I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became one myself.
Before you judge the man in this story too harshly — and there’s certainly much to judge, especially given the follow-up post — consider the environment he and I grew up in. Being gay as a young teenager in the early 1990s could feel literally like a death sentence. AIDS panic was everywhere. Gay men in movies were comedy sidekicks or dying wrecks (“Philadelphia”). There was a real threat of violence from other kids. If you could pass as straight, why wouldn’t you give it your best shot? The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you. (This is literally how I imagined gay life at age 13.)
I still feel like I’m barely getting started on the therapy journey to recover from those decades. Seems like the man in the story never had the chance for professional help (or didn’t seek it). The compartmentalization can be extremely taxing. He disappointed many people, but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.
There's judging people, and there's judging actions.
- Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this.
- Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation.
- Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.
- You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
“OK” is an over-simplified word to use here. It’s incredibly complicated. And it changes with the era and location. If it’s illegal to be gay where you are, or if there literally is no societal understanding of gayness like in the 1700s or whatever where staying a single man is not always an option, I don’t think asking someone to be celibate their entire life is reasonable either. It’s still not _great_ but I don’t blame the individual as much as I do society.
Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.
Once i realized he was gay and chinese it just read how i expected it would go for most in that situation and time period. I am not gay, traditional, chinese or quite as old (probably i am 15 years younger than the gay dad) but i hope i would pull it off as well as he appears to in that situation. He raised only minorly messed up kids, managed to find a little of what his heart felt was love. Biggest fail was not finding a lesbian in the same situation to pull this off together and avoid the lieing and resentment and pain caused to the other partner from a marriage only known to be a sham to one party.
At 57, that means he entered university during the early to mid 1980s.
That was peak AIDS phobia (for good reason), and the anti-gay rhetoric was also at its peak.
There was a lot more to lose coming out during those days, beyond just marriage and family cold-shoulders.
By good reason, I mean people were panicked because people didn’t know which activities could spread the virus. Anyone else remember toilet seat fears?
I wasn't in any way judging the father harshly when I read it. I also read between the lines that there was additionally "traditional Asian culture" as another factor.
I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union", but I can easily imagine that it was his wife's desire.
A very sad story in general. I lost my mom a few years ago and I suspect I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
> I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union",
They might be lead to believe "if only we got married ... if only we had kids ... that will 'fix' it." Even straight couples who aren't in love fall into this trap.
I don't know how well real life imitates art, but a lot of films involving gay historical characters have a similar enough narrative I assume it has some grain of truth: The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice. Maybe they even have some small amount of feelings for the spouse or think they can "learn to love them." See Rustin 2023 as an example of the psychology in action.
> I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
Sorry for that. Loss is one of the hardest, most confusing emotions. That lack of closure and the unknown is a truly awful feeling.
> The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice.
What's striking about those stories is that there were clearly quite a lot of cases where people objectively chose not to be gay, but they did it by repressing and masking it away by working hard on exemplary marriages that delivered many offspring to their name. Ultimately this means that yes indeed they could chose to not be gay, but they would have to sacrifice their whole sense of self just to comply with a societal norm.
It is a sad story. But I will say that events in my life have really made me regret questioning the decisions of others.
I did things “right” I met my wife right after college, and I loved her dearly. We lived a happy life and have a wonderful son. We lost her a couple of years ago to cancer, followed by my parents and my mother and father in law, all of whom i was incredibly close with.
Yet life carries on. I come from a very traditional ethnic-focused catholic background. I’m not going to be following the standard script. I’m in my 40s, any partner will likely be divorced with their own child(ren). I’m not having more children. Will that partner be compared to my wife? Will I judged if she is too old/young/in a higher/lower status profession?
Reality: everyone has been incredibly supportive of my family and I. But the anxiety is there.
I would just say in looking at the lives of others, try to walk in their shoes. By all accounts the father in the story was not a perfect man. Few of us are. But consider that he was facing certain and complete rejection by his entire world, and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad.
"and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad."
The least bad for him.
"mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny"
I strongly disagree. The father passed on the same trauma he experienced to his own child. It makes it worse because he knows exactly how painful it is but did it anyways.
I'm watching my ex do the same thing to our kid. I understand it on a mechanical level. But on an emotional level I will never understand how you can look into the eyes of your child and hurt them.
The mechanics of it are what you see in the OP. I see it in my parents, my aunts/uncles, and my cousins. It's somewhere between denial and minimization. It's like a defense mechanism against the truth which is something like my father didn't love me enough to not severely damage me. "They did the best they could" is a common refrain. Ultimately that ends up being their justification for hurting their own kids.
There is a balance to hit here. Yes, we are all human and you can't expect perfection. What you can expect and what everyone deserves from their loved ones is for them to at all points try to and not hurt you. There's forgiveness for coming up short if there's effort and steady improvement.
I agree. I don't expect perfection from anyone, including myself. But what I expect from myself is to give my kids a better upbringing than I had - which was actually a mostly great upbringing, but we should always strive to be even better. I despise parents who hurt their kids through negligence and inaction, I find it inexcusable.
Having kids is half the reason (or more) for such marriages, nothing completes the nuclear family picture quite like it. And not like it's easy for gay couples in accepting environments to have kids either, surrogacy is banned in most countries ("liberal" ones too, US is kind of an exception here) and adoption is nigh impossible. Some countries like Italy go as far as selectively making both illegal, but only for gay couples.
I would say many asian parents care very little about the partner, as long as they get their grandkids. A mix of that and "what would society think".
Where did you hear that surrogacy is banned in most places outside the USA? That's just not true, and I suspect you've been indoctrinated with more US-exceptionalism. Surrogacy is not banned in the UK, Australia, NZ, much of Europe, Iran, much of Asia, etc.
It's "legal" at first glance but it's effectively banned in most cases. No monetary compensation, only direct relatives, only traditional pregnancy, etc.
It's outright banned (commercial) in most of EU. In most countries it was left unregulated for a long time but most of them are choosing to ban all commercial forms of it. Besides US, most major countries have banned it.
Now many people do ignore these laws and most governments do little to enforce them unless they make the news for some reason. Banning commercial forms of it just ensures abuse and issues go unreported. It's the paternalistic part of feminism that's been leading the charge for modern bans, with both liberal and conservative roots.
Surrogacy is illegal in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Finland, and Turkey. Also banned in China, some states in the US and Québec.
Thats a pretty hefty chunk of the worlds population.
A lot of other countries also have a limbo status where there is either no clear law making it illegal but put so many hurdles up that its impractical.
Some countries, like Italy, also make it illegal for Italian citizens to go abroad to a country where it is legal and then do it there.
> only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union"
For a lot of people, building a family is a duty you embrace with your household partner. It's why you exist in the first place. It's why you get married and share a home with somebody at all.
Perhaps, if you're lucky, your children are a fruit of love, or perhaps, if you're horny, they're a fruit of passion.
But for a lot for such people, having and raising kids is the entirety of why you get married, and is the rationale for you might not marry for love or passion in the first place.
Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into. But they nonetheless feel an obligation, and even desire, to form and raise a family anyway, and so they march ahead and get it done, hopefully with somebody that they respect as a partner and who reciprocates the same.
That's great. Indeed, many of us don't see ourselves existing for that reason, especially among people who read and post on this site.
But many many many in the world do see it that way, and more even in the past -- when the "dad" would have been making life their life choices -- than do right now. Either partially, but significantly, or wholly.
My comment was helping its parent recognize the influence of that way of seeing the world, as it seemed to have escaped them.
> Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into.
Man, I feel this. And it's also funny that you write it in such an objective way but it's true. It _is_ a very culturaly specific practice.
I've lucked into it. It feels amazing. But I'm lucky that I was crazy enough to really teach myself how to get over rejection and just search for as long as needed to find someone who felt the same way about me as I felt about her. Amazing character building though, it was a true rite of passage for me that started around when I was 16 and ended when I was 32 and married. Dating and being good at it, in order to be in an amazing relationship, has been an obsession of my life. This was in part because I sucked so hard at it as a young teenager. I think in earlier times I'd have settled for someone unappealing or stayed a virgin. Thank god, the internet was a thing when I was young.
I rarely judge people in these situations (sexuality or whatever the reason, there's a million different way to get stuck in a false life due to social pressure, "weakness" [aren't we all at times?]...)
I'm just floored by the misery most people go through, the misery we inflict on each others... it's not easy to bold, to be free, to be you.
I see his actions as immoral (not as much as most violence) but could seem justified to a person in his circumstances with reasonable moral judgement.
He grew up in a social environment where coming out as gay would make everyone around him sad and angry/ashamed at him. But he was gay, intrinsically. Eventually (possibly because of societal acceptance, possibly because he decided total suppression wasn’t worth it), he secretly broke his traditional relatives and friends’ trust by acting gay. Something most people today see as justified. But he also broke his lovers’ trust by having multiple affairs, something most people today see as unjustified.
A caveat is that he didn’t even confide in his daughter, who is gay; he didn’t file for or allow divorce, to make things easier for his wife; and perhaps he should’ve noticed that, in the changing times, being gay became acceptable but not cheating. Again, I don’t think he was right, and I can imagine a different person in his position handling the moral disconnect better for his family, who I believe he still cared about. But my understanding is that being gay is really taboo in some cultures, and has been in many more even a couple decades ago, so I can understand him being really suspicious and assuming those taboos held more strongly for more people.
In which case to him, doing anything gay was setting up emotional damage to many people, and every affair was just setting up damage to one more person.
Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents.
Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily.
No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse!
I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome!
There is another, third perspective one can have on this.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.
When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.
He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."
The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).
There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.
why was the divorce so hard for him? In that society, they just don't let you get divorced unless both parties agree to it? And with the evidence he had of her being a lesbian, does that mean nothing? What is even the point of divorce in that society?
I'm guessing India, and it's dowry part of it that complicates things a lot. And once either party goes into legal proceedings, it becomes a shit slinging mess of he-said she-said. Hence why most people try to "settle" things out of the court even if they were the victim. You wouldn't wish the Indian legal system on your worst enemy.
Because it's the great nation of India, where harassment and dowry cases and custody laws swing hard in favor of the wife. Which has resulted in the worst of both worlds - poor women who won't even see a the light of day in front of a courthouse, never mind inside it, continue to be oppressed by their husbands, while wealthy women tired of their marriages hire ever-more-eager lawyers and slap false dowry cases on their ex-husbands.
A guy, Atul Subhash, recently (about a year ago) committed suicide because his ex-wife and her family slapped false dowry cases against him and his extremely aged parents. Another case, a woman named Jasleen Kaur falsely accused a guy of sexual harassment, because they had a minor argument on the street. That case took 4 years, and in the meantime, Jasleen went to Canada to study, received the then Chief Minister's support and never appeared in court even once. Meanwhile the guy, Savjit, was arrested, had to post bail, was called "National Predator" and "Delhi's Pervert" on mainstream media, and received zilch for all the harassment he received. After he was acquitted, he pressed criminal charges against Jasleen and her family for false accusations, but the courts threw that case away because apparently "loss of reputation" isn't enough to press charges.
All of this in a backdrop where poor women are raped, sometimes even murdered, every single minute, while actual rapists walk free and often even freely contest and win elections on the current ruling party's ticket. Yeah, India is super fucked.
One of the parent comments mentioned a similar situation involving a colleague who other comments think was from India based on the description of the dowry.
That is quite the judgement of a person you've never known, based solely on the view of one person's brief writing processing a deeply emotional experience.
There's too much apologizing for people's horrible actions these days. Nearly everyone is a sympathetic character when you get to know them, but that doesn't excuse them. There were other people, in his situation, who took different approaches that didn't result in locking a woman away in a loveless marriage for her entire life. I'm sure a lot of us come from easier situations, but the people who come from hard situations will probably tell you, yeah, it was hard, it was horrible, but he didn't have to do that.
I'm not apologizing for anyone's actions. This is not to say he is a good person. It is to say that there isn't enough evidence to judge one as a bad person.
A lot of good people have made bad choices, and these writings reflect a mere sliver of a man's life choices from the very thin perspective of one person's grief laid bare.
I agree. To me, it's like a blameless retro. You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear:
> the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well
And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.
The notions of "blame", "excuse", and "forgiveness" are strange to me now. I want to say that understanding is key, and everything else follows from understanding. If I understand a person's action, I should act, according to my values, regarding that person. Consistency to one's values is also key. Any emotions, feelings, etc. should either be recognized in my values or shouldn't interfere. If I am to praise or elevate someone, I should praise or elevate that person, and the same if I should rebuke or punish someone. Any extraneous desires that would prevent me from doing what I should do are to be contained. I must understand my values, by which I will understand the world, and how I should act within that world is then determined.
I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.
I think you're misreading that last line. I'm pretty sure what the author is saying is:
> the evening we found the love letters my mom said to me, "he wasted his entire life, his entire life, and mine as well."
Also, I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.
> I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.
It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.
> I think you're misreading that last line.
Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's *no* judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
> It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.
No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.
> The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding
If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Also on this:
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
My point here is that she's doing both.
> Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!
Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.
I (think I) got it from ReinH on birdsite (before everyone left and moved to mastodon and Bluesky). He also gave a lot of talks on blameless postmortems and culture and general SRE stuff. This is one talk but not sure if it touches on the origins https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrsvLMqF1Q
Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding? In which case, doesn't this perspective completely rule out the possibility of any appropriate blame?
> Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding?
Yet, blame is easy and satisfying and true understanding requires empathy and is hard and often unsatisfying.
The term "understanding" is fractal and infinite. Therefore
Its 100% reasonable to find a stopping point and say "I blame you" (or, as you point out, otherwise, no one would ever be allowed to assign blame).
My comment is more about intent. The "seeking" word weights heavy. Many commenters are not seeking understanding, they are seeking satisfaction. Validation. The author of the post could have stopped much sooner if they were seeking blame, they could have chosen to build a caricature to heap more judgement upon. But they chose a more nuanced and exploratory path.
Even if the end result is blame or judgement. It's important that the purpose of the journey is clear. True understanding requires empathy, and it's really hard to empathize with someone you're actively trying to judge or vilify.
There are students who get good grades on their assignments and tests, and there are students who get bad grades on their assignments and tests, but there are no good and bad students.
Does chinese law not allow a woman to individually apply for divorce without the partner's consent, or start a court case? Seems like they were both 'locked' in similar ways.
I think marrying someone despite being attracted to the other sex without telling them and then having an affair with someone definitely makes you a bad person. But that’s me.
I can even tolerate / excuse / forgive up until that point, because it is indeed an unfair system. She took a gamble and got caught, at which point she ought to have made a deal with the guy. Not exploited the other unfair system of state violence against him.
You can extrapolate this on to anyones life, not just someone with such a huge and dramatic secret they were hiding for the stability of their family life.
If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get stuck in a job or any other myriad life events occur, the weight of your own days can suddenly drain so much time and energy that years fly by. Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
And this is why society is going to shit. “Live free, no regrets” has to be one of the most narcissistic memes I’ve ever heard of. If a person commits to a partner and/or a family, they shouldn’t just hit the reset button because they’re bored or upset with how life turned out. Talk to your partner. Tell them the truth. It’s wild that this has to even be said. Obvious caveats for abuse or depression, but come on. Have some grit.
> Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
My father had an affair, with a woman. It came to light but remained contained within the family. My parents are still married. The whole situation taught me that life is complicated and sometimes situations that seem morally obvious on the surface can actually be very difficult and have lots of nuance.
When I was a teenager I dated a married man. On paper it's easier to explain "gay dude in a homophobic society" but in reality, he was an asshole and a coward. No empathy for him.
I know what you're saying, but pragmatic doesn't apply here.
We're talking about secretly dating a teenager while married with children. This is more than serving "societally taboo" urges on a transactional basis.
