After my dad died, we found the love letters
jenn.site
jenn.site
I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became one myself.
Before you judge the man in this story too harshly — and there’s certainly much to judge, especially given the follow-up post — consider the environment he and I grew up in. Being gay as a young teenager in the early 1990s could feel literally like a death sentence. AIDS panic was everywhere. Gay men in movies were comedy sidekicks or dying wrecks (“Philadelphia”). There was a real threat of violence from other kids. If you could pass as straight, why wouldn’t you give it your best shot? The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you. (This is literally how I imagined gay life at age 13.)
I still feel like I’m barely getting started on the therapy journey to recover from those decades. Seems like the man in the story never had the chance for professional help (or didn’t seek it). The compartmentalization can be extremely taxing. He disappointed many people, but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.
Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents.
Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily.
No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse!
I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome!
> but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.
No, he is a bad person! Ffs.
That is quite the judgement of a person you've never known, based solely on the view of one person's brief writing processing a deeply emotional experience.
Your judgement reflects poorly on you.
A lot of good people have made bad choices, and these writings reflect a mere sliver of a man's life choices from the very thin perspective of one person's grief laid bare.
The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear:
> the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well
And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.
This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!
Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.
Yet, blame is easy and satisfying and true understanding requires empathy and is hard and often unsatisfying.
The term "understanding" is fractal and infinite. Therefore Its 100% reasonable to find a stopping point and say "I blame you" (or, as you point out, otherwise, no one would ever be allowed to assign blame).
My comment is more about intent. The "seeking" word weights heavy. Many commenters are not seeking understanding, they are seeking satisfaction. Validation. The author of the post could have stopped much sooner if they were seeking blame, they could have chosen to build a caricature to heap more judgement upon. But they chose a more nuanced and exploratory path.
Even if the end result is blame or judgement. It's important that the purpose of the journey is clear. True understanding requires empathy, and it's really hard to empathize with someone you're actively trying to judge or vilify.
I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".
If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.
Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.
I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.
You might really appreciate reading some of Bishop Butler's sermons, which are not pay walled. When I briefly studied Moral Psychology, I was taught that Butler is sort of the under-appreciated bedrock of Moral Psychology. His perspective is on the surface religious, which is perhaps why he is not considered among Locke and Hobbes as a foundational thinker of the Enlightenment. And yet his methods are just as rational and philosophical. He tries to construct a taxonomy of what you call "emotional-logical beliefs."
Maybe I ought to read older texts more often...I do not fully understand what Butler means by terms such as "plain"! But that was a good read.
I do wonder which instances Butler imagines "sudden anger" to be useful in. I would think it rare that immediate action without consideration is good, but where it is good, I do not think the actor is acting in anger so much as he is acting in a justified instinct. It is probably more correct that the actor acts in anger when the action is bad. To be precise, I am talking about the actor's intention, whereas his action may turn out to be good or bad in that split-second. I don't believe that people should be judged on what occurs but only what they tried to do, while keeping in mind that "ideal intention" and "actual intention" are distinct (as good intentions pave the road to Hell!).
I do like how Butler described "deliberate anger" and its role in addressing wrongs committed unto people. I had to ponder what I myself meant when I brought up emotional-logic, because I have not understood it so well that I never confuse myself, but I suppose that is what Butler is describing: logic that addresses emotions, or allows emotions. In fact, if logic is not subservient to "cold-bloodedness", emotions are presumably a major component of the logic we perform every day, at some level or another.
I'm not religious, nor atheist or the like. I consider myself agnostic, but I think to be a proper agnostic one has to work to earn the title. Extending the notion of agnosticism to its logical conclusion, I find that we should all be agnostic in all matters: never professing knowledge to anything that we are ignorant of (which ultimately must be everything, because who knows anything nontrivial?). That's an extreme position, and would require a dense discussion, but it can be moderated to suit the circumstances. It suffices to say that, on momentous matters such as God, we must be ignorant. This doesn't preclude positing axioms, accepting them on faith, and performing logic, however. Indeed, we all require faith in some way or another. Anyways, I've found that freeing myself of the expectation of believing a certain way has helped me better appreciate all manner of religious, spiritual, mystic, etc. schools of thoughts. God is the greatest of the unknowable things, so any way we discuss Him shines light on some mode of life.
> the evening we found the love letters my mom said to me, "he wasted his entire life, his entire life, and mine as well."
Also, I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.
It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.
> I think you're misreading that last line.
Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's *no* judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.
> The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding
If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Also on this:
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
My point here is that she's doing both.
> Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.
No
why was the divorce so hard for him? In that society, they just don't let you get divorced unless both parties agree to it? And with the evidence he had of her being a lesbian, does that mean nothing? What is even the point of divorce in that society?
A guy, Atul Subhash, recently (about a year ago) committed suicide because his ex-wife and her family slapped false dowry cases against him and his extremely aged parents. Another case, a woman named Jasleen Kaur falsely accused a guy of sexual harassment, because they had a minor argument on the street. That case took 4 years, and in the meantime, Jasleen went to Canada to study, received the then Chief Minister's support and never appeared in court even once. Meanwhile the guy, Savjit, was arrested, had to post bail, was called "National Predator" and "Delhi's Pervert" on mainstream media, and received zilch for all the harassment he received. After he was acquitted, he pressed criminal charges against Jasleen and her family for false accusations, but the courts threw that case away because apparently "loss of reputation" isn't enough to press charges.
