It's entirely possible that my views will change later, but I was asked to specify, so I did. There is nothing "digging in" here, and I also think that these values were not particularly rare until recently, and I also think that values cannot be changed so easily, and if they were changed easily, then there's not much weight to your principles in the first place. I understand you've had a lot of casual sex, so the viewpoint is probably alien to you. But yes, sex is different to me. It would be convenient if it was not, and it would be convenient if I liked tattoos or fat women, too.
Edited to add: The softening of my young Earth creationist views took literal years of seeing with my own eyes that the Bible is not literally true, that bad things happen to good people for little reason, years of seeing other Christians mention that the "Inspired Word" meant that the Bible could be fallible in a multitude of places, and finally punctuated with taking some geology classes that laid out the evidence for an old Earth irrefutably. The equivalent for sex would probably be to try to get into a bunch of relationships. That is probably ultimately what I need, and it fits with other commenters' advice to just stop thinking so much and go out and do things.
oats_son
1d ago
Yeah, the distribution is probably a lot more favorable.
The sperm bank thing was a weird thing to suggest, sorry, but I don't think that it makes sense to put that type of parenthood in the same slot as "stepfather". That's a totally different thing than marrying into some kids.
oats_son
2d ago
Damage to them and to yourself. Do you think that a man who has had sex with dozens of prostitutes will truly respect sex with his wife? I don't. I think that process works on a more minor scale for every time you have sex, in a similar way that if you admit micro-evolution exists, that macro-evolution is the obvious undeniable conclusion. If you have macro-intimacy donations to many women, your micro-intimacy doesn't mean anything, and that sensation was robbed from you as if dozens of pickpockets snatched up everything you had little by little as you walked through the medieval town square.
oats_son
2d ago
I really wish I had anything at all useful to say about his or your actual problems; sorry.
No problem. The Dreadnoughts once had a blog post when the Ukraine War started that said
But the two worlds came together most clearly with Foreign Skies, a folkpunk concept album entirely focused on the insanity and tragedy of the First World War. I took my reading in history and social philosophy and tried to recreate the themes of that time by writing a diverse set of songs from the perspective of a wide variety of people; Gavrilo Princip, the Suffragettes, the German Soldier in Belgium, the executed deserter. We got a lot of questions about whether this was a “political” album; it wasn’t, unless bearing witness to horror, tragedy and evil is political. The only “message” was: this happened.
It's a striking line, and I think he wrote it in a post for Vicki's Polka too, which ended with the death of Vicki in 2020 and the family not being let in due to covid restrictions. It's striking because it's how I've viewed a lot of life. For a long time, I was immensely displeased that my life was not going how I wanted it. It's only now that I've lived this long and done so many things and talked to so many people that I finally realized: it's not the life I wanted, but it's a life. I can honestly say that I have lived a fulfilling life, and I think I'm a more interesting, more funny, more smart, more empathetic person overall than I was 10 years ago when I had all those social connections.
I was also struck by this feeling watching "In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World", featuring a woman who was basically forced into marriage with someone she did not even know. She didn't hate him, but there was a lot about her situation that she felt was un-ideal, such as her sister-in-law treating her like garbage, and her not being able to do anything except smile and close her eyes and bear it like she always did, her hair thinning from the stress she kept hidden. And then, being 1930s Japan, the world started falling apart around her for reasons entirely outside of her control. Unspeakable horrors, but unlike Grave of the Fireflies, I feel it ends on a nicer note. We do not choose our circumstances, but we choose how we look at them and how we move forward from them, and in the end, Suzu from the movie provided a very nice model for how you do that.
oats_son
2d ago
I have so many thoughts about Dad. It's been interesting to see the comments on him with such a narrow slice I've presented of him. I thought about doing a @naraburns style writeup on him, but I don't know how to make it interesting. As I've said elsewhere, he's become even more extreme since the divorce, and he's a strange mixture of empathy and complete lack of empathy in favor of brazenly demanding things of you because he's your dad and the Bible says children must respect their parents. I'm pretty sure he hasn't worked at all since the divorce, but he was very reluctant to tell me anything because he thought my mother would take him to court and that I would rat on him as soon as I found out anything. It occurs to me he's never actually bought a house. He moved into the shitty farmhouse that Grandpa already owned. Did some repair work on it and moved in. After the divorce, he moved back in with his parents. Sometime, perhaps a year later, after everyone moved everything out of it, the house burned down. Both parents blamed the other one. I suppose the house burning down also contributed to the "end of everything" vibe I was getting. It really was a shitty house though haha. The wreckage is still there, as it has not been bulldozed.
