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After my dad died, we found the love letters

jenn.site

441–450 of 470 posts

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

#441
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…

Your comment about not judging their integrity because they had different life experiences... that doesnt make sense to me. Integrity is absolute, you dont get slack on your integrity because you were dealt a bad hand. That being said, we ought not to judge anyway

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can even tolerate / excuse / forgive up until that point, because it is indeed an unfair system. She took a gamble and got caught, at which point she ought to have made a deal with the guy. Not exploited the other unfair system of state violence against him.

He was the one who filed for divorce after she tried to make a deal with him.

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

#443

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…

If it’s any comfort, no one ever truly knows who you are, even if you wanted to be totally honest. 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 k…

I would say moat pekple dont know their own selves well. People like to pretend that Identity is self determined, but I think identity is likely more accurately observed by 3rd parties

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

#444

Man… the battle between cultural expectations and our true selves is humanity’s oldest conflict. A few people get lucky. Most of us survive in the cracks. No capitalization was as surprising as the narration itself… not sure how to feel about it! Counter culture?

I drop case with everyone I know well and feel comfortable with.

I find it intimate. And her writing is very intimate.

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

#445
post #83

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…

[deleted]

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.

(I haven't presently read Wolf's essay on account of it being paywalled. However, I think I get the gist of it, and Scanlon's view too, from the abstract and some commentary.) 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 conc…

Oh wow, thanks for engaging.

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."

https://anglicanhistory.org/butler/rolls/08.html

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

#447
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.

Totally. It really annoys me.

I get distracted. The writer misses to accurately transmit the piece of information at its full extent.

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

#448
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a mistake, it’s a choice. Quite a common one among younger people who grew up using Slack at work and iMessage everywhere else.

It is a choice, and yet it is still a mistake...

Thanks. You understand me. Communication is hard and we have tools for doing a good job, why not using it? Individuals should raise the bar instead of embracing mediocrity.

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

#450
post #49
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

I capitalised the quote. All lowercase is an annoying affectation that I didn’t choose to repeat.
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