Suppressing what is going on tends to make things come out in even worse ways. If not suppressing it gets you murdered….
Not great. But could be worse, and it seems like it was done mindfully with minimal damage. That’s the pragmatic part.
He could have been hooking up with randos at clubs (dramatically higher disease risk), or worse, instead of what seems like a relatively stable (outside) relationship?
I’ve seen a lot worse. Not condoning, but the math seems obvious.
And his daughter may not like it, but she’s also literally only here because of it. So….
In most of the major Asian cultures, you have a very specifically shaped box to fit in. If you refuse to fit in it, you’ll be hammered on until you do. It’s not a great environment if you’re not box shaped. But society doesn’t particularly care - this was especially true 30+ years ago.
Some exceptions of course (Thai, some areas in big cities), but it’s largely still the case.
"Before you judge the man in this story too harshly"
I will judge him harshly. Instead of getting a divorce, he emotionally abused his wide and child, which probably means therapy for the child for life. He's a selfish asshole, that doesn't think about anyone but himself.
He also could have brought diseases back home to his wife (Just hearing the stories of his selfishness, he would have kept this hidden or not even gotten tested at all).
"The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you."
This is the worst case scenario. He could have gotten a divorce, and lived the life he wanted.
Not to mention the partner who he made move to another country and then still wouldn’t tell anyone about. The more I think about this post the more insanely controlling the guy seems!
Her wife was the first person she told about it, and they are still together, with a daughter.
It was a little weird for me when I found out, but if her wife is OK with it, and they're providing a stable home for their daughter, I don't see an issue with it; not really my business.
The issue is being dishonest, for decades. That's the primary issue. There are always excuses, but living your life with integrity is of the utmost importance.
Most of are out here in our own shoes walking home faithfully to our own spouse. The man in the story neglected his own spouse and CHILD to go and spend time with another partner.
I understand not being warm and loving toward a wife you were forced to marry, even if I also know it means you're punishing her on top of the fact that she's dealing with the same thing. To ask her own family to verbally abuse her into not divorcing you so that you have the LUXURY of staying closeted and hooking up with various partners during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
But to treat your child as worth nothing to you like this man did is a disgrace. I'm glad the author isn't taking it personally. Imagine growing up effectively without a father because another man has taken all of his affection away from you and your family.
>because you see, my dad was a coward. mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny.
What exactly do you call that? NoT ThE SAmE ThInG As "AbuSE"?
so by this rational a person can be abused without even being aware of it and seeing no comparable ill effect?
Where is the line drawn? Am I abusing my spouse when I decide that we're a bit too over-stretched financially and that we're going to need to skip the surprise Disney World trip that I had planned but hadn't yet told them about?
What about if I think they just didn't try their hardest during the family softball competition? Are they abusing me?
From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind:
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.
I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.
I think she absolutely has a right to her judgment. She clearly has empathy for her father, but the rest of her family also suffered--greatly, it seems--from how he went about his life.
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong.
Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.
She wrote most of it centered on his perspective (as she understands it). And if you take that line as such, then you're right. I took that line as bringing another perspective to show the damage he caused. She has a lot to unpack and showing those conflicts demonstrated it.
He was so afraid of coming out that he FORCED his wife to never divorce him and kept a lover on the side while cheating on him as well with multiple partners at the heights of the AIDS epidemic while lying to him that they had a future that he was too scared to ever make a reality. If that's not a coward, then I don't think you and I can agree on very simple definitions of words like "coward".
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.
It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.
> One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance"
Here's a funny thing, what I got from that story was that it must have been a hard and sad life for the dad, probably the mom, and especially a horrifying discovery for the mom. These are not judgments, but tidbits of empathy and sadness for all the parties involved. I didn't have to force myself into that, probably because it didn't clash with my personality or values.
If something made you tick and you want to condemn one of the people in the story, I'm wondering if forcing your brain into "accepting" would make any difference. The real question is what you feel for the other person. I think it might come out as a judgment if it clashes with your actual values and personality. If you don't recognize yourself and would have had a different approach, you might have a negative outlook on the people in the story.
I'm extremely lucky to be a straight dude in the progressive society of today's. Had I been a gay guy in the traditional Chinese culture of the 80s, I'd probably have had the same life as that dad, and employ some of the same strategies. So it's easy for me not to judge. But some people are more upfront, active, liberated, and for them it might be harder not to judge ; and I think that's fine.
For those reasons, I won't even look for such letters when my parents die. I will take a photo or two. There are of course reasons to dig in the past, but that should be done cautiously, not for sensation, and even then under the condition that we only know a little and may not understand. The past is past. Nothing you learn can change it, but it can seriously fuck up your future.
> I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
Absolutely. A person's right to privacy doesn't die with them.
Ooof. Occasionally you read something that hits different in the feelings, and this article was one for me. The regret at all the lost time and opportunity for all concerned. The might-have-beens. Sometimes, the shackles placed on us by our society, our family and ourselves are unbreakable.
I'm a dad too, and I'm in a somewhat similar situation. My son is under five, and it feels like I'm still at the very beginning of his story. I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path. It felt easier to stay closeted. Easier to date a woman. Easier to move in together, propose, get married, and even have a child than to face my truth.
I love my wife and my son, and I feel loved by them in return, but I'm also painfully aware that the version of me they love is someone I constructed. I lie constantly: about why I don't want sex, about my affairs, about my feelings, about my motivations. No one really knows me, and I don't get to be myself, not even in the relationships where I should feel safest.
I've read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and other similar books, and I'm trying to build the courage to finally do something about all of this. It's incredibly difficult. But I refuse to use my son as an excuse to keep postponing coming out. This blog has pushed me even further in that direction.
They'll be angry (well at least my wife). Their lives will be upended. But at least they'll have the chance to ask questions, to understand. They'll see me taking responsibility for the consequences of my choices, and maybe just maybe, in some way, that clarity will be a relief for all of us.
I know it may seem like the hardest thing ever - but you are doing the right thing. Come out, end the sham, start to heal. Otherwise you are in for a life of pain. I'm not gay but I'm divorced and whatever the reason for the divorce, it is always hard. But it's so much better afterwards, rather than living in a lie of a relationship.
Do what’s best for your son. There’s nothing that will overcome that guilt. Not saying what’s best for your son is for you to reveal the truth now or later. That’s entirely situational and only you know.
I don't think it's fair to consider only the son in this. I'd say do what's best for both your son and your wife. And to me that's pretty clearly telling his wife the truth here.
I think this is right. Many parents could think of choosing to opt out because raising a family can be difficult sometimes, but it’s a responsibility people have taken. Take it seriously. It’s a bit chicken to say “I’m out” whatever the reason. See them through their formative years then do your thing.
> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.
Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.
> the version of me they love is someone I constructed
It's also possible they love you because you are someone who can love them, even though it doesn't feel quite right. You're there for them.
I don't have the full picture, but thinking they don't love the real you seems simplistic. You're the sum of all parts and layers, not just what you consider core feelings. We're all putting on facades.
Try to do it peacefully, and keep good relations. That may require a lot of preparation, time, and emotional dealing, but you're weighing your struggle with your history against two lives. It may also be in your interest, because a fighting divorce may end with you not seeing your son. That's a price I consider too high.
I'm pretty certain that children are quite perceptive, and will sense an unease that something is not quite right at home. It would be a service to them to put something concrete to that unease.
Wow, I'm reading this very differently. I don't know why there has to be emotional violence erupting. Handling something that's fundamentally changed at the core of a relationship and at the core of one's identity will bring strong emotions but it doesn't have to be violent. It can also be handled with all the best qualities we all have like patience, curiosity, support, trust. Strong relationships can grow stronger after being tested.
Have you considered that it doesn't have to mean the end of your family? It's possible that there's no arrangement that meets everybody's needs. But, maybe there is.
Consider finding a therapist and quality couples counselor to help you navigate the necessary rupture as you take steps towards honesty and clarity in your relationships
I'm straight and love my wife of 44 years. But I long ago made the thought experiment of what would happen if she were in the same kind of situation you were in: what if she decided I was a mistake, or that being in a relation with a man was a mistake, and that she needed to do something else. I decided that would require I support her in that. How can you love someone and not want what is best for them, even if that has a cost?
I don't know your wife, and I don't know if she would feel the same way. Maybe she would?
I can relate to this probably the most out of everything I've seen on HN so far. My fiancee is pansexual and overall seems to prefer women, so I surely am quite a bit of a surprise in her life (to the point where her family laughed at the fact that I 'fixed her' the first time I met them...) as a straight man. I know she loves me, I love her with all my heart but I am aware that at some point she may want to change me for someone of the opposite sex. I have therefore decided that as long as this does not happen behind my back I will support her, even if that means I have to endure a lot of pain.
I don't really see why you should support that. In your case your wife is not closeted and living a lie, everything is out in the open. So deciding to change you for someone else, regardless of sex, is no different than if I decided to change my wife for another woman. We give stuff up to make a commitment to someone else. It doesn't always work out and I'm not saying people should stay together when they don't want to, but I am questioning your pre-acceptance of your partner wanting to shag someone else even though that would clearly make you very unhappy.
"Prefer women" could be in a sexual context, romantic context, platonic, etc. and the commenter above didn't define it. I imagine it's hard enough for bisexual people to be asked if they're "living a lie" by having to choose a side.
For you and anyone else reading this I recommend the book "the designer relationship" - its actually about polyamory but I think it does a great job solidifying the concept that really, a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be, not defined by social norms. What comes first is open and honest communication and negotating through hard conversations to find a way of mutually meeting everyones needs
FWIW my wife is bi and dates women, not that really ever bothered me but in no way has it ever been more damaging to our marriage beyond basic scheduling conflicts. I will admit I would have had a much harder time opening up to her being with other men though. Im lucky that she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em I guess, but partly thats because our marriage is otherwise great and shes already free to explore her gay side so why would she want to leave?
I admit that when reading the description of your relationship (I don't mean to be disrespectful, for what it's worth) I can't help but wonder how it can possibly be consistent with "a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be." It really reads like the relationship is whatever _she_ wants it to be.
If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.
I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
In experiments they have found that women are much more ok with sexual infidelity than men. They aren’t fully ok with it just more ok with it than men by a huge margin. There’s a huge gender difference and given how culture doesn’t differentiate this aspect in terms of teaching, logically the only origin is biological.
It fits with evolutionary psychology as well. If a wife engages in sexual infidelity a man could end up raising a child that is not his own and that is a huge evolutionary cost so men evolved to be extremely guarded against sexual affairs while for women the cost is just a man potentially raising another child. She loses resources of the man but if the man doesn’t raise another child it’s not as huge of a deal. This isn’t stuff I’m making up… it’s academic.
For you to be in a polyamorous relationship you are definitely overriding your default biological drive and giving evolutionary advantages to your mate (if she is female and you male). Birth control largely eliminates this cost but the emotional states are the same in the sense that is a form of submission. Case in point: Most likely it is the female partner that initiated polyamory and the male partner who had to learn how to accept it.
Between this, a post about disrespecting your wife if they have sex during an open relationship, and your other post about emotional violence being inflicted on a child if their parent comes out as gay, you need to seek some therapy. This is major incel vibes.
You have a right to have firm boundaries and communicate them clearly to your partner. Doing so will usually make a relationship and life together better, not worse because your partner will respect your honesty and strength. If her doing that will hurt you, I strongly recommend you communicate clearly and up front that you know she has those interests, but following up on them is a deal breaker for you, and you need her to be honest about that. You’re not even married yet, have the conversation now! It won’t be good for you or for her to be an angry shell of yourself like the dad in the article, making a sacrifice you never wanted to make.
dude fuck that - cheating is cheating - don't be that guy (unless you're into that sort of thing, of course). if she feels that you aren't the one for her, drop it like it's hot. there's plenty of other fish in the sea
Lots of judgment all over this thread. I vote more of us listen to anecdotes like this one here, from someone whose long and successful relationship is based on wanting the best for someone else--who they recognize as human and fallible--even when that means change.
If you want marriage to mean that your partner will never change, or that the 100% match on the inside what you think they are looking from the outside, you're gonna have a hard time. This discussion is just further down the continuum than most.
(Exceptions made for arranged marriages and the like; the primary purpose there isn't romantic love-based companionship, so there isn't a pretense to shatter.)
I think this is a good example of how lying can affect one's autonomy (though I don't remotely hold that as an absolute principle). In the ideal exercise of love, I agree with your claim. I don't think it's dismantled in practice, but I think it is weaker. The spouse fell in love with "someone", but it turns out it's just a dummy of the other spouse. To some extent, probably everyone only loves or even perceives imperfect images of others, but this takes it a step further. I think this is somewhat different from supporting a disabled/ill spouse, because that condition arose through no fault of anyone (presumably). I think this is also different from a spouse, sometime into the marriage, realizing a different romantic/sexual orientation, because no one could've known at the time of marriage (presumably).
I'll add another scenario like this would be if ones partner had an egg-breaking epiphany and decided they needed to transition. And my personal conclusion would be the same.
Obviously I can only speak for myself here but I wouldn't be so understanding, especially when my partner lied about such a fundamental aspect of their life and joined in a union of marriage with me.
I suppose, for me it would feel like the vows they took where not real and the foundation of our life, all the memories, thoughts and feelings were nothing but smoke and mirrors.
You're right, we're all humans and life is complex but I think it's selfish to waste your partner's life for years because you can't face the truth. I suppose that a bitter end is better than endless bitterness however.
Not all lies are equal. Marriage is a contract built on trust and commitment. When you have been lying about that specifically, you have defrauded someone.
You’ve stolen time and emotional energy from these people. They can never get those years back.
Your children have been deprived of seeing parents role modeling romantic love. They have built their entire world views based on your behavior towards your spouse, which incorporated subtle lies and deception.
The victims of your fraud now have to deal with second guessing which things you said might be true and which might be lies - you shatter everything they ever believed throughout the marriage. It is a horrendous thing to put people through.
So can I understand why they did it? Sure. But I will definitely judge them for their actions and not support them.
Exactly. I’ve even seen cases of murder where I sympathize with the perpetrator. But we need to not get too involved with the narrators plight. It’s a first person story and it’s easy to get strung along by that perspective.
For the article and the many admissions in the thread underneath people can’t just pay attention to and sympathize with the perpetrator you need to take the next step an construct realistic avatars for his relationships and visualize the intense damage done to them as well.
Since you took this path, I'd suggest you not have affairs while married. Either divorce now or consider waiting 10 years while your son really needs you.
Yeah if you wanna be closeted, fine - live like it then. Otherwise it proves getting your dick wet is actually more important to you than the wife and child you claim to love.
If it’s any comfort, no one ever truly knows who you are, even if you wanted to be totally honest.
Everyone has a version of you they’ve constructed, no one has your entire perspective on your life and access to your inner thoughts, and even if they did they would forget or misinterpret details.
Don’t chase a desire to have people know the real you, they never will. Even if you had a new gay lover just because they know you’re gay doesn’t mean they know the real you.
And sometimes people don’t even know their own real self.
"If you're going to pretend to be someone, why not pretend to be someone who doesn't hit on the cocktail waitress when he's away from his family?"
Edit: found the exact quote:
> "I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."
> Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
> "But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
> The narcissist demands absolutism in all things-- relative to himself.
Do you plan to find a new relationship after you break up with your wife? Is the desire to come out because of that or because you just want to stop lying to them and be honest about who you are? I will just say that if you have a good relationship with your wife and child, perhaps it’s worth it keeping things to yourself until your son is out of the house. If you leave them, you might find yourself in terrible relationships for a long time, or you may strike luck. But as someone who never managed to have a good relationship and family I wish I had a wife who actually wants sex and children and if I had that I would never leave even if I had to sacrifice a lot. But I do want that, maybe you never really did!?