I know faith is high on this forum, and I applaud your zealotry, but it's funny, my salvation is basically the last thing I'm thinking of right now. If God doesn't understand why I think the things I think, then the game was truly stacked against me all along.
oats_son
2d ago
Even in my small town, first generation Asian immigrants are present, though not in huge numbers. However, I don't know any, and cold approaching is scary to me. I also question the assumption that Asian immigrants would be much different. I was talking to a Chinese girl on a language learning app, and she described the same dynamic I see: traditionalist upbringing that sex was special, falls for the first man that pays attention to her when she starts college, gets burned by him, but realizes that she has a high sex drive and starts to convert more to the sexual liberalism thing.
I will give you that Asians are hot, though it would make me wonder if I should use a sperm bank to make the kids all-Chinese instead of just half. That has its own benefits because I don't know if mental illness and overthinking run in my blood. Also the kids could speak Chinese and English, but Chinese writing is dumb and the kids would probably turn out illiterate. My idea was that American citizenship would be something valuable I could bring to the relationship, but plane tickets are expensive and there's so much you don't get about someone through text. It was okay practice for talking to women, though. Turns out they're not really that much different from men in terms of personality, they just have different things they're interested in, and conversation is about finding mutual interests. Also that girl is really nice. I told her so many things about myself that I thought would be weird and make her stop talking to me but she was so accepting of everything.
As an aside, "Kill Your Inner Loser" is a guide for dating apps that I have seen posted here more than once by people that presumably find it helpful. My reaction was shock. "This is what it takes to be successful on dating apps??" That guide is disgusting to me. I thought to myself I'd rather stay single forever than do that, because that guide isn't who I am and isn't even who I want to be.
oats_son
2d ago
Haha I was thinking that as I wrote it, "hmm 14/15 year old me wasn't doing his math properly"
oats_son
2d ago
So here's a thought, and again this comes from a place of curiousity. Why do you believe that sex makes you permanently uglier? Is it a byproduct of your religious upbringing? Or from something else?
I think I can't really give you a satisfying answer. Someone else here has said it before, but the human brain is not so simple that if it has been told that a primal urge is very very special for a good 15 years, it's going to be a really conflicted mess of a concept for it. If it were simple, we wouldn't get all these new sexualities and new genders and new questions from new genders about their new sexualities that we've seen in the last decade. Sex is not tennis.
Sex does not make you permanently uglier. Sex outside of the confines of marriage does. The idea that you shared something so intimate with a woman only to break up and her to take that part with her as she walks away. That you made someone worse, added extra baggage to her, added to her "bodycount" and made her less desirable to everyone else. Made her less good at pair bonding. People have committed murder many times throughout history over women, and sex with them, so I hope you don't think you can talk someone out of that. I understand you're center left, but rhetoric only goes so far.
oats_son
2d ago
I suppose it could be "both". I didn't know she liked to cut frogs open when I met her. She was "cute" in her genuineness and she was funny. Perhaps she was more outgoing because of her trauma; it sounded like both her parents and also her stepfather were terrible people. I regret getting involved with her in more ways than one, but I guess I don't feel too ashamed to publicly admit that I liked her now.
oats_son
3d ago
I really appreciate you honing in on a proper response. I know I'm not being entirely clear.
I love the idea of church. A strong community with strong values that are very family-friendly is great. But I feel something that ex-Mormons might feel, and it's that the Bible is based on some seriously flawed principles. It struggles greatly with the problem of evil, as @Hoffmeister25 has elucidated elsewhere. It struggles with the Epicurean paradox. And, if kids are raised like I was, it inflicts some suffering as they encounter and convert to sexual liberalism. The women do okay, they might have a slut phase but they can get married easily if they just lie about their bodycount. The men get fucked up. I feel very damaged, because I am expected to have a high bodycount by now, and I wasn't even true to the principles of what I was taught and I started masturbating to ease the urges. And this is all assuming that they don't just fall out of the religion altogether. I believe I could attend church and say all the right words because a kind God who would understand everything about me is deeply touching. But would my kids appreciate my lying to them? I don't really believe God would send a Son to one tiny region in the Middle-East and damn everyone else who didn't have faith. Or if they aren't damned, then what's even the point of believing in Jesus Christ? I can tell you, statistically, Christians are not helped at all by their faith, except for their community building. If goodwill and karma and a loving God existed, that girl I knew wouldn't have shot herself.
