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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

#191

Post by _yb2s »

71bw wrote: post #104
pfdietz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You have a right to have firm boundaries and communicate them clearly to your partner. Doing so will usually make a relationship and life together better, not worse because your partner will respect your honesty and strength. If her doing that will hurt you, I strongly recommend you communicate clearly and up front that you know she has those interests, but following up on them is a deal breaker for you, and you need her to be honest about that. You’re not even married yet, have the conversation now! It won’t be good for you or for her to be an angry shell of yourself like the dad in the article, making a sacrifice you never wanted to make.

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

#192

Post by moralestapia »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #79
siva7 wrote: post #60

Did it ever occur to her that he wanted a child with his wife? That he loved his wife - even though not romantically? And still had a happy life as a father of her? The author seems to have many misconceptions about gay people..

The author mentions in the follow-up that she is gay herself.

Of course!

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

#193

Post by nvarsj »

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 know it may seem like the hardest thing ever - but you are doing the right thing. Come out, end the sham, start to heal. Otherwise you are in for a life of pain. I'm not gay but I'm divorced and whatever the reason for the divorce, it is always hard. But it's so much better afterwards, rather than living in a lie of a relationship.

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

#194

Post by swatcoder »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #186
swatcoder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union" 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 r…

I don’t exist to produce children, tbh a very narrow view of what life can be.

That's great. Indeed, many of us don't see ourselves existing for that reason, especially among people who read and post on this site.

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.

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

#195

Post by astura »

djohnston wrote: post #160
astura wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from... 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 fathe…

That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with. So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking abou…

I also grew up with abusive parents (plural). Poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, violence. The whole nine. You can check my comment history, I talk about it openly on here. Here's one previous comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400583

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.

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

#196

Post by esafak »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #52
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

Baby boomers have used up all the capital letters on Yelp reviews and Facebook rants, unfortunately, and have left none for future generations.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/clinton-deploys-v...

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

#197

Post by ReluctantLaser »

shark1 wrote: post #178

The deliberate choice of committing such a basic mistake of lower-casing the beginning of all sentences is an insult. I am afraid of reading it, becoming desensitized, and starting to do the same.

Why is that important to you?

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.

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

#198

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

judahmeek wrote: post #143
crossroadsguy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment definitely made it sound like the victim/husband's suffering came from the culture they lived in, not the wife's actions directly. So I vote for bad system, not bad people.

I think marrying someone despite being attracted to the other sex without telling them and then having an affair with someone definitely makes you a bad person. But that’s me.

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

#199

Post by armchairhacker »

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 see his actions as immoral (not as much as most violence) but could seem justified to a person in his circumstances with reasonable moral judgement.

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.

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

#200

Post by delecti »

Permit wrote: post #164
Dumblydorr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, driven to a lifetime of harmful decisions by an extremely regressive society. Would he have settled down and been faithful if he could have started off right in his teens, open and truthful and honest? Lies become a habit and I’ve known others who couldn’t break themselves of the cheating/lying habit and lost whole friend groups for it.

Is there anything he could have done that you would not excuse by the society in which he was born?

That comment explained what led him to be that way, but I don't think it justified his actions.
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