Nah, my wife is much more like you, and it’s often exhausting, although she’s learned a bit across the decades.

You’re a little old to be equating the capacity to lie to get by, doing even the bare minimum to preserve your own and others’ dignity, and feelings, with “being shitty”. As if euphemism and metaphore are just “cool story-telling tricks we developed for some reason”, or human recall doesn’t make AI hallucinations look almost par for the course of actual intelligence.

No wonder you’re single.

You don’t build on the bullshit and lies, but around it. It’s a pain-in-the-ass, but so is dealing with a snitch who is incapable of lying. Personally, I tell my wife and kids to throw me under the bus as needed to get them out of awkward conversations and commitments they don’t want to make. “My dad won’t let me do that” works a treat. The latest was “my dad won’t let me commit insurance fraud”(like I particularly care about insurance fraud, but my limits are surprisingly more restrictive than some we know who would never admit it).

Home (at least somewhere they are welcome to stay, and comfortable staying…)

Income (Don’t budge on this one)

Vehicle (or at least used to public transit/walking/biking enough to not treat you as a chaufer)

… all anyone needs to bring to the table on a material level. People will tell you about their standards all day long, but most are hypocrites - they are more flexible than they’ll let-on and/or are probing for push-back, checking to see who will “wear the pants” in a relationship.

If you’re inflexible your-self, with zero tolerance for bullshit or even a sense of humor about it, you’re going to have a bad time.

People say “single people are single for a reason”, but almost always pretend its unique to their age group or dating pool/whatever, but really its just-about equally true at all ages, and always applicable to onesself. Hardly anyone is single just-because their shitty ex was so shitty - shitty people attract shitty people, and its easier to make a new lover into a shitty person than to un-fuck what previous relationships and they have done to themselves, trying to hold-on to what they saw in so-and-so to the point that when its over they can’t let go of all the bad “surprises” that awaited them.

Don’t think of yourself or your experiences as so different from theirs. If you’ve had fewer, longer-term relationships than they, you still likely had many events where you and previous SO’s fell in-and-out of love - you just happened to work through them until you didn’t. In many cases, by most people’s criteria, maybe you shouldn’t have, and in just-as many, maybe your partner “should have” walked-away - its when “should have” wins-out over attachment that the relationship is dead, even if it doesn’t know it yet.

That said, if someone demands to be treated like a pet, that’s between you and them, and no, I’m not referring to furries or people who are self-aware, but the “don’t you dare shatter my fantasies”-types. I don’t have the patience to constantly pretend I am also surprised that the inevitable happened, but I’ve seen plenty who do. The ones that realize it aren’t always so-bad off, unless its “I gotta pretend for th kid’s sake”. Generally, don’t have kids with the poor, the disrespectful, OR the crazy, yeah?

Still better to not have to face it out-in-the-open this side of (recognized/recognizable)change for the better. Don’t see where I said anything about you, but you didn’t hold back about me, did you? Am I supposed to thank you?

I’m talking about friends that are to be rightly missed. Still close-by and friendly, but not like it once was. Anyone remotely like you’ve described in my life moved-away or died. They rarely-offered and more importantly never-accepted help in the first-place.

I’m more afraid of being thought of as one of them than worried about bothering to ditch anyone like-so.

Up-skirt photos are the one area where this gets me caught-up; Either a hypocrite or a shitty person. For the sake of consistency, I tend towards shittiness - the only real reason there’s anything like an expectation of privacy in public is so shitty (powerful)people can get-away with shitty things, when really, being in-public is being on-display.

Then there’s my stance on getting “caught” having sex on a park bench in a secluded forest by way of a trail-cam. I’m far from convinced that video evidence should count as evidence of an otherwise truly private, victemless, “crime” that otherwise wouldn’t be. We should only be jailing public officials caught-out in conflicts of interest/corruption like-so, and almost never the camera-man.

Instead, its the opposite. We are surprisingly far into all of this deep-fake and leaked-video shit for the average person to have any qualms about saying “whether that video is real or not is none of your business”, as if significant resources will be spent validating all but the highest-profile of images, but I get there are people who are generally embarassed and not just wrapped-up in their personal “sin” of having been portrayed or caught in a compromising position.

None of it upsets me so much as former strippers or adult film stars losing their jobs over shit that’s years-behind them, while genuine pedos escape notice for decades. I’ll say it again: society and the law are laser-focused on the wrong shit, and from the wrong-end of the turd at that.

They think they are shooting you down, when really they are shoving you out of the way of the bullet that is themselves. “You know where to find me when you grow up" is a line I had worn-out by the end of my teens, yet I never get to leave it out of my repertoir for long.

The world is swimming in children of all ages. The only “favor” having them young migh do is forcing them to grow up a little earlier, and only if you’re very lucky, they are still whole enough to both resent you for it and forgive you. People think their adult children still idolizing them is a good result, but those children are NOT grown.

Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.

Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.

Are people confusing Telegram for offering anything like privacy or anonymity now? It’s been wide-open five ways from Sunday since inception, by the standards of this community. I am NOT watching a goddamned video about it in 2026!!!

Not one mention of AI, let alone performance. Are we certain they evaluated the card on a task its really meant for?

College educated couples who got married after the age of 30 are exactly the sort to buy a house before having kids. They’ll also have locked-in friends and family who they can count-on, and likely owe them favors. Other than grandparents and single people, these ARE the society you want in your corner.

As someone who did it in the reverse order, I promise you, you’re gonna burn a friendship or familial relation or three out of need, ones that otherwise would have lasted generations, and know as its happenning you’ll be living with that regret the rest of your life. You may be able to pay them back, but almost certainly neither in-kind or in any way, or on any time-scale, that makes the relationship what it once was.

As you get older, relationships ossify - it takes life-changing events to have any chance to undo extinction events or straight “I’m burned-out on their shit”.

So yeah, I have a lot of people who know that I, and my kids know, our family owes them and I will do anything in my power to do whatever I can to help them should they ever ask. They even would likely still help with whatever I asked for, even non-sense(“we’re square”)…

… BUT, they stopped coming to fun “note-worthy” things we invite them to many years-ago. Any sharing in our modest successes(or just relief that x milestone was reached) is tainted by all the dirty-dirty of all the sausage they’ve helped us make to get to here.

Relying on society, when it works out, still usually leaves you with over-extended or strained relationships(especially with friends and family), and kids who will never understand just what was so important about their conceptions and births that couldn’t have waited until you were a little more ready and not constantly stressed to the breaking point - kids who are absolutely right.

Ask me how I know. If I look at it from the stand-point of the heart-attack that seems due any day now, maybe there was some urgency, but without trying to shoe-horn kids into a lifestyle that wasn’t ready for them and ultimately had to be abandoned in-favor of doing whatever it takes to keep them happy and healthy, external/internal consequences be damned, then my health outlook might not look so bleak.

All that, and have you seen divorce statistics? Jesus FUCK, have you SEEN divorce statistics? … and it’s somehow still okay to throw massive financial insecurity into the mix, the SINGLE GREATEST driver of divorce? Sure. Aim for the stars, kid. The world is your oyster and all that.

The first one isn’t misogyny. Minus the specifivity of the “$2 million” part, its the Jewish tradition of what is required for a man to be able to propose. “Having kids is too expensive” is just the straight-up truth for anyone who isn’t uncommonly comfortable relying on charity and/or society.

Like, are we going off the avatar, pretending a woman who says those things is crazy? Because she’s absolutely not, and neither are the men trying to live up to those items, at a minimum.

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“Encountered”? I was raised on that shit. I was bewildered the first time I encoundered a printed graphic sleeve, and learned that some people spent shelf space on tapes with only one movie each on them…

There’s no way she put-in little-enough thought to make her statements since sincere, except, probably, drugs, but in the modern narrative that was just another layer of something that “happened to” her. I don’t buy the “self-harm” angle either - that’s just another facet of ex-post-facto internalized shame, without which none of the mental gymnastics would be “necessary”.

As for the rest of your first paragraph, right there with you. I’m never intentionally looking up the one video, at least.

Nothing wrong with it until she decided, probably after the fact, that it was wrong all-along, and she should probably at least pretend to regret it, as if society and people like you would ever forgive her, or just as likely, an angle for her to seize the spotlight for another precious moment without really trying. Thankfully, there’s people like you she was able to wring another few precious pennies from.

I’m not here for anyone’s perscriptive “should she have done that?” agendas, and your double-speak on the matter is gross.

Dunno who that is, don’t care. Again, there’s plenty of other recent articles about it.

I can never discredit myself to the degree you have done yourself, attacking points and stances I never even came close to making or endorsing. Insincere, infantile and facetious from your first reply, and only escalating from there. Bye now.

No fucks given about the body-count. Not putting a stop to it at the point it becomes traumatizing AND leaning-in on the trauma in public quotes? I relive all the times I let myself almost-break for a dollar enough in therapy enough, without risking strangers asking me about it or calling me “brave”(as if THAT’S what would happen…) No mistake, good-on-her for following-through if she genuinely wanted to or deemed it that important, but from the sound of it…

… Oh, and let’s not pretend society(or even 95+% of women who despise OOP, rightly or otherwise…) would be cool with me being cool with that and still wanting to date Bonnie Blue this side of her-changing-career-paths and me magically having enough money to “fix” her, either. I’m not interested in increasing the number of judgy “I got mine”/aspiring prudes in this world, TYVM.