All of this in a backdrop where poor women are raped, sometimes even murdered, every single minute, while actual rapists walk free and often even freely contest and win elections on the current ruling party's ticket. Yeah, India is super fucked.
So I vote for bad system, not bad people.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.
When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.
He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."
The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).
There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.
I can’t really get into his fiction, but the diaries are astounding.
He gave them to his son to read and publish posthumously.
When I was a teenager I dated a married man. On paper it's easier to explain "gay dude in a homophobic society" but in reality, he was an asshole and a coward. No empathy for him.
People will try to explain away all kinds of behaviors that violate trust a la "they'll never find out..."
I agree on the immoral part, but I’ve seen so much immoral behavior over the years this seems (relatively) mellow.
If you’re in the medical field, you see some wild stuff.
We're talking about secretly dating a teenager while married with children. This is more than serving "societally taboo" urges on a transactional basis.
Also, no one got murdered or blackmailed to cover it up apparently? Or even bullied into leaving town?
Any small town has half a dozen or more of these types of stories.
Coverups aren't exclusive to gays, and coverups are universally condemned because of the dishonesty.
It's on you to elaborate your point.
I’ve literally seen every one of the situations I described play out, without a gay person in sight. (Though only attempted murder, not successful)
And notably, gay relationships of any gender don’t have a habit of getting anyone pregnant.
The described situation in the article is pretty tame by ‘hidden/forbidden relationship’ standards.
But then, I used to be a mandatory reporter.
It sounds like we agree in general.
Not great. But could be worse, and it seems like it was done mindfully with minimal damage. That’s the pragmatic part.
He could have been hooking up with randos at clubs (dramatically higher disease risk), or worse, instead of what seems like a relatively stable (outside) relationship?
I’ve seen a lot worse. Not condoning, but the math seems obvious.
And his daughter may not like it, but she’s also literally only here because of it. So….
In most of the major Asian cultures, you have a very specifically shaped box to fit in. If you refuse to fit in it, you’ll be hammered on until you do. It’s not a great environment if you’re not box shaped. But society doesn’t particularly care - this was especially true 30+ years ago.
Some exceptions of course (Thai, some areas in big cities), but it’s largely still the case.
I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union", but I can easily imagine that it was his wife's desire.
A very sad story in general. I lost my mom a few years ago and I suspect I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
I would say many asian parents care very little about the partner, as long as they get their grandkids. A mix of that and "what would society think".
A lot of other countries also have a limbo status where there is either no clear law making it illegal but put so many hurdles up that its impractical.
Some countries, like Italy, also make it illegal for Italian citizens to go abroad to a country where it is legal and then do it there.
It's outright banned (commercial) in most of EU. In most countries it was left unregulated for a long time but most of them are choosing to ban all commercial forms of it. Besides US, most major countries have banned it.
Now many people do ignore these laws and most governments do little to enforce them unless they make the news for some reason. Banning commercial forms of it just ensures abuse and issues go unreported. It's the paternalistic part of feminism that's been leading the charge for modern bans, with both liberal and conservative roots.
For a lot of people, building a family is a duty you embrace with your household partner. It's why you exist in the first place. It's why you get married and share a home with somebody at all.
Perhaps, if you're lucky, your children are a fruit of love, or perhaps, if you're horny, they're a fruit of passion.
But for a lot for such people, having and raising kids is the entirety of why you get married, and is the rationale for you might not marry for love or passion in the first place.
Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into. But they nonetheless feel an obligation, and even desire, to form and raise a family anyway, and so they march ahead and get it done, hopefully with somebody that they respect as a partner and who reciprocates the same.
But many many many in the world do see it that way, and more even in the past -- when the "dad" would have been making life their life choices -- than do right now. Either partially, but significantly, or wholly.
My comment was helping its parent recognize the influence of that way of seeing the world, as it seemed to have escaped them.
> Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into.
Man, I feel this. And it's also funny that you write it in such an objective way but it's true. It _is_ a very culturaly specific practice.
I've lucked into it. It feels amazing. But I'm lucky that I was crazy enough to really teach myself how to get over rejection and just search for as long as needed to find someone who felt the same way about me as I felt about her. Amazing character building though, it was a true rite of passage for me that started around when I was 16 and ended when I was 32 and married. Dating and being good at it, in order to be in an amazing relationship, has been an obsession of my life. This was in part because I sucked so hard at it as a young teenager. I think in earlier times I'd have settled for someone unappealing or stayed a virgin. Thank god, the internet was a thing when I was young.
They might be lead to believe "if only we got married ... if only we had kids ... that will 'fix' it." Even straight couples who aren't in love fall into this trap.
I don't know how well real life imitates art, but a lot of films involving gay historical characters have a similar enough narrative I assume it has some grain of truth: The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice. Maybe they even have some small amount of feelings for the spouse or think they can "learn to love them." See Rustin 2023 as an example of the psychology in action.