Writing, journaling, is such a good way to process thoughts and emotions and this is a great example. I'm grateful for this person sharing her very personal journal entries with us even though it is not required at all. It sets a great example of what to write about and how. It also reveals that people and the lives they live are incredibly complicated and messy. The longer I live and the more people I get to know the more I believe that nobody is as simple and "good" as they seem on the surface. If your life has been simple and relatively pain free up to this point, just wait, and try not to judge others in situations more difficult and complicated than yours too harshly. There is much you do not yet know.
I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering.
> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else
That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.
> he wasted his entire life, my mom said
In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.
The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life. He didn't have to live with his wife much. He liked the idea of having a daughter.
Given the hand he was dealt it's a pretty good outcome for himself. Grossly selfish, but not a waste for himself.
This, I do think parents have a right to secrecy. Kids don't have to know everything.
Even the idea that our partners/spouses/SO should know everything about us is waaaay too extreme. I think that as long as we love and don't hurt each others and we respect the rules we set between each others it is ok to keep some things secrets.
From what I understand from the author's post, the whole marriage was a big lie to begin with so it is not like authors parents really loved each others. While we can criticize his father for not accepting divorce and thus allowing his mother to rebuild a life, we can hardly call him cheating. And I don't think kids have a right to know everything. I know my parents have had at least one major crisis when I was a kid without knowing the specifics but I have no right nor need to know why. It was between them.
A lot of couples only stay married because it is easier from an organisationnal, social and economic point of view than divorcing anyway.
Some don’t fully understand that the universe does not owe you any camaraderie in your affairs. Not even a small mouse to talk to. Many live the same paths we live entirely alone. While life took from her a real romance, it did not take from her partnership. Friends along your travels is not guaranteed, neither are best friends, or the bestest of best friends. Make do, seriously.
Yup, though often will deny it if it comes out. The ‘subconscious’ part is not often fully unknown forever, even if it may be uncouth to acknowledge such awareness.
Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you?
There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe
The author obviously has this as an acquired habit or affectation, possibly for stylistic reasons. It's interesting that some people can read this just as well as normal prose, but to others it feels as if someone is pouring sand all over their well-oiled gears. I gave up after a paragraph as well.
I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.
Many readers rely on articles being written in a specific language, does that mean every writer is obligated to publish every piece in every language?
Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
Maybe it's because I studied poetry, or because I was a voracious reader of experimental writing when I was younger, but I've probably worked my way through thousands of pages of uncapitalized or unconventionally capitalized writing; I can empathize if it's more difficult for you to read (personally I would consider an absence of paragraph breaks a nearly-unforgivable travesty), and I wouldn't even deny you the opportunity to complain about it.
But I think calling it "a must" for accessibility is perhaps overstating it a bit.
There is no obligation at all (my comment did not include any must beyond that being a requirement for broadly accessible text either). Merely the observation that if you want to write accessible text in any chosen language, following conventions means that you expand your reach.
Experimental language has its place. I can quite enjoy that too depending on the context. But combining the wish to convey a story or message with avant-garde text layout turns it into something more akin to art. I'm not always in the mood for that, in part because it is more taxing to engage with. In this case I figure the goal of the author is for readers to hear their story, not grapple with their specific manner of self-expression. Of course if their life goal is to make lowercase text common and acceptable, then this may be completely on point. My point about the accessibility of the text still stands though.
> Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
I can train myself to read text upside-down as well, or in Klingon, or with no spaces at all. I have no wish to do so, since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers. Besides, being able to read well because you have a solid grasp on the conventions, lexicon, and idioms used is a net benefit to me. Our brains are pattern matching machines after all — pattern recognition is what we humans excel in. If have no desire to diminish that skill either.
> since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers.
To push back on this, following convention is often the easy thing to do (so not something regarded versus defaulted to).
There's a literary history of form influencing story; there was even a story about a famous example of this on HN recently that discussed this year's Nobel laureate—who notably publishes long novels that play with punctuation conventions: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/
I find that people who make a point out of violating writing norms as part of their house style typically don't have thoughts worth communicating. Nothing is missed by not training myself instead of reading something that flows smoothly.
Generally agree with that, but in this particular case I don't think this text was designed to be broadly accessible, given the content and the platform (little indie website).
Edit: checked out some of their other posts and they don't always use this style. Seems like a pretty deliberate choice here.
It doesn't improve readability for sure but for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.
English is a second language for me and I feel really bad when I impose a grammar mistake or a badly put together sentence to my readers!
So for me pushing that on purpose is borderline insulting to the reader ie. suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
> for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.
Same for me. See Sam Altman, for example.
> suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
These days you actually have to fight against spell checkers to avoid having capitals after a period.
The lower case "I" stands out very much in reading it as a self-annihilating affectation.
However, the sentences are well formed. If you really want to lose your breath, try "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Marquez. You really won't be able to put it down.
It's interesting to me that you had such difficulty, and it makes me wonder how old you are. Growing up using instant messengers on the internet in the '90s and early '00s, it was normal to type without ever using capital letters, except for emphasis. The only thing that changes that style is when someone is typing on a phone that capitalizes for them (though one friend manually undoes those "corrections").
Wow, driven to a lifetime of harmful decisions by an extremely regressive society. Would he have settled down and been faithful if he could have started off right in his teens, open and truthful and honest? Lies become a habit and I’ve known others who couldn’t break themselves of the cheating/lying habit and lost whole friend groups for it.
"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.
Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.
There is some sociology/psychology research based on concepts like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs that motivate human behavior. There is also memoirs of Bonnie Ware, "Regrets of the Dying", where she as a nurse at an old folks home over several years interviewed people who are about to die and their regrets turn out to be:
not living a life true to oneself, working too hard, not having the courage to express feelings, losing touch with friends, and not allowing oneself to be happier.
With a heavy overweight on the first point.
I think that the comment "he wasted his life" is supposed to be in reference to this, that most people realize at the end that nothing really mattered, and that they chose to follow the structures of society by default instead of daring to do what they inherently wanted intrinsically. Then you can feel as your life was wasted, you got a single chance to play around and do what you like with your brief time in the universe and you chose to let someone else dictate how that was going to go, a waste.
The thing is, that This is speculation (with all respect).
I, on the other hand, do not lack courage to do hard things. But I have learned that it is a strawman - it does not make you happier to quite you job, leave your spouse, go for your passion in a startup, etc.
Luckily I fucked up everything in that fever dream early enough that it did not have substantiel impact on my life.
He wanted to have a different life, but he didn't embrace it. Instead he lied to his wife and lover. In a more recent update he was cheating on his way lover as well, so he comes out looking pretty bad. At the end of the story everyone in his family is hurt by his actions. Send like he wasted his life and hers if that was the best he could do
This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.
None of us here ever knew the man, and the only reports we have on his life are from a pseudo anon author who admits that they also did not know him very well. That any of us, including the author, are justified in calling him "villanous" is a big stretch in my opinion. It feels more likely that the author, and perhaps you, simply disagree with the decisions he made. Which is fine, but a far cry from villainy.
We don't have a 24/7/365 video feed of the man's life with which to throughly judge him on, this is true. So casting him as a villian based on this shadow caricature version of a story we've been told might be unfair to the actual person. We're not Michael at the heavenly gates or Osiris or Anubis though, we're just going off of what's been written. Do the actions of that man as described not qualify as villainous to you? It’s small, affecting only the lives of those in his immediate vicinity. But it’s still not good. Maybe little V villainy not big V villainy like Voldemort?
It's mind-boggling to me how many commenters are here to defend the honor of a serial adulterer who broke the hearts of the people most related to and dependent upon him. Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
There are a number of comments here that read like "yes, but you have to understand those things benefitted the father". It's like people think if you're doing something that hurts other people, it's OK if that's for selfish reasons? I guess I'll try not to think of how this reflects on our industry as a whole.
Are people defending his honor, or just offering sympathy? Because I don't find sympathy strange at all. He betrayed the trust of a lot of people he claimed to care about, but also barely had any unfettered happiness in a too-short life. He was complicated, as we all are.
For all we know that entire account is fiction. None of us know the man or the author yet we feel content to pass judgement on his life from a few paragraphs of from a narrator who has made it clear they also didn't know him well.
>Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
It's because they have no experience with have such a bad person in a supposed "caregiver" role in their life so their minds literally can't imagine it. They think he just MUST be misunderstood instead of just callous and uncaring.
Or they are a parent and can't imagine not carit about their own child, so they assume it must be a universal thing, and the father MUST have loved her, even if he didn't show it. Truth is, a fuck ton of people don't love, like, or give two shits about their own children. These people do exist.
That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with.
So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I also grew up with abusive parents (plural). Poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, violence. The whole nine. You can check my comment history, I talk about it openly on here. Here's one previous comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400583
Others extend clearly bad people who do bad things more grace than they deserve if they are parents. You hear things like "I'm sure they love their children but are stressed and don't know how to express it. It's probably hard for them." (Ignoring how hard it is for the innocent CHILDREN!)
However, I know from experience there's no love there. No like. Only hate.
And there more to this story than a closeted gay man. The author made it clear he was also distant as a father and wasn't at all a caretaker to her either. All evidence from the post points to the fact the father was callous and uncaring to those around him. Using others for his own gain. The followup shows he was having affairs from his affair partner before he died. This is not someone who would have been a kind man if he was just allowed to come out.
The other thing that immediately stood out to me that nobody else is noticing - the father encouraged a man half his age to give up his entire life in China to come to Canada on a fucking student visa (which is inherently temporary) with the, most likely, promise (stated or unstated) that he'd marry him and sponsor him as a permanent resident and they'd build a new life together. All evidence points to deception here. He wasn't making moves to legally divorce his wife and was having affairs with other men on top of that. You can't legally work on a student visa, so the partner would have been entirely financially dependent on the father.
It’s always surprising to me how so many people believe in ideals. Finding love. Living happily thereafter. These are ideals and you’d be truly lucky to have it in your life. One in a billion. Life is ephemeral. We are innately fickle beings shifting from one equilibrium to another. Yet we long for a mirage of permanence.
Judging by the follow up that reveals he was cheating on his lover as well and had been doing it for years he seems to agree with your last two lines. He got the most out of life, but hurt his lover, wife and daughter in the process
Did it ever occur to her that he wanted a child with his wife? That he loved his wife - even though not romantically? And still had a happy life as a father of her? The author seems to have many misconceptions about gay people..
It does not sound as such if you read the content of the post. It's hardly a misconception to suggest that gay men do not generally fall in love with women.
> It does not sound as such if you read the content of the post. It's hardly a misconception to suggest that gay men do not generally fall in love with women.
Aside from the fact that this premise is incorrect, it's also inapplicable, because, as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.
How do you know the father never said he was gay? He may well have said that to the man he enjoyed dating as opposed to the wife whom he clearly didn't like very much.
Man… the battle between cultural expectations and our true selves is humanity’s oldest conflict. A few people get lucky. Most of us survive in the cracks.
No capitalization was as surprising as the narration itself… not sure how to feel about it! Counter culture?
honestly ive had it with the shift key myself. just a nuisance. besides, the text looks much nicer and 'even' when every letter is broadly the same height, but that is ofcourse subjective.
it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
Capital letters at the start of sentences makes reading easier for those who are used to reading languages where that is customary. The absence is a noticeable reduction in ease of reading.
> it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
Easy: Latin script.
The more interesting question is the source of lower case letters which appeared much later.
Even though many of us might not relate exactly to the circumstances, we can relate to the feelings. She’s an excellent writer. Some of her other essays are good.
Many years ago, I read The Bridges of Madison County. This reminds me a bit of that.
I love the occasionally very surprising submission on here. Sometimes, something with nothing to do with technology touches this group of jaded techies enough to bring it to the front page.
> i learn the story afterwards. dad went upstairs for a lie-down after dinner, but was awoken by severe chest pain. he vomits, which is a thing he never does, and asks mom to call 911 immediately. she does and provides all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her that they've sent for an ambulance, and they should get ready to go.
> so they get ready, and then they wait. they wait for 15 long minutes, my dad in an extreme amount of pain, and nothing happens.
> mom calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. the dispatcher responds that don't have visibility on that. she asks if she should just drive my dad to the hospital and is advised that the best thing to do is to keep waiting.
> so they wait another 15 long minutes, and still no one shows up. the house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes away from a major highway, a ten minute drive from the hospital.
> mom decides that they should not keep waiting. she and my brother help dad into the car, and they drive him to the hospital.
> they arrive at the emergency room entrance. dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, lurches forwards, and dies on the front steps of the hospital.
What the fuck, that's horrible.
My dad's house is in a rural area of the country. He sadly passed away a week ago, I found him in his bed while coming to visit, he didn't pick up the phone that day, despite us having talked just the day before. When I found him, I called the emergency number and they still sent an ambulance, it was at the house in like 15-20 minutes, they confirmed the situation and did some paperwork and helped me with the next steps.
I can't imagine how horrible the circumstances in the article must feel and I'm not even sure what "justice" would look in a case like that, how the fuck can an emergency line dispatcher not have "visibility" on an emergency call, that's their one fucking job!
This is something I've noticed with EMTs & Ambulances. They don't actually move all that fast and I'm sure they have their reasons. But it's always seemed like driving to the hospital would be better and I wonder how much truth there is to that.
Although I feel that many countries have transitioned to a time of liberty, when people can live as they truly wish, some people are afraid to embrace this freedom.
Of course, families can be a powerful force.
But, as my father once told me: family are those who are near you [not necessarily those you share genes with].
Sometimes, people make the decisions they do because others they saw before them made the opposite decision too - or they made the decision they did because they felt the consequences of making it any other way would be worse.
when my mom died i found a bunch of letters she wrote to people but never sent. Theres so much to peoples lives that you can never fully know and some of the things really shocked me. Appreciate you sharing your story, many parallels that I can appreciate through reading.
So, what should you do if you know someone trapped in this kind of situation?
I currently know someone like this. He's not homosexual, so it's not quite the same issue.
But he's gotten himself trapped in a relationship, and worst of all, cannot admit it to his friends. The only reason I know is that the one friend he did tell, has told the rest of his friends. We've known each other since childhood, yet he doesn't ask me for help. Which is up to him, of course, but he also doesn't know that I know that he is keeping a remarkably straight face about his situation. In a way it would be easier if I hadn't been told.
So now, I have to pretend like I think he's just a single man about town. He just shows up to everything when I'm around, and chats to me like he always has throughout the years. We'll meet another old friend, yet his life update is that he's just like any other bachelor-for-life, just enjoying his video games and freedom, while the rest of us are having kids and worrying about school bills.
It's a "partner" who uses him for his wealth. No kids, and there won't be any, because I know how those are made and you have to do certain things that are not being done.
When you talk to the guy, everything is great. Not even a sign that he has gotten hitched to this lady, or is dating, or that anything has happened at all.
Yeah it's weird. I was incredulous when I was told.
I'm saddened by the followup, when she asserts that the fantasy of seeing her dad happy, settled, and domestic was a "stupidly heteronormative fantasy".
Quoting the “what to submit” guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I find it very hard to judge whether I'm fulfilling that part of the guidelines. I only have a few submissions, and I think I'm good there, but I'm more conflicted when it comes to upvoting or engaging in other people's submissions. For example, earlier today I saw a thread on German laws on date rape drugs. I upvoted the thread. Do I think it's important for people to talk about date rape drugs? Certainly. I'm not sure if it falls under satisfying my "intellectual curiosity", though. Is HN "the right place" for this conversation? I'm not sure, though I think the reality on the ground would say "yes". Most likely, all of this is an organic adaptation that HN has experienced.
Don't be a phony. Be true to yourself. Don't let your life be governed by the mores of others.