For the dating apps, look, I think I can accept a woman who isn't a virgin. That's just expected these days. But I'm worried she won't accept me. Right now, I can fall in love really quickly. Right now, I don't want to have sex unless I see a very serious chance that I will marry her, but I have no idea how I will feel if I'm deeply in love and accustomed to touching her a lot. I think that most women my age would not have much patience for me if I'm like a preteen and nervous and sweating while touching her. I don't know how many women will have it be a dealbreaker if we don't have sex within a short timeframe, or if I fail to break the touch barrier, or if I suck at kissing. I don't know if they will mind if I have dealbreakers like no blowjobs or no anal sex. I mostly think the old model of expecting marriageable women to be virgins worked really well, there were no pregnancy accidents, less STDs I'd guess, less jealousy on the part of the man, and less expectations for performance on the part of the woman. I think a huge mistake liberalism makes is saying that you need to sleep around to figure out what you prefer sexually, that every time you're with another person, you get closer to your true self. I hate that thought. I think the self is fleeting and changes even as you pursue it, and it's better to be sure about someone before making a commitment. I think sex is special and should be reserved for your life partner, and if she doesn't turn out to be your life partner, it was such a waste, and you were made permanently uglier.
I described them as weird hangups, and they are. I wanted to blame liberalism (including sexual liberalism) to the awful state of the country right now, but it's a little unfair, because Christianity led to liberalism led to people celebrating shooting each other, so they're both bad in that way. I don't know. The world is ugly, the sexual world is ugly, and my brain has been made weird.
oats_son
3d ago
I know it might sound like I'm doing poorly, but I'm actually not doing poorly. I sometimes get sad, sure, who doesn't? But avoiding thinking about sad stuff or anything heavy like fears that I will die alone and un-romanced did wonders for me up until now. The only reason I wrote any of that out was to paint a picture for everyone to give me actually good advice on what to do with myself romantically, because it will be difficult without some strategy to go for. Will liberal atheist women accept me? How can I accept them without harming myself so much? After writing it, I think it might be stupid to even think about it at all, and just try to go for many women and see who works out. If she loves me, then she will be okay with talking the sexual hangups all out with me. Or, perhaps, I will rapidly make her unattracted to me by becoming emotional. Either way, I do appreciate your request to DM. I don't actually have any more sad things to say.
oats_son
3d ago
If it matters to you, he was drunk when he did it, and probably very unhappy. I would recommend either cultivating a love for life or avoiding substance abuse when your kids are around if you wish to avoid a similar fate. I am touched by your words, though. I've always thought it was difficult to describe how he was; he wasn't directly abusive, I don't think, and he wasn't exactly neglectful, either, but he did a pretty terrible job. I could have really used a good father during my teens and early 20s. Sometimes I wished he beat me so that it would be easier to describe what exactly is wrong with me.
oats_son
3d ago
Yes, it's about romance. I don't know. I have some weird values and clearly some hangups about getting intimate with women and accepting their own sexuality. I don't know whether to try the church thing or to try some combination of dating apps and making social connections in the real world. One preserves my original values but requires some beliefs that I think don't work, and are the reason that so many people are falling out of religion. The other opens me up to dating many more people, but they have their own shortcomings, like the belief in the "true self" and the discovery of your "self" sexually. Right now, I can't do either, because I still live at home and I'm in a dying rural area. But once I get a job elsewhere, these options will open up. But @WhiningCoil is who I wanted to hear most from because it sounded like he had a similar situation to me, and he's totally correct that I am thinking too much.
oats_son
3d ago
I don't really blame you for not reading the whole thing, because it was rather long. But I already told you I kind of doubt that I could continue my career without some specific permanent thing, someone who cares about me, and then something that I will grow and leave behind (children). I believe that because I sometimes feel pangs of existential dread on my drives home like my life is going nowhere and that I don't know why I'm doing anything. I believe that because the same pangs caused me to drop out of all my classes a couple times. So, respectfully, I think your advice doesn't apply to me.
oats_son
3d ago
I have no idea if you're being serious here or not. Did you really think this was an appropriate thing to respond with? That's autism on another level. You are not the person I want to hear from.
oats_son
3d ago
I apparently have to make an extremely personal post here. I remember last time I did that, it was because I was having a big existential crisis about whether my career was going somewhere. On that front, I talked to my old software engineering professor, and he was impressed when I told him some of the stuff I'd been doing, and he advised me about how to frame my accomplishments both to myself and to employers, so I think I will be okay.
TL;DR: I am torn between liberalism and traditionalism myself and seeing too many flaws in both. I don't know what to do with myself after I move out.
