I think this KIND of problem, may be a direct result or symptom of something that it took me a VERY long time to recognize, despite numerous "hints."

That is, that many very desirable traits and characteristics we each want, are inherently tied to some much less desirable, even seriously unpleasant things we don't want.

In the area of respecting others, just for example, lots of people want a mate who is decisive, and knows what they want in life, both so that they can make reasonable plans for the future, and because when someone like that does desire to be with you, its very exciting and comforting.

But all too often, "decisive and knows what they want" comes with a strong component of "self-centered and uncaring of others problems." Sometimes even to the point of that person being all too ready to set their official mate aside for a new whim.

At the other end, finding someone sensitive and caring, can be linked to tendency to wait interminably, or being easily distracted by others, or even an inability to really dedicate themselves to one person.

I've also learned to watch for INACTIONS as well.

Lots of people say nice things, but do nothing to support their claimed positive ideals.

Well, with a mess that complicated, all I can think to suggest, is that you obviously can't offer another chance to try to go back to what you used to think was true.

You can decide to sort of start over, relating to what you and he actually are, and maybe build some kind of friendship, instead of a fake marriage.

You and he each sound like you've got a lot to be upset about in life.

A lot of what seems to give us each a rough go, is figuring out that the inner picture of what we thought our lives were all about, turns out to be crap somehow. Whether by betrayal of a mate, or by betrayal of life circumstances, it feels as though we really are fools somehow, and that makes us extremely angry. I know I've got plenty of that.

Not sure what else to tell you, other than that it seems to help me the most, to think everything through over again, and try to come up with a more accurate guess about what's left of my possibilities.

"why is so hard to find a true and real gentleman?"

After studying this for six decades, I have noticed two main things about it.

One, is that very few people (especially males) are directly taught what it is to be a "gentleman." Mostly, we are expected to pick it up via osmosis.

A much bigger reason, is that BEING a gentleman isn't generally rewarded.

Note the entries here about people not saying "thank you," for example. It took me a long time and a lot of effort and thought, to work out what I SHOULD have been directly taught, which is that saying "please" and "thankyou" are not rote obligations, to be used only in formal settings, or worse, to signal subservience. What they actually are best used for, is to directly signal mutual respect and good will between people.

Socially, things get slightly trickier, because one of the prime components of being a "true and real gentleman," is that one is not pushy and demanding. But in US society at least, many people only get noticed in a crowd, if they ARE pushy and demanding. That alone, tends to make those of us trained by "osmosis," opt for discarding the whole "gentleman" thing, fairly early on. those of us who stick with it anyway, often spend a fair amount of time quietly observing the females who complain about the dearth of "real gentleman," as they go about their lives repeatedly choosing the non-gentleman, because those guys are the ones doing the bulk of the overt chasing.

Basically, it's math. Just as the guys who complain that most women are duplicitous, think that's true because they habitually chase duplicitous women, so too most women who complain they can't find any "true gentlemen," are only looking at the loud and pushy non-gentlemen for attention.

I learned a long time ago, that when someone calls for "openmindedness" and also "just for fun," it invariably means

"I want to do something weird, that you probably wont enjoy, which will be great fun for me, but I also want you to declare in advance that it's YOUR fault when I have fun and you don't."

I'm very familiar with it, and I know that it isn't connected to only ONE intent.

What it means, depends on the exact circumstances.

If you're in the midst of a conversation with someone, they are overall sad or bored, and they lock eyes with you for a moment and flash the quick smile, it CAN mean that they are trying to tell you not to worry about them. It can also mean they want to tell you that they just said the last thing they did, more as a wry joke, than as a direct serious statement. Or it can mean that they want you to know that they consider you to be "on their side."

Bottom line, even those of us who are NOT commonly plagued by difficulty "reading" expressions, have a hard time knowing what the "flash smile" means.

