ChrisN

Use whatever you can to filter the masses. Could give dating sites like OKCupid a shot where you can profile your matches. You don't have all the time in the world so I would look for any red flags out of the gate and quickly move on to better prospects. One of steph's stories about how he met his wife was that when they sat down to meet that they were very straight to the point about what they wanted. What I take away from that is not to play games but be clear, polite, respectful, and analytical about the value of the person and how they play into your future life. Hope that helps a bit.

Kind of like the FDR podcast named UPB for Children, maybe it makes sense to put it in terms they can relate to if they're interested in it at all. I didn't get interested in politics at all till after 16 or so - Can't imagine most kids being too in to election results personally. Could be described something like - Many people have wildly different ideas about how things should be. People get really excited over politics (sad / angry). When people lose but they thought they would win, they might feel betrayed or like it was unfair. Going further than that might be too much for children (maybe?) but followup could be talking about how unfair it is to the 49% that they have to obey the 51% on a very basic / non politicized level. Eh just my thoughts.

My plan is to work from home so that I can be closer to my hopeful future children in the future. Obviously not everyone can do that so it might be helpful to find work with minimum commute time. That could mean an extra 30 minutes - 1 hour with the family.

Thanks for the responses. We did talk things out again. Mostly what it comes down to is that we recognize that the family is abusive and cannot be brought over to the side of genuine apologies and change, but that it would be catastrophic to just up and leave at once. She is financially tied to the family more so than emotionally but has been moving in the direction of being able to fund herself. At the moment, I and her agree that the best way to exit the situation would be to keep them involved until marriage and slowly drift apart rather than to cause a period of great tension and effectively isolating her previous connections all at once. I understand that philosophically it's not good to keep abusers around but in this case I'm concerned that I would cause far more harm than good by being totally honest with dishonest people. In this situation, would it actually be the just thing to do to appease the family until the means and situation were better to move on in a less directly confrontational manner. I guess in some ways it could be compared to handling prison guards and the like - lying or misleading evil people who will certainly do you harm (spreading rumors in the local community, getting relatives involved, verbal attacks, and hopefully nothing worse than that). So in the end it - if we continue long term - it might be better to accept the marriage peace offering down the road as a price to be paid and keep our opinion private to prevent more traumatic conflict. Anyone see any flaws in that logic? Thanks again for taking interest in what's going on here.

I've been dating a girl upwards of three years now. We generally get along very well but I have some huge problems with her family and we both agree that they're not great and we'd like to reduce their influence on our lives in the long run. They're pretty authoritarian and I watch how the mom constantly tells her brother to do things like chores and schoolwork in a borderline yelling way pointing fingers several inches from his face. There's not a lot of back and forth communication in the family - it's hierarchical. I just turned 25. She's just shy of 21 and currently in the 2nd half of her undergraduate college and her parents would not permit us to live together until marriage. I don't strongly disagree with the importance of a committed relationship but my fear is that they will always be a presence in our life going forward. Meanwhile, I've already stopped talking to my own family (~1 year ago) because of the way the treated me during my childhood with no genuine apology or reparations to date yet based on what I've seen in the family and heard from her, I imagine that she and her brother had it even worse in her household. We've already discussed possible answers to the problem. Currently it would involve giving her parents the marriage their looking for (involves inviting them to the wedding as well as many of her relatives), then telling them that we would like to reduce their presence in our life. This would be more of a soft break as opposed to a hard one where we go against their wishes and break ties after something like a verbal argument. One problem I have with the soft approach is that I'm not sure that would be enough to really remove them and also that in the long run it does little to make the situation better. A family that got told offhandedly to shove it would feel more or less the same as a family where you walked out the door and stopped taking phone calls, right? In addition, giving them the privilefge of dictating wedding terms and how our relationship goes does seem a bit self-defeating. We've talked about it a handful of times to various lengths but when I bring it up now, she tends to get annoyed. She points out that there's no point in talking about something that we've already reached our solution on. She doesn't want to keep them close in the long run but admits that there's little that we could do about it now without stirring up a hornets nest. Am I right to keep bringing up something that I have a problem with when I don't have any other solution (since basically it's get married or she has to stay with her family)? Values wise I clearly have an internal problem stomaching having her family in my life. In a way, I think when I keep bringing it up it's a plead for her to cut ties but it would be incredibly discomforting for her to do that in her life at the moment (if at all). Probably worth mentioning that the same kind of frustration and annoyance seems to come out from her when I rant too heavily about the state of the world and politics which I've been pretty passionate about lately.

Originally from Michigan too. Welcome to the board.

