentially an epithet) although one that I am surprised to hear from someone as otherwise erudite and thoughtful as Benedict. Theological fundamentalism came out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93modernist_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...) and none of its earliest and strongest proponents (Machen, Van Til, etc.) were literalists. In fact, they were quite the opposite. While certain strains of fundamentalism have literalist tendencies, there is nothing implicit literalist in fundamentalism. Some might look at the Five Fundamentals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93modernist_controversy#The_Doctrinal_Deliverance_of_1910_(the_Five_Fundamentals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...] and consider them implicitly literalist, but most of them are contained in the creeds and confessions that Catholicism and Protestantism hold together and so denying any of them would place one outside of either Catholic or Protestant doctrine.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      Uh. Catholicism calls for you to love everyone to the point of torture and death. It is weird that you missed this message. The Catholic line would be something like "God created marriage as a kind of metaphor for your relationship with all people, as a kind of easy arena where you can play out the kind of love that you should extend to the entire world." Jesus, after all, did not die for a wife except in this very metaphorical sense. He died for sinners, lazy shits, prostitutes, tax collectors, etc, etc, etc. That is what the calling in Catholicism is.
      - adamrezich 3y ago
        Catholicism calls for one to commit to at least one Sacrament of Service: Holy Orders and/or Matrimony.
        nathan_compton 3y ago
        So? That isn't even a necessary condition for being a good Catholic. It certainly isn't a sufficient one. The message is clear: a good person, from the point of view of Catholicism, is one willing to sacrifice everything, even in a gruesome fashion, for the lowliest person.
        adamrezich 3y ago
        this is an enormous oversimplification of a complex system of beliefs.
        nathan_compton 3y ago
        " Catholicism calls for one to commit to at least one Sacrament of Service: Holy Orders and/or Matrimony. " And this isn't?
        adamrezich 3y ago
        I listed one of many beliefs of the faith, whereas you claimed to boil the entire faith down to a single phrase—I'm having trouble understanding the supposed contradiction.
    - mjh2539 3y ago
      Re your gist post, the hypostasis had a human nature from the beginning, and not just from the time he was born.
asah 3y ago
The 1970s/GenX/latchkey have entered the chat.
- parpfish 3y ago
  as an 80s kid raised by a helicopter stay-at-home parent, i've always been deeply envious of the independence afforded to latchkey kids
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    The latchkey kids did not find it to be a bed of roses. Turns out that a lot of kids miss parents when they don't have them.
ctvo 3y ago
> It seems like we've failed a whole generation of adults with good examples of what a relationship should be like. ... the good examples are like your relationship I assume? In some cultures parents are number 1, and the expectation is your elderly parents outrank your wife in terms of the devotion and love you should show them. Is that disrespectful too, or does it only apply to close friends? Who are you to judge here?
- ddj231 3y ago
  well the parent to child relationship is not a procreative one. New family units have to form that are procreative or that society will eventually crumble. So it’s not simply subjective. The marriage relationship is procreative and a bedrock for society. I don’t think a society having greater / lesser deference to parents as authority figures takes away from that reality. The parents themselves are in a procreative relationship, and are matriarchs and patriarchs to their line. And clearly the cultures that demand “more” love to parents than a spouse, do not (cannot rightly) demand intimate love. So I would question what “more” love is.
  - nkjnlknlk 3y ago
    Why would monogamous relationships be better for society from your perspective? Shouldn't you be arguing that marriage is holding our "new family unit" generation back?
    - ddj231 3y ago
      Well after procreation comes child rearing. We don’t abandon human children to the wild. I don’t believe the benefits of monogamous marriage are simply cultural. One would have to pose a better ideal for generating and raising children (because nurturing the next generation is a key part of societal survival) that leads to human flourishing. Is it polygamy, or casual hookups, or absentee fathers? That said I do think there is more to the marriage relationship than procreation. That 2 people are becoming one. With that comes life long friendship bound by a vow that weathers the storms of life, close intimacy etc.
  - 3y ago
nathan_compton 3y ago
I feel like this is demented, frankly. If you loved your wife, then you would only want her to flourish. It seems necessarily disordered to think about your expectations of your partner in terms of "I should be her top priority." You should expect that she treats you with respect, obviously, and that might mean different things for different people, but I think centering the idea of "she must see me as Numero Uno" is a bad way to think about a lifelong relationship. A healthy relationship is one where each partner is dedicated selflessly to the flourishing of the other partner. In any case, the idea of a "number one person" is also really two dimensional and limiting.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > A healthy relationship is one where each partner is dedicated selflessly to the flourishing of the other partner This sounds co-dependent to me, not healthy at all.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    It would be if each partner we dedicated exclusively to the flourishing of the other partner. But in this relationship neither partner would find that an acceptable state of affairs.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    it's the opposite. What the OP is describing is simply altruistic love. You love someone for who they are, not how they relate to you. That is the only form of relationship that involves no dependency. Any relationship that makes your feelings for someone dependent on their feelings for you is effectively a complicated form of bargaining.
kgwxd 3y ago
If she told you that, and it was true, how is it disrespectful? What would would do in that situation? Demand "respect" and decree you must be her number one?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  “I think you are a fat, ugly sow and I hate you” might be someone’s true feelings but it’d be hard not to feel disrespected hearing it.
teolandon 3y ago
What is this? Just because you stopped finding friends after getting married doesn't mean that if she finds new friends it means any disrespect to you. Just because someone gets married doesn't mean they have to start depending only on their spouse for everything, just to keep that spouse at that "number one" spot.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  It’s not about friends being bad so much as the “you’re always second fiddle, deal with it” part.