This article isn't about sexuality. It's about honesty and the impact that artifice can have, not only on your own life, but also on the lives of others.
I see these comments on most HN threads that aren’t about tech stuff, but to me these are the best part of HN. I think it should include things people in tech who are also humans find interesting and want to discuss, like this, not just discussions of the latest cpu architecture or whatever. If you don’t find it interesting ignore it, and the algorithm will make it go away on its own if most people agree!
just as HN is segregated from the majority of the web by focused interests within the community at large, within this community there could also be segregation of interests. you don't need to try to stamp it out every time you hear about it, that's like the web trying to stamp out HN
Some people don't really get to "decide" for themselves.
FTA:
> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
There is no life without pain and suffering. It's as much a law of nature as gravity. Life needs something to push against, to struggle to overcome. Without that there simply is no life. If life doesn't struggle and suffer against things it never even starts. Once started, if life stops struggling and suffering, it quickly dies.
Religion and tradition have elevated humanity and it's good to acknowledge that. They never could have eliminated suffering, only changed the sources and types of suffering. It is helpful for many of us to have things like religion and traditions to give the suffering more meaning, sense, and purpose.
Those are both embodied expectations of idealizations.
When people like the father never find the courage to speak, they will be harmed/destroyed/etc. in exactly the way those traditions would warn against.
Very well written. Many here in the comments seeking to find sense in this matter or pass judgment; a wise person would simply nod in acknowledgement, understanding that things simply are the way they are.
I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".
Yep, I find that stylistic writing choice to be rather selfish. It might be because I'm a gamedev at heart but a huge part of writing is UX: sure you have something to say but the way you say it for the reader to actually go through all of it is almost as important.
That's why I think shortish chapters are good UX, instead of a single unbroken one. Using a good font, making use of paragraphs to divide sections and using caps whenever required.
I personally think if a writer doesn't care to even add a bunch capitalisation to make my life easier then I assume that piece of writing is mainly for themselves and I immediately stop reading, since it's not meant for me but for them.
Agreed. I normally find the complaints about formatting to be petty, but for a long form writing piece like this, all lowercase is just a bad choice with no discernable upside.
Capitalization would not change the content at all, but would make it easier to read. People reading English have expectations are capitalization. Breaking those expectations makes the text more difficult to read and feel less effortless.
They still respect writing rules, in fact - except for the capitalizations.
If they wrote, say, phonetically instead, the text would become utterly unreadable, even though the raw thoughts in one's head aren't expressed in written English.
Poetry works in a different way, though. The lines are short and your eyes won't struggle much with continuity. e.e.cummings eschewed capitalizations as well and his poetry is still easily readable (to me at least).
A larger block of text is harder to parse without capitalizations. This is actually why they developed in the first place. Original Roman writing was very "blocky" and thus much harder to read, see for example this:
Hmm I see your point, though to be fair, that Roman writing is also missing spacing and punctuation.
My guess is the author knows what they are doing and is intentionally reinforcing the disoriented and unsettled feeling. Or, at least, is intentionally making no effort to mitigate it.
(In many other posts, capitalisation rules are followed.)
I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
As I understand it the root was people using the iPhone with autocorrect turned off. That’s how someone from the tumblr emo crowd (where it was definitely prevalent!) explained it to me, and the reason was because there was a lot of culture specific terminology used (including deliberate misspellings of words) that was difficult if autocorrect was switched on.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
This is not really anything new, back in AIM and SMS messaging days, people would type "wuu2" or "whats up" to a friend, but to express the same idea in an email, you would probably be sending some variant of "What are you up to?"
There is massively different subtext between the two. Autocapitalization and autocorrect represents a limit on the subtextual bandwidth you can communicate along with a message. Restrictions on subtextual bandwith are not ideal when your generation relies on text-based communication for evermore intimate interactions - that "whats up" message might be the start of you asking someone out on a date, I don't want it formatted the same way as a message I would send my boss.
I've always wondered what the point of capital letters even is? It doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile to the language. You need to learn 26 extra shapes, and then some arbitrary rules for when to use the majuscule. But if you never heard of capital letters, nobody will be confused by what you wrote.
They make scanning and reading text easier since they make jumping to the end/start of sentences easier. When you read your eyes are constantly jumping ahead and even backwards. The capital letters help you land quickly back at significant positions in the text since they are associated with boundaries in logical clauses.
If that were the point, why does English capitalize proper nouns? That would seem to complicate finding the start of a sentence. Besides, you have periods, exclamation points, and question marks at the ends of sentences anyway.
In German even ordinary nouns are capitalized, making it even less easy to find the capital at the start of a sentence.
1. Dots are tiny and are hard to see. A capital letter is a more visible indicator of the start of the sentence.
2. English barely uses any punctuation (vs. Russian) therefore making adherence to readability rules even more important. Paragraphs are also nicer to read vs. trying to read a wall of text.
Homophobia sucks massive dick. It doesn't take being gay to despise people who's collective "wisdom" subjects millions to lifelong suffering like that.
This is not an acceptable comment on HN. It's not OK to scold or harangue people like this here. The guidelines foremost ask us to "Be kind" in comments, and that isn't negated just because you disapprove of what the parent commenter has done. Further, we've had to ask you repeatedly to observe the guidelines and refrain from trolling. We have to ban accounts that continue to act this way. Please stop this if you want to keep participating here. A reminder of the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree with the sentiment but staying quiet is not right because it takes away the rest of the wifes life. He should have the courage to tell her so she at least has a choice of what to do.
You talk like a coming-out divorce ‘upends’ a family in some unprecedented way. People get divorced all the time. Families reconfigure, children adapt, adults survive. Get a grip.
No. Divorce ruins the lives of the kids. Look at the statistics. The outcome and financial damage and emotional damage is horrid.
The problem is more that it’s normalized. I think the normalization is wrong. Similar to how North Korea normalized poverty. Marriage should be taken seriously and divorce is extremely serious. The fact that you think of it as nothing is whats out of touch.
Eh? No. The wife is living in an illusion constructed as a manipulation by the husband. Either the husband maintains the illusion till death and no one is hurt or the husband destroys it and allows himself to be happy at the cost of the happiness of others that he chose to manipulate.
This is insulting. I simply have a different opinion than you.
I think if you have the ability to tell someone in public to go to therapy without realizing how rude and insulting and uncivil it is, you’re the one that needs therapy. Wake up.
It’s not sickening at all. Think about this: You’re biased like many people reading it.
It’s easy to get emotionally strung along by his first person narrative but you need to think bigger. You need to construct avatars for the wife and for the child and visualize the emotional damage done to them. What he did isn’t trivial. He lied and manipulated his wife and had a child with her. That is a fucking crime. Constructing a total lie and manipulating his partner to sacrifice everything to live that lie with him and then to bring a child into that lie and force him to grow up with it.
I think people like you are blind. It’s one thing to disagree with me but to call what I said sickening? You enjoy upending lives and manipulating people? Maybe you’re sick?
No that’s not true at all. I’m not going to fall for your trope of just calling people sick without understanding their perspective. You’re not sick. Just stupid. you are biased and you aren’t thinking from the perspective of the lives he has ruined all in the name of emotional cowardice of admitting who he is. I get how hard it is, but it doesn’t justify what he did.
I share this sentiment. Most in the west (especially on HN) have been conditioned to believe mercy must always be granted and justice is evil. You can’t have one without the other or society falls apart.
As a child of a mother who cheated and ruined our family, I complete agree with you. This story filled me with disgust, and I want to live in a culture where people like this feel guilt at what they did. The sibling response here is happy to tut-tut you with the weight of progressive cultural authority behind them, as only a short sighted ideologue could. Lying of this level is bad for the family and bad for society. Protecting it is akin to protesting the removal of a cancerous tumor.
Wishing for liars to live terrible lives does not help your life. At all. It makes it worse.
This comment and mindset is self-destructive. Yes, bad things happen - but nothing is ruined. There is no such thing as ruining, only changing. The relationship changes, the people change, and your understanding changes.
Desperately vying for any sense of sameness, and forcing yourself to continue a life that is not true, doesn't serve you or anyone.
Things can be good. You can get divorced and that can be a better outcome. Things can change.
And even if you don't consider the well-being of the father at all, surely the best thing for his wife and child isn't for him to continue the charade. I certainly wouldn't want that, in their place.
Straight people will never understand the crushing suffocating binding evil of straight supremacy. They call a gay man a coward when they and their kind are murderers of ours.
The deliberate choice of committing such a basic mistake of lower-casing the beginning of all sentences is an insult. I am afraid of reading it, becoming desensitized, and starting to do the same.
Capital letters come from Roman script. Lowercase letters come from a medieval administrative script (Carolingian minuscule). So you could say that we are mixing two completely different scripts. This becomes very clear when you look at a text written entirely in lowercase letters: the typeface is so uniform that I, at least, find it very pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, this is not the norm. Instead, I am condemned to live in a world where I have to look at writing consisting of two obviously thrown-together scripts day in and day out. Schopenhauer was right: the world is a vale of tears!
Ouch. This hits incredibly hard.
I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became one myself.
Before you judge the man in this story too harshly — and there’s certainly much to judge, especially given the follow-up post — consider the environment he and I grew up in. Being gay as a young teenager in the early 1990s could feel literally like a death sentence. AIDS panic was everywhere. Gay men in movies were comedy sidekicks or dying wrecks (“Philadelphia”). There was a real threat of violence from other kids. If you could pass as straight, why wouldn’t you give it your best shot? The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you. (This is literally how I imagined gay life at age 13.)
I still feel like I’m barely getting started on the therapy journey to recover from those decades. Seems like the man in the story never had the chance for professional help (or didn’t seek it). The compartmentalization can be extremely taxing. He disappointed many people, but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.
There's judging people, and there's judging actions.
- Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this.
- Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation.
- Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.
- You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
>Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK
In what world is this ever "OK"?
“OK” is an over-simplified word to use here. It’s incredibly complicated. And it changes with the era and location. If it’s illegal to be gay where you are, or if there literally is no societal understanding of gayness like in the 1700s or whatever where staying a single man is not always an option, I don’t think asking someone to be celibate their entire life is reasonable either. It’s still not _great_ but I don’t blame the individual as much as I do society.
Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.
Several cultures are okay with open marriage. Usually you have agreement between parties, however.
those aren't called affairs though. just relationships.
Once i realized he was gay and chinese it just read how i expected it would go for most in that situation and time period. I am not gay, traditional, chinese or quite as old (probably i am 15 years younger than the gay dad) but i hope i would pull it off as well as he appears to in that situation. He raised only minorly messed up kids, managed to find a little of what his heart felt was love. Biggest fail was not finding a lesbian in the same situation to pull this off together and avoid the lieing and resentment and pain caused to the other partner from a marriage only known to be a sham to one party.
At 57, that means he entered university during the early to mid 1980s.
That was peak AIDS phobia (for good reason), and the anti-gay rhetoric was also at its peak.
There was a lot more to lose coming out during those days, beyond just marriage and family cold-shoulders.
By good reason, I mean people were panicked because people didn’t know which activities could spread the virus. Anyone else remember toilet seat fears?
I wasn't in any way judging the father harshly when I read it. I also read between the lines that there was additionally "traditional Asian culture" as another factor.
I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union", but I can easily imagine that it was his wife's desire.
A very sad story in general. I lost my mom a few years ago and I suspect I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
> I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union",
They might be lead to believe "if only we got married ... if only we had kids ... that will 'fix' it." Even straight couples who aren't in love fall into this trap.
I don't know how well real life imitates art, but a lot of films involving gay historical characters have a similar enough narrative I assume it has some grain of truth: The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice. Maybe they even have some small amount of feelings for the spouse or think they can "learn to love them." See Rustin 2023 as an example of the psychology in action.
> I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
Sorry for that. Loss is one of the hardest, most confusing emotions. That lack of closure and the unknown is a truly awful feeling.
> The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice.
What's striking about those stories is that there were clearly quite a lot of cases where people objectively chose not to be gay, but they did it by repressing and masking it away by working hard on exemplary marriages that delivered many offspring to their name. Ultimately this means that yes indeed they could chose to not be gay, but they would have to sacrifice their whole sense of self just to comply with a societal norm.
Being gay isn't the choice here, choosing not to act on your attraction/desires is. Might feel nitpicky but a very important distinction.
It is a sad story. But I will say that events in my life have really made me regret questioning the decisions of others.
I did things “right” I met my wife right after college, and I loved her dearly. We lived a happy life and have a wonderful son. We lost her a couple of years ago to cancer, followed by my parents and my mother and father in law, all of whom i was incredibly close with.
Yet life carries on. I come from a very traditional ethnic-focused catholic background. I’m not going to be following the standard script. I’m in my 40s, any partner will likely be divorced with their own child(ren). I’m not having more children. Will that partner be compared to my wife? Will I judged if she is too old/young/in a higher/lower status profession?
Reality: everyone has been incredibly supportive of my family and I. But the anxiety is there.
I would just say in looking at the lives of others, try to walk in their shoes. By all accounts the father in the story was not a perfect man. Few of us are. But consider that he was facing certain and complete rejection by his entire world, and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad.
"and he most likely made the choice that he felt was the least bad."
The least bad for him.
"mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny"
I strongly disagree. The father passed on the same trauma he experienced to his own child. It makes it worse because he knows exactly how painful it is but did it anyways.
I'm watching my ex do the same thing to our kid. I understand it on a mechanical level. But on an emotional level I will never understand how you can look into the eyes of your child and hurt them.
The mechanics of it are what you see in the OP. I see it in my parents, my aunts/uncles, and my cousins. It's somewhere between denial and minimization. It's like a defense mechanism against the truth which is something like my father didn't love me enough to not severely damage me. "They did the best they could" is a common refrain. Ultimately that ends up being their justification for hurting their own kids.
There is a balance to hit here. Yes, we are all human and you can't expect perfection. What you can expect and what everyone deserves from their loved ones is for them to at all points try to and not hurt you. There's forgiveness for coming up short if there's effort and steady improvement.
I agree. I don't expect perfection from anyone, including myself. But what I expect from myself is to give my kids a better upbringing than I had - which was actually a mostly great upbringing, but we should always strive to be even better. I despise parents who hurt their kids through negligence and inaction, I find it inexcusable.
Having kids is half the reason (or more) for such marriages, nothing completes the nuclear family picture quite like it. And not like it's easy for gay couples in accepting environments to have kids either, surrogacy is banned in most countries ("liberal" ones too, US is kind of an exception here) and adoption is nigh impossible. Some countries like Italy go as far as selectively making both illegal, but only for gay couples.
I would say many asian parents care very little about the partner, as long as they get their grandkids. A mix of that and "what would society think".
Where did you hear that surrogacy is banned in most places outside the USA? That's just not true, and I suspect you've been indoctrinated with more US-exceptionalism. Surrogacy is not banned in the UK, Australia, NZ, much of Europe, Iran, much of Asia, etc.
It's "legal" at first glance but it's effectively banned in most cases. No monetary compensation, only direct relatives, only traditional pregnancy, etc.
It's outright banned (commercial) in most of EU. In most countries it was left unregulated for a long time but most of them are choosing to ban all commercial forms of it. Besides US, most major countries have banned it.
Now many people do ignore these laws and most governments do little to enforce them unless they make the news for some reason. Banning commercial forms of it just ensures abuse and issues go unreported. It's the paternalistic part of feminism that's been leading the charge for modern bans, with both liberal and conservative roots.
Surrogacy is illegal in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Finland, and Turkey. Also banned in China, some states in the US and Québec. Thats a pretty hefty chunk of the worlds population.
A lot of other countries also have a limbo status where there is either no clear law making it illegal but put so many hurdles up that its impractical.
Some countries, like Italy, also make it illegal for Italian citizens to go abroad to a country where it is legal and then do it there.