> I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
Sorry for that. Loss is one of the hardest, most confusing emotions. That lack of closure and the unknown is a truly awful feeling.
What's striking about those stories is that there were clearly quite a lot of cases where people objectively chose not to be gay, but they did it by repressing and masking it away by working hard on exemplary marriages that delivered many offspring to their name. Ultimately this means that yes indeed they could chose to not be gay, but they would have to sacrifice their whole sense of self just to comply with a societal norm.
I did things “right” I met my wife right after college, and I loved her dearly. We lived a happy life and have a wonderful son. We lost her a couple of years ago to cancer, followed by my parents and my mother and father in law, all of whom i was incredibly close with.
Yet life carries on. I come from a very traditional ethnic-focused catholic background. I’m not going to be following the standard script. I’m in my 40s, any partner will likely be divorced with their own child(ren). I’m not having more children. Will that partner be compared to my wife? Will I judged if she is too old/young/in a higher/lower status profession?
Reality: everyone has been incredibly supportive of my family and I. But the anxiety is there.
I would just say in looking at the lives of others, try to walk in their shoes. By all accounts the father in the story was not a perfect man. Few of us are. But consider that he was facing certain and complete rejection by his entire world, and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad.
The least bad for him.
"mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny"
I'm watching my ex do the same thing to our kid. I understand it on a mechanical level. But on an emotional level I will never understand how you can look into the eyes of your child and hurt them.
The mechanics of it are what you see in the OP. I see it in my parents, my aunts/uncles, and my cousins. It's somewhere between denial and minimization. It's like a defense mechanism against the truth which is something like my father didn't love me enough to not severely damage me. "They did the best they could" is a common refrain. Ultimately that ends up being their justification for hurting their own kids.
There is a balance to hit here. Yes, we are all human and you can't expect perfection. What you can expect and what everyone deserves from their loved ones is for them to at all points try to and not hurt you. There's forgiveness for coming up short if there's effort and steady improvement.
He grew up in a social environment where coming out as gay would make everyone around him sad and angry/ashamed at him. But he was gay, intrinsically. Eventually (possibly because of societal acceptance, possibly because he decided total suppression wasn’t worth it), he secretly broke his traditional relatives and friends’ trust by acting gay. Something most people today see as justified. But he also broke his lovers’ trust by having multiple affairs, something most people today see as unjustified.
A caveat is that he didn’t even confide in his daughter, who is gay; he didn’t file for or allow divorce, to make things easier for his wife; and perhaps he should’ve noticed that, in the changing times, being gay became acceptable but not cheating. Again, I don’t think he was right, and I can imagine a different person in his position handling the moral disconnect better for his family, who I believe he still cared about. But my understanding is that being gay is really taboo in some cultures, and has been in many more even a couple decades ago, so I can understand him being really suspicious and assuming those taboos held more strongly for more people.
In which case to him, doing anything gay was setting up emotional damage to many people, and every affair was just setting up damage to one more person.
That's the good case. The bad case would be he would lose his job, and be forced into poverty.
I will judge him harshly. Instead of getting a divorce, he emotionally abused his wide and child, which probably means therapy for the child for life. He's a selfish asshole, that doesn't think about anyone but himself.
He also could have brought diseases back home to his wife (Just hearing the stories of his selfishness, he would have kept this hidden or not even gotten tested at all).
"The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you."
This is the worst case scenario. He could have gotten a divorce, and lived the life he wanted.
This guy deserves zero sympathy.
I understand not being warm and loving toward a wife you were forced to marry, even if I also know it means you're punishing her on top of the fact that she's dealing with the same thing. To ask her own family to verbally abuse her into not divorcing you so that you have the LUXURY of staying closeted and hooking up with various partners during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
But to treat your child as worth nothing to you like this man did is a disgrace. I'm glad the author isn't taking it personally. Imagine growing up effectively without a father because another man has taken all of his affection away from you and your family.
Where is the line drawn? Am I abusing my spouse when I decide that we're a bit too over-stretched financially and that we're going to need to skip the surprise Disney World trip that I had planned but hadn't yet told them about?
What about if I think they just didn't try their hardest during the family softball competition? Are they abusing me?
What exactly do you call that? NoT ThE SAmE ThInG As "AbuSE"?
People do selfish stuff all the time. It’s not abuse even if it’s shitty behavior. Abuse means more than that.
It would be far worse if you let her divorce you, typically. Divorced women in East Asian cultures (well, Asian generally) are not treated well.
Not everyone works the same way.
That is a very toxic thing that people do in relationships all the time. It is used as a rationalization for prioritizing one's own desires.
If you think that is very toxic, that is the tip of the iceberg.
To really put icing on the cake, they do it because they have plenty of examples of how badly people screw up their lives if someone isn’t doing that for them.
looks around at the opioid crisis in the west right now. Not that we would have anything like that going on.
There is no perfect, just different trade offs. And everyone usually cringes at the trade offs everyone else makes.
One of my relatives is an MtF transwoman now.
Her wife was the first person she told about it, and they are still together, with a daughter.
