Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Inspiring controversy on Reddit today is an extremely long-winded comic, "I Don't Like My Boyfriend". Each of its 12 panels was posted as a separate image, so here are some consolidated renditions for your convenience.
One image, millions of colors (11 MiB)
One image, 256 colors (2.3 MiB)
Text (5.8 kiB)
In this comic, a woman contemplates how she doesn't like her boyfriend (who is drawn as a short, fat Chudjak). She finds him boring and annoying. However, he is smitten with her, and she has never had any friends, let alone romantic partners, other than him. She wonders whether she is just an unlikeable person, and should be more grateful for having hooked a person with such low standards. The general opinion of commenters seems to be hatred for the woman.
This actually matches my personal experience with attempts at friendship (1 2) somewhat well! I eventually couldn't tolerate my pseudo-friends any longer and kicked them all to the curb, and the commenters seem to think that the woman depicted in the comic should do the same with her romantic partner.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic?
I appreciate your usual output of strange court cases.
Well what was the issue? They didn't want to fill out your forms or they didn't want to send you a form to fill back?
I think a friend is just somebody who is willing to give you a little piece of their day in exchange for the simple pleasure of spending time with you.
You can be friends with different kinds of people in different ways. Maybe there's somebody who you only talk about sports with, or anime, or strange court cases.
If you already thoroughly know somebody, how are they going to surprise you, how are they going to teach you anything? Making them fill out a form to give you the information you care about is in a way spoiling the fun out of the friendship. Ideally this is somebody you can be sincere with and you can be humble with, you are not worrying over the way you are phrasing your thoughts not to sound dumb or offensive, in a way one would rewrite a paragraph to avoid modding on themotte.
If the spreadsheet-filling game is a core friendship need for you, I'd suggest frequenting fans of map-coloring or 'productivity' games like factorio, I assume they'd be more likely to be into spreadsheets.
I hated myself more and more for continuing to interact with them in a close, friendly manner despite disliking them. (See my flair.)
I think you've misunderstood what I said. The participants in my pseudo-friendships didn't send forms full of questions back and forth. Rather, we sent each other questions and answers via Facebook messages, perhaps one to five at a time. The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally, rather than allowing (or forcing) one person to spam a zillion questions.
Throughout my life I have answered "Who has done more?" arguments in personal relationships -- my own and others -- with what I have thought was sage advice: if you're going to count, you need to count. Sometimes it makes sense to count, though even household chores runs into tricky division of labor problems that require agreed upon values. So normally the point of this quip is to impress upon a person the futility of trying to balance the ledger, sometimes after years of transactions not previously understood as such, or to demonstrate that negotiating the values is so tedious as to be absurd. It has worked for me, as it is almost always more constructive to find a mutually acceptable arrangement for the future and attempt to address cause for perceived unfairness in other ways.
You, sir, sound quite willing to count. I kneel.
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