I was taught from a young age that sex outside of marriage was a grave sin. My father got angry at my brother multiple times when he suspected him of going upstairs to masturbate rather than play with Bionicles, as he claimed. He once asked me and my brother both whether we had any "puppy love" for anyone, and when we sheepishly lied we didn't, he said "good." He once, at the state park, pointed to two girls, one of which I had a crush on, and said "see those girls? never marry those girls". He once showed me a news story of a 12 year old boy getting a girl pregnant and getting disowned. He put it like this: "if you're old enough to do that, you're old enough to move out and get a job". My mother took a more minor role in this, saying that childhood romance is pointless and you shouldn't even think about dating until you're 16 and own your own car. On a different note, Dad didn't like "clowns", and I had taken the Bible verse to "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt", so every time I felt compelled to make a joke or to talk about myself too much, I felt bad. That old country house had sulfurous water, so my parents decided I should bathe once a week and "smell like a kid" rather than smell like sulfur. We also lived out in the country and had almost no social connections at all, and Dad thought church was a scam, citing that the Bible's original conception of church was that neighbors would host each other on a rotating basis every Sunday. So we instead took turns reading Bible verses aloud on Sundays, though Dad would get angry if you seemed like you were bored or not paying attention, or if you were bad at reading, Dad might angrily take a lotion bottle and tell you to read the back of it using your voice in an interesting way, rather than the dry way that most people read aloud. Anyway, I didn't really have what I would call "friends" until I was 13, due to all of these things. I started taking Tae Kwon Do when I was 10, but the kids I met there weren't very familiar with me, and I never saw them outside of practice or tournaments.
A little more on my dad: he was a geophysical navigator, meaning he would be on a boat 4 weeks on and then be back at home for 4 weeks before the process repeated. I think he hated doing it. He got really interesting photos, but I think he hated leaving his home every 4 weeks. Every time he came back, it was like the world filled with color. It filled with humor and warmth and adventure and interesting ways of thinking and it filled with pain. Random pain, random things that would set him off, too many things to remember all of them. I remember once that he got obsessed with the fact that laundry detergent companies got everyone to use too much laundry detergent so they could sell more. He said he learned that you only need to use a 1/4th cup full, they tested it on the boat, your clothes are completely clean. He had been saying this for a while, and Mom seriously disagreed, telling me to always use a full cup. Well, one day he decided to have me do it and watch me. I was so conflicted between the two of them that I ended up filling it half full to split the difference and hopefully not make him mad. It didn't work, he shouted at me and stormed off to argue with my mother. This was near the end of the marriage; it had taken on a deterioration when I was about 11. He had just gotten back from Kazakhstan, and he had mostly stopped bathing or changing his clothes. Mom decided then that she would divorce him someday, but wanted to wait until we were older, because she knew the statistics on single motherhood. Towards the end, he hadn't gone back on the boat for a good 6 months and he was drinking boxed red wine and playing Lord of the Rings Online about every day. One memory I have was him getting mad that he got killed in "Monster Play" and all of a sudden cutting himself off and looking at me intently. I laughed nervously, and he uproariously laughed at my response.
But he ultimately was consumed by paranoia that my mother was cheating on him. I was so shocked at how harshly he treated her. I remember he accused her of having sex in her chair at work, and she repeated back to him "I'm having sex in my chair at work" in utter disbelief he could say something like that, and he laughed and shouted "Straight from the mouths of babes!" It might have been that same night that they were having a vicious argument like that in front of me, and I think Mom excused herself to do some chore in the bathroom or something and I went to help her and we both tried to avoid talking about it, we made up some stupid cute skit to laugh at as we worked. When we came back, Dad accused us of talking about him behind his back. I remember once he tried to get me to take his side in such an argument, and I couldn't, I said "I am impartial" in the most neutral voice I could muster. But the night of the separation was the worst. An hours-long argument with both parents trying their utmost to hurt each other. The final straw for him was when Mom brought up the "wheat germ oil" incident. The car was out of gas, and I think Dad tried to fill it up with a combination of old gas and "wheat germ oil" to make it work again, he had read that it would work, but it didn't. Dad put out some sincerity when she brought it up and said "I thought it would work..." and Mom said "Because you're a retard!" and Dad got so angry that he took her and threw her out onto the patio. I remember walking off onto the nearby gravel road to try to calm the turmoil in my mind sometime during this argument; at night, it gets so dark in the countryside, and no one is around to hear you cry. When the cops showed up, she showed them her bruise, they took statements from my mother and brother (I declined), and he was taken. To this day, he still holds a bitter grudge against my mother and will easily say quite harsh things towards her. I learned recently that he did not practice what he preached regarding sex before marriage; I have a half-sister that I didn't know about because he fucked a girl he met at church in a one-night-stand type scenario without protection, and my brother was conceived from similar out-of-wedlock sex. My mother regretted getting pregnant like that, because it seriously reduced her leverage in the relationship.