It was a little weird for me when I found out, but if her wife is OK with it, and they're providing a stable home for their daughter, I don't see an issue with it; not really my business.
The issue is being dishonest, for decades. That's the primary issue. There are always excuses, but living your life with integrity is of the utmost importance.
I'm just floored by the misery most people go through, the misery we inflict on each others... it's not easy to bold, to be free, to be you.
That was peak AIDS phobia (for good reason), and the anti-gay rhetoric was also at its peak.
There was a lot more to lose coming out during those days, beyond just marriage and family cold-shoulders.
By good reason, I mean people were panicked because people didn’t know which activities could spread the virus. Anyone else remember toilet seat fears?
But I don't think you meant it that way.
For anyone reading that wasn't around it was very much an irrational hysteria. The bigots latched on to it to spread fear and justify their dehumanization of gay people. There were people that tried to bring reason and science to the conversation but they were drowned out by the panic/bigotry.
There was no good reason for the AIDS phobia in the 80s.
It’s only in hindsight and it wasn’t just bigots. Safer sex as we know it today was directly from the AIDS scare.
AIDS was no less than a death sentence. It was incurable, untreatable, and the cancer after-effects were pretty nasty. Broad research and public transparency took a long time to take hold and that left regular people speculating for years.
Even medical doctors turned away suspected AIDs patients, because everyone was pretty scared.
For a bit, even as a kid I remember it being on par or scarier than nuclear war because so much was unknown.
If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get stuck in a job or any other myriad life events occur, the weight of your own days can suddenly drain so much time and energy that years fly by. Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
- Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this.
- Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation.
- Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.
- You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
In what world is this ever "OK"?
Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.
> Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.
Is there a difference between:
- Going to them proactively to get some money
- Telling them when they ask you right after they captured you
- Telling them after 24 hours of torture
It's wrong and harmful in all circumstances; but in the first case, it's doubly wrong, whereas in the last case, there are significant mitigating circumstances.
If this whole story had stopped at #2, you could say it's wrong, but there are mitigating circumstances. Risk of disease is fuzzy and far away; the physical and emotional rewards are right in front of your face. If you don't see any hope of improving the situation, it looks to you like your choices are:
- Come out and completely destroy your life, your wife's life, and your child's life
- Live in a loveless marriage, never enjoying romantic or sexual intimacy
- Enjoy romantic and sexual intimacy secretly, telling yourself that you're not really hurting your wife because you're being "careful" or whatever.
It's not right, but I can see how a person who experiences normal human empathy could choose #3. When I was younger I certainly made my fair share of stupid decisions in search of romantic intimacy (or more crassly, when the "little head told the big head what to do").
As we go down the line, the damage to others becomes greater and more immediate, and the alternative "right" behavior become less and less desolate. It therefore becomes harder not to conclude that he person either lacks empathy entirely, or have made massive efforts to suppress it -- either finding justifications to avoid looking at what's right in front of their faces, or just killing the feeling altogether.
His wife has no doubt spent years of her life being gaslit as well, being conditioned to doubt her assessments of what's normal and to feel guilty for suspecting him, for resenting him, for wanting something better. I doubt she'll ever read what I wrote, but there's a non-zero chance it would be helpful to have my take on it.
The fault is here:
> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
You have an entire community that exerted enough social pressure to force two people together by fiat who clearly did not want to be together. Reading between the lines: a closeted gay male and a woman being excessively pressured to produce a child NOW before getting too old.
At that point, you've created such a highly aberrant social situation that you're guaranteed to get pathological behaviors.
After the community generated such a screwed up situation, it is difficult for me to assign much fault to the couple involved rather than see them both as unfortunate victims.
I may not approve, but I find it difficult to blame.
> So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
Why are you assuming that the social pressure that forced them together magically went away and assigning both agency and blame solely to the husband? Why is the community pressure somehow easier to deal with 10 years/15 years/20 years later? The fact that the wife could be browbeaten back into line shows that the community social pressure very much did not decrease or become easier to deal with over time.
If so, then you are painting everybody, including the wife, with that same scumbag brush.
The wife didn't have to get married, but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to get pregnant (not just once, but twice), but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to stay married but did because of the social pressure. etc.
If you have a situation with enough social pressure to force two people who really don't want one another into both marriage and child rearing, it's not clear there is any viable way for the individuals involved to correct the situation afterward.
I may not approve, but it is hard to blame.
times change, people can too and should take responsibility for themselves
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.
I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.
It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong.
Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.
Absolutely. A person's right to privacy doesn't die with them.
> One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance"
Here's a funny thing, what I got from that story was that it must have been a hard and sad life for the dad, probably the mom, and especially a horrifying discovery for the mom. These are not judgments, but tidbits of empathy and sadness for all the parties involved. I didn't have to force myself into that, probably because it didn't clash with my personality or values.
If something made you tick and you want to condemn one of the people in the story, I'm wondering if forcing your brain into "accepting" would make any difference. The real question is what you feel for the other person. I think it might come out as a judgment if it clashes with your actual values and personality. If you don't recognize yourself and would have had a different approach, you might have a negative outlook on the people in the story.
