From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 19:36:06 PDT
"Adam Rifkin" wrote:
> [...] Remind me to give
> you a paper cut and pour lemon juice on it the next time I see you. :)
It's not just the sheer rawness of the sentiment, but the fact that
someone can offer to make human ceviche of a fellow FoRKer and then add
the smiley.
This is such a great mailing list.
"Ernest N. Prabhakar" wrote:
>
>[...] However, even at its most necessary, I consider divorce
> a tragedy.
I quite agree. I don't belive that divorce should considered an a
priori personal failing on the part of either person. On the other
hand, I think people often give up too soon, or have incompatible ideas
of what is important in marriage and/or life that lead to divorce. What
started as disappointment can quickly become bitterness, and a passive
resentment can become active hostility.
> I believe unconditional married love is the highest earthly joy
> to which a human being can aspire. Even if the ideal is not often reached,
> to give up on that ideal makes us less than human...
"When people speak of "having a religious experience" in love, they are
seeing for a brief instant some major aspect of another's spark
revealed, a dazzling glimpse of that whole perfection which is within
each one of us. It is possible to see the spark in anyone if you try,
but this is such a powerful experience that it is not recommended for
everyday use or for anybody. Cultural conditioning teaches us that
persons whose spark we can see are people we love, and that we have
certain obligations and ties to them." --from "A Personal Cosmology",
January 1996, SRC (unpublished)
"Dave Winer" wrote:
> [...] Each adult would be intimate with 20 other adults.
> I think that's how we're programmed, and why looking to one person for
> intimacy leads to dissatisfaction. [...]
"[...] There's nothing inherently (see "Morality and Context", later)
wrong with having sex or even making love with other people besides your
chosen
partner. However, some people choose to do a deep and wide exploration
of one other person's spark, rather than a shallower exploration of
multiple sparks. I would not care to argue relative "depth" of
experiences between persons,
and believe that multiple sexual partners can have deep experiences of
each other. I will maintain that deep communication between two people,
over a number of years and life experiences both good and bad, is
qualitiatively
different than deep communication spread over multiple persons. There's
no value judgement inherent, simply a recognition that they are
different experiences. I believe that the former leads to a more
thorough, intimate knowledge of the other's spark than the latter. I
personally would rather have one other person illuminated to me that
way, and be that for them. " --ibid
"Jeff Bone" wrote:
> [...]
> Today, marriage is a template contract which, in essence, specifies a bunch > of liabilities and responsibilities on the part (primarily) of the man.
> [...]
Interestingly enough, Jewish marriage has had this characteristic for a
*very* long time. The ketubah (marriage document) is a legal contract
spelling out the responsibilities involved and naming a divorce fee that
is payable to the woman if a divorce occurs. A Jewish divorce is not
legal unless another contract (a "get") is given to the woman by the
man. In observant Jewish circles (in which I do not run, in general) a
woman whose husband has left her but who has not given a get is called
an "agunah" (chained woman) and she is not free to remarry or to get
involved.
The reason that the ancient rabbis insisted on the institution of the
ketubah is precisely because women were so often taken advantage of,
could not own property, etc, and were sometimes left with children whom
they would not have chosen to have if they had known they would be
caring for them alone.
> [...] is it just me, or does anyone else perceive serious legal
> imbalance in the way society treats relationships between men and women
> even outside of the context of marriage? [...]
A lot of the text after that was showing up in my buffers as "oink,
oink", I'll have to see if something triggered a M-X Load FemiNazi.el by
mistake.
I think my feelings about paternity responsibilities are best summed up
TomWhore style-- *OWN* your tadpoles, JizBoy!!!
If some hotboy didn't try hard enough to make sure that his woman wasn't
the type to hatch a baby on her own, he shouldn't have been letting his
salmon swim upstream without a raincoat. Dig it? I know it's a sad
world where we have to let little things like integrity and character
interfere with orgasm, but damn, it's a cruel world out there. If you
don't like the hand you're dealt, you can always just deal with your
hand. There's that pesky .el module again, I gotta edit my .emacs
file...
