8 ms·
The Placeholder Girlfriend
- 121789 3y agoReally enjoyed reading this
- tryauuum 3y agoI think it's acceptable to make a sheet like that. As long as is doesn't end with "temporary"
- strken 3y agoWhy?
- bruce343434 3y agoWhy not? Does it matter if you do or don't materialise what is already in your thoughts into (what should be) a private sheet?
- Aeolun 3y agoI dunno, feels kind of like writing things you don’t want your boss to know in corporate chat.
- strken 3y agoMy problem with the spreadsheet is that it has "temporary" and red cells in it. If your private thoughts are that you should leave your girlfriend, then it's a bad idea to stay and a worse idea to compare her to the other options. It's inconsiderate of the limited time she has available for living her life. Commit, leave, or communicate to her that the relationship is temporary. Plus, a numerical rating from 0 to 10 is a reductionist way of understanding someone. What exactly does a low chill mean? It's probably situational, right? Numerically defining someone turns amorphous changing thoughts into a solid number and locks that perception in place, preventing you from learning more. Maybe you're putting her in situations where she's not chill? Maybe it's situational and you haven't learned what causes it? These complexities hide behind a single simplifying number.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoIdk I think its wrong or at the least unhealthy to evaluate ( also known as judge) people on a scale like that.
- remram 3y agoSince this is Hacker News and this text is written in first-person without introduction, it probably deserves a "fiction" warning in the title or something...
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> Since this is Hacker News Should rebrand as Hacker Thoughts for April Fools next year.
- frereubu 3y agoYou're not seriously suggesting that anyone reading that wouldn't know within a couple of sentences that it's not fiction? Or are you worried that people might end up reading fiction without a trigger warning? "What to Submit. On-topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- flkenosad 3y agoI read the first paragraph, then skipped to the comments and realized it's fiction but I'm not sure I would have known otherwise. What gives it away to you that it's a work of fiction?
- sltkr 3y agoIt's a combination of things that screams fiction: 1. Most stories about lesbians that aren't attributed to a definitely female author are written by males. 2. It seems unlikely someone so pedantic to keep full records of their partners would be careless enough to leave the file open for someone to find. 3. Keeping spreadsheets of data about your partners is not very usual to begin with (though not unheard of), but it's hard to imagine anyone would be so meticulous to rate a partner by now fewer than a hundred criteria. I don't think I could even formulate a 100 criteria worth caring about, let alone gather enough data about a person to assign concrete ratings in just a few months of dating.
- adr1an 3y agoThanks for sharing. Nice read, the ending warmed my heart, and put a small tear in my eye.
- dudul 3y agoWhat really bothered me in this story is that the crazy used a 1-10 scale. Everybody knows the best scale is 1-5.
- seper8 3y agoYou also think the imperial system is the best I guess?
- wlesieutre 3y agoThe problem with 1-10 is that the middle of the scale is 5.5, so you can’t give a neutral rating with a whole number. But 1-5 is often insufficient resolution (unless you do decimals, in which case it’s too much resolution), so the best scale is 0-10.
- timthelion 3y agoit's good not to be able to give a neuteral rating, if there is a center lazy raters skew neutral.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoIf there's 100+ dimensions, quantizing to ~2.3 bits might be fine.
- Adverblessly 3y agoFor rating media I (internally) do 1-10 with 5 in the middle! 1 is worst, 5 is neutral, 9 is best and 10 is "personal favourite". This goes really well with the fact that not everything I really like is actually great so I can acknowledge that by giving it a spot to the side in its own category :)
- wlesieutre 3y ago0-10 is exactly like that, but with the matching acknowledgement that sometimes a thing just deserves no points and scoring it a 1 would be too generous.
- 3y ago
- markwj 3y agoThanks for sharing, the ending brought a big smile to my face. Excellent storytelling, thanks for bringing us along on your journey. My favorite line: "Before it had bothered me that I was low on both Ambition and Chill (6.0). But now I was at 10 for both. I was going to humiliate my evil girlfriend. But I was chill about it because I knew it would happen."