I'm extremely lucky to be a straight dude in the progressive society of today's. Had I been a gay guy in the traditional Chinese culture of the 80s, I'd probably have had the same life as that dad, and employ some of the same strategies. So it's easy for me not to judge. But some people are more upfront, active, liberated, and for them it might be harder not to judge ; and I think that's fine.
I love my wife and my son, and I feel loved by them in return, but I'm also painfully aware that the version of me they love is someone I constructed. I lie constantly: about why I don't want sex, about my affairs, about my feelings, about my motivations. No one really knows me, and I don't get to be myself, not even in the relationships where I should feel safest.
I've read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and other similar books, and I'm trying to build the courage to finally do something about all of this. It's incredibly difficult. But I refuse to use my son as an excuse to keep postponing coming out. This blog has pushed me even further in that direction.
They'll be angry (well at least my wife). Their lives will be upended. But at least they'll have the chance to ask questions, to understand. They'll see me taking responsibility for the consequences of my choices, and maybe just maybe, in some way, that clarity will be a relief for all of us.
I don't know your wife, and I don't know if she would feel the same way. Maybe she would?
In this case though, they're saying their partner is pansexual - open to many kinds of sexual activities. And they're saying that they'd be accepting if their partner needed to go and do sexy stuff with someone else even though it'd cause them a lot of pain (that's my reading of it, not having a platonic friendship with someone else as you mentioned). I'm asking why? Having a different to hetrosexual appetite before going into a relationship shouldn't give you special rules once you're in one - it's absolutely no different than if a hetrosexual person wanted to sleep around. OK if your relationship allows for that, really not OK if it's going to cause your partner/spouse/love pain, as they said.
FWIW my wife is bi and dates women, not that really ever bothered me but in no way has it ever been more damaging to our marriage beyond basic scheduling conflicts. I will admit I would have had a much harder time opening up to her being with other men though. Im lucky that she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em I guess, but partly thats because our marriage is otherwise great and shes already free to explore her gay side so why would she want to leave?
https://www.amazon.com/Designer-Relationships-Monogamy-Polya...
If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.
I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
It's not up to debate whether or not I accept cheating because I've already set it as an immovable barrier multiple times: come into sexual contact with anybody else during the marriage and she's going to be thrown out of the window with all of her belongings.
But if she comes to me with honesty and hasn't done anything yet - why would I want to be on bad terms with her as she leaves? I can only be sad at her decision.
You’ve stolen time and emotional energy from these people. They can never get those years back.
Your children have been deprived of seeing parents role modeling romantic love. They have built their entire world views based on your behavior towards your spouse, which incorporated subtle lies and deception.
The victims of your fraud now have to deal with second guessing which things you said might be true and which might be lies - you shatter everything they ever believed throughout the marriage. It is a horrendous thing to put people through.
So can I understand why they did it? Sure. But I will definitely judge them for their actions and not support them.
Obviously I can only speak for myself here but I wouldn't be so understanding, especially when my partner lied about such a fundamental aspect of their life and joined in a union of marriage with me.
I suppose, for me it would feel like the vows they took where not real and the foundation of our life, all the memories, thoughts and feelings were nothing but smoke and mirrors.
You're right, we're all humans and life is complex but I think it's selfish to waste your partner's life for years because you can't face the truth. I suppose that a bitter end is better than endless bitterness however.
If you want marriage to mean that your partner will never change, or that the 100% match on the inside what you think they are looking from the outside, you're gonna have a hard time. This discussion is just further down the continuum than most.
(Exceptions made for arranged marriages and the like; the primary purpose there isn't romantic love-based companionship, so there isn't a pretense to shatter.)
being a role model means demonstrating how to be happy
an existence proof of a good and happy life is a powerful thing
people learn at a young age that words are cheap. advice doesn't cut it
"If you're going to pretend to be someone, why not pretend to be someone who doesn't hit on the cocktail waitress when he's away from his family?"
Edit: found the exact quote:
> "I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."
> Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
> "But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
> The narcissist demands absolutism in all things-- relative to himself.
From this article:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cu...
Note that I am not accusing you of being a narcissist, merely saying that you may find this blog very interesting.
Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.
So, I see you. <3
It's also possible they love you because you are someone who can love them, even though it doesn't feel quite right. You're there for them.
I don't have the full picture, but thinking they don't love the real you seems simplistic. You're the sum of all parts and layers, not just what you consider core feelings. We're all putting on facades.
Good on you for recognizing it and taking steps, there is lots of support around if you need it
Everyone has a version of you they’ve constructed, no one has your entire perspective on your life and access to your inner thoughts, and even if they did they would forget or misinterpret details.
Don’t chase a desire to have people know the real you, they never will. Even if you had a new gay lover just because they know you’re gay doesn’t mean they know the real you.
And sometimes people don’t even know their own real self.
