A Broken Model of The World
The American visa rejection was delivered with the bureaucratic indifference characteristic of empire in its senescent phase. No California, no Texas, no opportunity to temporarily escape to the land of my dreams and do Rationalist Things. Instead: India. The eternal return. Air conditioning as opposed to indoor heating, and dogs who hadn't yet learned that unconditional love is a dangerous thing. I didn't intend to disabuse them.
But of course, and here's where the reptilian cortex asserts its dominion over whatever higher functions medical school was supposed to cultivate, there were women. Specifically, women who might conceivably miss me, which is to say women whose neural architecture had been sufficiently damaged by prior exposure to my personality that they'd developed something like Stockholm syndrome, except with worse texting habits. I didn't have the time to cultivate new relationships, nor was I prepared to go through the rigmarole of setting up a dating profile to local tastes. Old flames could be fanned out from the embers instead.
Near the top of this list, glowing with the phosphorescent intensity of a bad decision that knows it's bad and has made peace with this knowledge: Her. The Model. You know the one. Hot as hell, but her head is held aloft by a mixture of helium and bad decisions.
I'd dated her very briefly before fleeing to residency, that period of psychiatry training designed to teach you about antidepressants and then teach you more about which ones you've come to need (all of them). She presented, in the phenomenological sense that Heidegger might have recognized had he spent less time with Nazis and more time on dating apps*, as the eternal feminine victim: doe-eyed, helpless, perpetually buffeted by the cruel winds of toxic masculinity, which is to say every man she'd ever met, perhaps excluding me.
She'd been reaching out at semi-random intervals during my Scottish exile, something my brain's tired pattern-recognition systems had correlated with relationship turbulence, usually accompanied by marriage proposals that made me feel simultaneously desirable and like I was being offered a role in a particularly depressing regional theater production. Very ego-syntonic, as we say in the trade, which is professional code for "it made me feel good in ways I'm not too ashamed to admit."
Then: radio silence. Months of it. I'd interpreted this through my characteristically solipsistic lens as evidence that she'd found stability, or at least a nice man in the neighborhood, which turned out to be partially correct in the way that a broken clock is correct twice daily, accurate in its specifics while missing the larger horror entirely.
She had technically just reached out. Just a few days before I was due to fly in. Just a perfunctory "hey" on Insta, which I had genuinely not seen for days because, well, psychiatry doesn't make for very exciting day-in-the-life posts. At least not without trouble with the GMC.
I'd landed back in India and reached out. Nothing. I began contemplating that I was being ghosted, or that I'd outlived my usefulness to her. Maybe she had found a nice Punjabi boy to grow fat with. My daydreams were each more psychologically sophisticated than the last, which is what you do when you've spent too much time learning about defense mechanisms instead of developing functional ones.
The truth was stupider: she didn't check her DMs. She'd always been a bit shite about that. Well, self_made_human, that's the pot calling the kettle black. The solution, obvious in retrospect, required abandoning digital mediation for its older, more aggressive cousin: I called her.
Two rings. Then:
"Oh my god! You're back?"
The voice hit me like a familiar drug: breathless, pitched at a frequency that triggered some deep mammalian subroutine, laced with an enthusiasm that I knew was performed but which worked anyway because evolution has programmed male brains to be very, very stupid about certain audio frequencies. It was the auditory equivalent of those supernormal stimuli ethologists use to make birds try to mate with volleyball-sized eggs.
"I am," I said, attempting to maintain the facade of being a person with boundaries. "I thought you were ignoring me."
"No! Never! I just don't check my phone, I swear." A statement that would have been disqualifying if I were capable of learning from experience. Women and their phones are inseparable at the hip. "I missed you so much. We have to meet. Tonight? Please say tonight. I need to vent."
Reader, I am a man of medicine, of science, someone who has spent years training to make rational decisions based on evidence. I am also a man who hears a pretty woman say she needs him and immediately becomes a golden retriever who's been told there might be treats. I tell myself I'm only going out of a curdling combination of curiosity and boredom, but my tail wags nonetheless.
(The charitable explanation is that I have a genuine drive to be helpful and derive satisfaction from being nice to people. Less charitably, I crave mild amounts of drama in my life, preferably when I'm out of the immediate blast zone. The truth can be found with a Monte Carlo simulation, namely throwing darts at me.)
I arrived at her workplace, a boutique where she moonlights in sales, effectively selling insecurity to women and delusion to their husbands. Local traffic made me late, which meant I missed seeing her in her element, which was probably for the best. Some illusions should be preserved.
She drove. I rode shotgun. She was competent behind the wheel, which I noted with the mixture of surprise and guilt characteristic of men who've internalized certain stereotypes while remaining theoretically opposed to them. The other drivers, less conflicted, shouted helpful commentary about her driving that had nothing to do with driving and everything to do with living in a society that's still working through some issues around women operating heavy machinery.
It's an interesting dichotomy. Male drivers face less verbal abuse, mostly because they're a physical threat. Female drivers bring out the peanut gallery, but they're not really at much risk of having someone lay hands on them in such a public setting. But I digress:
She needed to park. I needed something to do with my hands. I bought her a soft toy from an overpriced Japanese store, that particular species of useless consumer object that somehow carries totemic significance, a material manifestation of affect that short-circuits rational gift-giving in favor of pure aesthetic stimulus. Women are suckers for these, which is a sexist observation that's nonetheless empirically correct, which is why sexism persists: it works.
After an interval calibrated to maximize anxiety without quite tipping into actual worry, she returned. She loved the gift. Then she began talking, and I realized I'd made a terrible mistake, which is to say exactly the mistake I'd intended to make.
The story was long. She'd warned me it would be long. She wasn't lying, which may have been the only thing she wasn't lying about. Or perhaps she's excessively honest with me, I seem to be a safe space, a person she can unload all her cares on without much concern. The lies were for the rest. Regardless, I took my glasses off and buried my face in my hands so many times I lost count, performing exasperation for an audience of one while that audience performed innocence for an audience of me.
The situation had evolved. The roster of suitors had expanded.
There was the Poor Nice Guy (who lives with his parents and won't move out, who I'd previously dissected with the detached interest of an entomologist pinning butterflies to cardboard). There was the Toxic Ex (who cheats), but as far as I could tell, was now out of the picture. And now, there was the Rich Guy. He's new.