That separation happened in October of 2012 when I was 15. I had respected my father so, so much, so the pain of his separation was very sharp. It felt like my life had gone awry before it had even began. I liked video games, so I likened it to getting the "bad ending" in life, that my life had already ended, I was just seeing the epilogue. Regardless, I started to really come out of my shell when I was 16 somehow. I joined Scholastic Bowl and I made new friends, new jokes, new random mood swings. I found myself popular when I was 17 and I felt I could talk to a wide array of people by then. I chalked this up to being an upperclassman, but now, I'm not sure. Even though I finally started masturbating at age 16, I found that sexually forward women made me uncomfortable and embarrassed. I had to be coaxed into the slow dance circle at the school dance because even touching a woman's shoulders made me very nervous. The virgin valedictorian was hopelessly obsessed with me to the point that I felt bad for her, but I had no idea how to talk to her alone in the first place, and I was also disgusted when I learned even she had given a blowjob once. There were other reasons, besides; I felt like I would just end up hurting anyone who loved me, and I also had extremely low self-confidence somehow. I had no job, I had no car except my brother's which I would borrow, I had no muscle, I had no idea why women would be attracted to me. The second semester of my senior year was marked with a lot of random flip-outs on my part. It felt even more like my life was ending. All my social connections would be severed, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. Graduating was surreal.
At 16, with much guilt, I started talking to a girl 4 years my younger that I met on the bus. She was 13 and I was 17 when I started to notice that I really wanted to be around her. In a very short talking stage with a girl I was talking to online last week, she said I was like a primary school kid in terms of my affections, which was very enlightening to me. A therapist had told me I liked the 13 year old because she was likely traumatized and had been made more mature before her age, but now I think it's probably the other way around; I was very immature, and still am. Once, I met her in the park after graduating, and she touched my chest as a joke, then felt awkward and expressed regret; I felt guilty enough for this age-gap touch that I eventually saw some classmates close to my age and I walked off to talk to them without even saying goodbye. After graduating, I kept talking to her through Facebook. Somehow, the conversation turned dark eventually. I told her I had heard she liked to kick frogs from someone else, and she said she did, because she hated them, and not only that, she liked to cut them open while they were still alive, and watch as their organs throbbed until expiration, because it made her feel alive in a visceral way. I tried to get her to disavow this, but she didn't, and she could tell that I was very disturbed, and expressed some sadness that her honesty with me had driven me away, and that she should be less honest in the future, because honesty hurts her. I told her she was wrong, that honesty is always good, but in truth, it had indeed hurt her; I stopped talking to her the next day. It was near the Christmas reunion, and I had so much turmoil in my mind and was so randomly irritable that I spent most of it upstairs reading. In a reading rage, I finished Crime and Punishment in the course of a couple days.
The first semester of college went well; I had missed the fall semester due to my indecision and due to flirtation with enlisting that went nowhere because my father disliked the idea enough to sabotage it. I got A's in everything, even hard stuff like chemistry and Calculus 1. But I failed to make any friends, something that would carry over into the second semester, when I started taking my first Engineering classes. I started to feel some lack of motivation somehow, and I started to perform less well. This feeling got worse after I checked the social media of the girl I had loved: she had shot herself. On the last day of her life, she was silent until the latter half, getting more and more excited, saying "today's the day" without specifying what she meant. It was a week before her 16th birthday. I found out she had been in a sexual relationship with a man in his 30s, a man working construction on her house, a friend of her stepfather, a man who had previously been convicted of sexual abuse of a different girl under the age of 15 and was on parole. After her death, he was convicted again and sentenced to 77 years. I remember feeling awkward at the funeral because I think some people didn't even know why I was there, but her family was appreciative. I was so surprised at how well her brother had taken it; I apologized to him, and he said "she's in a better place now." Her grandmother had heard of me and thanked me having been her friend and for coming to the funeral, and I said she was welcome and threw in an "I'm sorry", and I could feel the words cut her as she walked away.