> only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union"
For a lot of people, building a family is a duty you embrace with your household partner. It's why you exist in the first place. It's why you get married and share a home with somebody at all.
Perhaps, if you're lucky, your children are a fruit of love, or perhaps, if you're horny, they're a fruit of passion.
But for a lot for such people, having and raising kids is the entirety of why you get married, and is the rationale for you might not marry for love or passion in the first place.
Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into. But they nonetheless feel an obligation, and even desire, to form and raise a family anyway, and so they march ahead and get it done, hopefully with somebody that they respect as a partner and who reciprocates the same.
I don’t exist to produce children, tbh a very narrow view of what life can be.
That's great. Indeed, many of us don't see ourselves existing for that reason, especially among people who read and post on this site.
But many many many in the world do see it that way, and more even in the past -- when the "dad" would have been making life their life choices -- than do right now. Either partially, but significantly, or wholly.
My comment was helping its parent recognize the influence of that way of seeing the world, as it seemed to have escaped them.
Yea, solid take.
> Marrying the person you're most attracted to or have the most fun with or whose pants you're most eager to get into is a very culturally specific practice and frankly, even where it is an aspiration, its one that a lot of people just don't luck into.
Man, I feel this. And it's also funny that you write it in such an objective way but it's true. It _is_ a very culturaly specific practice.
I've lucked into it. It feels amazing. But I'm lucky that I was crazy enough to really teach myself how to get over rejection and just search for as long as needed to find someone who felt the same way about me as I felt about her. Amazing character building though, it was a true rite of passage for me that started around when I was 16 and ended when I was 32 and married. Dating and being good at it, in order to be in an amazing relationship, has been an obsession of my life. This was in part because I sucked so hard at it as a young teenager. I think in earlier times I'd have settled for someone unappealing or stayed a virgin. Thank god, the internet was a thing when I was young.
>For a lot of people,
if the social pressure was strong enough to push them to get married, it would undoubtedly be strong enough to push them into making babies
I rarely judge people in these situations (sexuality or whatever the reason, there's a million different way to get stuck in a false life due to social pressure, "weakness" [aren't we all at times?]...)
I'm just floored by the misery most people go through, the misery we inflict on each others... it's not easy to bold, to be free, to be you.
I see his actions as immoral (not as much as most violence) but could seem justified to a person in his circumstances with reasonable moral judgement.
He grew up in a social environment where coming out as gay would make everyone around him sad and angry/ashamed at him. But he was gay, intrinsically. Eventually (possibly because of societal acceptance, possibly because he decided total suppression wasn’t worth it), he secretly broke his traditional relatives and friends’ trust by acting gay. Something most people today see as justified. But he also broke his lovers’ trust by having multiple affairs, something most people today see as unjustified.
A caveat is that he didn’t even confide in his daughter, who is gay; he didn’t file for or allow divorce, to make things easier for his wife; and perhaps he should’ve noticed that, in the changing times, being gay became acceptable but not cheating. Again, I don’t think he was right, and I can imagine a different person in his position handling the moral disconnect better for his family, who I believe he still cared about. But my understanding is that being gay is really taboo in some cultures, and has been in many more even a couple decades ago, so I can understand him being really suspicious and assuming those taboos held more strongly for more people.
In which case to him, doing anything gay was setting up emotional damage to many people, and every affair was just setting up damage to one more person.
Have you read John Cheever’s diaries? It’s the same story.
I can’t really get into his fiction, but the diaries are astounding.
He gave them to his son to read and publish posthumously.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to read that!
I have heard this play out too many times.
Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents.
Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily.
No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse!
I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome!
> but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.
No, he is a bad person! Ffs.
There is another, third perspective one can have on this.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.
The author refers to their dad as a coward.
When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.
He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."
The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).
There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.
I think I am totally naive on this subject,
why was the divorce so hard for him? In that society, they just don't let you get divorced unless both parties agree to it? And with the evidence he had of her being a lesbian, does that mean nothing? What is even the point of divorce in that society?
I'm guessing India, and it's dowry part of it that complicates things a lot. And once either party goes into legal proceedings, it becomes a shit slinging mess of he-said she-said. Hence why most people try to "settle" things out of the court even if they were the victim. You wouldn't wish the Indian legal system on your worst enemy.
Because it's the great nation of India, where harassment and dowry cases and custody laws swing hard in favor of the wife. Which has resulted in the worst of both worlds - poor women who won't even see a the light of day in front of a courthouse, never mind inside it, continue to be oppressed by their husbands, while wealthy women tired of their marriages hire ever-more-eager lawyers and slap false dowry cases on their ex-husbands.
A guy, Atul Subhash, recently (about a year ago) committed suicide because his ex-wife and her family slapped false dowry cases against him and his extremely aged parents. Another case, a woman named Jasleen Kaur falsely accused a guy of sexual harassment, because they had a minor argument on the street. That case took 4 years, and in the meantime, Jasleen went to Canada to study, received the then Chief Minister's support and never appeared in court even once. Meanwhile the guy, Savjit, was arrested, had to post bail, was called "National Predator" and "Delhi's Pervert" on mainstream media, and received zilch for all the harassment he received. After he was acquitted, he pressed criminal charges against Jasleen and her family for false accusations, but the courts threw that case away because apparently "loss of reputation" isn't enough to press charges.
All of this in a backdrop where poor women are raped, sometimes even murdered, every single minute, while actual rapists walk free and often even freely contest and win elections on the current ruling party's ticket. Yeah, India is super fucked.
Why are you all talking about India when the blog post used Chinese words and explicitly said he was in China?
One of the parent comments mentioned a similar situation involving a colleague who other comments think was from India based on the description of the dowry.
> No, he is a bad person! Ffs
That is quite the judgement of a person you've never known, based solely on the view of one person's brief writing processing a deeply emotional experience.
Your judgement reflects poorly on you.
There's too much apologizing for people's horrible actions these days. Nearly everyone is a sympathetic character when you get to know them, but that doesn't excuse them. There were other people, in his situation, who took different approaches that didn't result in locking a woman away in a loveless marriage for her entire life. I'm sure a lot of us come from easier situations, but the people who come from hard situations will probably tell you, yeah, it was hard, it was horrible, but he didn't have to do that.
I'm not apologizing for anyone's actions. This is not to say he is a good person. It is to say that there isn't enough evidence to judge one as a bad person.
A lot of good people have made bad choices, and these writings reflect a mere sliver of a man's life choices from the very thin perspective of one person's grief laid bare.
I agree. To me, it's like a blameless retro. You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear:
> the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well
And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.
The notions of "blame", "excuse", and "forgiveness" are strange to me now. I want to say that understanding is key, and everything else follows from understanding. If I understand a person's action, I should act, according to my values, regarding that person. Consistency to one's values is also key. Any emotions, feelings, etc. should either be recognized in my values or shouldn't interfere. If I am to praise or elevate someone, I should praise or elevate that person, and the same if I should rebuke or punish someone. Any extraneous desires that would prevent me from doing what I should do are to be contained. I must understand my values, by which I will understand the world, and how I should act within that world is then determined.
I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.
I think you're misreading that last line. I'm pretty sure what the author is saying is:
> the evening we found the love letters my mom said to me, "he wasted his entire life, his entire life, and mine as well."
Also, I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.
> I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.
It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.
> I think you're misreading that last line.
Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's *no* judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
> It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.
No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.
> The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding
If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Also on this:
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
My point here is that she's doing both.
> Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.
It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.
> No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.
No
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.
This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!
Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.
I (think I) got it from ReinH on birdsite (before everyone left and moved to mastodon and Bluesky). He also gave a lot of talks on blameless postmortems and culture and general SRE stuff. This is one talk but not sure if it touches on the origins https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrsvLMqF1Q
Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding? In which case, doesn't this perspective completely rule out the possibility of any appropriate blame?
> Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding?
Yet, blame is easy and satisfying and true understanding requires empathy and is hard and often unsatisfying.
The term "understanding" is fractal and infinite. Therefore Its 100% reasonable to find a stopping point and say "I blame you" (or, as you point out, otherwise, no one would ever be allowed to assign blame).
My comment is more about intent. The "seeking" word weights heavy. Many commenters are not seeking understanding, they are seeking satisfaction. Validation. The author of the post could have stopped much sooner if they were seeking blame, they could have chosen to build a caricature to heap more judgement upon. But they chose a more nuanced and exploratory path.
Even if the end result is blame or judgement. It's important that the purpose of the journey is clear. True understanding requires empathy, and it's really hard to empathize with someone you're actively trying to judge or vilify.
There are good and bad actions, not people.
There are students who get good grades on their assignments and tests, and there are students who get bad grades on their assignments and tests, but there are no good and bad students.
Does chinese law not allow a woman to individually apply for divorce without the partner's consent, or start a court case? Seems like they were both 'locked' in similar ways.
Your comment definitely made it sound like the victim/husband's suffering came from the culture they lived in, not the wife's actions directly.
So I vote for bad system, not bad people.
I think marrying someone despite being attracted to the other sex without telling them and then having an affair with someone definitely makes you a bad person. But that’s me.
I can even tolerate / excuse / forgive up until that point, because it is indeed an unfair system. She took a gamble and got caught, at which point she ought to have made a deal with the guy. Not exploited the other unfair system of state violence against him.
I think judging a person's actions without considering their circumstances, which includes culture, is a mistake
You can extrapolate this on to anyones life, not just someone with such a huge and dramatic secret they were hiding for the stability of their family life.
If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get stuck in a job or any other myriad life events occur, the weight of your own days can suddenly drain so much time and energy that years fly by. Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
And this is why society is going to shit. “Live free, no regrets” has to be one of the most narcissistic memes I’ve ever heard of. If a person commits to a partner and/or a family, they shouldn’t just hit the reset button because they’re bored or upset with how life turned out. Talk to your partner. Tell them the truth. It’s wild that this has to even be said. Obvious caveats for abuse or depression, but come on. Have some grit.
No one advocated for anything you're railing against.
> Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
My father had an affair, with a woman. It came to light but remained contained within the family. My parents are still married. The whole situation taught me that life is complicated and sometimes situations that seem morally obvious on the surface can actually be very difficult and have lots of nuance.
When I was a teenager I dated a married man. On paper it's easier to explain "gay dude in a homophobic society" but in reality, he was an asshole and a coward. No empathy for him.
This is the sober take.
People will try to explain away all kinds of behaviors that violate trust a la "they'll never find out..."
When a lot of dudes get murdered for it (historically, and currently in many places), there is also a pragmatic aspect.
I agree on the immoral part, but I’ve seen so much immoral behavior over the years this seems (relatively) mellow.
If you’re in the medical field, you see some wild stuff.
I know what you're saying, but pragmatic doesn't apply here.
We're talking about secretly dating a teenager while married with children. This is more than serving "societally taboo" urges on a transactional basis.
Hey, at least the teenager didn’t get pregnant, and wasn’t related? (Cringe, I know) And also seems pretty consensual, despite the age difference.
Also, no one got murdered or blackmailed to cover it up apparently? Or even bullied into leaving town?
Any small town has half a dozen or more of these types of stories.
They do.
Coverups aren't exclusive to gays, and coverups are universally condemned because of the dishonesty.
That’s what I’m saying yes? What is your point?
You were being snarky about blackmail/death threats.
It's on you to elaborate your point.
Not being snarky at all. Mind actually saying something clearly?
I’ve literally seen every one of the situations I described play out, without a gay person in sight. (Though only attempted murder, not successful)
And notably, gay relationships of any gender don’t have a habit of getting anyone pregnant.
The described situation in the article is pretty tame by ‘hidden/forbidden relationship’ standards.
But then, I used to be a mandatory reporter.
It ties back to your use of "pragmatic", which I don't think applies. Your usage was off, imo.
It sounds like we agree in general.
Suppressing what is going on tends to make things come out in even worse ways. If not suppressing it gets you murdered….
Not great. But could be worse, and it seems like it was done mindfully with minimal damage. That’s the pragmatic part.
He could have been hooking up with randos at clubs (dramatically higher disease risk), or worse, instead of what seems like a relatively stable (outside) relationship?
I’ve seen a lot worse. Not condoning, but the math seems obvious.
And his daughter may not like it, but she’s also literally only here because of it. So….
In most of the major Asian cultures, you have a very specifically shaped box to fit in. If you refuse to fit in it, you’ll be hammered on until you do. It’s not a great environment if you’re not box shaped. But society doesn’t particularly care - this was especially true 30+ years ago.
Some exceptions of course (Thai, some areas in big cities), but it’s largely still the case.
"Before you judge the man in this story too harshly"
I will judge him harshly. Instead of getting a divorce, he emotionally abused his wide and child, which probably means therapy for the child for life. He's a selfish asshole, that doesn't think about anyone but himself.
He also could have brought diseases back home to his wife (Just hearing the stories of his selfishness, he would have kept this hidden or not even gotten tested at all).
"The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you."
This is the worst case scenario. He could have gotten a divorce, and lived the life he wanted.
This guy deserves zero sympathy.
Not to mention the partner who he made move to another country and then still wouldn’t tell anyone about. The more I think about this post the more insanely controlling the guy seems!
And he cheated on that partner so much that said partner is now despondent and wants nothing to do with any memories of him ever again.
At the end of the day it's about integrity.
One of my relatives is an MtF transwoman now.
Her wife was the first person she told about it, and they are still together, with a daughter.
It was a little weird for me when I found out, but if her wife is OK with it, and they're providing a stable home for their daughter, I don't see an issue with it; not really my business.
The issue is being dishonest, for decades. That's the primary issue. There are always excuses, but living your life with integrity is of the utmost importance.
It’s really easy to prescribe what other people should do when you don’t have to walk a yard in their shoes.
Most of are out here in our own shoes walking home faithfully to our own spouse. The man in the story neglected his own spouse and CHILD to go and spend time with another partner.
I understand not being warm and loving toward a wife you were forced to marry, even if I also know it means you're punishing her on top of the fact that she's dealing with the same thing. To ask her own family to verbally abuse her into not divorcing you so that you have the LUXURY of staying closeted and hooking up with various partners during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
But to treat your child as worth nothing to you like this man did is a disgrace. I'm glad the author isn't taking it personally. Imagine growing up effectively without a father because another man has taken all of his affection away from you and your family.
Where in that story did he emotionally abuse anyone? He was distant and miserable but that’s not abusive (except to himself).
Um, you don't see the problem with that when it's your father / husband?
“Problem” is not the same thing as “abuse”.
>because you see, my dad was a coward. mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny.
What exactly do you call that? NoT ThE SAmE ThInG As "AbuSE"?
No. Being selfish is not the same thing as abuse.
People do selfish stuff all the time. It’s not abuse even if it’s shitty behavior. Abuse means more than that.
Calling up your wife's parents and telling them to scold her for wanting to divorce you IS ABUSE.
In Asian cultures this is pretty mellow.
It would be far worse if you let her divorce you, typically. Divorced women in East Asian cultures (well, Asian generally) are not treated well.
Not everyone works the same way.
Coercing someone to remain in a loveless marriage while you abandon and repeatedly cheat on them sure is though.
so by this rational a person can be abused without even being aware of it and seeing no comparable ill effect?
Where is the line drawn? Am I abusing my spouse when I decide that we're a bit too over-stretched financially and that we're going to need to skip the surprise Disney World trip that I had planned but hadn't yet told them about?
What about if I think they just didn't try their hardest during the family softball competition? Are they abusing me?
His wife repeatedly requested a divorce and he basically forced her to remain in the loveless marriage. Your strawmen really aren't relevant.
pavlov: Thank you for sharing!
From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind:
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.
I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.
I think she absolutely has a right to her judgment. She clearly has empathy for her father, but the rest of her family also suffered--greatly, it seems--from how he went about his life.