The Rich Guy. Precisely as advertised. Distantly related (third cousin maybe?) far enough to avoid the genetic problems, close enough to carry social weight. He'd proposed marriage multiple times. He sounded, even to my determinedly cynical ear, like a reasonable choice. But she couldn't commit.
The reasons were familiar: he lived with his parents, lived below his means. But also (and here's where it got good) he had dogs, and her OCD couldn't handle them.
I couldn't relate. Shortly after I had landed in the country, my puppy had just destroyed my best shoes and my comfortable slippers, and my response had been mild scolding undermined by my complete inability to maintain anger at something with floppy ears. But I'm not the protagonist of this story. She is. Or maybe the dogs are.
She has OCD. She hates the dogs. She claims it's hygiene, but we know the diagnosis: Narcissism cannot tolerate a rival for attention, even if that rival licks its own ass.
I feel like an ass just saying that, I'm not The Last Psychiatrist, even if I'm more cynical than a certain Buddhist-Sufi-Lite Namebrand alternative. Don't listen to me, she does actually have OCD. Sees an actual shrink for it, not that that lady sounds like she's competent.
"He said he'd give them away," she says, pulling back to look at me with those wide, imploring eyes. "He said he'd get rid of them for me."
Pause.
This man is willing to exile two living creatures that love him unconditionally, loyal beasts that rely on him for their survival, just to secure access to her. But he won't move out of his parents' house. He is willing to sacrifice the innocent (the dogs) but unwilling to sacrifice his safety net (Mommy and Daddy). It might also have been filial piety, who knows. I had complained that Poor Guy had a stick up his ass, whereas this gentleman could use such a prosthetic as a spine.
"So let him give them away," I say.
"No," she pouts. "I can't make him do it. Then his parents will hate me. Then he'll resent me."
Then came the bombshells, delivered with the casualness of someone ordering coffee. One, she was still seeing Poor Guy. Two, she wanted me to commit fraud.
She'd convinced herself that the solution was a forged medical document stating she was deathly allergic to dogs. She'd already tried this gambit with Rich Guy, but he'd pointed out (with admirable attention to empirical reality) that she'd played with his dogs before without issue. Now she wanted me, as a doctor, to make it official.
"Write me a note," she says. "Say I have a severe allergy. If it's medical, he has to get rid of them, and it's not my fault. It's doctor's orders."
She wants the result (no dogs) without the cost (guilt). She wants to outsource the moral culpability to me.
I have many moral failings. They are numerous and well-documented. But I enjoy having an unblemished record and no medical board investigations, so I declined, explaining this in terms I hoped were clear even to someone whose relationship to truth was essentially fictional.
She escalated. She offered sex.
"Come on," she says, pressing against me. "I'll make it worth your while."
Let me pause here to note the cosmically insulting nature of this offer. Sex as payment for fraud. Sex as the universal solvent for moral reasoning. Sex offered with the bland confidence of someone who's learned that it usually works, which is the most damning indictment of men as a category that I can conceive.
Been there, done that, I told her. Which was true. Which made me complicit. Which made this whole scene a kind of recursive nightmare where everyone's crimes implicated everyone else's.
She changed tactics: Would I help her decide between Rich Guy and Poor Guy?
Finally, a question I could answer. My reply was nigh instant, the answer was obvious.
"Go for Rich Guy," I said. "He's sensible. It's better to be with someone who loves you, than someone you love (if you can't have both). And I know you. You couldn't adjust to a lower standard of living if your life depended on it."
She blinked. "But won't Poor Guy become rich when he marries me? He could take over what my dad built!"
I sighed the sigh of a man who's realized he's explaining addition to someone who's still working on number permanence. "That's your own money, returned to you. If you marry into wealth, you have twice the money. Use that pretty head. Think."
Her face scrunched up in an adorable display of revelation. She told me that she'd never considered this. Twice the money sounded good. Almost twice as good, accounting for diminishing marginal utility. The fact that she was treating marriage as a financial instrument while simultaneously maintaining that she wanted true love, this contradiction didn't seem to register. Cognitive dissonance requires cognition.
But wait: Poor Guy worked in her dad's field. Rich Guy was adjacent: leather tanning, not textiles. Who'd run the family business?
I suggested that maybe Rich Guy could learn. She seemed unconvinced. I offered to make a SWOT analysis, because apparently I'd become the kind of person who does strategic planning for other people's romantic clusterfucks.
I reached for my phone and its rarely used stylus. "Let's be logical. Let's do a SWOT analysis."
Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats.
I started drawing the grid. I was outlining why the Rich Guy was the strategic play. Strengths: Money, Devotion. Threats: The Dogs.
"See?" I said. "The Rich Guy is the move. You just have to deal with the dogs."
"I made a list too!" she chirped.
She pulled out her iPhone and shoved the Notes app in my face. (Why do women love Apple's default apps? This is a genuine mystery to me, impenetrable as quantum mechanics.) "Great minds think alike!"
Fools seldom differ.
I looked at her list. It was a chaotic mess of emojis and bullet points. Rich Guy and Poor Guy were neck and neck.
But there, buried in the text, was a note she had clearly forgotten was there:
Still sleeping with [Poor Guy]. [Rich Guy] doesn't know, haven't slept with him yet.
She was showing me the evidence of her own infidelity. She was handing me the smoking gun. And she didn't even realize it. She was scrolling past it, pointing out that the Rich Guy buys nice purses, completely oblivious to the fact that she had documented her own moral bankruptcy.
I looked at her. "Are you fucking insane? What if Rich Guy finds out about Poor Guy??"
She startled. "When did I tell you their names?"
I pointed at her phone. The blush that overtook her face was the color of shame, or possibly arousal, or possibly both, because at this level of dysfunction all emotions blend into an undifferentiated psychic sludge.
I laughed. It was absurd.
"What?" she asked, smiling blankly.
"You're amazing," I said. "You're really something."
I grabbed her hand. I deployed a metaphor about masturbation and bushes that I'm not proud of but which seemed apt.
"So you'll write the note?" she asked. "You're a liberal guy. You understand. You should just marry me."
"Liberal."
She uses that word like a get-out-of-jail-free card. To her, "liberal" doesn't mean "politically left-leaning." It means "permissive." It means "you are too smart to have boundaries." She thinks that because I listen to her stories without vomiting, I approve of them. Maybe I've internalized too much, it's worth reminding myself that in my personal life, I can just get up and walk away. I've done that before, with her, when she'd called me out on a date and then broke down into tears and asked me to drive her to her ex’s place.