I heroically finished my work that semester and got A's and B's, but everything felt pointless. I couldn't believe that the world still spun around after that. Bad ending, indeed. The semester after that, January of 2017, I did horribly in every class. I dropped almost everything except for a natural sciences class and one engineering course and I developed an unhealthy obsession with the speech professor, emailing her too much. One day I had a particularly nasty breakdown and asked her why I shouldn't kill myself, after some test cuts to my wrists and neck, and I was introduced to campus police in my dorm, who took my knife. In response, I went and bought a new knife. One week, I had been having a bad week; I had such stress from finals about to happen, and I had barely been sleeping, and I had had an embarrassment in front of everyone in the science class, and I forgot to mention I had no roommate during this time so I had no one to put a strong face in front of, and I had frustratedly emailed the speech professor again and got a reply back that I had broken her boundaries and made her uncomfortable and she would never reply to any of my emails again. I felt physically sick and dizzy reading it, and I began to saw myself with the knife in earnest in a rage that lasted for probably an hour or so before the cuts were deep enough that they had a sort of aching pain to them. I browsed social media for a while, then thought to call my therapist. I wanted to see her, and she told me I couldn't, because we had no appointment and she was busy. I told her I had cut myself, and she then flatly told me to come in. It was a funny feeling walking outside. It was such a nice day out. The sun was bright, the birds were singing, and the temperature was perfect. I walked into her office and she said "let's see those cuts!" cheerfully. Her face quickly turned to horror seeing the deep pulsating wound in my left wrist. I was put into a chair and some EMS people looked at me; they found I had missed the vein entirely. I had cut vertically, too, so no tendons were cut. I was making some small dark jokes now and again up until I learned that I had to be taken to the hospital instead of just being stitched up and released, to which I finally said "goddamn it." which my therapist laughed at, oddly enough. I had to be wheeled out, but I was so ashamed that I asked if my face could be covered. They obliged, giving me a shirt or a towel or something. The EMS worker in the back of the ambulance was some 40 year old woman or something and, just like the others, was weirdly urgent in wondering if it was a serrated knife or a regular one. She was saddened at what I had done. She tried to tell me everything would get better, that her life had gotten much better and she really enjoyed her life at 40, that I would find similar fulfillment. I cynically told her that 40 was actually the age at which most men killed themselves. She frowned and said "you're killing me!" When she dropped me off at the hospital, she took one last deliberate look at me before walking off. I wonder what she was thinking.
It was in the hospital and the psych ward and the weeks afterwards that I found the reason to exist. The reason is the deep abiding suffering that I inflicted in both of my parents with my attempt. Mom said she was angry when she was driving up to visit me, but upon seeing me, she couldn't help but cry a little, and tried very hard to put on her most affable affect, and she brought me a Mark Twain book and visited me every day. It was only afterwards, witnessing her listlessness and a few flip-outs of her own at my various depressed cruelties, that I realized how much she suffered. Dad did not visit me; he called, and commented harshly that I tried to die without God's permission, and I got mad at him and called him some swear word or other and was outraged that he could call me and say that at a time like this, and he remarked that he had succeeded in his mission of getting me to feel an emotion other than sadness, and I told him that that the illness was actually two emotions, sadness and anger, and he started to cry and asked why I did it. In the psych ward, he kept calling me. He first tried to convince me that the girl was in heaven, but somehow I conveyed to him that I actually didn't even do it because of the girl. I had come to terms with her death by then and informed him that it wasn't my fault, and I stopped talking to her because she kicked frogs, and that was a perfectly natural thing for me to do. This, I think, confused him, because the next day, he called again, wondering if I did it because he wasn't helping me to pay for college. We then got into a bitter argument, me right there in the psych ward battling his stupid justifications. He said "the father usually doesn't even pay for half! he only pays for a third! the SON is the third party involved, and he makes it go three ways!" and I furiously said "then why won't you pay even for a third?!" a little bit louder than my inside voice. I think his justification was that he never agreed for me to go to a private university like I did, but it didn't really matter. The psych ward is a story for another time. I got incompletes for my finals, and went back to finish them later that summer. The natural science professor probably knew what happened to me, but didn't speak of it; he was just friendly to me in a casual way. I saw him in the gym locker room once, the following semester, and he was happy to see me, greeting me, laughing.
I switched majors to computer science, and things started going well again for me in my classes. I found a group of people in the 2nd floor (the Honors floor) lounge that liked to play video games; they would just take in their laptops and play. Usually one of them would hook into HDMI and play, and people would watch him. I really liked this relaxed environment, it was liberating in some ways because you could make so many jokes in such a casual place, with people coming and going whenever they pleased. It was also restricting, because they were almost all game dev majors, and I couldn't talk about shared professors with them, and they were all liberal and didn't have a very broad range of things they liked to talk about. They liked D&D, which I never really saw the appeal of. After 2020, many of them experimented with their gender. Two of them went nonbinary and changed nothing else, one of them went from gay to aromantic asexual, two of them went properly MtF and changed their names to weird ones, and one of those MtF ones went even further and developed into an endogenic system and brought PluralKit onto the Discord server. He played around with it once and then never again.