by ragnot 3y ago

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I grew up in a religion where I am expected to love my wife to the point of torture and execution if it would protect her from harm (or at least, that’s the ideal). I doubt any “platonic life-partner”…

abosherid 3y ago
May I ask what religion?
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Traditional Catholicism. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it.” Doesn’t take more than a minute of reflection to figure out why we interpret it this way. Edit @avar to your question ("posting too fast"): https://gist.github.com/gjsman/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543535 https://gist.github.com/gjsman/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543...
  - avar 3y ago
    I'm an atheist, but this is an honest question: does it? My understanding of catholic doctrine is that Jesus was part of the holy Trinity and knew it before he sacrificed himself. Therefore when he sacrificed himself for humanity he wasn't in the sort of personal danger or at risk of eternal damnation that a mere mortal in his shoes would be. I've always understood that as God making a grand gesture of some sort, not that Jesus was in personal danger comparable to that of a mortal in his shoes. Of course being tortured for days before being guaranteed a seat by God's side in heaven upon death would royally suck in the short term. But I'd think an internally cotsisconsistent interpretation of doctrine would call for a personal sacrifice short of that of Jesus in his last days from a mere mortal, the odds being stacked in the deity's favor. No?
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      Catholics don't really take the bible as literal as many protestant religions do. Some fundamentalist Catholics do but the Catholic Church (capital 'C') does not and has not for a very long time. Pope Benedict XVI in 1993 when he was a Cardinal: “Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by "literal interpretation" it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development… The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem… Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.” So because of that it isn't really necessary to logically evaluate it unless you want to poke holes in a Protestant and Fundamentalists cheery picked parts. I want to be careful to not run into a "No true Scottsman" thing here, but Catholics by and large have tried to adapt the Bible to modern problems, not dissimilar to Reform Judaism.
      - phd514 3y ago
        Unfortunately, Benedict is conflating fundamentalism with literalism here. It's a common mistake (and "fundamentalist" has become essentially an epithet) although one that I am surprised to hear from someone as otherwise erudite and thoughtful as Benedict. Theological fundamentalism came out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93modernist_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...) and none of its earliest and strongest proponents (Machen, Van Til, etc.) were literalists. In fact, they were quite the opposite. While certain strains of fundamentalism have literalist tendencies, there is nothing implicit literalist in fundamentalism. Some might look at the Five Fundamentals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93modernist_controversy#The_Doctrinal_Deliverance_of_1910_(the_Five_Fundamentals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...] and consider them implicitly literalist, but most of them are contained in the creeds and confessions that Catholicism and Protestantism hold together and so denying any of them would place one outside of either Catholic or Protestant doctrine.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Uh. Catholicism calls for you to love everyone to the point of torture and death. It is weird that you missed this message. The Catholic line would be something like "God created marriage as a kind of metaphor for your relationship with all people, as a kind of easy arena where you can play out the kind of love that you should extend to the entire world." Jesus, after all, did not die for a wife except in this very metaphorical sense. He died for sinners, lazy shits, prostitutes, tax collectors, etc, etc, etc. That is what the calling in Catholicism is.
    - adamrezich 3y ago
      Catholicism calls for one to commit to at least one Sacrament of Service: Holy Orders and/or Matrimony.
      - nathan_compton 3y ago
        So? That isn't even a necessary condition for being a good Catholic. It certainly isn't a sufficient one. The message is clear: a good person, from the point of view of Catholicism, is one willing to sacrifice everything, even in a gruesome fashion, for the lowliest person.
        adamrezich 3y ago
        this is an enormous oversimplification of a complex system of beliefs.
        nathan_compton 3y ago
        " Catholicism calls for one to commit to at least one Sacrament of Service: Holy Orders and/or Matrimony. " And this isn't?
        adamrezich 3y ago
        I listed one of many beliefs of the faith, whereas you claimed to boil the entire faith down to a single phrase—I'm having trouble understanding the supposed contradiction.
  - mjh2539 3y ago
    Re your gist post, the hypostasis had a human nature from the beginning, and not just from the time he was born.