"How long are you staying in Scotland?" she said. "Why won't you just marry me? Things would be so much simpler!"
Previously, this plea had made me feel significant, wanted, like Captain Save-a-Ho riding in on a white horse. Now I felt something closer to disgust. Not an immense amount of disgust, I've long since abandoned the pretense that I hold all the moral high ground. Mostly the aesthetic disgust of watching someone dig their own grave with manicured nails until those nails chip and bleed, and then mild, incipient rage at the idea that she saw me that way, as a convenient solution to all her problems. The kind, thoughtful doctor who actually listened, didn't judge too much (to her face, an anonymous audience is different, or so I say). I was her idea of a BATNA, a man without an ego, willing to tolerate stodgy in-laws, the kind who wouldn't tell his wife to stop dressing like such a slut the moment the marriage pyre went cold.
The safe choice. I resented this, I do have an ego. I do have standards, even if I'm too polite to throw that in someone's face when they presume that they meet them.
But disgust and rage are just other forms of engagement, and I was too deep in this to extract myself cleanly.
So I tried reverse psychology.
It was then, that I played the card I'd kept up my sleeve for exactly this moment.
I told her I'd come around to marriage. (True.) That I could be convinced to marry her. (Highly Debatable.) She demanded to know when I'd be back permanently.
Two years minimum, I said. Probably more. She deflated immediately. Too long.
So I flipped it: "Come to Scotland," I said.
I said it with the gravitas of a romantic lead in a period drama. Leave this all behind. Come with me. That wasn't a lie, technically. A proposition can't be false. But I said it with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how she'd respond.
I only said it because I knew with 100% certainty she would decline.
It was a zero-risk bet. She has her "career" here, her parents, her tangled web of dysfunction. She wasn't going to Glasgow. But by offering, I get to be the Savior. I get to be the "One That Got Away." I get the credit for the gesture without having to buy the extra plane ticket.
She blanched. Scotland? Doing her own laundry? Cooking? Cleaning? Not cool. She'd grown up wealthy. She told me she couldn't adjust. She didn't seem to be the least bit ashamed of this.
"I can't," she sighed, exactly as predicted. "It's too complicated."
"I know."
I pointed out that I'd grown up similarly and adjusted fine. That First World life wasn't so bad. I explained that even my salary was enough to allow for a decent existence for a young couple. The more I pushed, the more she retreated, exactly as predicted.
Excellent. My model of human nature, or at least her particular neural architecture, remained accurate. I'd convinced her that I wasn't an option by making her convince herself. The lies you tell yourself stick harder than the lies others tell you. So does the truth. Nothing I'd said was a lie, after all. This is why advertising works. This is why democracy fails.
"Will you wait until you're back to marry me?" she asked.
I laughed. "You won't wait two years."
"You're right," she admitted.
Throughout this conversation, she kept flinching, looking out the windows (but hadn't asked me to remove the arm I had around her, or the other on her thigh). I asked why. She said she was worried one of the men might be in the neighborhood. It was midnight. They lived elsewhere. I pointed this out.
"Wait! I can check." She opened WhatsApp. Rich Guy, it turned out, was insecure and demanded she share her live location constantly. Every few minutes, down to the meter. No wonder she'd chosen this café, it was close enough to home to explain, far enough from anywhere else to avoid detection. A prisoner's exercise yard.
To his credit (which is very little), he reciprocated by sharing his own location. The panopticon didn't have a one-way mirror.
She messaged him asking him his plans. His reply was terse but quick. Business meeting, too tired to visit, going to bed. Her paranoia subsided.
Then came the detail that broke me: he'd offered to get rid of the dogs. Kicking out his elderly parents? A step too far.
Where did she find these people? My dog had destroyed my shoes and I'd merely scolded him. This man was willing to dispose of two loyal animals for a woman who felt nothing for him.
Psychiatry teaches phenomenology, empathy, understanding. It never quite conveys that some people are mentally alien. If I had to choose between a woman and my dogs, I know which bitch I'd be showing the door. Both my dogs are male.
More conversation. More coffee. Then beer, she told me they secretly sold it, just hid the menu to maintain a veneer of family-friendliness, which felt like a metaphor for something but I was too tired to figure out what.
She looked exhausted. Grey hairs emerging. Still gushing about her nephew, the Indo-Italian baby who'd break hearts someday, she exulted over my observantion. Feminine solidarity is nothing next to evolutionary psychology.
More terrible ideas sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Could I present as her psychiatrist and talk to Rich Guy? I said I'd talk to him in a personal capacity only, mostly from morbid curiosity about the kind of men she attracted. Maybe I'm trying to understand myself.
"Why can't I be happy?" she asked.
"Because," I said, with clinical detachment, "you are a dumb bitch."
I didn't say it with anger, even if I felt it. I said it with the flat affect of a clinician delivering a terminal diagnosis. It was cruel. Very uncharacteristically so for me, I still feel bad about it, but she'd pushed me to breaking point. It was also a diagnosis. She teared up.
"You're mean!" she sobbed. "I'm trying so hard! Why are you calling me names?"
No she didn't. That would have been easy, given me the option to stonewall in the face of bluster and crocodile salt-trails. Instead:
She stayed quiet, head lowered, hair cascading down to hide her tears. This made it much harder, she was self-aware enough to know of her flaws. I decided to relent, and attempt an explanation.
I explained that her misery was entirely self-manufactured, a boutique artisan suffering. "You are crying because you don't like the mirror," I told her. "Look at what you're doing. You have a guy who wants to marry you. He is rich. He loves you. He is willing to give up his dogs for you. And it's not enough."
"It's not perfect!" she wailed.
"That's your problem," I said. "In the search for perfection, you are turning down 'good enough.' You are creating chaos because you are terrified of settling. You cheat on the Rich Guy with the Poor Guy, you cheat on the Poor Guy with the Rich Guy, and you try to cheat on both of them with me. You are miserable because you refuse to make a choice."
She looked at me, mascara running, eyes wide.
"But I just want to be happy," she whispered.
No, she doesn't.
She wants to be admired. Happiness requires compromise. Happiness requires you to live in a house with a mother-in-law or a dog you don't like. Happiness is tolerating unhappiness today in the hopes it'll pay interest tomorrow. Happiness is boring.
