"You might find this astonishing, but: other marriages are not like yours" does seem pretty condescending. If you're going to comment here, please be more civil than that.
Fair point, I've edited the comment to clean it up.
Readit Newszzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
zzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
I was molested and raped as a child. I got married at age 19 to another 19 year old with issues as serious as mine, though different. I did a lot of therapy. We did couples counseling. I also had a higher sex drive than him and was unfaithful, which he knew and did not throw in my face.
Sorry if my remarks bother you, but your assumptions are completely out of line. My marriage was neither easy nor a case of good fortune.
So how about if you try to abide by HN guidelines and leave out the condescension, etc.
Condescension?
This article is all kinds of horrifying. ... "We are just going through the motions cuz we gotta. Kind of like plunging the toilet."?
Maybe you should go read a book like "Lovers in marriage" before you go trying to write anymore marriage advice.
Or, you know, you can make time for each other because this is the most important person in your life. Instead of making excuses.
I could go on.
I did not set the tone, here, and I stand by my comment.
zzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
The article mostly throws up its metaphorical hands and concludes "maybe, language is hard", which is fair enough. But:
> if your spouse is your best friend, then whom do you complain to your spouse about?
Complaining about your spouse to your friends is a wonderful way to damage your relationship; the unthinking assumption that you should be venting about your spouse is harmful and should be challenged.
> Dr. Bader said that she wished popular magazines would challenge the notion that you shouldn’t get married to change someone. “I think that’s what marriage is about,” she said.
That sounds like horrifying bad advice if taken literally. I hope there was some context that was omitted from the article. People certainly can and do change, and obviously spouses should help encourage each other to change for the better. So sure, marriage is, in part, about change, inasmuch as marriage is a part of life, and life is about change. But to get married in order to change someone? As in "wow, I hate how extroverted this person I'm dating is, I know we'll get married so I can make them introverted"? That's the opposite of a good idea, and warning people off it is a staple of popular magazines, unpopular magazines, relationship counselling, and dating advice because it's a really dumb notion.
Complaining about your spouse to your friends is a wonderful way to damage your relationship; the unthinking assumption that you should be venting about your spouse is harmful and should be challenged.
Just on this point, I couldn't agree more.
The problem with "venting" is that whomever is listening is almost certainly part of your personal echo chamber. And when dealing with a problem in one's marriage, the last thing people need are mirrors reflecting themselves.
I can't tell you the number of times I've come out of a fight with my wife where, some time later, I realized I was a total ass and needed to apologize for my behaviour.
If I'd "vented" to someone, odds are it would've just hardened my resolve.
zzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
I had sex 2 to 3 times a week for 20 years with the same man. The most hot and heavy sex did not occur in the first few months. It occurred when I crossed the country to see him a few years into the marriage when our kids were still little.
I don't feel I am misreading the article. I stand by my horror. Downvotes for saying it don't make me less appalled.
(edited for tone)
In many perfectly healthy, normal marriages, there's a disparity (sometimes significant) in sexual interest/appetite between the spouses that has absolutely nothing to do with their love for each other and everything to do with basic biological, sociological, and psychological differences.
In such a marriage, sexual intimacy actually requires focused effort to maintain. Not "work". That makes it sound transactional in nature. But effort. Like, you have to prioritize it.
To suggest that marriages in which this is necessary are somehow broken is simply unfair. Every marriage is unique and beyond basic expectations of love and decency, it's unreasonable to use ones own experiences as the template by which to judge other people's relationships.
zzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
I am at 10, two kids, going strong and probably forever (who can say for sure, of course?) - and my wife and I have separate best friends.
I really can't see why this has to be the case. There are things my wife should share with someone close that she can fully trust, and sometimes that can't be me. Same is true in the other direction.
Hey, if it works for you, it works for you.
That said, I'm curious to hear what kinds of things you're referring to. Do you have some fictional examples?
My wife and I each have our own best friends, but in my own marriage (14 years... since we all have to publish our credentials ;), if there's something I can't tell me wife, it's something I wouldn't tell anyone, best friends included.
The only obvious exception is if it's something about the marriage itself, but in that case, I'd speak to a friend first only if I needed to work out my own thoughts and emotions before I then talked to my wife. So even in that case, it's more a matter of timing than keeping certain things from her entirely.
zzalpha commented on Should Your Spouse Be Your Best Friend? nytimes.com/2017/10/12/st... · Posted by u/SREinSF
A mostly uninteresting article in my opinion, but didn't agree with this:
> Dr. Bader said that she wished popular magazines would challenge the notion that you shouldn’t get married to change someone.
Most of the relationships I've seen where one partner has a goal of changing the other person have failed. I would bet that this would bear out in a well-designed study as well.
I think the word "goal" is too strong, here, but it is a valid point.
People change, and in a good marriage, the spouses should absolutely push each other to change in ways that are healthy and positive.
It's simply ridiculous to assume that whomever you're marrying, right now, is the person they will be for the rest of their lives, or that you shouldn't try to influence those changes.
In fact, that goes beyond just marriages... I would hope that, in all of my relationships, be it as friend, brother, husband, or son, I am a positive influence on my loved ones, and that those people are a positive influence on me.
I'm not sure where I came across this concept, but I've heard the use of a terminal described as entering into an interactive conversation with the computer.
That is, where users of a point-and-click interface might interact with a computer superficially, the command-line allows for a fluidity of expression and progression of intent that it's extremely difficult to supplant.
When you realize this, the mistake this comic makes is obvious: the command-line is, for many problem domains, simply a superior method of human-computer interaction. In fact, in many ways, it's the GUI that squanders the immense power we have at our fingertips, as it frequently makes it more difficult to express intent rather than less.
For example, here's a basic task: Find all files in a given directory with spaces in their names, and replace those spaces with underscores.
At a command-line I can think of any number of ways to solve this problem. I'd probably opt for a combination of find, sed, and bash looping.
Now try to do this efficiently in any existing GUI interface that isn't purpose built for this exact operation.
The conversations we enter into on the command-line allow us to iteratively build up solutions to problems, solving them with simple, composable tools. There is simply no GUI equivalent.
zzalpha commented on Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet orchidprotocol.com... · Posted by u/apsec112
(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".)
Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technology, you might look at Tor, or the "out-proxies" from I2P).
So what are the benefits over Tor?
zzalpha commented on Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet orchidprotocol.com... · Posted by u/apsec112
The FAQ says
"Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth."
So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.
How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content.
You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.
zzalpha commented on Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet orchidprotocol.com... · Posted by u/apsec112
How is this different from Freenet or Tor?