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong.
Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.
She wrote most of it centered on his perspective (as she understands it). And if you take that line as such, then you're right. I took that line as bringing another perspective to show the damage he caused. She has a lot to unpack and showing those conflicts demonstrated it.
It is their own dad, they are allowed to be bitter.
He was so afraid of coming out that he FORCED his wife to never divorce him and kept a lover on the side while cheating on him as well with multiple partners at the heights of the AIDS epidemic while lying to him that they had a future that he was too scared to ever make a reality. If that's not a coward, then I don't think you and I can agree on very simple definitions of words like "coward".
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.
It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.
So when can we judge someone a coward then?
It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.
> It's ok not knowing or judging
> One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance"
Here's a funny thing, what I got from that story was that it must have been a hard and sad life for the dad, probably the mom, and especially a horrifying discovery for the mom. These are not judgments, but tidbits of empathy and sadness for all the parties involved. I didn't have to force myself into that, probably because it didn't clash with my personality or values.
If something made you tick and you want to condemn one of the people in the story, I'm wondering if forcing your brain into "accepting" would make any difference. The real question is what you feel for the other person. I think it might come out as a judgment if it clashes with your actual values and personality. If you don't recognize yourself and would have had a different approach, you might have a negative outlook on the people in the story.
I'm extremely lucky to be a straight dude in the progressive society of today's. Had I been a gay guy in the traditional Chinese culture of the 80s, I'd probably have had the same life as that dad, and employ some of the same strategies. So it's easy for me not to judge. But some people are more upfront, active, liberated, and for them it might be harder not to judge ; and I think that's fine.
For those reasons, I won't even look for such letters when my parents die. I will take a photo or two. There are of course reasons to dig in the past, but that should be done cautiously, not for sensation, and even then under the condition that we only know a little and may not understand. The past is past. Nothing you learn can change it, but it can seriously fuck up your future.
> I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
Absolutely. A person's right to privacy doesn't die with them.
It kind of does. They’re dead.
Ooof. Occasionally you read something that hits different in the feelings, and this article was one for me. The regret at all the lost time and opportunity for all concerned. The might-have-beens. Sometimes, the shackles placed on us by our society, our family and ourselves are unbreakable.
I'm a dad too, and I'm in a somewhat similar situation. My son is under five, and it feels like I'm still at the very beginning of his story. I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path. It felt easier to stay closeted. Easier to date a woman. Easier to move in together, propose, get married, and even have a child than to face my truth.
I love my wife and my son, and I feel loved by them in return, but I'm also painfully aware that the version of me they love is someone I constructed. I lie constantly: about why I don't want sex, about my affairs, about my feelings, about my motivations. No one really knows me, and I don't get to be myself, not even in the relationships where I should feel safest.
I've read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and other similar books, and I'm trying to build the courage to finally do something about all of this. It's incredibly difficult. But I refuse to use my son as an excuse to keep postponing coming out. This blog has pushed me even further in that direction.
They'll be angry (well at least my wife). Their lives will be upended. But at least they'll have the chance to ask questions, to understand. They'll see me taking responsibility for the consequences of my choices, and maybe just maybe, in some way, that clarity will be a relief for all of us.
I know it may seem like the hardest thing ever - but you are doing the right thing. Come out, end the sham, start to heal. Otherwise you are in for a life of pain. I'm not gay but I'm divorced and whatever the reason for the divorce, it is always hard. But it's so much better afterwards, rather than living in a lie of a relationship.
Do what’s best for your son. There’s nothing that will overcome that guilt. Not saying what’s best for your son is for you to reveal the truth now or later. That’s entirely situational and only you know.
I don't think it's fair to consider only the son in this. I'd say do what's best for both your son and your wife. And to me that's pretty clearly telling his wife the truth here.
I completely agree. Life as a parent is only about oneself insofar as looking after yourself is good for your family.
children mimic the actions and lifestyle of their parents
being a role model means demonstrating how to be happy
an existence proof of a good and happy life is a powerful thing
people learn at a young age that words are cheap. advice doesn't cut it
I think this is right. Many parents could think of choosing to opt out because raising a family can be difficult sometimes, but it’s a responsibility people have taken. Take it seriously. It’s a bit chicken to say “I’m out” whatever the reason. See them through their formative years then do your thing.
> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.
Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.
So, I see you. <3
> the version of me they love is someone I constructed
It's also possible they love you because you are someone who can love them, even though it doesn't feel quite right. You're there for them.
I don't have the full picture, but thinking they don't love the real you seems simplistic. You're the sum of all parts and layers, not just what you consider core feelings. We're all putting on facades.
Try to do it peacefully, and keep good relations. That may require a lot of preparation, time, and emotional dealing, but you're weighing your struggle with your history against two lives. It may also be in your interest, because a fighting divorce may end with you not seeing your son. That's a price I consider too high.
I'm pretty certain that children are quite perceptive, and will sense an unease that something is not quite right at home. It would be a service to them to put something concrete to that unease.
I disagree. The emotional violence erupting from such a revelation would cancel out any benefit from releasing that unease.
Wow, I'm reading this very differently. I don't know why there has to be emotional violence erupting. Handling something that's fundamentally changed at the core of a relationship and at the core of one's identity will bring strong emotions but it doesn't have to be violent. It can also be handled with all the best qualities we all have like patience, curiosity, support, trust. Strong relationships can grow stronger after being tested.
A kid can handle a gay parent. A kid can handle a divorce. It's not some apocaplypse.
This, look at the stats on how kids fare after these events compared to the death of a parent. Lies have consequences.
Have you considered that it doesn't have to mean the end of your family? It's possible that there's no arrangement that meets everybody's needs. But, maybe there is.
More power to you my friend, your situation is very common, and the result of a highly homophonic society.
Good on you for recognizing it and taking steps, there is lots of support around if you need it
Consider finding a therapist and quality couples counselor to help you navigate the necessary rupture as you take steps towards honesty and clarity in your relationships
I'm straight and love my wife of 44 years. But I long ago made the thought experiment of what would happen if she were in the same kind of situation you were in: what if she decided I was a mistake, or that being in a relation with a man was a mistake, and that she needed to do something else. I decided that would require I support her in that. How can you love someone and not want what is best for them, even if that has a cost?
I don't know your wife, and I don't know if she would feel the same way. Maybe she would?
I can relate to this probably the most out of everything I've seen on HN so far. My fiancee is pansexual and overall seems to prefer women, so I surely am quite a bit of a surprise in her life (to the point where her family laughed at the fact that I 'fixed her' the first time I met them...) as a straight man. I know she loves me, I love her with all my heart but I am aware that at some point she may want to change me for someone of the opposite sex. I have therefore decided that as long as this does not happen behind my back I will support her, even if that means I have to endure a lot of pain.
I don't really see why you should support that. In your case your wife is not closeted and living a lie, everything is out in the open. So deciding to change you for someone else, regardless of sex, is no different than if I decided to change my wife for another woman. We give stuff up to make a commitment to someone else. It doesn't always work out and I'm not saying people should stay together when they don't want to, but I am questioning your pre-acceptance of your partner wanting to shag someone else even though that would clearly make you very unhappy.
"Prefer women" could be in a sexual context, romantic context, platonic, etc. and the commenter above didn't define it. I imagine it's hard enough for bisexual people to be asked if they're "living a lie" by having to choose a side.
For you and anyone else reading this I recommend the book "the designer relationship" - its actually about polyamory but I think it does a great job solidifying the concept that really, a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be, not defined by social norms. What comes first is open and honest communication and negotating through hard conversations to find a way of mutually meeting everyones needs
FWIW my wife is bi and dates women, not that really ever bothered me but in no way has it ever been more damaging to our marriage beyond basic scheduling conflicts. I will admit I would have had a much harder time opening up to her being with other men though. Im lucky that she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em I guess, but partly thats because our marriage is otherwise great and shes already free to explore her gay side so why would she want to leave?
https://www.amazon.com/Designer-Relationships-Monogamy-Polya...
I admit that when reading the description of your relationship (I don't mean to be disrespectful, for what it's worth) I can't help but wonder how it can possibly be consistent with "a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be." It really reads like the relationship is whatever _she_ wants it to be.
If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.
I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
If I didnt like it, I would leave. Reread the post though you misinterpreted our situation.
This stuff doesn’t work for most men. Most Men aren’t ok with the idea that their partner is fucking other men. It’s literally a biological instinct.
It is tough to overcome jealousy/insecurity and to have that level of trust, for anyone, I agree. Phrasing it as biological wiring, I'm not sure fits.
It does fit. There’s actually science on this.
In experiments they have found that women are much more ok with sexual infidelity than men. They aren’t fully ok with it just more ok with it than men by a huge margin. There’s a huge gender difference and given how culture doesn’t differentiate this aspect in terms of teaching, logically the only origin is biological.
It fits with evolutionary psychology as well. If a wife engages in sexual infidelity a man could end up raising a child that is not his own and that is a huge evolutionary cost so men evolved to be extremely guarded against sexual affairs while for women the cost is just a man potentially raising another child. She loses resources of the man but if the man doesn’t raise another child it’s not as huge of a deal. This isn’t stuff I’m making up… it’s academic.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151008083755.h...
For you to be in a polyamorous relationship you are definitely overriding your default biological drive and giving evolutionary advantages to your mate (if she is female and you male). Birth control largely eliminates this cost but the emotional states are the same in the sense that is a form of submission. Case in point: Most likely it is the female partner that initiated polyamory and the male partner who had to learn how to accept it.
Between this, a post about disrespecting your wife if they have sex during an open relationship, and your other post about emotional violence being inflicted on a child if their parent comes out as gay, you need to seek some therapy. This is major incel vibes.
You have a right to have firm boundaries and communicate them clearly to your partner. Doing so will usually make a relationship and life together better, not worse because your partner will respect your honesty and strength. If her doing that will hurt you, I strongly recommend you communicate clearly and up front that you know she has those interests, but following up on them is a deal breaker for you, and you need her to be honest about that. You’re not even married yet, have the conversation now! It won’t be good for you or for her to be an angry shell of yourself like the dad in the article, making a sacrifice you never wanted to make.
Besides what everyone else said, just get yourself a pre-nup too :-)
That’s really noble of you. I disrespect her a lot if she does that.
dude fuck that - cheating is cheating - don't be that guy (unless you're into that sort of thing, of course). if she feels that you aren't the one for her, drop it like it's hot. there's plenty of other fish in the sea
Lots of judgment all over this thread. I vote more of us listen to anecdotes like this one here, from someone whose long and successful relationship is based on wanting the best for someone else--who they recognize as human and fallible--even when that means change.
If you want marriage to mean that your partner will never change, or that the 100% match on the inside what you think they are looking from the outside, you're gonna have a hard time. This discussion is just further down the continuum than most.
(Exceptions made for arranged marriages and the like; the primary purpose there isn't romantic love-based companionship, so there isn't a pretense to shatter.)
I think this is a good example of how lying can affect one's autonomy (though I don't remotely hold that as an absolute principle). In the ideal exercise of love, I agree with your claim. I don't think it's dismantled in practice, but I think it is weaker. The spouse fell in love with "someone", but it turns out it's just a dummy of the other spouse. To some extent, probably everyone only loves or even perceives imperfect images of others, but this takes it a step further. I think this is somewhat different from supporting a disabled/ill spouse, because that condition arose through no fault of anyone (presumably). I think this is also different from a spouse, sometime into the marriage, realizing a different romantic/sexual orientation, because no one could've known at the time of marriage (presumably).
I'll add another scenario like this would be if ones partner had an egg-breaking epiphany and decided they needed to transition. And my personal conclusion would be the same.
There’s a big difference between changing and lying. I wouldn’t be happy if my spouse lied to me.
I wouldn't be happy either, but I'd be understanding. Everyone is human. Everyone lies, even to themselves.
Just because it is human doesn't mean you can't be hurt.
I think you're a better person than I am.
Obviously I can only speak for myself here but I wouldn't be so understanding, especially when my partner lied about such a fundamental aspect of their life and joined in a union of marriage with me.
I suppose, for me it would feel like the vows they took where not real and the foundation of our life, all the memories, thoughts and feelings were nothing but smoke and mirrors.
You're right, we're all humans and life is complex but I think it's selfish to waste your partner's life for years because you can't face the truth. I suppose that a bitter end is better than endless bitterness however.
Not all lies are equal. Marriage is a contract built on trust and commitment. When you have been lying about that specifically, you have defrauded someone.
You’ve stolen time and emotional energy from these people. They can never get those years back.
Your children have been deprived of seeing parents role modeling romantic love. They have built their entire world views based on your behavior towards your spouse, which incorporated subtle lies and deception.
The victims of your fraud now have to deal with second guessing which things you said might be true and which might be lies - you shatter everything they ever believed throughout the marriage. It is a horrendous thing to put people through.
So can I understand why they did it? Sure. But I will definitely judge them for their actions and not support them.
It's also built on forgiveness, because no one can possibly not ever need that.
Exactly. I’ve even seen cases of murder where I sympathize with the perpetrator. But we need to not get too involved with the narrators plight. It’s a first person story and it’s easy to get strung along by that perspective.
For the article and the many admissions in the thread underneath people can’t just pay attention to and sympathize with the perpetrator you need to take the next step an construct realistic avatars for his relationships and visualize the intense damage done to them as well.
Since you took this path, I'd suggest you not have affairs while married. Either divorce now or consider waiting 10 years while your son really needs you.
Yeah if you wanna be closeted, fine - live like it then. Otherwise it proves getting your dick wet is actually more important to you than the wife and child you claim to love.
tell your wife you are gay homie
If it’s any comfort, no one ever truly knows who you are, even if you wanted to be totally honest.
Everyone has a version of you they’ve constructed, no one has your entire perspective on your life and access to your inner thoughts, and even if they did they would forget or misinterpret details.
Don’t chase a desire to have people know the real you, they never will. Even if you had a new gay lover just because they know you’re gay doesn’t mean they know the real you.
And sometimes people don’t even know their own real self.
Read The Last Psychiatrist blog.
"If you're going to pretend to be someone, why not pretend to be someone who doesn't hit on the cocktail waitress when he's away from his family?"
Edit: found the exact quote:
> "I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."
> Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
> "But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
> The narcissist demands absolutism in all things-- relative to himself.
From this article:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cu...
Note that I am not accusing you of being a narcissist, merely saying that you may find this blog very interesting.
Do you plan to find a new relationship after you break up with your wife? Is the desire to come out because of that or because you just want to stop lying to them and be honest about who you are? I will just say that if you have a good relationship with your wife and child, perhaps it’s worth it keeping things to yourself until your son is out of the house. If you leave them, you might find yourself in terrible relationships for a long time, or you may strike luck. But as someone who never managed to have a good relationship and family I wish I had a wife who actually wants sex and children and if I had that I would never leave even if I had to sacrifice a lot. But I do want that, maybe you never really did!?
There's a follow-up posted already too.
https://www.jenn.site/my-dead-deadbeat-gay-dad/
Yeah kind of wish I hadn’t read that one. But the whole truth is always best to know. Somehow makes his story so much more sad.
Edit: Oh my goodness didn’t realize this was the same Dad from: https://jenn.site/my-dad-could-still-be-alive-but-hes-not/
Ok...
This is writing about a real person. I certainly hope you don't see yourself as so one dimensional, why should others be?
Your profile has this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Maybe you should read it.
What?
Writing, journaling, is such a good way to process thoughts and emotions and this is a great example. I'm grateful for this person sharing her very personal journal entries with us even though it is not required at all. It sets a great example of what to write about and how. It also reveals that people and the lives they live are incredibly complicated and messy. The longer I live and the more people I get to know the more I believe that nobody is as simple and "good" as they seem on the surface. If your life has been simple and relatively pain free up to this point, just wait, and try not to judge others in situations more difficult and complicated than yours too harshly. There is much you do not yet know.