I will just take an intermission here to speak of LISA: The Painful RPG. It felt like looking in a mirror. Brad Armstrong was a picture of me: bald, bearded, background in martial arts and toxic family dynamics, losing someone he cared about to suicide, a lack of willingness to be intimate, a storm of emotions going on within him that he evidently never let anyone know, and a painful march to the end without even knowing why he was doing it. The humor in the game and the cruel hopelessness of the situation reflected what went on in my heart. I felt empty on finishing it.
For my part, I went strong for a couple semesters; in the third semester, I once again lost all motivation and dropped everything, only this time, I had very little suicidal ideation, just despair. Once again, it felt like the world was ending around me, except this time, it wasn't even due to personal circumstances; Covid had come and closed the university around me, though my downward spiral had started before that. I made at least one professor sad that semester; it was a stern looking yet funny East Asian woman, I think from China or Taiwan, teaching Assembly Language or whatever the low-level computer code language class is called. I think she emailed me for my lack of attendance. I emailed her back telling her I was going to drop it because there was no point in my coming in anymore, she expressed sympathy and told me that I was actually doing better than most in the class. She wasn't the only one. I loved the compassion of many of the professors, including the religions professor and the old calculus professor and the high-effort-paper professor, though half the time, I rejected their allowances for my illness because I felt it would be even worse if I accepted their kindness and then still failed. But the college was finally unamused by my dropping classes this second time. I wasn't making enough progress, they said, and they cut off my financial aid. It was already breaking my mother's finances even before that, so that was the end of my time at that college.
After moving back home, things actually started going a lot better for me. I got a part-time job at the gas station near me. It was fun. Having money for the first time was nice. I spent one off semester just working there. I realized that covid wasn't going to blow over after that, so I bought my first car and resumed my studies, this time at a local state university, a 20 minute commute, no meal plan, no dorms. It was actually fun this time, I'm not sure why. It was nice cooking for myself at home, I had started talking to people I really liked on Discord, and my mother provided some actual warmth in my life. Even though I didn't have any real social connections at college, I had a lot of fun. The professors liked me and I still talk to them sometimes. I was also excited to get a job in my field just a few months out of college in 2023, even despite the state of the industry. I've almost completely paid off my debt by now, and Mom's finances are not at the breaking point anymore, and I bought a newer car this year, not even needing a loan. Coupled with my professor saying I have real job prospects and this wasn't just a dead-end job I'm working, I'm actually pretty excited for the future these days.
However, the romance is something I'm probably going to have a tough time with, and I dread it. I've lost my faith, but yet, I don't belong to either the atheist liberals or the religious conservatives entirely. I think Christianity is deeply flawed in many ways, but I think the way liberalism handles relationships is very ugly. I don't want to give an intimate piece of myself to a woman who I'm not sure I will marry by having sex with her. If we break up, I will have been made permanently uglier in a way that I haven't been up to now, and it won't feel special with the next woman. At the same time, the old belief system I had was flawed; Dad never did what I'm doing now, he was apparently a rampantly sexual creature before marriage. But I think the liberal belief system is ugly, itself. It brought this country to what it is today. All of these thoughts, and then I realize I'm probably overthinking this, and I will have to take anyone who accepts me, because I have too many flaws to be too choosy. Perhaps I should just get into a relationship with someone who I have connections with and see what happens. I know one thing: I actually do need a relationship, regardless of my misgivings of hurting my partner. I predict that if I move out and don't start a relationship, I will quickly wither and crash out of my job, lacking any warmth in my life. Regardless, I need to start before my parents die, or my life will either end with a quick romp through alcoholism and a gunshot, or something similar to Brad Armstrong, a purposeless journey more brutal and agonizing without any end in sight.