For what it's worth, you also may be surprised about how willing even your wife is to accept this. I obviously don't know anything about your situation, and there's any number of things that can influence how loved ones react to something like this, but I have direct knowledge of a situation fairly similar to yours that turned out quite well; my aunt on my father's side has only one child, a daughter from her first husband, who ended up coming out as gay at some point when my cousin was fairly young. They divorced, and from what I'm aware of, continued to co-parent civilly, and my cousin would spent time with each of them during holidays (e.g. she's always spent Christmas Eve with my aunt and our grandparents and Christmas Day with her father). Almost thirty years later, both my aunt and uncle have been remarried happily for years, and nobody cares that my uncle happens to be gay. If anything, I have to assume that literally everyone is much happier in the current situation than they would be if things had gone differently and he had never come out. I don't pretend that any of us can know how things will turn out for you and your family whichever path you choose, but I truly think that if you decide to tell the truth, you'll be giving all three of you the best chance at happiness in the long run.
I feel like the author of this post would have benefited from those letters. Maybe your kids would too.
Edit: Oh my goodness didn’t realize this was the same Dad from: https://jenn.site/my-dad-could-still-be-alive-but-hes-not/
This is writing about a real person. I certainly hope you don't see yourself as so one dimensional, why should others be?
Maybe you should read it.
> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else
That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.
> he wasted his entire life, my mom said
In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.
That it is any other way is just something we tell ourselves to try to provide more foresight or potential meaning than is really available.
What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family.
I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.
Given the hand he was dealt it's a pretty good outcome for himself. Grossly selfish, but not a waste for himself.
People usually do know what they're marrying into.
Even the idea that our partners/spouses/SO should know everything about us is waaaay too extreme. I think that as long as we love and don't hurt each others and we respect the rules we set between each others it is ok to keep some things secrets.
From what I understand from the author's post, the whole marriage was a big lie to begin with so it is not like authors parents really loved each others. While we can criticize his father for not accepting divorce and thus allowing his mother to rebuild a life, we can hardly call him cheating. And I don't think kids have a right to know everything. I know my parents have had at least one major crisis when I was a kid without knowing the specifics but I have no right nor need to know why. It was between them.
A lot of couples only stay married because it is easier from an organisationnal, social and economic point of view than divorcing anyway.
If his wife had been content in a low-intimacy marriage, then that would be one thing. Some people are -- they have security, they have children, they have approval of their family, they're fine.
But his wife wasn't -- she wanted to end the marriage, to try to find romantic, sexual, and relational intimacy elsewhere. And he actively guilt-tripped her into staying with him, multiple times.
He got to experience romantic and sexual intimacy the way he wanted, while preventing his wife from doing the same. He stole decades of the prime of her life from her. There is simply no justification for that.
There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe
However, the sentences are well formed. If you really want to lose your breath, try "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Marquez. You really won't be able to put it down.
I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.
Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
Maybe it's because I studied poetry, or because I was a voracious reader of experimental writing when I was younger, but I've probably worked my way through thousands of pages of uncapitalized or unconventionally capitalized writing; I can empathize if it's more difficult for you to read (personally I would consider an absence of paragraph breaks a nearly-unforgivable travesty), and I wouldn't even deny you the opportunity to complain about it.
But I think calling it "a must" for accessibility is perhaps overstating it a bit.
Experimental language has its place. I can quite enjoy that too depending on the context. But combining the wish to convey a story or message with avant-garde text layout turns it into something more akin to art. I'm not always in the mood for that, in part because it is more taxing to engage with. In this case I figure the goal of the author is for readers to hear their story, not grapple with their specific manner of self-expression. Of course if their life goal is to make lowercase text common and acceptable, then this may be completely on point. My point about the accessibility of the text still stands though.
> Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
I can train myself to read text upside-down as well, or in Klingon, or with no spaces at all. I have no wish to do so, since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers. Besides, being able to read well because you have a solid grasp on the conventions, lexicon, and idioms used is a net benefit to me. Our brains are pattern matching machines after all — pattern recognition is what we humans excel in. If have no desire to diminish that skill either.
To push back on this, following convention is often the easy thing to do (so not something regarded versus defaulted to).
There's a literary history of form influencing story; there was even a story about a famous example of this on HN recently that discussed this year's Nobel laureate—who notably publishes long novels that play with punctuation conventions: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/
a non native English writer may have a "house style" that you see as violating norms
dismissing all those people removes a great diversity of thought and expression from your mind without due consideration
better to engage with more ideas, even those in unusual packaging. learning to read it easily and without bias is two kinds of skill growth anyhow
Edit: checked out some of their other posts and they don't always use this style. Seems like a pretty deliberate choice here.
English is a second language for me and I feel really bad when I impose a grammar mistake or a badly put together sentence to my readers!
So for me pushing that on purpose is borderline insulting to the reader ie. suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
Same for me. See Sam Altman, for example.
> suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
These days you actually have to fight against spell checkers to avoid having capitals after a period.
To me instant messaging is different because we usually type short messages
The capitalization is not needed to structure the text because a sentence = a message
So the UI will take care of delimiting the sentences
We all got it coming
It’s easy to throw them under the bus, but the followers generally always know what’s going on - when they aren’t actively avoiding it anyway.
It's because they have no experience with have such a bad person in a supposed "caregiver" role in their life so their minds literally can't imagine it. They think he just MUST be misunderstood instead of just callous and uncaring.
