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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   38819 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Ok, I’ll bite. What are the red flags? Is it that she’s older and polyamorous? That’s certainly not ideal, but 36 with frozen eggs isn’t exactly “barren”. The main concern with polyamory is knowing the kids are yours. IVF makes that a non-issue.

Is it that she’s older and polyamorous?

Yes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/feature/she-championed-the-idea-that-freezing-your-eggs-would-free-your-career-but-things-didnt-quite-work-out/

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.

Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.

With a bit of bad luck she might be practically infertile. Freezing, unfreezing and implanting into the uterus is rolling the dice repeatedly.

The main concern with polyamory is the main concern with dating single mothers, divorcees etc. - the involvement of other men in her life, be it other denizens of the polycule or the ex-husband/baby daddy, will be a constant source of unnecessary drama in your life. "Mom's boyfriend" is also a factor that correlates heavily with child abuse.

I think getting to the point in her life where she’s advertising herself on a Google form is a major red flag. I understand the argument of maximizing the number of people you encounter but frankly normal people who you can expect to have a normal happy productive relationship with do not do this.

Why is it any weirder than advertising yourself on a dating app? The only difference is the url.

I think like so many questions about social norms, it's just tautologically weirder because it's considered weirder. Back when dating apps were first taking off, they were considered weird, or at least weirder than meeting someone at a bar or in your friend circle or at work or whatever. Now dating apps are nigh ubiquitous, so they're not weirder - in fact, meeting someone at work would be considered quite a bit weirder nowadays. Posting your own personal "date me" doc isn't common, so it's considered weird, which makes it weird.

If we want to justify it more rationally, we might posit that an individual who is enough in-tune with the social norms of the culture to recognize what is and isn't considered weird to not do things considered weird is a more desirable partner than someone who isn't. But then there's countersignalling where people intentionally signal that weirdness to attract people who find that sort of weirdness more desirable in a partner. That's probably at least partly going on here.

The url being different is a big deal! We expect you to go to the thick market, if you don’t, we wonder why they didn’t work for you and make some inferences about you.

Also, the medium is very different. A couple sentences dating app profile versus for some reason feeling the need to wordswordswords about herself. Like I’m a cerebral guy who values that in a partner but you convey that by being cerebral and intelligent, not by writing a novel about how you’re cerebral and intelligent. Show don’t tell is like a writing 101 concept.

But also being honest I wouldn't care about any of this if she was hot lol.

Currently polyamorous but open to monogamy. Seeking primary partner, open to other things.

Re: She's the town bike.

High variance. Very happy sometimes. Very agentic sometimes. Very dysfunctional and inert sometimes. Very good at some things. Very bad at some things.

That captivating combination of arrogance and crippling self-doubt

Mental health problems (anxiety, OCD, probable depression). I'm neurotic across topics ranging from obviously stupid so my partner has to keep being like, 'no, you are not dying of a pulmonary embolism right now', and 'yes, the people who liked you last week haven't suddenly started hating you for no reason', and things that are extremely hard to dismiss, such as that everyone is plausibly going to die.

Probable ADHD: I’m bad at doing things I’m not interested in, which includes a lot of things that it would be strategic to do.

She's mentally ill.

Tend to either do things in a twenty hour blaze of action or a dispirited three month slog.

Into ‘spirituality’. Very unsure what’s up with that. Sometimes everything seems amazing in a spiritual way. (I’m an atheist.)

Probably yellow flags more than red flags. Still, there be dragons.

And then about 10,000 more words trying to paper over her obvious personality disorders into some sort of manic pixie dream girl persona... except she's almost 40 and that's only cute in 20 somethings who can ostensibly grow out of it.

I could see that working for companionship, but not necessarily for raising children. Both because it dramatically increases the chances of the children ending up with mental illnesses, and also because at least one partner should be reasonably emotionally stable so the kids still get taken care of, all the time.

She’s the town bike

This is bad, but it’s more of a negotiable than a non-negotiable. I’d much rather be with someone with a high body count than say, raise another man’s child.

She’s mentally ill

These aren’t the mental illnesses you need to be worried about. I don’t see bipolar, BPD, or schizophrenia anywhere.

manic pixie dream girl persona

Idk seems like she might be fun.

RE the bipolar, numerous of her statements could be viewed as describing manic and depressive episodes. Specifically

Tend to either do things in a twenty hour blaze of action or a dispirited three month slog.

High variance. Very happy sometimes. Very agentic sometimes. Very dysfunctional and inert sometimes. Very good at some things. Very bad at some things.

That captivating combination of arrogance and crippling self-doubt

“If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best”-vibes.

Very agentic sometimes

Not sure if this is a not like other girls nod toward the hypoagency of women, or if she thinks being agentic is something men would also feel is necessary to point out about themselves.

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