asah 3y ago

The 1970s/GenX/latchkey have entered the chat.

parpfish 3y ago
as an 80s kid raised by a helicopter stay-at-home parent, i've always been deeply envious of the independence afforded to latchkey kids
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  The latchkey kids did not find it to be a bed of roses. Turns out that a lot of kids miss parents when they don't have them.

ctvo 3y ago

> It seems like we've failed a whole generation of adults with good examples of what a relationship should be like. ... the good examples are like your relationship I assume? In some cultures parents are number 1, and the expectation is your elderly parents outrank your wife in terms of the devotion and love you should show them. Is that disrespectful too, or does it only apply to close friends? Who are you to judge here?

ddj231 3y ago
well the parent to child relationship is not a procreative one. New family units have to form that are procreative or that society will eventually crumble. So it’s not simply subjective. The marriage relationship is procreative and a bedrock for society. I don’t think a society having greater / lesser deference to parents as authority figures takes away from that reality. The parents themselves are in a procreative relationship, and are matriarchs and patriarchs to their line. And clearly the cultures that demand “more” love to parents than a spouse, do not (cannot rightly) demand intimate love. So I would question what “more” love is.
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  Why would monogamous relationships be better for society from your perspective? Shouldn't you be arguing that marriage is holding our "new family unit" generation back?
  - ddj231 3y ago
    Well after procreation comes child rearing. We don’t abandon human children to the wild. I don’t believe the benefits of monogamous marriage are simply cultural. One would have to pose a better ideal for generating and raising children (because nurturing the next generation is a key part of societal survival) that leads to human flourishing. Is it polygamy, or casual hookups, or absentee fathers? That said I do think there is more to the marriage relationship than procreation. That 2 people are becoming one. With that comes life long friendship bound by a vow that weathers the storms of life, close intimacy etc.
- 3y ago

nathan_compton 3y ago

I feel like this is demented, frankly. If you loved your wife, then you would only want her to flourish. It seems necessarily disordered to think about your expectations of your partner in terms of "I should be her top priority." You should expect that she treats you with respect, obviously, and that might mean different things for different people, but I think centering the idea of "she must see me as Numero Uno" is a bad way to think about a lifelong relationship. A healthy relationship is one where each partner is dedicated selflessly to the flourishing of the other partner. In any case, the idea of a "number one person" is also really two dimensional and limiting.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
> A healthy relationship is one where each partner is dedicated selflessly to the flourishing of the other partner This sounds co-dependent to me, not healthy at all.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  It would be if each partner we dedicated exclusively to the flourishing of the other partner. But in this relationship neither partner would find that an acceptable state of affairs.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  it's the opposite. What the OP is describing is simply altruistic love. You love someone for who they are, not how they relate to you. That is the only form of relationship that involves no dependency. Any relationship that makes your feelings for someone dependent on their feelings for you is effectively a complicated form of bargaining.

kgwxd 3y ago

If she told you that, and it was true, how is it disrespectful? What would would do in that situation? Demand "respect" and decree you must be her number one?

emodendroket 3y ago
“I think you are a fat, ugly sow and I hate you” might be someone’s true feelings but it’d be hard not to feel disrespected hearing it.

teolandon 3y ago

What is this? Just because you stopped finding friends after getting married doesn't mean that if she finds new friends it means any disrespect to you. Just because someone gets married doesn't mean they have to start depending only on their spouse for everything, just to keep that spouse at that "number one" spot.

emodendroket 3y ago
It’s not about friends being bad so much as the “you’re always second fiddle, deal with it” part.