Hi,
I saw your post on the IQ test. Have you find any tests in portuguese?

I mean, you see friendship as more important than romance, and that's cool, but you have to recognize that some people don't. And even if they do, many people can't easily flip-flop from romance into friendship without being unfulfilled and dishonest with themselves and their new "friend".

It's not the fact that it's a friendship, and I'm not saying friendship can't be awesome. Obviously I've had many friends for a hell of a lot longer than any relationship. But if I saw that my prolonged investment with a friend was leaving them with unfulfilled love, I'd end it because I know how that feels. You've said you're turned off by romance, so I can't believe you have any idea what prolonged unfulfilled love dangling in front of you feels like. It takes compassion and empathy to recognize that. I know the saying goes "Love is like a fart: if you have to force it, it's probably shit." and the same is true with friendship. if you're forcing it, it's not real friendship. At least not in the awesome mutually beneficial way you see it.

I mean that someone who is truly friends has compassion for their friend. If they know about and see their friend with their unfulfilled love and attraction, it's negligent to prolong that. I know many people think that cutting ties would be hurtful and they like the person and don't want to cause them pain, but in reality, prolonging that unfulfilled desire with no actual hope is way more painful. A mature and compassionate person would see that.

Ok, so we agree then

I don't think I was talking about "leading him on". I think that's something completely different than what I was talking about. I'm talking more about knowing how he feels and being negligent to that fact.

Haha, I was being sarcastic about it, but I'm sure there's some truth in it.

Hey, I responded to this...just wanted you to know I'm being a smart ass. Sometimes people can't tell.

Shifting to PM land.

With regard to abusive relationships: The key question is not whether you should leave to protect yourself. The question is how the patterns of their interaction evolve over time so that there comes to be abuse, where there was love.

Without resolving the core issues, an individual getting away doesn't change that more such problems are occurring elsewhere. Without understanding the flaws in your own habits, you might also make the problem recur in the next relationship. I know a decent number of people who act in ways that guarantee that people will treat them badly.

... Although many of these headaches might simply not apply to you.

And please explain further what broken marriages have to do with the second part of my post, I didn't catch the link T.T Even so, the "old" structure damages the freedom of the individual. Not to mention unhealthy and unbalanced marriages are sure way less damaging to the children than divorces, am I right? You are basically saying, "think of the children!11!!" but I'm sure the freedom to choose how to live their adults lives is a good thing. And that includes the choice of leaving an unhealthy marriage.

Social structures and different conflict resolution attitudes and skills, change your ability to be happy. The individual oriented towards their own freedom, rarely achieves happiness even for himself if the society around him is not working in a stable fashion... Plus they are more disruptive and often increase unhappiness for others also.

Too much focus on individual freedom makes a person parasitic as opposed to symbiotic. If you're willing to work things out, they often can be. If you have an orientation to work towards mutual benefit, that is different still.

Making society work better so that everyone is better off, is a different orientation than letting people choose whatever. What we think, feel, and want are not truths of who we are. They are more learned things based on local adaptation and extrapolation from what is believed to be correct (and people are not trained to verify the validity of the systems they are constructing, when they are given too much freedom - as ideas go farther from reality, they start losing validity)
(Keeping yourself from going defective is no minor accomplishment )

... I don't think I'm explaining any of this well. What I say is based on my own knowledge and also my own biases. Trying to determine a definite form of right and wrong, is not a simple thing to try. Even what right might be, is somewhat questionable (which is part of the reason for the individual orientation now since people started to try to think more for themselves)

My view is more a reverse engineering of the concepts underlying ideas of good, and re-extrapolation from there. And IMO, good is defined by what makes society work better and through that makes people's lives better.

You see, its much easier to conform to rules when everyone is doing it - then you don't feel like you're being cheated. Like this whole right to work thing... most people work because they have to. Its not glorious. Its almost more ridiculous to think that you should want to work instead of being taken care of since that's an obviously preferable state (kinda like being rich)

Also, even now, the basic principle of being happy is lowering expectations. Most of your unhappiness comes from your imagination, and the world you experience, being too out of sync (and from picking up habits that make it hard to advance in life). Problems like that happened less easily in the old world. Even smaller towns often have a closer community feel where people treat each other better and you can trust each other more.

Happiness is a function of emotional state (of how your mind and body feel) when you think things are going well, not of what you have or can theoretically do. Its an internal thing.
(If we stay on this topic too long, we're going to go into the whole issue of me not thinking that happiness is a particularly valuable indicator of anything, and that its a primitive thing to want)

As for the kids. I agree with you, although the human race isn't exactly designed in terms of human laws. Like for example... lets assume a traumatic event happened to you that badly affected your life. Lets assume you lost your memories. Are you still unhappy because of that event? Its just a matter of perception and your mind deciding that it should be upset... Raised differently, your mind might decide to not be upset. This in turn, becomes a matter of cultures and how we are raised having a decent impact on how experiences in life affect us. (like a rich kid with a major sense of entitlement might be upset at losing something minor that a poor kid might not even notice losing or not having)

I was talking to catzmeow about dealing with abuse victims lately since she works with them. As far as I understand the basis of the currently prescribed approach to it; it boils down to messing up the memory, changing its internal representation so it isn't so bad, and changing the things that it has become linked to, so your mind isn't going into negative states.
So say, with the right guidance, even if something bad happened to you, you could get away with almost no negative effects.
... and that goes back to the earlier point - there are many things that go into turning an experience into a psychological disaster. And well-intentioned family that don't know how to correctly handle things, are often a part of what messes you up and makes sure that you stay damaged.