- stavros 3y agoI loved that part, such wry humor.
- gurchik 3y agoCan you say more about why you liked the ending, to someone who doesn't get it? It doesn't seem like a happy ending to me. She's riding off into the sunset, happy that she became the better person and didn't humiliate her girlfriend. But she doesn't seem to realize that the actions she _did_ take throughout the story arguably made her the "evil girlfriend" the entire time, and there isn't any indication that has changed by the end of the story.
- spencerchubb 3y agoWhat did the author do that was evil? I don't see anything in the story that makes the author evil. She improved herself and after she graduated from placeholder status, she turns the tables. When she had sex with someone else, I don't really think it was cheating since their relationship was labeled "Temporary"
- gurchik 3y agoIt's not just the sex with someone else. The main character is lying to their girlfriend the entire time, avoiding the girlfriend to prepare in secret, trying to "get" her before she herself gets "got." But she didn't even know for sure the "got" was going to come. Yes, she saw the "temporary" label, but every relationship starts out temporary. Sometimes people date other people knowing ahead of time that it won't last forever. Sometimes people express that fact in writing (private diary, spreadsheet, whatever). That doesn't excuse this behavior. I'm curious, if cheating in this kind of relationship is fine, when do you think it becomes unacceptable?
- mmmeff 3y ago[flagged]
- lmm 3y agoInteresting how being rated lead her to become better in every way but she still hates it.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYeah. also: GF: She shrugged. “I like being real with myself about where I’m at. So I do those sheets. I’m sorry you saw it. (...) Author: I told her I was sorry she needed that. Then I kissed her cheek like the moon kisses the sun at the end of an eclipse. Then I left. Then I was gone. Me: Sucks being the girlfriend with ADHD and/or on the spectrum. What's the moral here? All I can see is, "never ever let others learn of your coping mechanisms - they won't understand".
- fireflash38 3y agoDoes that absolve the hurt or pain that those coping mechanisms might cause? Does it absolve responsibility for your actions?
- lmm 3y agoYou bear responsibility for when people are reasonably hurt by your actions. I would say you don't bear responsibility for when people take exception to private thoughts that weren't acted on, and to my mind that should extend to your private notes too.
- flkenosad 3y agoThere's no moral. It's a made up story.
- monkeydreams 3y agoAll stories have a moral. That is why humans love them so much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- postmeta 3y agomaybe a 6.5 story
- Racing0461 3y agoThe bottom 80% of women are placeholder girlfriends/concubines/side chicks/in chad's harem and the bottom 80% of men are sexless cucks. Such is life western society.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here. Edit: Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- Racing0461 3y agoI'll tone it down.
- Mobil1 3y ago[dead]
- cwmma 3y agoI liked this, but you could tell a guy wrote it, the tip off was when the women (briefly) contemplates killing her girlfriend for for embarrassing her.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agook that explains why the author is "Conor". I've met women with traditionally-masc names, but never a female "Conor".
- frereubu 3y agoSurely the tipoff is the name in the domain name, ConorBarnes.com
- bruce343434 3y agoWomen don't contemplate murder? Even fleetingly?
- flkenosad 3y agoNot unless their hormones are way off.