Overall, I think the main thing to try to recognize, is when the person knows you saw them smile, and when they think you didn't. If they know you saw it, as in they did make sure you were looking at them first, then its likely they were trying to tell you something with the smile. If they think you didn't see it, and they were looking at someone else as they did it, they may have been using it to talk ABOUT you, or about the overall situation, to that other person.

I was trained with a rhyme. Unfortunately, everyone but me already knew the rhyme, so the teachers always had the whole class say it together, and if you've ever heard thirty school children say ANYTHING out loud at the same time, you also know what distant thunder sounds like.

So as far as I know, the rhyme for I and E goes:

"I before e, except ....sometimes."

Minor "fun" note: the reason why i and e come at different times for different words, is because we English descendants either stole, or had foisted on us, words from all kinds of other languages.

So spelling confusion is just one more reason to resent imperialism, in a way.

oldkid46:

I watched as what you describe occurred. I saw much of it directly, even though I was too young to immediately recognize what was happening. I only later pieced together what I now am convinced is the accurate sequence of events. My view is tricky to follow as well.

First, a good thing happened. We won World War 2. The reason why I think all modern history dates from that point, is that before that time, there was no worldwide sensibility for most people, and no worldwide instant communications to keep them sensing it all.

Element one: the Atomic Bombs. More than anything else, the bombs captured the imagination of the world, and of Americans, and somewhat inadvertently convinced everyone that the way to victory in all things, was through being SCIENTIFIC about it.

Element two: that unfortunately contributed heavily to the conviction that science should be blindly applied to industry and business as well. America rapidly moved from idealizing people with good ideas, to idealizing the ones who managed to profit the most from how the ideas were MARKETED. It took about a decade or so for the leaders of American business to be replaced by Business Science leaders, but once they were in control, maximum profit alone, became the judge of whether a product was good or not.

It took a little while longer for those who owned the major news services, to decide that those should cease to be purely service to their communities, and instead should become profit centers as well. Out went effort to get stories right, and in proper proportion, and in came an emphasis on excitement and viewership, at the expense of literally everything else.

It took almost another decade for the political party leaderships to decide that the same idea would work for them: by approaching elections from a pure business-science standpoint, many reasoned that they could only support their goals, if they were voted into power.

It should have been no surprise that main party which was both convinced that it's most cherished ideas were unpopular, AND wanted to style themselves as the Party of Business, would be the one that decided that truth in advertising should take second place behind winning elections.

Mind you, that doesn't mean they were the only ones who decided to be less than honest, it just meant that they were the ones who most rapidly moved from putting personal and party honor in second position of importance, to finally discarding it altogether, as we see they have done now.

This last step happened through predictable and natural evolution: if your leadership sets a standard of win only, and otherwise do as you wish, with the assumption that the wiser top leaders could then run the country wisely once in power...and it takes more than a single generation for the plan to succeed... the leadership itself will cease to be the wise string-pullers who knew they were lying to get there, and would have become the people who actually believed the lies used to win, were true.

Thus the party of Lincoln didn't SET OUT to become racist; but by catering carefully to racists in order to win elections for several decades, a lot of actual racists climbed the steps of power within the party, until racism now actually infests the upper reaches of it.

And willingness to look the other way, if needed to win elections, evolved to eagerly looking directly at despicable activities and praising them.

You missed my point entirely.
To you and I, there is a big difference.

To someone who instead sorts the world into "people who believe as I do," and "people who don't, and are therefore wrong," there is no difference.

As an additional note, lots of people differ as to what "agnostic" means. Some think it means "don't have an opinion and don't care." Some think it means "waiting for acceptable proof." Some think it means "not a Gnostic."

Good relationships, eh?

Depends on what you mean by that, but very generally, relationships that seem good, tend to go bad when peoples motivations or personal goals diverge.

Obvious things like, one person wants more new kids, and the other doesn't; or one person wants to live a certain way, or in a certain area, and the other doesn't.