Summary: Perception is complicated, emotional guidance of people is complicated, and what normally evokes emotions and helps manage your emotional state and life is also... complicated

I don't know where the fuck any of these people are getting any of this bullshit from.

The past sucked balls? There was less technology. People in general worked together better (because they had to learn to), and the lifestyles themselves were better attuned to being human - and thus happier. (Its like how if you exercise a decent amount a day, your quality of life will improve and you'll get endorphin release from that... so the hard work isn't necessarily hurting you)

Does pedophilia sound like a defective concept? It does to me. I have the impression that even farther in the past old people didn't go for really young people... at least not those who hadn't even hit puberty.
I've never fully thought about pedophilia before. It occurs to me however that assuming that they aren't trying to have sex, some kind of sensual touching ... *brain rejected the line of thought*

As for harm done. Again, abuse is different from behavior that may not even be making someone uncomfortable. And people's beliefs and how they are treated change the actual impact of what happens.

... Like your objection to slut shaming. A woman might feel very embarrassed at her actions and feel badly for quite a while afterwards for what she has done. Or she could've been raised to think differently and had people react differently... and the experience might make her feel better about herself.

Or say you're going to have sex with a person. If you were to go in expecting it to be exciting and really open to it, and planning to do your best to enjoy it; that would be a better experience than if you were untrusting or unhappy that day or tired... Its still with the same person, the different element is you and your own feelings and expectations, that are creating a serious positive or negative bias in how the experience will impact you.

But what is right, didn't necessarily change because we randomly changed things (although, right really is more about what works in a society, so it kinda does. Absolute right doesn't change ).

I think its just a random evolution of parents determining who their kids would marry at 10. To parents still retaining that right till the kid was 18. To parents not really making those decisions anymore. To some idiot deciding that parents couldn't make that decision at all (although parents of a fifteen year old or less possibly can still give consent to marriage, if not the right to have sex)

... and all of this random idealistic change in the last hundred years or so... Otherwise, you have basic facts like Juliet in Romeo and Juliet being a 13 year old.

When families live close together and support each other. Younger marriages are much more viable than when a kid is expected to be independent before marrying - especially when nowadays you can't get a job easily at an earlier age without education and have laws to stop you from doing much even if you wanted to (So basically we are forcing people to be children)

As for psychological harm. With us being social creatures, a lot of that is less a natural consequence of what happened, and more a consequence of how we were treated and how people expected us to behave.

There are some Danish studies where children who grew up without being found out or treated like something horrible had happened, grew up to still have positive relationships with the adults they had (non-abusive?) sexual contact with as children. There may be some bias to the studies since I think the Danes even have a political party fighting for the rights of pedophiles () ... but I think that an absence of mishandling of the situation by parents and other people, might be part of why there was no obvious harm.

Being scarred is often more a factor of what you were raised to believe, and how you were treated by other people after the fact. Normal humans, raised in a time when child mortality was high and average life expectancy was around thirty... couldn't possibly have beliefs and reactions from other people, like ours.

I tend to think of broken marriages as (apart from people lacking a sense of responsibility), people just not being mature or having the skills or attitude to resolve issues, so that they keep getting worse. You really should be able to resolve most issues if you try to. A child does not make for a good role model for their own child (even apart from what other needs might be left unfulfilled).

I find it slightly odd that people have learned to throw away their responsibilities and are passing that teaching along to other people.

This seemed kinda suitable in the overall context of the situation.

I can actually tell that you're a decent person. But you're INTJ. You actually remind me of a cousin of mine.

Its more that being rejected or abandoned by people you care a lot about, causes harm. Not to mention that lack of healthy (or at least functional) relationship examples, reduces people's inclination towards such.

... and yes, there is more than one route to becoming a certain type of person. But some things still aren't good for you. There are other issues active too, like change in overall philosophy towards greater individualism. Trying to minimize obvious pain and legislate it away

My gut says you're a decently good person. I was just giving an example of crazy. I think how detached a person is however, is a function of how much they feel they've been hurt or betrayed. That's one of the areas where I find broken marriages dangerous for children (and the general immaturity and inability to resolve issues that usually results in them). You can't have too many people running around who've been hurt and have thrown their walls up and become too self-centered. Healing them isn't easy, and not healing them often makes them an emotional danger to other people (that and I don't like working too hard to be friends with people or win their trust )