She doesn't want boring. She wants the drama. She wants the crisis. She wants to be on a couch begging a doctor to commit fraud so she doesn't have to feel bad about making a man kill his dogs.
I told her the juggling act would end, the plates would smash on her pretty face, and I would not be there to sweep up the shards.
She didn't disagree.
Eventually it was late. I was out of useful things to say. "Go back to the Rich Guy," I said, standing up. "Marry him. Make him give up the dogs. See how that feels."
"You think I should?"
"I think you deserve each other," I said.
She took this as a compliment.
He is a coward who betrays his loyalty to his pets. She is a narcissist who betrays her loyalty to her partners. They are a match made in hell, and they will be perfectly miserable together in a very nice house, once the parents and the dogs die of old age.
She kissed me goodbye, carried off that kawaii rabbit with a spring in her step, turned the corner to her gated compound. I gave in to impulse and bought a cigarette.
I didn't smoke it.
The visa was declined. My winter in California is gone. But as I stepped out into the humid Indian night, I realized I didn't need the Pacific Coast Highway.
Here's what I think: everyone in this story should kill themselves. Except the dogs. I'll include myself if they get a pass.
The dogs are the only innocents. The rest of us are complicit in whatever this is, this performance of intimacy masquerading as intimacy, this simulation of care that exists primarily to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves and each other. We're all playing roles in a production that should have closed years ago, but we keep showing up because what else are we going to do? Be alone? Be honest?
I get roped into this shit because I'm bored. I relate to the claim that the worst thing a man can be is useless. Perhaps I am minimally complicit, as it goes, but my hands are hardly clean. They probably still smell of her perfume.
Better to keep performing. Better to keep pretending that our patterns aren't patterns, that our compulsions aren't compulsions, that our inevitable trajectories toward mutual destruction aren't already written in every decision we've made since we were old enough to know better.
The dogs, at least, love honestly. They destroy things because they don't know better, not because they're trying to avoid knowing better. There's something almost sacred in that.
As for the rest of us? We're just apes with pretensions and smartphones. Millions of engineers work tirelessly to make them capture accurate renditions of reality, millions more work to meet market demand by creating filters to reduce reality to something more palatable, more Insta-worthy. Some of us are stumbling through the dark, convincing ourselves that the lies we tell ourselves are somehow more sophisticated than the lies others tell us.
The standard literary thing to do would be to protest that they're not, that all lies and sins are made equal. I'm not so far gone as to believe that. No, I think I've put in a reasonable amount of effort into giving her the best advice I could. She never listens, but isn't patient autonomy all the rage?
The head is a hot air balloon.
But remember: the balloon only looks like it's flying. It's really just at the mercy of the wind.
Stop blowing.
*Confession: I haven't read Heidegger, unless a Wikipedia summary counts. I both refuse to read Continental Philosophy on principle and happen to be new to the whole pretentious navel-gazing literary style, please bear with while I calibrate the signal.
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Notes -
I enjoyed reading this, thank you.
There's a scene in my favorite noir, Out of the Past, where the main character is talking to his conniving horrible ex. Like typical noir fashion, they're in quite a pickle.
As the ex goes on and on about an unrealistic dream of them getting away, she quips "we deserve a break."
The main character responds "we deserve each other." In this moment, due to circumstances, he gives up on the good girl waiting for him, and commits to his ex (to bring her to justice). Even if it ends with both him and his ex getting gunned down.
Not exactly relevant but the first thing that popped in my mind as I was reading. Out of the Past is a great movie, and while there are more critically acclaimed noirs (Double Indemnity), Out of the Past will always be my favorite.
I'm relieved to find out that I wasn't quite cynical enough to go full noir. I never actually believed that I "deserve" this lady, not quite willing to consign myself to purgatory yet. My attitude towards the genre is like my attitude towards Warhammer 40k, fun to read about, fun to imagine myself as the hard-boiled protagonist, but actually inhabiting it? Oh hell no.
You're welcome!
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I thought this was fun. The writing did wander, and I think you somewhat self-consciously allow the AI a little too much of a free hand with the editing pass (your writing was better before it, really). But it was good, and I was entertained throughout.
As regards the story, there’s plenty unsaid that you’re not yet ready to admit to yourself, especially around your offer. But you know that.
That is the biggest tell. I did ask the AIs to try their hand at editing (I just didn't use it). They always spit out something more... polished. Streamlined. Less fluff. Fewer details. That's just not me.
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I actually didn't use AI for this one! I sometimes feel the need to do things the old fashioned way, but I use them so much that I've probably internalized something or the other. I'm even tempted to use em-dashes, but I'm scared of the inevitable hissy fits. It would have been nice to notice that they were an option—before they became borderline taboo.
This essay was heavily workshopped. I used the bots for feedback, and oh boy were they pissed. Apparently even LLMs have soft spots for women in distress and pattern match to bad behavior. To my relief, gently asking them to justify their takes while refraining from revealing authorship reliably gets them to chill out.
And when I include most of the other essays I've written about my romantic misadventures? Poor bastards want to buy me a drink. I'm not inclined to disagree with them on that one.
I genuinely don't know that. Believe me, I've tried. I maxed out messages on multiple platforms asking for psychoanalysis, and only found a minimal amount of it helpful. The essay, in conjunction with my lengthy argument with Here, that sums up everything about my understanding of myself that I feel is defensible.
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Thank you. That's high praise. I remember you being very engaged with the prequel, it seemed to resonate with your own experiences, so I was wondering if you'd have anything to say about this one.
Say what you will about the drudgery of junior-level psychiatry in the NHS, it at least keeps me too busy to make questionable decisions. I land back in town, and realize that I don't have quite as many friends left there as I'd like, and there's only so much I can pet my dogs before they go bald. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, even if I think my behavior has only been slightly impish.
Hey man, if you're anything like me, you do have the answers for yourself. The problem is executing upon them. And that? Easier said than done. I am undoing my cynicism by falling madly in love again, it's worth a shot.
I agree that it is ugly. Having written the piece, I was on tenterhooks about actually posting it. I still am, since you don't see me shilling my Substack. I try to bring clarity and an incisive edge to my observations of others, sometimes turning the scalpel inwards hurts. But I also value honesty, I'm not a perfect individual, and I do not wish to present myself as the flawless observer who does no harm., who always observes the system without disturbing its mechanisms. I certainly harm myself, on occasion.