Or they are a parent and can't imagine not carit about their own child, so they assume it must be a universal thing, and the father MUST have loved her, even if he didn't show it. Truth is, a fuck ton of people don't love, like, or give two shits about their own children. These people do exist.
It's a truly cruel cognitive dissonance.
So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Others extend clearly bad people who do bad things more grace than they deserve if they are parents. You hear things like "I'm sure they love their children but are stressed and don't know how to express it. It's probably hard for them." (Ignoring how hard it is for the innocent CHILDREN!)
However, I know from experience there's no love there. No like. Only hate.
And there more to this story than a closeted gay man. The author made it clear he was also distant as a father and wasn't at all a caretaker to her either. All evidence from the post points to the fact the father was callous and uncaring to those around him. Using others for his own gain. The followup shows he was having affairs from his affair partner before he died. This is not someone who would have been a kind man if he was just allowed to come out.
The other thing that immediately stood out to me that nobody else is noticing - the father encouraged a man half his age to give up his entire life in China to come to Canada on a fucking student visa (which is inherently temporary) with the, most likely, promise (stated or unstated) that he'd marry him and sponsor him as a permanent resident and they'd build a new life together. All evidence points to deception here. He wasn't making moves to legally divorce his wife and was having affairs with other men on top of that. You can't legally work on a student visa, so the partner would have been entirely financially dependent on the father.
Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.
I, on the other hand, do not lack courage to do hard things. But I have learned that it is a strawman - it does not make you happier to quite you job, leave your spouse, go for your passion in a startup, etc.
Luckily I fucked up everything in that fever dream early enough that it did not have substantiel impact on my life.
Nobody was holding her hostage with a knife to her neck.
not living a life true to oneself, working too hard, not having the courage to express feelings, losing touch with friends, and not allowing oneself to be happier.
With a heavy overweight on the first point. I think that the comment "he wasted his life" is supposed to be in reference to this, that most people realize at the end that nothing really mattered, and that they chose to follow the structures of society by default instead of daring to do what they inherently wanted intrinsically. Then you can feel as your life was wasted, you got a single chance to play around and do what you like with your brief time in the universe and you chose to let someone else dictate how that was going to go, a waste.
I don't suppose I shall ever read it again but I have saved it in my cache of personal web pages.
I'm so glad I finally came out to my family and friends.
Aside from the fact that this premise is incorrect, it's also inapplicable, because, as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.
I don't, which is why I didn't say that. I said:
> as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.
Somehow related, I had to go through my father in-law papers after his death, and I have seen papers that probably were not meant to be seen ever. I am now part of this secret. The weird part is that I feel that I cannot talk about it to anyone in the universe. For the first time in my life, I feel the burden of keeping secret until I die. There is no therapy for it. Now, I understand how some people when tragedy strikes, have to bury it deep, to the point where they forget about it, as it is too painful to even think of it. I am at a point where I do not want to impair (drunk, high) myself and reveal the secret. I thought my life was simple, but man some unfortunate events can flip entire lives... I was a firm believer that talking the truth/facts was the best solution, and now I realize that some things better stay buried as it would generate more pain than anything.
So, some papers might not be good to keep, as you never know what it could unleash after you pass away (and that can happen anytime).
I obviously can't know what exactly you found, or how it might affect you or others, but with a few specific exceptions like knowledge of imminent harm to yourself or others, there isn't really something that's outside of the purview of what you can talk to a therapist about. You'd still need someone you feel you can trust with being open with your emotions with, and that's a difficult thing for a lot of people even without as giant secrets as you seem to be burdened with, but in a lot of ways when it comes to stuff like this, there isn't really therapy "for" specific things as much as just a general practice of how to deal with things that are tough emotionally in general. I'm not sure if your reference to previously believing in truth and facts being the best solution is intended to mean that therapy is something you would have considered in the past, or if it's conveying something closer to a "radial honesty" type approach, but if there's any chance you've ever considered talking a therapist before, I'd urge you to consider if it's really out of the question for what you're specifically going through. I'm of the firm opinion that pretty much everyone in the world likely would benefit from some amount of therapy, and a good therapist wouldn't just immediately insist on you revealing the intimate details of your pain to be able to start helping you through it (and it's possible that depending on specifically why you feel the way you do, it may not even be necessary for them to ever know them in order to help you learn to live with it in a way that's less painful).
No capitalization was as surprising as the narration itself… not sure how to feel about it! Counter culture?
it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
> it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
Easy: Latin script.
The more interesting question is the source of lower case letters which appeared much later.
I find it intimate. And her writing is very intimate.
Many years ago, I read The Bridges of Madison County. This reminds me a bit of that.
Regardless, it is a well written article with an emotionally strong impact. Thank you for sharing.
Just raw thoughts, no rules.
If they wrote, say, phonetically instead, the text would become utterly unreadable, even though the raw thoughts in one's head aren't expressed in written English.
That's why I think shortish chapters are good UX, instead of a single unbroken one. Using a good font, making use of paragraphs to divide sections and using caps whenever required.
I personally think if a writer doesn't care to even add a bunch capitalisation to make my life easier then I assume that piece of writing is mainly for themselves and I immediately stop reading, since it's not meant for me but for them.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thi...