- bruce343434 3y agoAnd where did you get this idea from?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- striking 3y agoIn response to being listed in a spreadsheet? It's not a great thing to experience but women are pretty much constantly objectified in our society so it does seem a little out of left field that this particular incident sets our main character (briefly) on the path to murder. A male author might find this premise to be novel simply for not having had the same life experiences as a female author might have had (i.e. not being regularly objectified). I too found this work to feel a little weird, for the same reason as GP. It feels like a story told the way a man might experience it, but with a woman's voice and tone. Less believable still is the way it goes on and on, with the protagonist trying to turn herself into a perfectly scoring example. I get that sometimes it's okay because otherwise there would be no story, but I don't buy the motivation or the end result in combination and that really makes it hard for me to read. I've actually heard of this particular thing (spreadsheets of dating partners) already and the way it was presented to me it seemed pretty reasonable. It's hard to know what you value in a person, so for your own benefit you might try listing a few scores and see which ones match up most strongly with how you feel about someone. Maybe you care deeply that someone knows how to cook, or maybe you think their music taste matching yours is of the utmost importance. It's kind of hard to figure out otherwise. I don't really feel it's quite like an attempt at a linear ordering / sorting of people as much as it is for one's own benefit. All in all, I kind of wish the author had spent more time consulting women on how their relationships actually work, even if it means the story might never have been written.
- freetime2 3y ago> Your girlfriend should think of you as a ten in everything. This seems like a pretty damaging belief to have about relationships. Better to have a significant other who is accepting of your imperfections.
- frereubu 3y agoThe whole point of this story is that the rating system is silly. The point above is immediately followed by "No. You aren’t even supposed to think these things." It's someone's confused thoughts in the middle of finding out their partner is rating them out of ten on everything, not an approval of that specific thought.
- yieldcrv 3y agoIf anything that list was the best thing that could happen to her, or at least the most introspective.
- flkenosad 3y agoBrother, the story is made up! Real people don't behave this way.
- freetime2 3y agoMaybe not this way exactly, but I have known people who have dramatically improved themselves after experiencing rejection.
- yieldcrv 3y agoyou mean listing attributes about an undergrad, turning them into your assistant and leaving your computer open with your actively managed character stats sheet for them to find and spiral about, while pretending not to know? or do you mean the undergrad spiraling?
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago[flagged]
- robocat 3y agoI know too many people that can't or won't listen to fair criticism. And even good listeners often fail to change even egregious interpersonal faults that affect them negatively. Very little of our society helps us become emotionally smarter - the most skilled I know seemed to learn everything almost in passing - perhaps some sort of emotional genius. We see glimpses of something similar on HN when a poor comment generates an honest critique yet the commenter keeps repeating the same fault (never learns). https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ seems relevant. Few people ever ask for criticism. Few people give honest criticism. It always surprises me that we can sometimes recognize someone's personality within 5 minutes of meeting them. We see faults they perhaps can't see or maybe choose to live with (even faults that harm themselves or those near them). And I know a few superskilled that can immediately recognise well-hidden dangers of others. I'm a middle aged analytical guy. So I've had decades of seeing how difficult it is for us all to acquire wisdom. We want to be better, but we just don't seem to know how to do it. There's a self-harm industry around self-help books. Pop-psych. A whole dogma and industry around words like trauma, mindfulness. One of of the least insightful people I know is a psychologist. Some of the people I most admire have low-status jobs and little formal education. I know people that try to make a list of all the attributes they require in a partner. I multiplied out the percentages for one friend, and their chances of finding someone that met all the easy requirements lead to a 1 in 10 billion chance of their perfect partner existing. Even after dropping many other constraints! [edit] removed naive para where I took it as an article rather than a story. Great writing!
- flkenosad 3y agoThe story is made up. People in real life will not be that good at "curing" their emotional "flaws". This post is a little dangerous if people are reading it as a true story.
- Aeolun 3y agoDoing it once does not make you a 10. You’d have to consistently do so without thinking. I don’t think the story is about that though.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoOnly one here finding that story super awkward, weird and full of clichēs?
- woleium 3y agoit’s definitely got first draft vibes, but there is a great story in there.
- layer8 3y agoThe issue for me is that neither the detailed-spreadsheet girlfriend nor the levelling-up-all-the-skills girlfriend seem particularly believable characters. And the “I’m fake-sorry you’re such a pitiful person” is always cringy. Not to mention that “Roberta” almost did the same to “Alice” in return by pettily now also keeping her as a temporary girlfriend. Leaving her right away would have been the more appropriate and “levelled-up” choice.