It makes perfect sense. My essays are snapshots, time capsules, photographs of a state of mine and a very particular time. I hope to look back at this mirror when the cracks have healed. I hope you do the same, for yourself.
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This may be the least Autistic thing Ive ever read on here.
It says... something that I read that last line 3 times and for every single instance, my brain autocorrected "least" to "most" lol. My priors on the Motte's personality are just that strong.
Thanks. It's hard being an ADHchuD in an autist world.
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Decent writing but I can't stand dogs. They're rude, smelly, mostly idiotic beasts who think only with their stomach and are incapable of love. /r/dogfeee is one of my favourite subreddits and it's gratifying to me how, now that I have become a parent to a young newborn, how many posts I see in the parenting subreddits with new parents hating/regretting having a pet dog. They are disgusting creatures and your "dumb bitch" is 100% right to be wary of marrying a dog owner.
Dogs qua pets suck. But dog lovers are the worst. They elevate dogs to be above humans. Their world revolves around their dogs. Just wild people. My sister in law gets deeply offended that I don’t like her dogs.
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If I ever have delusions about wanting to get into a relationship, I'll just talk to self_made_human to kill that urge in a jiffy.
I see comments like this and am reminded of my mother's current dog, who will literally tear down baby-gates and open doors to get to me. Or the family's previous dogs, who regularly patrolled and open doors to check and see if I was present and alright.
Get better dogs, I suppose.
This is "Pagliacci becoming a doctor for clowns" territory. I can't cure my own urge to get into a relationship! I'm doing that right now, by which I mean getting into one and not the curing. (it's not with the model).
By all means, do enter into relationships. We live in a fallen world, in an age of declining TFRs. Everyone needs to do their part. Find love, expose your heart to being flying kicked and then curbstomped. It's a learning experience. Most women are actually nice, I just have very little to say about them that isn't better articulated by some romance blogger with a bazillion followers on Substack.
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Dogs aren't known for table manners or calculus skills. My dogs certainly think with their stomachs, they delegate to their small intestines if that's not enough intellectual horsepower. Incapable of love, however? Are you sure you've met a real dog and not a coyote?
My dogs spend weeks waiting for me at the border of the property after I'm gone. They drown me in slobber and leave muddy pawprints on my white shirt when I make the mistake of greeting them right after a flight. If that's not love, I don't know what is.
Some claim humans don't deserve dogs. I disagree, we do. We took the slinking, hungry, ravenous beasts that circled our campfires in the night and made the perfect companion out of them.
I am surprised to hear of a sub that is almost certainly more insufferable than /r/childfree. I must hate-browse it at some point. If dogs aren't for you, so be it. But actively hating on them confuses me, even after an essay on moral mutants.
Dogs suck. The fact you describe it as love shows why dogfree is important. Dogs are conditioning to be pack animals and you are part of their pack. But for there to be love, the other party needs to have the capacity to judge you; to reject you. Dogs are incapable of that. To put it in erotic terms making love requires another human and the best kind is when each is enthusiastically into the act. Masturbation is a pale imitation of the real thing because it’s missing that other human. So it is with dogs.
Dogfree is less about hating dogs (though they do hate dogs) and more about hating dog people who degrade our society by abandoning attempts at true love and replacing it with the narcissistic love of dog.
"To put it in erotic terms" is a phrase that almost invariably precedes a terrible argument.
You seem to be operating under the belief that love is only valid if it is conditional. You imply that affection is only real if it is withheld until specific performance metrics are met. That is closer to an insecure attachment style than it is a philosophy.
If your definition of "true love" necessitates that the other party is constantly adjudicating your worthiness, constantly holding the threat of rejection over your head like a sword of Damocles, then I feel pity. You are describing a courtroom, not a relationship.
Dogs can reject you. Try mistreating one. They bite. They run away. They cower. Sometimes they just don't like the cut of your jib. When a dog looks at you with adoration, it is not because they are biological automata programmed to worship. It is because you have proven yourself to be a benevolent leader of the pack. You've earned that trust through consistency and care.
Narcissism? I call it a relief from the exhausting, transactional nature that is human interaction (on occasion) that I detailed in the post above. Humans "judge" and "reject" based on tax brackets, social standing, and their own untreated neuroses. Dogs judge based on character and kindness. Perhaps they also weight how stinky your feet are in the equation, but I don't hold that against them.
If you think preferring the latter degrades society, you clearly haven't spent enough time in the dating market. Or perhaps you lucked out, that's been known to happen. The narcissism isn't in the dog owner. It is in the human who believes they are too complex and special to learn anything from a creature that figured out how to be happy fifty thousand years ago.
And in case, if it's not obvious, the majority of dog owners have... normal relationships with their pets. A healthy one, even. They've been shown to improve mental health, though it's hard to prescribe a golden retriever unless the patient is blind. I should hope it's clear that I'm open to more complicated relationships, while finding solace in simple licks.
To put it in erotic terms" is a phrase that almost invariably precedes a terrible argument.
Funny I have the same reaction when I see your name on a post.
First you are wrong with dogs. I’ve been around plenty of dogs who I’ve spent very little time with. They all reacted perfectly nice to me if I pet them. I didn’t earn anything.
And you misunderstand the argument. It isn’t about withholding love until certain items are measured. It is about choice. Dogs make very simple choices because they are simple creatures who’ve been bred to be simple. It is very simple to get a dog to like you — it really isn’t about you.
In contrast, humans are complex. They have a real choice in the matter of interpersonal relationships. You can’t form deep connections without some degree of choice on both parties. But it can be a beautiful thing when that choice is made. It is, in my mind, somewhat similar to charity as an act v charity as a law. The choice in the first situation isn’t about judgement but about love. But in the second? Sure you can feel for your fellow man but you are performing the charity out of obligation.
To conclude, the ability to say no is a prerequisite for forming deep connections. Provided you feed and don’t kick dogs, they can’t say no (they are after all your property and were breed to do exactly what you want). Ergo dogs don’t really have the ability to choose.
I don't think of you at all, and that's for the best.
Honestly, spend a minute or two thinking about your own argument. Heard of feral dogs, dingos?
Love requires the ability to say no and to be able to say "fuck you" and bounce? Well, I suppose no child has ever loved their parents till the age of ~12.
You think pretty highly of yourself despite being a cad (if your story is true — more likely it is fake) and not particularly bright.