"Diva" wrote:
> [...] my theory is this: the older you get, the more able you
>are to know the right person when they come along.
I found this to be true for me, although I wasn't very clueful about
it. I had exchanged email with my husband-to-be, but we had never
spoken on the phone. Our first date turned into a 12-hour nonstop
conversation, concluded only because one of us had to shoo the other out
to get some sleep. Things didn't get physical until we had been dating
several times a week for about 6 weeks. We couldn't stop talking to
each other, and even now several years later (met in 96, married in 98)
we have to be careful not to just hang out and talk endlessly instead of
going out and doing stuff.
The clueless part was that I had felt up to that point that "love", or
at least what I had been chasing as "love" was the zingy nervous
hormone-rush feeling I got with some people. I reclassified that, for
myself at least, as some cross between attraction, lust, and
insecurity. The lightbulb going off was that during the first 2 - 3
weeks of dating Mike I was also meeting other people. Even if the other
folks gave me the "zingy" feeling, I found that I really wanted to talk
to Mike about them, as well as about anything else that I felt or that
was happening in my world. <THUNK> Clue-by-four! </THUNK> For both of
us, it was important to find someone who could be a really really close
friend first and foremost, someone to share our inner life with.
Turns out that once we got to know each other as people more, the zingy
stuff started kicking in when we were together in private. It might be
just as lame to get a full-out "Zing!" reaction from someone in public
as it might be to get a full-out "Fear!" reaction from them. It ain't
love, it's just overload! Why else would it kick off in a business,
light social, church, etc context where it isn't wanted or appropriate?
This may be a gender specific thing, the gang with the one busted X
chromosome probably has variable mileage on that from all the engagement
advice I've seen flying by recently on the list.
>I, for one, have dated a ton of losers, duds, bores and creeps and
> as a result I know a gem when I see one! [...]
Yeah, I did several rounds of "after 3 years of living together, you
should either get married or break up...right, we're breaking up
(finally!!!!)", then took a year or so off and did things differently
right from the beginning. The only reason that doesn't count as getting
divorced is because we didn't get married. In at least two of those
cases we both would have sworn up and down that we were just as
committed as if we'd gotten married, but we never shared a checkbook and
we never pruned the duplicates from our CD and book collections.
That ought to be on the mental checklist for "sure we're life partners,
we just don't believe in the bourgoise institution of marriage". Yeah,
right-- share a checkbook? Get rid of your golden master 2-CD set of
The Wall 'cause your loved one has a copy too? I didn't think
so...don't give me that crap about the efficiency of having a copy for
home and for work, you're just not sure you're gonna still be together
as long as you'll want to have the CD to listen to!
My husband said for that him the committment really showed when he gave
his microwave to charity, after moving into my apartment 6 months after
our engagement. "If you give up appliances, there's no turning back!"
:-)
"Tony Berkman" wrote:
> I think Nietzsche would argue that we are ALL interested in just our own
> happiness. For some of us that may be in helping others find
> happiness. And by 'fulfilled lif' do you mean your own notion of a
> fulfilled life and, if not, whose?
Yes. Though wasn't it Nietzsche who also wrote that:
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Love is Hell, Matt Groening
For the truly disaffected, go read (or re-read) "Why I Hate Saturn" by
Kyle Baker. Out of print for quite a while, but reissued recently with
truly dreadful new cover art (IMHO) and available in the graphic novels
(big comics) section of some mainstream bookstores.
I don't have the book here to quote from, alas. Somebody want to post
Anne and Ricky's dialog about how Ricky gets to choose if his next
girlfriend is ugly, stupid, or crazy? "Right. Why get an "A+" when you
can get an "A" without trying?"
I better quit now, I haven't read all the responses yet but this message
is already too big.
Cheers,
_Strata
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strata Rose Chalup [strata@knownow.com] | strata@virtual.net, KF6NBZ Director of Network Operations | VirtualNet Consulting KnowNow, Inc [http://www.knownow.com] | http://www.virtual.net/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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