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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

#341

Post by acjohnson55 »

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…

Have you considered that it doesn't have to mean the end of your family? It's possible that there's no arrangement that meets everybody's needs. But, maybe there is.

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

#342

Post by micku7zu »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #213

for all the lowercase complainers: document.querySelectorAll("p").forEach(p => p.textContent = p.textContent.replace(/(^\w)|([.?!]\s*\w)|( i'? )/g, m => m.toUpperCase()));

Or using CSS p:first-letter{ text-transform: capitalize;}:

  document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("p:first-letter{ text-transform: capitalize;}",document.styleSheets[0].cssRules.length);

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

#343

Post by gwd »

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…

There's judging people, and there's judging actions.

- 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.

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

#344

Post by flowerthoughts »

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…

> the version of me they love is someone I constructed

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.

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

#345

Post by Thinkx220 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#346

Post by beanjuiceII »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #337

I love the occasionally very surprising submission on here. Sometimes, something with nothing to do with technology touches this group of jaded techies enough to bring it to the front page.

the guy was a shitbag and he ruined his wife's life and was very hard for his children all because he was weak

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

#347

Post by bdangubic »

beanjuiceII wrote: post #346
acjohnson55 wrote: post #337

I love the occasionally very surprising submission on here. Sometimes, something with nothing to do with technology touches this group of jaded techies enough to bring it to the front page.

the guy was a shitbag and he ruined his wife's life and was very hard for his children all because he was weak

yup, but interestingly enough, I was imagining that if this was turned into a movie the audience would symphatize with him…

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

#348

Post by tomhow »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #171

[flagged]

This is not an acceptable comment on HN. It's not OK to scold or harangue people like this here. The guidelines foremost ask us to "Be kind" in comments, and that isn't negated just because you disapprove of what the parent commenter has done. Further, we've had to ask you repeatedly to observe the guidelines and refrain from trolling. We have to ban accounts that continue to act this way. Please stop this if you want to keep participating here. A reminder of the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46022847 and marked it off topic.

Edit: on closer look, you've been posting so many bad (for HN) comments and breaking the site guidelines so frequently that we've banned the account.

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

#349

Post by mensetmanusman »

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?

If he killed all of society, it would be hard to blame society for that.

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

#350

Post by Drupon »

dpark wrote: post #328
Drupon wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because you see, my dad was a coward. 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. What exactly do you call that? NoT…

No. Being selfish is 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.

Calling up your wife's parents and telling them to scold her for wanting to divorce you IS ABUSE.
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