Your argument is against breeding—yes there are animals such as dingos that aren’t domesticated. But most dogs that humans interact with are bred to be domesticated meaning they don’t really have choice.
And kids love different than grownups. My daughters do love me but there is a difference in the kind of love that my wife and I have for each other. But the love my kids have for me will change with time—both for the better and for the worse (sadly it will lose the child like innocence but hopefully deepen in connection and understanding). There is a reason the Greeks had more than one word to describe love. I’m suggesting the highest love needs choice. It’s also the differences between parental love directed towards the child and the child’s love directed towards the parent.
It is a blessing that my self-esteem doesn't particularly hinge on validation from strangers. If I'm not so bright, then your words of wisdom are lost on me. It helps to recall that adage of not wrestling with pigs in the mud or arguing with fools.
In a coincidence that makes me marginally respect you more, I was considering pointing out the same fact. Unfortunately, for the opposite reason - namely that you chose to start by using eros to make claims about philia. Fortunately, I'm not horny for my dogs. Yeah, no fucking shit that your daughter doesn't love you like your wife. I'd certainly hope so.
Yes sex is very enjoyable. There is a base need there. But my example which you seemed not to understand is that even erotic love is greater when exercised with another that has a capacity for choice as opposed to self-love. It is in choosing each other and focusing outward that eros achieves its highest form. It is in self love where it reaches a base form.
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What a horrifying story. Certainly "marry the rich guy" is better medical advice than "kill yourself", but the Canadian strategy might have been a better fit. Can this woman really be happily married to anyone? I would feel pretty bad for the rich guy if it really did happen. With all that money, he cannot help but buy a narcissistic cheating woman who cruelly makes him give up his pets.
It is surprising to me that this kind of archetype exists in India, too. And if it exists in India, it probably exists in the whole world. Except maybe in Muslim countries?
She can't live without maids. Maybe I need MAID after this interaction.
I don't know if she was always this way. She was in serious relationships before, and as far as I know she was content and didn't cheat. Not that I know her that well.
It's possible that it's a trauma response. She's been burned by assholes so many times that her defense mechanisms include a terminal inability to commit, there's always a monkey with a juicier fruit on the next branch, and why let go of the one you're swinging on till you absolutely have to?
Maybe she'll settle down willingly. Maybe she'll find a controlling husband who makes her settle down. She's raised in a rather paternalistic society, if you didn't see my last post and her mom's reaction to her revelation that her ex was sleeping with hookers on vacation. Not did she seem to mind that Rich Guy demanded her whereabouts around the clock.
And you know what? I don't blame the guy one bit. It's not paranoia if they're out to get you. Insecurity is justified if your girl is cheating on you, denying you sex while sleeping with another man, and trying to fuck me into fraud.
I'm somewhat tickled by the innocence in that question. Human archetypes are nigh universal. Muslim countries? If Saudi Arabia didn't have ditzy women ready to turn tricks for a bag, they did after the Sheikhs discovered Instagram.
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First time?
List of non-Islamic countries safe from hoeflation:
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I sort of had comments on this, but my main take-away impression is: please stop trying to be a cut-rate The Last Psychiatrist.
Cut-rate? I can't help it, I'm sure he makes a lot more than I do. I charge as much as the market can bear, which is very little.
Funnily enough, the pastiche was intentional-ish. I was re-reading his blog. I was also rather mad, which probably culminates in something unusually cynical. I've already been compared to him a grand total of two times, in different contexts. That's not a lot, but it's funny that it happened twice. I guess there aren't that many psychiatric bloggers in the Ratsphere.
I do recall that you offered to pray for this lady. I'm not sure if you did, but I get the impression she needs it all the more now. I started off as sympathetic to her plight, but I think she's gone from being the victim of forces outside her control to actively making things worse for everyone else. Right now I just want to see how this ends, and maybe wrangle a wedding invite so I can eat at a buffet again.
See, you don't want to marry her, and that's fine (and indeed may be the sane choice). But you do want to use her, and here is where I get off the bus and hop aboard the Dumb Bitch wagon.
Fucking her around just so you can feel superior and post about it on here is not cool, man. You're being honest about being what, in older times, would have been called a cad or a hound. But it's still shitty behaviour. And the worst thing is, this post drips with you wanting to look cool while you're doing it. You're louche, you're rakish, you are that artfully distressed character in an indie movie wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking cigarettes while everyone else is giving up tobacco or turning to vaping or nicotine patches. Yeah, you're mean and nasty, but don't you just look so Hunter S. Thompson while you're being that way?
It's easy to describe another person like you described her and I'm describing you in order to score Coolness Points for Hip Writing. It's not good for the soul, though.
Look, ma'am, if you are going to litigate against male sexuality, you had best pack a lunch; court is going to be in session for the next ten million years. If you win the case, you'll be the first person worthy of canonization this side of the millennium. He who has no desire to sleep with a hot, nubile model may cast the first stone. I’ll wait.
That said, please substantiate "fucking her around."
I started in good faith. I told her I was moving. I rebuffed her efforts to convince me to marry her. I put marriage on the table if she came with me, because I was correct in hoping it would help her connect the dots. She declined. Instead, she wants me to stay here, uproot my life, and marry her, while she continues to sleep with other men. Do I look like a chump? Do I look like a chimp? Do I look like, as @Sloot would eloquently/crudely put it, a simp?
She treats my time with the entitlement usually reserved for minor royalty. She told me she'd let her ex get her drunk in his nightclub and then let him take her back home to fuck her senseless, a few weeks before I was due to leave. She hassled me with a pregnancy scare - I am not a gynecologist. She once called me away from a family dinner, weeping, begging to see me: only to reveal she actually just wanted a ride to her toxic ex's house because she missed him. She is lucky I didn't throw a drink in her face.
Do you know what the male equivalent of that behavior is? Removing panties under false pretenses. I have never done that. I have left beautiful women behind because I had the simple honesty not to lie to them. That is a low bar, I admit, but look at the other clowns in this circus. One is a cheater, the other is a coward, one more paranoid (justified with knowledge he doesn't have), and the lady in the center is an arsonist complaining about the heat.
So what if I stick around for the attention, the drama, and the chance to get laid again? Her home is already a burning heap of garbage; I didn't light the match. She is cheating on two men and trying to solicit fraud from a third. At this point, my aversion to homewrecking is overpowered by the realization that there is no home left to wreck. A good soul would have saved numbers and organized a group call with Rich and Poor alike.