More subtle things are lifestyle related. One person expects a high income, the other is happy at lower levels; one person is a neat freak, the other not at all; one feels antagonized by common daily chores, the other accepts them as normal life.

That kind of stuff.

There are some great old science fiction stories about the challenges of mind reading.

The most enlightening ones, point out that being able to read minds would NOT necessarily improve communication or understanding.

Aside from the fact that most peoples minds are active on multiple levels, and therefore full of noise, that the individual who owns the mind, has to filter, there is the problem that lots of us do and say things in our minds in PLACE of what we would actually do.

Someone reading MY mind, would have to know an insane degree of detail about my life, before they could make any sense of what they'd "hear."

So my answer is, I don't know. It would depend more on who was asking, than anything else, I guess.

Conversation is a central element of several facets of my life.

Since I work repairing things for others, I use conversation of several different kinds every day, as a matter of course. I converse with support people to diagnose and arrange repairs. I converse with customers both to arrange work, and to negotiate their psychological reactions to the need for work. I converse with fellow techs and superiors, as a part of guiding the company, participating in how everyone in it relates to me.

I come from a fairly intellectually oriented family, so I have in depth conversations about all sorts of things with the remaining members.

When trying to find and build a relationship, conversation is as much or more significant for me than most actions. People reveal more about the subtleties of themselves through conversation, than they do with their activities, because WHY a person does something (or doesn't) is far more pervasive in shaping their lives than WHAT they do.

and of course, I write as a basic core part of my life, so I am always in conversation with existence in that way.

"The United States exists because our founders performed genocide.
If that act never happened, Native Americans kept their land and their cultural heritage, the United States as we currently know it would never exist.
If Hitler had succeeded, the world stage as we see it now, would not exits as it is right now.

On a more personal level, if my mate never did that which offended me, I would still be married.
Its fundamental, the cause and effect, of those things which shape our lives.
Act A does lead to Act B then Act C and so on.
Its real-life experience that confirms it."

Your absolutely right that SOME cause and effect are absolutely linked, it's just that not ALL such things are.

It's absolutely true that the partial genocide of natives here (there was never a serious organized effort to wipe them out, just a vicious effort to prevent them from controlling even their own destinies) played an indelible part in America's past, and it's certainly true that there are consequences to the fact that it did happen that will be with us always as a result.

But it's not necessarily true that the genocide was necessary for everything that America became.

Likening it to my own disastrous relationships, the fact that I made some certain mistakes, is not entirely why I am the person I am today. Only partially so.

This all goes back to the idea that any particularly GOOD things about America, are only good because of the very bad things we did to our native population. That's the only point I'm arguing against.

I see you mention again, a binary way of seeing things. Your note that our only options were genocide, or setting the natives up as our superiors in some fashion. History of many other places and times on this planet, shows there are multiple possible choices between those extremes.

In short, I would myself NOT excuse the mistreatment of native (or other) peoples ANYWHERE, on the grounds that I like something about the state that followed some time later.

"If you remove either genocide from history, you remove the good that resulted from it."

Not actually logical.

Mainly because existence overall, is nowhere near so simple.

Basically, the universe is NOT binary in its nature. The fact that one thing occurred, followed by another thing, does NOT mean that the second thing was entirely dependent on the first.

It is NOT true that the United States as it is could not have existed without the attempted genocide of the previous natives.

There is something that is true, that is somewhat related to this reasoning, however. That can be found by shifting one's viewpoint slightly, away from "good versus bad," and over to "calculation of natural or logical consequences, and how desirable those consequences are."

This is the sort of calculation many parents end up making, whether consciously or not, regarding how they try to raise their children. Often parents conclude that doing something unpleasant, even contradictory to their adult philosophy, is what seems necessary to protect and help their children to survive.

And here's the key bit: parents don't always find over time, that the choices they made actually served to bring the results they desired for their children (or for themselves).

