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After my dad died, we found the love letters

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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#101

Post by tdeck »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #84
djohnston wrote: post #13

This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.

It's mind-boggling to me how many commenters are here to defend the honor of a serial adulterer who broke the hearts of the people most related to and dependent upon him. Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...

There are a number of comments here that read like "yes, but you have to understand those things benefitted the father". It's like people think if you're doing something that hurts other people, it's OK if that's for selfish reasons? I guess I'll try not to think of how this reflects on our industry as a whole.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#102

Post by nkrisc »

lordnacho wrote: post #99
zdc1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the age of the author, but interestingly, Gen-Z doesn't seem to use that key

I've always wondered what the point of capital letters even is? It doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile to the language. You need to learn 26 extra shapes, and then some arbitrary rules for when to use the majuscule. But if you never heard of capital letters, nobody will be confused by what you wrote.

They make scanning and reading text easier since they make jumping to the end/start of sentences easier. When you read your eyes are constantly jumping ahead and even backwards. The capital letters help you land quickly back at significant positions in the text since they are associated with boundaries in logical clauses.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#103

Post by gbin »

wiether wrote: post #49
pja wrote: post #4

> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.” 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.

Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you? 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

It doesn't improve readability for sure but for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.

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.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#104

Post by 71bw »

pfdietz wrote: post #83
throwaway142351 wrote: post #59

I'm a dad too, and I'm in a somewhat similar situation. My son is under five, and it feels like I'm still at the very beginning of his story. I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path. It felt easier to stay closeted. Easier to date a woman. Easier to move in together, propose, get married, and even have a child than to face my truth. I lo…

I'm straight and love my wife of 44 years. But I long ago made the thought experiment of what would happen if she were in the same kind of situation you were in: what if she decided I was a mistake, or that being in a relation with a man was a mistake, and that she needed to do something else. I decided that would require I support her in that. How can you love someone and not want what is best for them, even if that…

I can relate to this probably the most out of everything I've seen on HN so far. My fiancee is pansexual and overall seems to prefer women, so I surely am quite a bit of a surprise in her life (to the point where her family laughed at the fact that I 'fixed her' the first time I met them...) as a straight man. I know she loves me, I love her with all my heart but I am aware that at some point she may want to change me for someone of the opposite sex. I have therefore decided that as long as this does not happen behind my back I will support her, even if that means I have to endure a lot of pain.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#106

Post by nkrisc »

mierz00 wrote: post #27
rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I normally find the complaints about formatting to be petty, but for a long form writing piece like this, all lowercase is just a bad choice with no discernable upside.

I’ve come to love this style of writing. While not quite the same, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street felt similar. Just raw thoughts, no rules.

Capitalization would not change the content at all, but would make it easier to read. People reading English have expectations are capitalization. Breaking those expectations makes the text more difficult to read and feel less effortless.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#107

Post by lordnacho »

So, what should you do if you know someone trapped in this kind of situation?

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?

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#108

Post by geoffmanning »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #87
pavlov wrote: post #75

Ouch. This hits incredibly hard. 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…

I have heard this play out too many times. 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 di…

> 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.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#110

Post by pwillia7 »

noduerme wrote: post #58
quitit wrote: post #38

From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind: - 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 vio…

I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.

It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.
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