I chose unkindness because politeness failed. I chose to narrate it because it is absurd.
I have offered nothing but the truth, for once delivered with the bedside manner of a crash cart. I refused the fraud. I refused the gaslighting. I told her to settle for the least bad option. Truth is an absolute defense for libel, and it should be for being a "cad," too.
Guilty. Of looking cool. The sunglasses are there because the glare from her bad decisions is blinding.
Much of the tone is a bit. If you missed that I was performing the role as a shield against the sheer depressing reality of it, that's on you. If I didn't write it this way, I'd just be another sad guy wondering why the world is broken. Better to play Hunter S. Thompson than Werther.
But you read this story, where a woman offers sex in exchange for malpractice to cover up her infidelity and wishes to euthanize the dogs of a man she's cheating for her convenience, and think I'm the villain? Really? Not a word for the arsonist, just the guy taking notes? I'm not afraid to tell her anything you wish to convey. I don't care. She reached out to me again, today, so evidently she thinks I'm less of a cad than you do, not that I would trust her judgment further than I can throw her. She's using me, and I decide to use her in the sense that people used to pay money to gawk at the inmates of an asylum.
My soul floats as light as a feather. I trade off interesting vs. regret, and right now, the ROI is looking just fine.
I don’t think you’re the villain, but like many men you have a prurient interest in a ‘fallen woman’ (whether she is or isn’t, or what that means, is less important than that you think she is one) and both your interaction with her and more substantially this story serve that. In the end, that’s probably your most TLP-like trait of all.
I can't disagree. I mean, I could, but that would be a lie and insulting to both our intelligences. The savior complex will be the death of me. Pray I get better, or find someone actually worth saving.
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You offered marriage with the strings attached so that she'd refuse it, but that way you could feel like you were doing her a favour instead of acting like a heel. You wanted her trotting around after you like a little dog, but you disliked her enough not to want anything serious. I do think she's better off without you, and you may be better off without her. A woman you dislike, feel contempt for, and can't ever respect but damn it she's a human female, you're a straight human male, your biology goes "bong!" around her, and you resent the hell out of that - that's not a situation that's good for anyone involved.
Strings attached? I live in Scotland. That's where I'm going to be for the foreseeable future. I'm not marrying someone who isn't willing to relocate to be with me, and I think my unwillingness to do the same isn't unprincipled when I'm doing a residency. That's kinda sorta important for my career. Some spoiled daddy's girl who's too good to wash her own knickers? Do I want to sign up with a funeral home early?
I had hoped it would be clear that the whole point of that gambit would be to show her that what she was asking for was untenable. All the polite excuses I'd used till date didn't do the trick.
What would you prefer I said? "Sorry beautiful, I was already against marrying you because I think you're too dumb for me. We might have really fucked up kids. Wait, that was before I found out that you have the morals of an alley-cat."
That finally put it through to her that I'm not an option. I mean, I say finally with less than 100% confidence. I think there's a real chance that she's back to begging me to fly back and rescue her before this message goes cold. Even after becoming tired of her shit and pushing her buttons, I'm still a far superior option to any at hand. If you're inclined to disagree, look at her behavior.
What you insinuate, and which is absolutely, categorically false, is that I did it to lead her on or assuage my ego. I know I can have her, a snap of my fingers and she'd be on her knees with a ring, or for other reasons. "Babe, I'm willing to stay back for you. But you ought to know, I have a try before I buy policy, a sad consequence of being burned one too many times. Let's get you a drink and out of those stuffy clothes." Boom. Done. The only thing stopping me is a conscience, and I'm loathe to lose it.
I... uh... What do I even say to this? You might want to do less off-the-cuff pattern matching and look at the whole thing in context. God knows I worked very hard to provide said context. Was it all for naught?
I'm the one who wants her trotting around me? Hardly. I'd pulled away well before I was due to leave, I didn't bother her one bit while I was away, and I wouldn't have called her if she hadn't texted me first. Do you see any mention of me texting or calling first? No? After I've been brutally honest, and even penned an unflattering description of myself?
In contrast, I am distressingly close to being guilty of orbiting her.
This is the polar opposite of me jerking her around, making her dance to my tune. All I'm really guilty of is being guilted into playing along, and deriving some voyeuristic pleasure from seeing things play out.
Quite possibly. Unfortunately, she keeps coming back. I'll avail myself of a baseball bat should it happen again. I'm talking about me being better off without her.
Would she be better off without me? That's the debatable hypothesis. You do realize that I'm the least bad man in her life, by a country mile? I've been the voice of reason. I've gone hoarse. I'd dare say I was too nice, to the point of enabling more bad behavior because of her delusion that I'd always be there for her. It would have been better, quite definitively so, if she never knew me. Then perhaps she would have already shed many a tear alone and settled. I suspect she will eventually. Her lifestyle is unsustainable. She is a grown-ass woman almost my age, not a child who can't be expected to know better.
I would like to note that the overwhelming bulk of my attitude towards her, until very recently, was genuine pity rather than contempt. The things she told me struck me as beyond the pale, out of character even. I'm an imperfect judge of that, even if I think I do alright. Do you feel her actions aren't worthy of some contempt? If not, extend that Christian charity to me too. Besides:
If all men were wise, psychiatrists and clergymen alike would be out of a job. I've let my dick lead me to places I wouldn't go without a gun. There really is no solution, barring bumping into someone I actually want to marry and then doing so successfully. I'm hunting for the happily ever after. I'm working on it. I'm a lovesick fool, who mostly disguises his disappointed romanticism with performative cynicism. That isn't mutually exclusive with liking sex with pretty women.
You really won't get that. Not for any fault of your own, but a deeply religious, middle aged women who I believe professes chastity (I could be misrembering the last bit, genuinely do correct me if I'm wrong) is not in a position to grokk it. The men here? They're sighing or chuckling.
Incorrect. I'll be fine. I've found someone else I like, a lot. I have a date with her tomorrow. I have that pleasant giddiness at that prospect. I have flowers ready. I intend to buy a soft toy, but because I care, not because I needed to kill time. Unfortunately, the realist in me knows even that isn't unlikely to work out, but I'm ignoring him. He's a real drag. I could do with a fling during an Indian Summer, and who knows, things might work out. I might not ache forever.
The damage to me is bounded. I've done my best to minimize the damage to others. But you can see how well that worked I'm sure.