Basically, I need advice from smart people. I don't know what to even ask, so I will just end this cutely to hopefully create some juxtaposition within you. Reddit, DAE lack any intimacy and fear the unknown? AITA? Thanks for the AAQC, kind sir! (Please don't AAQC this, I don't want people to see it.)
oats_son
3d ago
I am touched by your looking forward to me posting. I will post, but it's going to take a while, because it will have to be long and extremely personal.
oats_son
3d ago
I know it isn't, but I have to be honest, I was raised in that kind of faith environment for 15 years. If a church shifts their stance on things because they feel they had to, that's going to feel like a softening to make way for what we've learned about the world in the 2000 years since the New Testament rather than the Divine Word being something for everyone eternally. In short, I am just as confused spiritually as I am sexually. I guess I really do have to make a Wellness Wednesday post, because I bet most therapists wouldn't even understand the question.
oats_son
3d ago
The more I think about this, the more extremely conflicted and broken I feel about everything. I was taught to not have sex before marriage, and so even the thought of a blowjob is gross to me, but I was never raised in the church and my family existed almost outside of the community entirely, and then I went and got my liberal education and lost my faith, because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place. When I was 16 I started masturbating and dabbled in watching pornography. I feel like either traditional relationships or liberal ones, I would be very out of place in, and it feels like it's already too late for me. I am also disgusted by the results of liberalism leading to the death of Charlie Kirk. I might have to make a new post tomorrow in Wellness Wednesday about this, but it's obviously going to be super personal and uncomfortable. I now remember one reason why I never dated in high school.
oats_son
4d ago
I appreciate your advice, I just have to comment on the sexual compatibility thing. Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility? The modern world is kind of fucked up. I was surprised to learn in high school that even the preppy valedictorian had sucked at least one dick, and this is in a rural area. I'm pretty sure she was religious, too.
I'm not religious anymore, but I see the good effects it has, and I also believe that you can probably make yourself believe anything if you give it a try, forgetting about Epicurian trilemmas or God of the gaps writings (as long as we're not into fantasy territory like with Young Earth Creationism). I was raised fundamentalist and the only times I went to church was when I was with other family members, which was like, twice total in my youth, so I would have to adjust to whatever church she went to.
Uh, what are the churches with actual young people?
oats_son
4d ago
Yes, you've put to words a lot of concerns I had here. Hitting up people at a farmer's market is not my idea of a good time, and probably not very likely to make anything happen. Who even goes to those kinds of things alone? That's just not how it works. I'm not looking for any casual fun here, I want something serious that ideally turns to marriage, because I'm 28 and not getting any younger. Actually, it would be better if we didn't have sex at all until we were engaged at least, but is there even any place for my sensibilities in today's sexual marketplace? I thought "getting a life" would be my best chances of keeping these values, because I doubt most women on a dating app would be understanding, even if I did get good photos somewhere and they overlooked my Norwood 7. Also yes, I had good friends in high school, but until I started doing sports, I didn't really see them much after school, and even then, I never did anything with them outside of those things.
oats_son
4d ago
Haha I like how you've written this. This is good advice. Yes, my question was more about creating a social circle. I haven't had one that isn't digital in a long time. The digital ones go pretty well! People think I'm funny and I have a pretty good amount of social capital, and I've really gotten a lot more confident about talking to random people about whatever the hell I want to talk about or what I think they'd be interested in. But they're all men and they're all around the country and they can't help me. Same for my family. I also live in a rural area that hemorrhages successful young people, and my brother is a loser too, and my mom isn't in any social circles that have any young single women, and my dad's crazy and far away and a loser too, and my grandma is only friends with other old women.
I went on some language learning apps to try to get some practice talking to actual women, and it seems many of the conversational skills transfer over, but there's still a lot I don't know, and there's so much that isn't conveyed that it would be pretty difficult to meet someone and marry them that way. I thought it would be easy, but women apparently don't think coldly about the benefits of American citizenship like a man would, and international college-educated women with interest in languages are similar to American college educated women, in that they don't even know what they want, and marriage isn't even on the radar until later in their lives.
I appreciate your words, and everyone else's, too. I think a lot of wisdom has been shared here that has been helpful to me and made me not regret posting what I did.
However, I have to reply to you to tell you I disagree that you shouldn't put weight on others to give you a reason to live. Humans are social animals, so it makes a ton of sense to me to tell someone that they must live for others. It helps build community, it's a very obvious and plainly true statement to say that your own death will hurt those around you and if you care about them at all, you must never purposely die. And I also take the stance that you should use whatever works to achieve your goals; for me, it's to avoid the Bad Ending. There are many Bad Endings to get, many failure paths, many ways to make people shake their heads at what happened to you. Pity is not an emotion I want to evoke in people, but I understand that there's some amount of pity that people feel for me already that is unavoidable.
I do agree with you if I modify your statement a little: "you can't put the weight on a small amount of others to give you a reason to live". To directly place my fate on one or two people is pretty cruel and creates intense pressure on them to never hurt me in any way, which I think is toxic. That's why I think involving yourself in a community with many people you care about is important. The cost is distributed, and you make many more people happy to be friends with you, and it's a greater motivation to be the best version of yourself so that you hurt people as little as possible.
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