Poetry works in a different way, though. The lines are short and your eyes won't struggle much with continuity. e.e.cummings eschewed capitalizations as well and his poetry is still easily readable (to me at least).
A larger block of text is harder to parse without capitalizations. This is actually why they developed in the first place. Original Roman writing was very "blocky" and thus much harder to read, see for example this:
https://share.google/EyVZfHb9NgIbtXlAl
It is a short text, but parsing it into individual words is quite a challenge.
My guess is the author knows what they are doing and is intentionally reinforcing the disoriented and unsettled feeling. Or, at least, is intentionally making no effort to mitigate it.
(In many other posts, capitalisation rules are followed.)
> i learn the story afterwards. dad went upstairs for a lie-down after dinner, but was awoken by severe chest pain. he vomits, which is a thing he never does, and asks mom to call 911 immediately. she does and provides all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her that they've sent for an ambulance, and they should get ready to go.
> so they get ready, and then they wait. they wait for 15 long minutes, my dad in an extreme amount of pain, and nothing happens.
> mom calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. the dispatcher responds that don't have visibility on that. she asks if she should just drive my dad to the hospital and is advised that the best thing to do is to keep waiting.
> so they wait another 15 long minutes, and still no one shows up. the house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes away from a major highway, a ten minute drive from the hospital.
> mom decides that they should not keep waiting. she and my brother help dad into the car, and they drive him to the hospital.
> they arrive at the emergency room entrance. dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, lurches forwards, and dies on the front steps of the hospital.
What the fuck, that's horrible.
My dad's house is in a rural area of the country. He sadly passed away a week ago, I found him in his bed while coming to visit, he didn't pick up the phone that day, despite us having talked just the day before. When I found him, I called the emergency number and they still sent an ambulance, it was at the house in like 15-20 minutes, they confirmed the situation and did some paperwork and helped me with the next steps.
I can't imagine how horrible the circumstances in the article must feel and I'm not even sure what "justice" would look in a case like that, how the fuck can an emergency line dispatcher not have "visibility" on an emergency call, that's their one fucking job!
Of course, families can be a powerful force.
But, as my father once told me: family are those who are near you [not necessarily those you share genes with].
You’ve censored out some names as “redacted” but it’s pretty easy to fill in at least one name by other articles in the site. If you want anonymity, consider doing a broad review.
I’m not trying to dox you - it’s totally up you what to share.
But some of the articles seem to be private, while others seem very public.
I currently know someone like this. He's not homosexual, so it's not quite the same issue.
But he's gotten himself trapped in a relationship, and worst of all, cannot admit it to his friends. The only reason I know is that the one friend he did tell, has told the rest of his friends. We've known each other since childhood, yet he doesn't ask me for help. Which is up to him, of course, but he also doesn't know that I know that he is keeping a remarkably straight face about his situation. In a way it would be easier if I hadn't been told.
So now, I have to pretend like I think he's just a single man about town. He just shows up to everything when I'm around, and chats to me like he always has throughout the years. We'll meet another old friend, yet his life update is that he's just like any other bachelor-for-life, just enjoying his video games and freedom, while the rest of us are having kids and worrying about school bills.
It's very odd. What would HN do?
Does he actually have kids in his relationship that he doesn't want to talk about or admit to in public? Is his partner being neglected, or children?
When you talk to the guy, everything is great. Not even a sign that he has gotten hitched to this lady, or is dating, or that anything has happened at all.
Yeah it's weird. I was incredulous when I was told.
> What would HN do?
document.querySelectorAll("p").forEach(p => p.textContent = p.textContent.replace(/(^\w)|([.?!]\s*\w)|( i'? )/g, m => m.toUpperCase())); document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("p:first-letter{ text-transform: capitalize;}",document.styleSheets[0].cssRules.length);People need to seriously plan and manage a marriage if they decide to go through with it.
FTA:
> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
This article isn't about sexuality. It's about honesty and the impact that artifice can have, not only on your own life, but also on the lives of others.
Quite applicable to the HN crowd.
There is massively different subtext between the two. Autocapitalization and autocorrect represents a limit on the subtextual bandwidth you can communicate along with a message. Restrictions on subtextual bandwith are not ideal when your generation relies on text-based communication for evermore intimate interactions - that "whats up" message might be the start of you asking someone out on a date, I don't want it formatted the same way as a message I would send my boss.
In German even ordinary nouns are capitalized, making it even less easy to find the capital at the start of a sentence.
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
You're almost a century off :) https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...
Religion and tradition have elevated humanity and it's good to acknowledge that. They never could have eliminated suffering, only changed the sources and types of suffering. It is helpful for many of us to have things like religion and traditions to give the suffering more meaning, sense, and purpose.
When people like the father never find the courage to speak, they will be harmed/destroyed/etc. in exactly the way those traditions would warn against.
An excellent article, to be nit-picked for a dumb reason as this
Capitalizing sentences is basic usability and readability. We should care about usability and readability.
The way you write about it feels like you're going to be infected by it, altered by it, if you read it fully. Seems like an odd reaction.
I get distracted. The writer misses to accurately transmit the piece of information at its full extent.