Colin, It's a really tough situation for sure and I can only imagine what it's like to have gone through it. You could start by asking yourself some questions about the relationship. Why do you love her and attracted you to her in the first place? If she loves you back, what is it that she loves about you? You say that she brought you to the police on false allegations and claimed that the baby was yours but that you wern't sure. If she lied about such serious things, do you still believe that you can have a healthy relationship with her? As for fixing her or yourself, I have not ever personally been able to fix or mold anyone for the better (though I have tried a few times) nor seen anyone fundamentally change another through intentional will before so I'm not sure it's possible but I could be wrong. Self-knowledge of yourself, your motivations, and how you got into the situation may be able to guide you towards an answer about exactly what to do. I know things must be so hard going through that situation but if you want things to be better in the future for you and her you may want to spend some time thinking things through.

That "Sorry you feel this way" kind of response you got really pisses me off. It is unbelievable how little responsibility many parents take for their actions, mine included whom I recently got a similar response from in person. I know therapy is something Steph often recommends people go into to help heal themselves but I haven't gone yet myself. What kind's of things did the therapist ask and tell you? What process did you go through for finding a good one? It's so aweful when you find out that gut feeling you had all along about people who claimed to love you was utterly spot on.

What a fascinating question! I believe Magnus is right here - an entity that has no concept and no intellectual potential (now or in the future) for property rights or morality cannot be considered valid recipients of property rights. A wild beast (with anything short of SciFi genetic alteration shinennagans) will live in a state of nature - Killing, stealing, and in some instances raping without any processed thought concept of what it is that they are doing. In addition, the photographer setup the situation for this to occur, the camera, the power, luring in the monkey who mearly by pure accident and with no understanding of what he had actually produced by triggering the camera. Because the monkeys triggering of the camera was purely accidental but only able to occur as a result of the photographer's actions, the effects and responsibilities lay with the photographer. If person A sets up a net trap, and person B walks over it with no knowledge of it being there and a whole group of people get caught up inside the net we would say that the responsibility for why people were in the net would lay with person A. Any flaws with that?

Nice. I would love to see more instances where people's parenting differs from the norm around where I live since the guilt tripping and overbearing authority most parents use is rather draining. Was there any other indication that they may have been a peaceful parenting family? Not that I want to be devil's advocate but it could have just been a one off coincidence that the Mom didn't execute parental intimidation.

Is it even possible to be a willing slave? If you choose to subjugate yourself or sign yourself as a servant of a master, then in that moment you are voluntarily choosing to work for him. If in the future you decide that you no longer wish to have the job title of "slave" and choose to forgo the contract then you may have violated the contract but a master forcing you to stay around, even if it said this was allowed in the contract legally, would be effectively turning you into an involuntary slave prisoner. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see how it's possible to be a voluntary slave. Is it not in the same vein, in terms of logically being possible, as being voluntarily murdered or voluntarily raped?

Thank you very much for the responses everyone. So if I'm understanding it, we use RTR to find out the true reasons behind things through discussing the emotions we feel in the moment. For anyone who is genuinely empathetic, I imagine they would ask about why you have a certain feeling which you may or may not actually have any real clue about. Then from there you can start checking with each other putting forward evidence and theories like "Well I felt angry when you brought up my parents like they are great people and I think it may have to do with my childhood" for example. Then with someone compatible with RTR you can get into a discussion that might unveil some things about yourself or them too. However, like Lians points out it might not be the approach to take with most people as they need to be "experienced in philosophy and self-knowledge". I recall in the book, there were characters that would just respond with aggression and zero empathy when confronted with statements of emotion about feeling sad / angry. So theories are good for getting to the correct conclusion which may be very different than the initial feeling, it's just that kind of automatic negative non-response to an emotion that's not really compatible with RTR. Sound about right?

Hello all. I've recently been doing some thinking about how to discuss feelings with another person. I listened to the RTR audiobook and I get as far as 'I feel X' without immediately putting the blame on them (ex. You pissed me off). I get a lot of 'Why are you sad/angry/mad/irritated (insert feeling here)' after that and I'm at a bit of a loss as how to respond to it in an appropriate manner. I'm not sure if it would be right to say 'Well I'm irritated because I don't think I'm being listened to' but without doing that I'm not sure how to discuss my feelings beyond what I am feeling. How can you discuss why you have a certain feeling that you might think is related to the other persons actions without blaming them (leading down to a chain of bashing each other rather than actually talking about the feelings and finding a productive solution). If anyone has a good example that might help too. Thank you very much in advance.

Know of any good resources on the subject? Indian reservations are almost never talked about from where I've been so I've heard very little on the subject. A good friend of mine has expressed some concern on the subject of the conditions in indian reservations but that's about it.