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What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

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Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#131

Post by uoaei »

mellosouls wrote: post #123
thomastjeffery wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is more than one kind of relationship! It's exhausting to constantly hear about romantic commitment as if it's the barometer for all relationships . That's absurd! Did it truly never cross your mind that a person can have more than one meaningful relationship in their lives? No wonder people are so lonely! You don't need one or the other: you can participate in a close…

you can participate in a close friendship and casual sex. You can have several of each. The casual sex "choice" doesn't apply to the majority of adults (most straight men don't have the option of multiple sex partners, most women don't want them) so it's difficult to see its relevance here. If you mean throughout their life rather than concurrently, that doesn't really affect the idea that marriage itself is of speci…

You'd be surprised what happens when you are kind and a good communicator with a healthy social life. I thought the same thing when I was younger but now I'm in the prime of my dating and casual sex life. I try not to hold tightly to expectations but can see this path in life leading to some new close friendships with the possibility of closer partnerships ahead.

The trick is to prioritize the people around you, rather than material gains for yourself.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#132

Post by robertlagrant »

seydor wrote: post #78
mydriasis wrote: post #28

I don't like anyone as much as I like my wife, straight up. It's incredible to have a partner that acts as my actual 'other half'. We are two sides of the same coin. It's an amazing thing. I can't, nor do I want to, get that close to other people.

Most people don't know otherwise. For much of history family was secondary to public life

In what country? By public life, do you mean politics?

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#133

Post by phd514 »

nemo44x wrote: post #77
avar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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%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%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.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#134

Post by senko »

stef25 wrote: post #110
ff317 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they age, you're going to find a whole different level of arguing about how to raise kids on an every-other-week rotation with conflicting influences/decisions. Trust me, I've seen it. It can work, but you're gonna need to put in some work on the relationship with the other parent to get through it and find decent compromises.

Respectfully, the last thing I'm going to do is put in work with my ex wife. When the kids are with me I'll do whatever I want. Those types of discussions are one of the reasons why we're no longer together.

You're going to love it when the kids reach puberty.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#135

Post by nathan_compton »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #119
nathan_compton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#136

Post by Barrin92 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #119
nathan_compton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#137

Post by ido »

mschuster91 wrote: post #117
dash2 wrote: post #23

As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. What if we learned to love being single? What if we substitute friendship for marriage? 64 ways to enjoy retirement on your own! This is the collective version of listening to an alcoholic explain why he doesn't have a problem.

> As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. Make childcare not a choice between living in poverty and not, and people will have children again. Many of my generation including myself can't afford children despite us wanting to. The worst problem is obviously housing costs and cost of living in general, coupled with wage stagnation. We don't wa…

The thing is that even countries with excellent social safety nets and childcare benefits (like northern and western europe) have seen their birth rate fall in the last 50 years. In fact the most common correlation is that as countries get richer & more prosperous, birthrates drop.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#138

Post by adamrezich »

nathan_compton wrote: post #85
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543...

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 m…

Catholicism calls for one to commit to at least one Sacrament of Service: Holy Orders and/or Matrimony.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#139

Post by stef25 »

senko wrote: post #134
stef25 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, the last thing I'm going to do is put in work with my ex wife. When the kids are with me I'll do whatever I want. Those types of discussions are one of the reasons why we're no longer together.

You're going to love it when the kids reach puberty.

Yeah, I believe you :) I'll with that in 10 years.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#140

Post by nineplay »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #17

As June rolled around today, I was just reflecting on the history of sexuality, and the philosophical shift that has occurred relatively recently, from "lifestyle" to "orientation" to "identity" and all that comes with it. People in the past did not consider themselves to have sexual orientations, to be gay or straight or something else. Even someone who was committed to a same-sex romantic relationship wouldn't have…

I think there has been a terrible loss that is rarely acknowledged in that men in the western world can no longer have intimate friendships without having to defend their sexual orientation. Seinfeld's "Not that there's anything wrong with that" became a catchphrase for a reason but the line of thinking still exists.

I watched the "Tollywood" film RRR and it was startling and refreshing how much affection the two main male characters showed for each other. I don't know how Indian audiences reacted to it, but I guarantee that a lot of American viewers thought "so they're supposed to be gay, right?" The idea that male affection is merely a cover for closeted sexual attraction is pervasive in US culture.

It is one of my longstanding pain points, as my favorite authors ( Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Wodehouse ) show unabashedly close relationships between male characters and all my life I've heard insistences that the characters are actually gay and the authors were too repressed/cowardly to say so. It's tragic and I wish it was talked about more.

Men are under so much pressure to bottle up their feelings, and I think the negative side-effects of that are around us.

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