- gurchik 3y agoThe main character cheated on their girlfriend to prepare for revenge for... what crime exactly? A private note that she violated her girlfriend's privacy to read? Are we supposed to root for the main character because they stopped themselves short on getting revenge and wasn't as shitty of a person as they originally wanted to be? I get this is (likely) fiction, and with all art, not everyone is going to "get it." That said, I don't really get it. The main character is the worst person in the story, but they're also not a relatable flawed antihero you can root for. What did the author intend for us to think?
- layer8 3y agoYeah, the juxtaposition of those flaws with the “let me work hard to become a more admirable (admired?) person” with the “and I’m super skillful at those improvements” is weird. Also details like cannot help but weep at the picture of a dead bird.
- LeroyRaz 3y agoI agree. Spreadsheet person is bizarre, but did nothing wrong (nor are they sad for having a spreadsheet, just unusual). I also find the protagonists leveling up mockable (but not particularly funny). Personal growth in any characteristic takes time and major effort, but maybe that is part of the satire? I find it hard to workout what is being played straight, and what is being mocked, tbh, I just don't care, or find it that funny. The tropes seem strongly tied to the rationality and EA communities, so maybe if one is part of those communities there is more to the satire?
- shermantanktop 3y agoReminds me of Moby’s Friendship-Acquaintance 6-Stage Theory: https://maximumfun.org/images/mobytheory.pdf https://maximumfun.org/images/mobytheory.pdf This was on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. It contains deep truths which are generally not ok to say out loud.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoFiction or not, the burgeoning anomie of modern Western society encourages the commodification of individuals, sociopathic social-sexual gamification patterns, and the absolute reduction of people to numeric grades and unflattering notations. Regardless of what people wish were the case, there is very little modern socio-economic penalty for being an asshole.
- prawn 3y agoI thought this story was going to be about an AI partner discovering the stats that defined them, and changing them to abruptly alter their personality.
- LillyLyle 3y agoI'm very taken by the illustration. Is it computer-generated, or drawn? It is a very strange but also very nice room.
- Planktonne 3y agoThis is not a story that the readership here is well-equipped to understand.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoGreat writing. With a satirical edge. I can imagine this becoming a meme. I'll give it a solid 8.
- acjohnson55 3y agoThis is a great story. I think folks are misreading it as something to be taken literally or that we're supposed the condone the narrator's reaction. I will say that I relate, because I once overreacted to a breakup going on a massive self-improvement binge. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I don't think it came from a place of sound mental health and self-esteem. On the other, a lot of good did come out of it, and I eventually found intrinsic motivation, rather than evaluating myself by how I thought my ex would think about me.
- nojvek 3y agoA guy I know broke up and first got into a drinking binge. Then hated it and turned into a gym rat. He became proper swol, started reading and meditating. When he bench pressed, his mantra was "Breakups build body builders".
- zafiro17 3y agoThis is tangential to the subject at hand, but I feel obliged to complain about how much Substacks now requires you install its app to read the content. Very similar to Reddit, in fact. I've watched the progression in pushiness over the year. On my phone, I did not install the app and there was apparently no other way to read the article. I block Reddit at the router for similar dark patterns.
- 1123581321 3y agoI’ve never seen this. Can you screenshot what they’re showing you?
- senkora 3y agoAs someone whose college girlfriend made a (much shorter) numerical chart about me before later dumping me, and even referenced it when explaining why, this hits home in a strange way.
- jwalton 3y agoYou might enjoy this: https://www.joeydevilla.com/2004/07/30/the-breakup-style-of-powerpoint/ https://www.joeydevilla.com/2004/07/30/the-breakup-style-of-...
- senkora 3y agoI did! This definitely applied. I wish I could go into more detail about how without doxxing myself, but PowerPoint had a unique and very strange prominence in my college friend group.
- holografix 3y agoCute but childish. Would fit well in “young adults” section for girls and I wish lots of boys also read it.