I agree with you insofar as, conditional on your story being true, you have little to directly feel bad about except the equivalent of gawking at a trainwreck.
However, I ultimately still come down on HereAndGone's side on practical terms. The secret to a good life is 90% avoiding bad people. A hot, unstable model with a (rightfully!) jealous fiance is someone that should get all your spidy senses tingling, screaming get out now.
There is so much potential here for things to go wrong, some of them even entirely out of your hand, and so little upside. It's not hard to imagine the fiance catching you two, coming to the wrong conclusion, and going after you. Maybe you have just one bad day, fall for the temptation, and get sucked in. Really, just keep your distance & find excuses not to meet until she gets the hint.
That is a sensible take. I don't really disagree. You have to understand that she's a very small component of my life, I've gone the better part of a year without thinking of her or being drawn in. Now that I'm back, I'm curious and slightly bored. I've been spending time with friends and family, treating my dogs to premium Scottish leather chewtoys (my shoes). I have a second date with someone I already feel limerence about. She (the model) even wanted to meet me yesterday, I demurred.
The previous assistance I offered her was born of genuine pity. There's far less of that now.
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Good story - I imagine TLP went through similar ones on the way to forming his theories. Now, as the resident Heidegger guy, I have to comment: Heidegger fucked the 18-year-old Hannah Arendt, and well enough that she defended him before a denazification tribunal twenty years later. I don't think he needed dating apps to know this stuff. And, of course, Heidegger is far more thorough, autistic, and consistent than analytic philosophers, probably one reason why they seethe about him.
Can you elaborate?
Yeah, absolutely. Heidegger gets a lot of stick for writing in 'Heideggerese', particularly in Being and Time. But what he's doing is carefully building his own set of technical terminology, because he believes existing philosophical terminology has been corrupted by a misguided tradition, covered in layers of implicit association from previous philosophers. So, take the 'care structure' as a famous example. Heidegger writes:
Now, this can read like a mouthful of nonsense. But the way he gets there is by very precisely defining each atomic component of these terms, and then constructing logical relationships between them such that they all fit into place. In fact, the opening of Being and Time is dedicated to explaining why and how he intends to use this method, and going into further detail (e.g. he explains why he goes from logic to example and back, in a kind of spiral where each phase checks the assumptions of the other). Back in undergrad, I was forced to do the "fun" exercise of translating passages from Kant into formal logic, so for instance you replace objects and properties with letters, write the argument as a logical proof, and see if it checks out (it always did, after correcting my errors, it's Kant). If you did the same thing to Being and Time, Heidegger would be just as logically sound - he doesn't make leaps of logic, he doesn't posit arbitrary things in the middle of his arguments to make them fit together, and his terms always mean the same thing, though the definitions are deepened over the book. Even at the one point where he appeals to Greek myth, he does that to explain why he uses the particular word "care", not because Zeus revealed it to him. A contrast to this would be Deleuze and Guattari: I think they're amazing, but they actively make wild leaps of logic, appeal to Moby Dick and horror movies as philosophical authorities, and actively resist giving their terms a single, precise meaning. That's the sort of continental philosophy people love to hate - Heidegger is just good philosophy done in an alien language.
As for why I say more consistent, that's just because doing any good philosophy is really, really hard, and analytics are only human. Even when they're trying to be as logical as possible, and not all of them are, they slip up. And whereas Heidegger is building his terminology from the ground up, analytics are working in a tradition where their terms have all kinds of arguments, confusions, shades of meaning, etc. baked into them. They have certainly noticed the skulls; much of analytic philosophy is about being hyper-aware of this.
It's true that Heidegger takes a more mystical turn in his later writings. But I think that we need to read this as a man capable of doing some of the greatest logical philosophy of his age explicitly choosing to take a mystical direction. He believed the project of Being and Time had failed, that its approach was not sufficient to capture subjects so great. He was also more interested in speaking to non-academic audiences (partly, he was banned from teaching, but at that point he also saw outreach to non-academics as more important. His Bremen Lectures on technology were given to an audience of industrialists, engineers, scientists, etc., his Zollikon lectures on psychology were given to an audience of psychiatrists and psychiatry students).
In fact, if this has piqued anybody's interest, I would recommend starting with the essay version of the Bremen Lectures, collected and translated as a book titled The Question Concerning Technology (unfortunately, it does not include the first, most mystical lecture, The Thing, which is in a book titled Poetry, Language, Thought). William Lovitt's translation is the perfect introduction to reading Heidegger because, when Heidegger introduces a new term, Lovitt generally includes an extensive footnote breaking down the German words involved, their precise connotations, and explaining why Heidegger may have chosen that term. It both removes a lot of room for misinterpretation and trains you to see Heidegger's terms as specific units of meaning to hold in your head as you read. If you'd like some non-partisan testimony, at this point I have browbeaten pretty much all my physicist friends into reading the essays Science and Reflection/The Age of the World-Picture from that book - all of them enjoyed it and generally said that Heidegger really gets how physicists see science (you'd hope so, given Heidegger's long friendship and collaboration with Werner Heisenberg).
There you were making a rather convincing argument, and now I think you've got a case of rhizomes on the brain /jk.
I'll be honest, I skim a lot of their schizo stuff and art riffing to get to the paragraphs where they get back to more rigorous theorizing. Unlike some "theorists", they're capable of rigor, they just don't want to do it - rigor is a tree, rigor is the State, rigor is the Face of Bronze Age Gods, etc. - but they also include a lot of injunctions against mindlessly going schizo and tearing off in whatever direction you want.
The really really bad stuff is largely outside of capital-P Philosophy, anyway (though there's a lot of bad Continental philosophy). It's in social theory, psychoanalysis, media/identity studies, and other places where you're just supposed to sound wild and have the Correct Politics to get tenure.
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Alright, I must say that this information has raised the level of esteem I hold Heidegger in. If you screw barely legal teens so good they're willing to go to court to testify on your behalf twice-as-many-years later, you're doing something right.
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A cynical and sad story. I hope you find love someday friend. And I hope this model lady wises up before its too late.
If it makes you feel better, this story is perhaps 50% more cynical than I actually am. I was going through TLP's Greatest Hits of Misanthropy and some of it rubbed off. It won't stick.
That's the rub, it isn't that I didn't find love, it's that it didn't stick. There is someone new in the picture, but as infatuated as I am, I know it can't really work out.
Don't we all?
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