Genocide can be a bit like that.

Historians intended the naming and definition of "ages" to be instructive, but there was an unintended consequence.

That is, that people who try to learn from the past, come to believe that actual "ages"of this or that, really existed. Some even come to believe that people in the actual time when this or that "age," were aware that a "new age" had begun.

That is often not the case.

Some "ages" were named after the fact, more as a sort of self-worshiping propaganda, than anything else. The "age of reason," for example, might well have been called "the age of the loss of god's will," had regimes based on religion succeeded.

We have been in an age of tumult and great change, for most of my life. There was hope at the start, that this would later come to be known as "the age of Pax Americana," by many. But the US attempts to establish a world-wide peace, too often resulted in new conflicts arising, and in old conflicts re-igniting.

We MIGHT one day look back at this time, and conclude that it was the age of insanity, if the insistence on ignoring climate change, proves to have been in error. Or it may be seen as the age of the defeat of reason, if the various religion based movements succeed in their goals.

Things like DNA research and manipulation, have very deep roots in past ages. This is common to all named "ages" in the past as well: the age of Reason didn't start suddenly, after centuries of people refusing to think, it was named the Age of Reason later, more to reinforce the concept of rule by thought, rather than rule by inheritance, than anything else.

True sort of, but since it's also true that each can see the opposite as well, not very useful.

The most common problems in life, tend to come as a result of people who think that something that is good (for them, at least) is also "good" in general.

Such as those who see that it is "good" to be wealthy, and deduce that therefore ANYTHING that they do, with any cost, to become wealthy, is therefore "good" as well.

Or people who know it is "good" to enjoy sex, and conclude that when they have sex with ANYONE, regardless of what they promised their mate, that that is "good" as well.

And as a bit of a reverse, people who think that if "good" and "bad" are always relative, and dependent on culture or point of view, that therefore anything at all they do, for whatever reason, can be declared "good."

What I like about this joke, is that we could substitute a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian and tell the same joke just as well.

If black tea caused autism or any other dramatic malady, the entire planet would be packed with autistic people.

If nothing else, the entire history of the British Empire (largest Empire ever on this planet) would have been a story of the conquest of Autism over the majority of the Earth.

Not to mention, that "treatment" would make tea undrinkable.
Yuk.

Are we anywhere near April?

I find it's wise to recognize that whatever it is that you HAVE, is what your reality is about; and that whatever it is that you do NOT have, is also what your life is about.

If you continue waiting for someone who is obviously ignoring you, you are basing your life around believing you have what you clearly do not have.

Not logical.

A bit of literalism here, for the sake of greater clarity(I hope)

Anticipation is NOT the same as Expectation, though they can be related.

In most applications in our society at least, EXPECTATIONS are very much like DEMANDS. Or REQUIREMENTS. If things don't happen as EXPECTED, people tend to be upset, one way or another.

ANTICIPATIONS, on the other hand, are often associated with enjoying (or fearing) in advance, the outcome that a person desires.

Lots of people ALLOW themselves to ANTICIPATE something, because they EXPECT it to happen; but lots of people don't ANTICIPATE what they expect at all. If anything, they do the opposite of ANTICIPATE. They move mentally ahead, right past the expected event, and deal with life as though the EXPECTED thing has already occurred.

I agree with the thrust of the opening post, that it is a good idea to NOT blind oneself to what COULD happen, by either too much EXPECTATION or too much ANTICIPATION.

The correct use of anticipation or expectation (IMO) requires that you be aware of the fact that that is what you are doing. Realize that when you EXPECT, you are trying to plan ahead; and if that IS your goal, then you should be sure to also plan for what to do if your EXPECTATIONS are not fulfilled.

The best way to ANTICIPATE, again IMO, is to go ahead and enjoy whatever in advance; but be aware that you are fantasizing about the future; not living in the present reality.

For me, it's all about staying grounded and self-aware.