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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Can you give an example of when answering this question honestly led to negative consequences?

It's in the aggregate, where the best possible result is maintaining the status quo, and the likely result is a downgrade. Those add up.

Can you give an example of a situation where this led to a downgrade?

I respond with something negative, she thinks less of me, repeat X times, the relationship is done.

What is an example of a negative thing you might have responded with?

Difficulties, frustrations, defeats. If you want specifics, tough luck, I haven't been in a serious relationship in years, because fuck that noise.

It's the sort of thing where she starts asking how your day was as a proxy for wondering if you're about to make her day bad as well, if you coming home tends to make her day worse. If you manage to express that your day was up to this point bad, but that it's better now that you're home, and you're not planning to make her day significantly worse by exuding fury for the next hour, then it's fine.

Funny, it always have been the female figures of my life who love to take out their frustrations on others. From education and employment authorities to any of the meager number of my serious relationships to the early memories of confusion of how my mother treated me badly after being angry with my father about what I as an adult am sure was some trivial useless shit. Inb4 a chorus of armchair psychoanalysts piping up how this explains everything, Freud this, social script that, no, fuck it, I haven't observed anyone female behaving differently even at a distance ever.

Inb4 a chorus of armchair psychoanalysts piping up how this explains everything, Freud this, social script that, no, fuck it, I haven't observed anyone female behaving differently even at a distance ever.

That actually supports the psychoanalytic interpretation over the "maybe all the women in your life are just sucky" one, though. There certainly are terrible women, but the ending suggests that isn't primarily what you're describing. If I were in your physical space right now, my day might just be about to get a lot worse.

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