I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering.
> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else
That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.
> he wasted his entire life, my mom said
In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.
There is no path without some things missed, or regretted. Some people will always see the regrets, some will always see the positives.
That it is any other way is just something we tell ourselves to try to provide more foresight or potential meaning than is really available.
> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.”
What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family.
I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.
The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life. He didn't have to live with his wife much. He liked the idea of having a daughter.
Given the hand he was dealt it's a pretty good outcome for himself. Grossly selfish, but not a waste for himself.
This, I do think parents have a right to secrecy. Kids don't have to know everything.
Even the idea that our partners/spouses/SO should know everything about us is waaaay too extreme. I think that as long as we love and don't hurt each others and we respect the rules we set between each others it is ok to keep some things secrets.
From what I understand from the author's post, the whole marriage was a big lie to begin with so it is not like authors parents really loved each others. While we can criticize his father for not accepting divorce and thus allowing his mother to rebuild a life, we can hardly call him cheating. And I don't think kids have a right to know everything. I know my parents have had at least one major crisis when I was a kid without knowing the specifics but I have no right nor need to know why. It was between them.
A lot of couples only stay married because it is easier from an organisationnal, social and economic point of view than divorcing anyway.
Some don’t fully understand that the universe does not owe you any camaraderie in your affairs. Not even a small mouse to talk to. Many live the same paths we live entirely alone. While life took from her a real romance, it did not take from her partnership. Friends along your travels is not guaranteed, neither are best friends, or the bestest of best friends. Make do, seriously.
Who's to say the mother didn't have an affair or two along the way?
People usually do know what they're marrying into.
Yup, though often will deny it if it comes out. The ‘subconscious’ part is not often fully unknown forever, even if it may be uncouth to acknowledge such awareness.
Is the capitalization of the quote your own doing or was it displayed like it for you?
There isn't a single uppercase letter when I open the article, it's impossible to me to read it because it feel like a single sentence and I can't breathe
The author obviously has this as an acquired habit or affectation, possibly for stylistic reasons. It's interesting that some people can read this just as well as normal prose, but to others it feels as if someone is pouring sand all over their well-oiled gears. I gave up after a paragraph as well.
I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.
Many readers rely on articles being written in a specific language, does that mean every writer is obligated to publish every piece in every language?
Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
Maybe it's because I studied poetry, or because I was a voracious reader of experimental writing when I was younger, but I've probably worked my way through thousands of pages of uncapitalized or unconventionally capitalized writing; I can empathize if it's more difficult for you to read (personally I would consider an absence of paragraph breaks a nearly-unforgivable travesty), and I wouldn't even deny you the opportunity to complain about it.
But I think calling it "a must" for accessibility is perhaps overstating it a bit.
There is no obligation at all (my comment did not include any must beyond that being a requirement for broadly accessible text either). Merely the observation that if you want to write accessible text in any chosen language, following conventions means that you expand your reach.
Experimental language has its place. I can quite enjoy that too depending on the context. But combining the wish to convey a story or message with avant-garde text layout turns it into something more akin to art. I'm not always in the mood for that, in part because it is more taxing to engage with. In this case I figure the goal of the author is for readers to hear their story, not grapple with their specific manner of self-expression. Of course if their life goal is to make lowercase text common and acceptable, then this may be completely on point. My point about the accessibility of the text still stands though.
> Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
I can train myself to read text upside-down as well, or in Klingon, or with no spaces at all. I have no wish to do so, since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers. Besides, being able to read well because you have a solid grasp on the conventions, lexicon, and idioms used is a net benefit to me. Our brains are pattern matching machines after all — pattern recognition is what we humans excel in. If have no desire to diminish that skill either.
> since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers.
To push back on this, following convention is often the easy thing to do (so not something regarded versus defaulted to).
There's a literary history of form influencing story; there was even a story about a famous example of this on HN recently that discussed this year's Nobel laureate—who notably publishes long novels that play with punctuation conventions: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/
I find that people who make a point out of violating writing norms as part of their house style typically don't have thoughts worth communicating. Nothing is missed by not training myself instead of reading something that flows smoothly.
in my experience, it is not a useful heuristic
a non native English writer may have a "house style" that you see as violating norms
dismissing all those people removes a great diversity of thought and expression from your mind without due consideration
better to engage with more ideas, even those in unusual packaging. learning to read it easily and without bias is two kinds of skill growth anyhow
Generally agree with that, but in this particular case I don't think this text was designed to be broadly accessible, given the content and the platform (little indie website).
Edit: checked out some of their other posts and they don't always use this style. Seems like a pretty deliberate choice here.
It doesn't improve readability for sure but for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.
English is a second language for me and I feel really bad when I impose a grammar mistake or a badly put together sentence to my readers!
So for me pushing that on purpose is borderline insulting to the reader ie. suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
> for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.
Same for me. See Sam Altman, for example.
> suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
These days you actually have to fight against spell checkers to avoid having capitals after a period.
The lower case "I" stands out very much in reading it as a self-annihilating affectation.
However, the sentences are well formed. If you really want to lose your breath, try "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Marquez. You really won't be able to put it down.
Or Finnegan's Wake, for that matter.
It's interesting to me that you had such difficulty, and it makes me wonder how old you are. Growing up using instant messengers on the internet in the '90s and early '00s, it was normal to type without ever using capital letters, except for emphasis. The only thing that changes that style is when someone is typing on a phone that capitalizes for them (though one friend manually undoes those "corrections").
to me it has much better readability
I barely comment but this is time it is worthwhile - please read the article first, it is worth it and the comments might spoil it.
Read the follow-up too, there are some unexpected twists.
https://www.jenn.site/my-dead-deadbeat-gay-dad/
Looks like they changed the link.
https://www.jenn.site/dissolution/
Thank you both, I'm glad I ended up reading these first.
Wow, driven to a lifetime of harmful decisions by an extremely regressive society. Would he have settled down and been faithful if he could have started off right in his teens, open and truthful and honest? Lies become a habit and I’ve known others who couldn’t break themselves of the cheating/lying habit and lost whole friend groups for it.
Is there anything he could have done that you would not excuse by the society in which he was born?
That comment explained what led him to be that way, but I don't think it justified his actions.
If he killed all of society, it would be hard to blame society for that.
"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.
Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.
There is some sociology/psychology research based on concepts like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs that motivate human behavior. There is also memoirs of Bonnie Ware, "Regrets of the Dying", where she as a nurse at an old folks home over several years interviewed people who are about to die and their regrets turn out to be:
not living a life true to oneself, working too hard, not having the courage to express feelings, losing touch with friends, and not allowing oneself to be happier.
With a heavy overweight on the first point. I think that the comment "he wasted his life" is supposed to be in reference to this, that most people realize at the end that nothing really mattered, and that they chose to follow the structures of society by default instead of daring to do what they inherently wanted intrinsically. Then you can feel as your life was wasted, you got a single chance to play around and do what you like with your brief time in the universe and you chose to let someone else dictate how that was going to go, a waste.
The waste is that he, and I too, could have lived a happier life had we had the courage and opportunity to come out earlier.
The thing is, that This is speculation (with all respect).
I, on the other hand, do not lack courage to do hard things. But I have learned that it is a strawman - it does not make you happier to quite you job, leave your spouse, go for your passion in a startup, etc.
Luckily I fucked up everything in that fever dream early enough that it did not have substantiel impact on my life.
tell us your story
So many people are telling this story. Ryan Holiday, Mark Manson, Michael Easter, Marcus Aurelius.
There is no way that any of us, including the man and the author, know that he would have been happier had he made different decisions.
He wanted to have a different life, but he didn't embrace it. Instead he lied to his wife and lover. In a more recent update he was cheating on his way lover as well, so he comes out looking pretty bad. At the end of the story everyone in his family is hurt by his actions. Send like he wasted his life and hers if that was the best he could do
This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.
There's a follow up linked a few times in the thread, and unfortunately he looks to be pretty villanous
None of us here ever knew the man, and the only reports we have on his life are from a pseudo anon author who admits that they also did not know him very well. That any of us, including the author, are justified in calling him "villanous" is a big stretch in my opinion. It feels more likely that the author, and perhaps you, simply disagree with the decisions he made. Which is fine, but a far cry from villainy.
We don't have a 24/7/365 video feed of the man's life with which to throughly judge him on, this is true. So casting him as a villian based on this shadow caricature version of a story we've been told might be unfair to the actual person. We're not Michael at the heavenly gates or Osiris or Anubis though, we're just going off of what's been written. Do the actions of that man as described not qualify as villainous to you? It’s small, affecting only the lives of those in his immediate vicinity. But it’s still not good. Maybe little V villainy not big V villainy like Voldemort?
People are rarely anything less than complicated.
The person who ends up making decisions which underpin what actually happens, almost always does.
It’s easy to throw them under the bus, but the followers generally always know what’s going on - when they aren’t actively avoiding it anyway.
It's mind-boggling to me how many commenters are here to defend the honor of a serial adulterer who broke the hearts of the people most related to and dependent upon him. Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
There are a number of comments here that read like "yes, but you have to understand those things benefitted the father". It's like people think if you're doing something that hurts other people, it's OK if that's for selfish reasons? I guess I'll try not to think of how this reflects on our industry as a whole.
Are people defending his honor, or just offering sympathy? Because I don't find sympathy strange at all. He betrayed the trust of a lot of people he claimed to care about, but also barely had any unfettered happiness in a too-short life. He was complicated, as we all are.
For all we know that entire account is fiction. None of us know the man or the author yet we feel content to pass judgement on his life from a few paragraphs of from a narrator who has made it clear they also didn't know him well.
>Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...
It's because they have no experience with have such a bad person in a supposed "caregiver" role in their life so their minds literally can't imagine it. They think he just MUST be misunderstood instead of just callous and uncaring.
Or they are a parent and can't imagine not carit about their own child, so they assume it must be a universal thing, and the father MUST have loved her, even if he didn't show it. Truth is, a fuck ton of people don't love, like, or give two shits about their own children. These people do exist.
It's a truly cruel cognitive dissonance.
That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with.
So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I also grew up with abusive parents (plural). Poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, violence. The whole nine. You can check my comment history, I talk about it openly on here. Here's one previous comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400583
Others extend clearly bad people who do bad things more grace than they deserve if they are parents. You hear things like "I'm sure they love their children but are stressed and don't know how to express it. It's probably hard for them." (Ignoring how hard it is for the innocent CHILDREN!)
However, I know from experience there's no love there. No like. Only hate.
And there more to this story than a closeted gay man. The author made it clear he was also distant as a father and wasn't at all a caretaker to her either. All evidence from the post points to the fact the father was callous and uncaring to those around him. Using others for his own gain. The followup shows he was having affairs from his affair partner before he died. This is not someone who would have been a kind man if he was just allowed to come out.
The other thing that immediately stood out to me that nobody else is noticing - the father encouraged a man half his age to give up his entire life in China to come to Canada on a fucking student visa (which is inherently temporary) with the, most likely, promise (stated or unstated) that he'd marry him and sponsor him as a permanent resident and they'd build a new life together. All evidence points to deception here. He wasn't making moves to legally divorce his wife and was having affairs with other men on top of that. You can't legally work on a student visa, so the partner would have been entirely financially dependent on the father.
That made me cry.
I don't suppose I shall ever read it again but I have saved it in my cache of personal web pages.
I'm so glad I finally came out to my family and friends.
One of the few posts where I was happy to not see any comments yet, lest I would just read all the comments and not the story
It’s always surprising to me how so many people believe in ideals. Finding love. Living happily thereafter. These are ideals and you’d be truly lucky to have it in your life. One in a billion. Life is ephemeral. We are innately fickle beings shifting from one equilibrium to another. Yet we long for a mirage of permanence.
Judging by the follow up that reveals he was cheating on his lover as well and had been doing it for years he seems to agree with your last two lines. He got the most out of life, but hurt his lover, wife and daughter in the process
You don’t find love: you build it together.
It’s obviously part of the human condition to yearn for the ideal/divine/essential.
Did it ever occur to her that he wanted a child with his wife? That he loved his wife - even though not romantically? And still had a happy life as a father of her? The author seems to have many misconceptions about gay people..
The author mentions in the follow-up that she is gay herself.
She also mentioned it in TFA too.
Of course!
It does not sound as such if you read the content of the post. It's hardly a misconception to suggest that gay men do not generally fall in love with women.
> It does not sound as such if you read the content of the post. It's hardly a misconception to suggest that gay men do not generally fall in love with women.
Aside from the fact that this premise is incorrect, it's also inapplicable, because, as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.
How do you know the father never said he was gay? He may well have said that to the man he enjoyed dating as opposed to the wife whom he clearly didn't like very much.
One of my best friends took his own life growing up in Iran. I will never forgive religion for what it made other people do to him.
I don't feel like this entry is harsh on authors father. I think it is nuanced and forgiving. It seems most commenters disagree with me on that.
Regardless, it is a well written article with an emotionally strong impact. Thank you for sharing.
Interesting follow up post, published the same day: https://www.jenn.site/my-dead-deadbeat-gay-dad/
Man… the battle between cultural expectations and our true selves is humanity’s oldest conflict. A few people get lucky. Most of us survive in the cracks.
No capitalization was as surprising as the narration itself… not sure how to feel about it! Counter culture?
honestly ive had it with the shift key myself. just a nuisance. besides, the text looks much nicer and 'even' when every letter is broadly the same height, but that is ofcourse subjective.
it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
Capital letters at the start of sentences makes reading easier for those who are used to reading languages where that is customary. The absence is a noticeable reduction in ease of reading.
> it would be good to track down the 'etymology' of capital letters.
Easy: Latin script.
The more interesting question is the source of lower case letters which appeared much later.
Capital letters came first.
SIC·EST
Even though many of us might not relate exactly to the circumstances, we can relate to the feelings. She’s an excellent writer. Some of her other essays are good.
Many years ago, I read The Bridges of Madison County. This reminds me a bit of that.
This is great. Thanks for sharing. Should be a book someday.
I love the occasionally very surprising submission on here. Sometimes, something with nothing to do with technology touches this group of jaded techies enough to bring it to the front page.
the guy was a shitbag and he ruined his wife's life and was very hard for his children all because he was weak
yup, but interestingly enough, I was imagining that if this was turned into a movie the audience would symphatize with him…
I read the linked post as well: https://jenn.site/my-dad-could-still-be-alive-but-hes-not/
> i learn the story afterwards. dad went upstairs for a lie-down after dinner, but was awoken by severe chest pain. he vomits, which is a thing he never does, and asks mom to call 911 immediately. she does and provides all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her that they've sent for an ambulance, and they should get ready to go.
> so they get ready, and then they wait. they wait for 15 long minutes, my dad in an extreme amount of pain, and nothing happens.
> mom calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. the dispatcher responds that don't have visibility on that. she asks if she should just drive my dad to the hospital and is advised that the best thing to do is to keep waiting.
> so they wait another 15 long minutes, and still no one shows up. the house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes away from a major highway, a ten minute drive from the hospital.
> mom decides that they should not keep waiting. she and my brother help dad into the car, and they drive him to the hospital.
> they arrive at the emergency room entrance. dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, lurches forwards, and dies on the front steps of the hospital.
What the fuck, that's horrible.
My dad's house is in a rural area of the country. He sadly passed away a week ago, I found him in his bed while coming to visit, he didn't pick up the phone that day, despite us having talked just the day before. When I found him, I called the emergency number and they still sent an ambulance, it was at the house in like 15-20 minutes, they confirmed the situation and did some paperwork and helped me with the next steps.
I can't imagine how horrible the circumstances in the article must feel and I'm not even sure what "justice" would look in a case like that, how the fuck can an emergency line dispatcher not have "visibility" on an emergency call, that's their one fucking job!
