notsomeguy

To what end are bonds shared with people, if not for self-fulfillment for each person? Like I said, good people are in short supply, and of course I can share these bonds with other people as well. They are not mutually exclusive. My opinion of those issues has not changed (that is, they are counter-rational), but my understanding of them has changed indeed, as I now recognize these mental habits as adaptations to traumatic experiences. For me, these qualities are too repellent for an intimate long-term relationship, but are tolerable in an otherwise rewarding friendship. For example, vanity as an expression of the need for validation is much stronger in an intimate relationship than a friendship. To take the mailroom to CEO to mailroom analogy: What if after working up to CEO level, you find that the board members are too difficult to deal with? What if you step down from CEO to midlevel employee, or part-time contractor? This way you don't need to deal with the board members, but can stick around if you appreciate the other employees and the work you do. (I like my analogies stretchy.) This is definitely worth exploring. I'll get back to you on this. Yeah, I get that. It still sounded to me like Stefan was making an unconditional (i.e. universal) argument. It was not hedged with "in this situation", or "in your case" or "if this were happening to me". The argument clearly applied in the caller's case. I'm checking if it is universalizable and if it applies in my case as well. I'm with you until the "and then decided to give up the friendship" part. Thanks for your perspective. I think I'm going to challenge my ex to consider whether she's supplementing her intimate relationship with our friendship, and see how she responds.

While my other respone is in moderator limbo, let me reference the call-in-show so you can check it yourself. Here's what prompted my question: The context of that conversation is that the caller's boyfriend was fooling around with an ex, and lying about it, but I think the statement at 41:55 was stated as true regardless of circumstances.

I don't want to turn this into a discussion about Tom Leykis, just that his suggestion that it's ridiculous to have a girlfriend at 19 sounded, well, ridiculous to me. I don't know what you mean about 'my answer being "we have unprocessed childhood trauma"'. It was a comment on his attitude towards relationships, so I don't think you understood me correctly -- or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. My gf was uncomfortable with it when we first got together, but not anymore. They're friendly, but not friends. These days my gf interested in how she's doing and such, the way one would be intested in a significant other's friends one does not see often. ("Hey, have you spoken to Bob lately? How's he doing?") No, but I just sent her a link. We're apart for a week due to a work/vacation incongruity, and she fell asleep early last night, so I hadn't yet shared this post with her. (As an aside, the moderation delay makes it tough for me to engage in this conversation -- my response had preempred PatrickC's questions, but he was unable to see it at the time.)

I got the impression that Stefan was saying that "it is not possible" to have a mutually healthy friendship with an ex. I interpreted this as an unconditional statement, So I was wondering if someone had an unconditional case to make about it. It's like abusive relationships are unconditionally bad -- you don't have to know the specifics to know it's bad (though the details help in determining how bad). And, as an aside, Stefan was saying this in the context of a relationship with an ex which was clearly unhealthy. So - definitions: a "friend" is someone with whom I share an intellectual and emotional connection, and an "ex" is -- well, this seems a bit redundant, but -- someone with whom I used to have a friend connection plus a sexual connection. But there might be a wider-ranging conversation to be had here, so here are the details of my situation: I'm late 20s, we had this relationship back in my college days, and it laster for 2 (3?) years. We ended it mutually -- in the abstract, our childhood trauma experiences did not mesh. She wanted validation and tended towards the superstitious, and I had little to no tolerance for vanity (this is still the case), and was dismissive of her issues with superstition. I also was quite against tokens of affection -- flowers, valentine's day cards, etc. I much prefer to say 'i love you' with actions, rather than words or things. She had a pretty fucked up family dynamic, which I recognized and called out at the time, but I did not connect it to her hangups until much later (thanks, FDR!). That's the short of it. I listened to some of this Tom Leykis thing -- you could say I'm a bit conservative for this player lifestyle perspective ("you're 19 -- why do you have a girlfriend?" is an attutude it'd probably stay the hell away from) he's coming from, but we don't talk avery day or borrow cars. We meet up once every month or two, talk about interesting stuff, I don't think either one of us is supplanting our romantic relationships with this friendship. My girlfriend (of 4 years) was suspicous at first, but not anymore. To sum things up, our histories made a long-term relationship too grating for both of us, but we can maintain a pretty solid friendship, and good friends are hard to come by.

Hey folks. On a recent call-in show, Stefan said that honest friendships with exes are 'not possible'. And no, I'm not talking about executables. Well, I'm friends with an ex of mine. We're both in long-term relationships, and I don't see how it is unhealthy or deceptive. But I have some history of my own with people staying friends after break-ups... My parents, after divorcing (+1 ACE points), remained on very good terms. My attitude is that they fucked up in not working out their issues, but I did not mind them remaining friendly. But clearly I might have a bias here, so I'd like some input on this matter. what do you guys think? Why can't one remain friends with an ex?

"Crime" is a terribly muddled word, especially coming from the mouths of police statisticians. The key question should be, "Is the number of victims increasing?" I think it's too early to tell, but at least this way we don't have to do the whole 'victimless crime' dance.

If you're discussing open-source distributed storage projects, you ought to look at Tahoe-LAFS, a distributed file storage and sharing platform. Its scope is quote a bit smaller than Maidsafe, but it's all ready to go and has already been used in production for a few years.