This is something I've noticed with EMTs & Ambulances. They don't actually move all that fast and I'm sure they have their reasons. But it's always seemed like driving to the hospital would be better and I wonder how much truth there is to that.
Although I feel that many countries have transitioned to a time of liberty, when people can live as they truly wish, some people are afraid to embrace this freedom.
Of course, families can be a powerful force.
But, as my father once told me: family are those who are near you [not necessarily those you share genes with].
Sometimes, people make the decisions they do because others they saw before them made the opposite decision too - or they made the decision they did because they felt the consequences of making it any other way would be worse.
when my mom died i found a bunch of letters she wrote to people but never sent. Theres so much to peoples lives that you can never fully know and some of the things really shocked me. Appreciate you sharing your story, many parallels that I can appreciate through reading.
It mentions “boskovitch's installation”. I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Fan_(Feel_It_Motherfu...
https://x.com/handbarfs/status/1741365674008559962
Grace and Frankie (tv show) deals with some of this, don't think I'm the target audience but I enjoyed it as 20-30 year old.
Oh, my heart. This is difficult and lovely and so complex. I want to wrap them all up in my own love.
There is also a part two apparently for anyone curious:
https://www.jenn.site/my-dead-deadbeat-gay-dad/
So, what should you do if you know someone trapped in this kind of situation?
I currently know someone like this. He's not homosexual, so it's not quite the same issue.
But he's gotten himself trapped in a relationship, and worst of all, cannot admit it to his friends. The only reason I know is that the one friend he did tell, has told the rest of his friends. We've known each other since childhood, yet he doesn't ask me for help. Which is up to him, of course, but he also doesn't know that I know that he is keeping a remarkably straight face about his situation. In a way it would be easier if I hadn't been told.
So now, I have to pretend like I think he's just a single man about town. He just shows up to everything when I'm around, and chats to me like he always has throughout the years. We'll meet another old friend, yet his life update is that he's just like any other bachelor-for-life, just enjoying his video games and freedom, while the rest of us are having kids and worrying about school bills.
It's very odd. What would HN do?
How is he trapped, and could you expand a little on the situation? I'm not sure I understand the social expectation at play for it.
Does he actually have kids in his relationship that he doesn't want to talk about or admit to in public? Is his partner being neglected, or children?
It's a "partner" who uses him for his wealth. No kids, and there won't be any, because I know how those are made and you have to do certain things that are not being done.
When you talk to the guy, everything is great. Not even a sign that he has gotten hitched to this lady, or is dating, or that anything has happened at all.
Yeah it's weird. I was incredulous when I was told.
So your friend has a sugar baby and you feel awkward about it?
What is the defining feature of a sugar baby relationship? And what did I say about that earlier?
for all the lowercase complainers:
Or using CSS p:first-letter{ text-transform: capitalize;}:
I'm saddened by the followup, when she asserts that the fantasy of seeing her dad happy, settled, and domestic was a "stupidly heteronormative fantasy".
Interesting anecdote, but for the life of me I can't understand what relevance this blogpost could have here on HackerNews
Quoting the “what to submit” guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I find it very hard to judge whether I'm fulfilling that part of the guidelines. I only have a few submissions, and I think I'm good there, but I'm more conflicted when it comes to upvoting or engaging in other people's submissions. For example, earlier today I saw a thread on German laws on date rape drugs. I upvoted the thread. Do I think it's important for people to talk about date rape drugs? Certainly. I'm not sure if it falls under satisfying my "intellectual curiosity", though. Is HN "the right place" for this conversation? I'm not sure, though I think the reality on the ground would say "yes". Most likely, all of this is an organic adaptation that HN has experienced.
Don't be a phony. Be true to yourself. Don't let your life be governed by the mores of others.
This article isn't about sexuality. It's about honesty and the impact that artifice can have, not only on your own life, but also on the lives of others.
Quite applicable to the HN crowd.
I see these comments on most HN threads that aren’t about tech stuff, but to me these are the best part of HN. I think it should include things people in tech who are also humans find interesting and want to discuss, like this, not just discussions of the latest cpu architecture or whatever. If you don’t find it interesting ignore it, and the algorithm will make it go away on its own if most people agree!
just as HN is segregated from the majority of the web by focused interests within the community at large, within this community there could also be segregation of interests. you don't need to try to stamp it out every time you hear about it, that's like the web trying to stamp out HN
But that's why I'm in HN, If I wanted to read this, I would be in reddit.
It's a different crowd here, I want to discuss those things with this crowd, not the one on reddit.
Because she mentions Obsidian. Though I don't hold that against her.
not everything in life is databases and ai
> he wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well.
People need to seriously plan and manage a marriage if they decide to go through with it.
Some people don't really get to "decide" for themselves.
FTA:
> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
who doesn't love dota :)
If we mean the game - then me. I never got over the lack of automatically moving camera, I prefer league simply because of that.
Thats so sad, and good reminder that we shouldn’t force others onto lifestyles that we want.
Yet ever increasing housing prices in the west force many into lifestyles they don't want. :(
Religion and tradition, the two things that elevated humanity, yet also been the source of much of its suffering.
There is no life without pain and suffering. It's as much a law of nature as gravity. Life needs something to push against, to struggle to overcome. Without that there simply is no life. If life doesn't struggle and suffer against things it never even starts. Once started, if life stops struggling and suffering, it quickly dies.
Religion and tradition have elevated humanity and it's good to acknowledge that. They never could have eliminated suffering, only changed the sources and types of suffering. It is helpful for many of us to have things like religion and traditions to give the suffering more meaning, sense, and purpose.
Those are both embodied expectations of idealizations.
When people like the father never find the courage to speak, they will be harmed/destroyed/etc. in exactly the way those traditions would warn against.
Very well written. Many here in the comments seeking to find sense in this matter or pass judgment; a wise person would simply nod in acknowledgement, understanding that things simply are the way they are.
It’s amazing to me all of the way homophobia also victimizes straight men and women and we don’t even realize the collateral damage we take from it.
Straight women brought this on themselves. Straight, especially supposedly egalitarian or leftist straight women hate bisexual men.
I’m not really sure straight women are entirely to blame for homophobia but interesting take.
Such a good article!
i'm very impressed with her writing. she's got the skill!
I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".
Yep, I find that stylistic writing choice to be rather selfish. It might be because I'm a gamedev at heart but a huge part of writing is UX: sure you have something to say but the way you say it for the reader to actually go through all of it is almost as important.
That's why I think shortish chapters are good UX, instead of a single unbroken one. Using a good font, making use of paragraphs to divide sections and using caps whenever required.
I personally think if a writer doesn't care to even add a bunch capitalisation to make my life easier then I assume that piece of writing is mainly for themselves and I immediately stop reading, since it's not meant for me but for them.
Agreed. I normally find the complaints about formatting to be petty, but for a long form writing piece like this, all lowercase is just a bad choice with no discernable upside.
I’ve come to love this style of writing. While not quite the same, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street felt similar.
Just raw thoughts, no rules.
Capitalization would not change the content at all, but would make it easier to read. People reading English have expectations are capitalization. Breaking those expectations makes the text more difficult to read and feel less effortless.
They still respect writing rules, in fact - except for the capitalizations.
If they wrote, say, phonetically instead, the text would become utterly unreadable, even though the raw thoughts in one's head aren't expressed in written English.
Here's another piece of writing, from a very different author, with lots of capitals. Maybe you like it more?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thi...
I like Emily Dickinson, actually.
Poetry works in a different way, though. The lines are short and your eyes won't struggle much with continuity. e.e.cummings eschewed capitalizations as well and his poetry is still easily readable (to me at least).
A larger block of text is harder to parse without capitalizations. This is actually why they developed in the first place. Original Roman writing was very "blocky" and thus much harder to read, see for example this:
https://share.google/EyVZfHb9NgIbtXlAl
It is a short text, but parsing it into individual words is quite a challenge.
Hmm I see your point, though to be fair, that Roman writing is also missing spacing and punctuation.
My guess is the author knows what they are doing and is intentionally reinforcing the disoriented and unsettled feeling. Or, at least, is intentionally making no effort to mitigate it.
(In many other posts, capitalisation rules are followed.)
A very adept writer.
Agreed. I just hope they repair their Shift keys soon.
I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
As I understand it the root was people using the iPhone with autocorrect turned off. That’s how someone from the tumblr emo crowd (where it was definitely prevalent!) explained it to me, and the reason was because there was a lot of culture specific terminology used (including deliberate misspellings of words) that was difficult if autocorrect was switched on.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
> I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??)
You're almost a century off :) https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...
I don't know the age of the author, but interestingly, Gen-Z doesn't seem to use that key
This is not really anything new, back in AIM and SMS messaging days, people would type "wuu2" or "whats up" to a friend, but to express the same idea in an email, you would probably be sending some variant of "What are you up to?"
There is massively different subtext between the two. Autocapitalization and autocorrect represents a limit on the subtextual bandwidth you can communicate along with a message. Restrictions on subtextual bandwith are not ideal when your generation relies on text-based communication for evermore intimate interactions - that "whats up" message might be the start of you asking someone out on a date, I don't want it formatted the same way as a message I would send my boss.
I've always wondered what the point of capital letters even is? It doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile to the language. You need to learn 26 extra shapes, and then some arbitrary rules for when to use the majuscule. But if you never heard of capital letters, nobody will be confused by what you wrote.
They make scanning and reading text easier since they make jumping to the end/start of sentences easier. When you read your eyes are constantly jumping ahead and even backwards. The capital letters help you land quickly back at significant positions in the text since they are associated with boundaries in logical clauses.
If that were the point, why does English capitalize proper nouns? That would seem to complicate finding the start of a sentence. Besides, you have periods, exclamation points, and question marks at the ends of sentences anyway.
In German even ordinary nouns are capitalized, making it even less easy to find the capital at the start of a sentence.
1. Dots are tiny and are hard to see. A capital letter is a more visible indicator of the start of the sentence. 2. English barely uses any punctuation (vs. Russian) therefore making adherence to readability rules even more important. Paragraphs are also nicer to read vs. trying to read a wall of text.
Baby boomers have used up all the capital letters on Yelp reviews and Facebook rants, unfortunately, and have left none for future generations.
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/clinton-deploys-v...
It’s ironic because you have to go to additional effort to turn autocorrect off, which contradicts the “i dont even care” effect they’re going for
It's a lot less effort than changing every nth word because of an aggressive autocorrect.
Yes, one of the best pieces I've ever read posted here.
AI generated?
emotional
At least he hid a part of his nature because of social pressure. Nowadays people live in disguise at will.
Homophobia sucks massive dick. It doesn't take being gay to despise people who's collective "wisdom" subjects millions to lifelong suffering like that.
Jesus Christ capitalize the start of sentences. Tech bros, stop butchering language to feel cool.
10 years ago people like you were called 'grammar nazis' - a term clearly out of fashion but the sentiment remains.
An excellent article, to be nit-picked for a dumb reason as this
[flagged]
This is not an acceptable comment on HN. It's not OK to scold or harangue people like this here. The guidelines foremost ask us to "Be kind" in comments, and that isn't negated just because you disapprove of what the parent commenter has done. Further, we've had to ask you repeatedly to observe the guidelines and refrain from trolling. We have to ban accounts that continue to act this way. Please stop this if you want to keep participating here. A reminder of the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46022847 and marked it off topic.
I agree with the sentiment but staying quiet is not right because it takes away the rest of the wifes life. He should have the courage to tell her so she at least has a choice of what to do.
You talk like a coming-out divorce ‘upends’ a family in some unprecedented way. People get divorced all the time. Families reconfigure, children adapt, adults survive. Get a grip.
No. Divorce ruins the lives of the kids. Look at the statistics. The outcome and financial damage and emotional damage is horrid.
The problem is more that it’s normalized. I think the normalization is wrong. Similar to how North Korea normalized poverty. Marriage should be taken seriously and divorce is extremely serious. The fact that you think of it as nothing is whats out of touch.
this is quite unhinged. and unfair -- the wife must endure a loveless marriage, because the husband cheated?
Eh? No. The wife is living in an illusion constructed as a manipulation by the husband. Either the husband maintains the illusion till death and no one is hurt or the husband destroys it and allows himself to be happy at the cost of the happiness of others that he chose to manipulate.
He made the bed. Fucking sleep in it.
Please go to therapy.
This is insulting. I simply have a different opinion than you.
I think if you have the ability to tell someone in public to go to therapy without realizing how rude and insulting and uncivil it is, you’re the one that needs therapy. Wake up.
This comment is sickening. If this is coming from a personal hardship, I hope you find peace soon.
I don't see what's so sickening. He made his bed, now he needs to lie in it.
Why? How is it helpful to him, to his wife, or their son to live this lie of unhappiness. The lie will be more damaging than facing the truth.
It’s not sickening at all. Think about this: You’re biased like many people reading it.
It’s easy to get emotionally strung along by his first person narrative but you need to think bigger. You need to construct avatars for the wife and for the child and visualize the emotional damage done to them. What he did isn’t trivial. He lied and manipulated his wife and had a child with her. That is a fucking crime. Constructing a total lie and manipulating his partner to sacrifice everything to live that lie with him and then to bring a child into that lie and force him to grow up with it.
I think people like you are blind. It’s one thing to disagree with me but to call what I said sickening? You enjoy upending lives and manipulating people? Maybe you’re sick?
No that’s not true at all. I’m not going to fall for your trope of just calling people sick without understanding their perspective. You’re not sick. Just stupid. you are biased and you aren’t thinking from the perspective of the lives he has ruined all in the name of emotional cowardice of admitting who he is. I get how hard it is, but it doesn’t justify what he did.
I share this sentiment. Most in the west (especially on HN) have been conditioned to believe mercy must always be granted and justice is evil. You can’t have one without the other or society falls apart.
As a child of a mother who cheated and ruined our family, I complete agree with you. This story filled me with disgust, and I want to live in a culture where people like this feel guilt at what they did. The sibling response here is happy to tut-tut you with the weight of progressive cultural authority behind them, as only a short sighted ideologue could. Lying of this level is bad for the family and bad for society. Protecting it is akin to protesting the removal of a cancerous tumor.
Wishing for liars to live terrible lives does not help your life. At all. It makes it worse.
This comment and mindset is self-destructive. Yes, bad things happen - but nothing is ruined. There is no such thing as ruining, only changing. The relationship changes, the people change, and your understanding changes.
Desperately vying for any sense of sameness, and forcing yourself to continue a life that is not true, doesn't serve you or anyone.
Things can be good. You can get divorced and that can be a better outcome. Things can change.
And even if you don't consider the well-being of the father at all, surely the best thing for his wife and child isn't for him to continue the charade. I certainly wouldn't want that, in their place.
Straight people will never understand the crushing suffocating binding evil of straight supremacy. They call a gay man a coward when they and their kind are murderers of ours.
The deliberate choice of committing such a basic mistake of lower-casing the beginning of all sentences is an insult. I am afraid of reading it, becoming desensitized, and starting to do the same.
Capital letters come from Roman script. Lowercase letters come from a medieval administrative script (Carolingian minuscule). So you could say that we are mixing two completely different scripts. This becomes very clear when you look at a text written entirely in lowercase letters: the typeface is so uniform that I, at least, find it very pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, this is not the norm. Instead, I am condemned to live in a world where I have to look at writing consisting of two obviously thrown-together scripts day in and day out. Schopenhauer was right: the world is a vale of tears!
Why is that important to you?
The way you write about it feels like you're going to be infected by it, altered by it, if you read it fully. Seems like an odd reaction.
It’s not a mistake, it’s a choice. Quite a common one among younger people who grew up using Slack at work and iMessage everywhere else.