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.
> 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.
You have an entire community that exerted enough social pressure to force two people together by fiat who clearly did not want to be together. Reading between the lines: a closeted gay male and a woman being excessively pressured to produce a child NOW before getting too old.
At that point, you've created such a highly aberrant social situation that you're guaranteed to get pathological behaviors.
After the community generated such a screwed up situation, it is difficult for me to assign much fault to the couple involved rather than see them both as unfortunate victims.
I may not approve, but I find it difficult to blame.
> 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.
Why are you assuming that the social pressure that forced them together magically went away and assigning both agency and blame solely to the husband? Why is the community pressure somehow easier to deal with 10 years/15 years/20 years later? The fact that the wife could be browbeaten back into line shows that the community social pressure very much did not decrease or become easier to deal with over time.
A person can be both a victimizer and a victim, in fact probably most are. Victim status does not excuse the victimizers actions, even if it sometimes helps explain them. We can study the root causes to help prevent it in the future and simultaneously realize that the man was a scumbag.
If so, then you are painting everybody, including the wife, with that same scumbag brush.
The wife didn't have to get married, but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to get pregnant (not just once, but twice), but she did because of the social pressure. The wife didn't have to stay married but did because of the social pressure. etc.
If you have a situation with enough social pressure to force two people who really don't want one another into both marriage and child rearing, it's not clear there is any viable way for the individuals involved to correct the situation afterward.
Let's say you know a secret, and you tell people who can use the secret to harm good people.
Is there a difference between:
- Going to them proactively to get some money
- Telling them when they ask you right after they captured you
- Telling them after 24 hours of torture
It's wrong and harmful in all circumstances; but in the first case, it's doubly wrong, whereas in the last case, there are significant mitigating circumstances.
If this whole story had stopped at #2, you could say it's wrong, but there are mitigating circumstances. Risk of disease is fuzzy and far away; the physical and emotional rewards are right in front of your face. If you don't see any hope of improving the situation, it looks to you like your choices are:
- Come out and completely destroy your life, your wife's life, and your child's life
- Live in a loveless marriage, never enjoying romantic or sexual intimacy
- Enjoy romantic and sexual intimacy secretly, telling yourself that you're not really hurting your wife because you're being "careful" or whatever.
It's not right, but I can see how a person who experiences normal human empathy could choose #3. When I was younger I certainly made my fair share of stupid decisions in search of romantic intimacy (or more crassly, when the "little head told the big head what to do").
As we go down the line, the damage to others becomes greater and more immediate, and the alternative "right" behavior become less and less desolate. It therefore becomes harder not to conclude that he person either lacks empathy entirely, or have made massive efforts to suppress it -- either finding justifications to avoid looking at what's right in front of their faces, or just killing the feeling altogether.
No it doesn't. Voluntarily choosing to marry someone, choosing to deceive them in such a cruel and selfish way, choosing to betray a solemn vow is not being "placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation". It is deliberate, conscious, malicious action over many years upon an innocent victim. The circumstances are entirely of his own creation. He is 100% culpable.
I think the point is not that having an affair is “ok” but that it’s within the range of things that not unusually awful people can do. So it’s “ok” as in “Ok, so you had an affair”, not “It’s ok that you had an affair”.
“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.
I recently discovered an acquaintance has been cheating on his wife for half a decade, and this thought has burned in my mind many many times. To hide such a thing is cruel; to expose your partner to potentially life-changing disease because you're a cruel liar is also disgusting and absurdly foolish. It's never OK.
You mean to be sarcastic, but there's a good chance it may. When I was recovering from my first marriage, during which I was pretty heavily gaslit, having rational, analytical assessments of my wife's behavior by third parties was actually really helpful for me to recover.
His wife has no doubt spent years of her life being gaslit as well, being conditioned to doubt her assessments of what's normal and to feel guilty for suspecting him, for resenting him, for wanting something better. I doubt she'll ever read what I wrote, but there's a non-zero chance it would be helpful to have my take on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
For anyone reading that wasn't around it was very much an irrational hysteria. The bigots latched on to it to spread fear and justify their dehumanization of gay people. There were people that tried to bring reason and science to the conversation but they were drowned out by the panic/bigotry.
There was no good reason for the AIDS phobia in the 80s.
I knew as I wrote that someone would feel compelled to respond. Too late to unwind.
It’s only in hindsight and it wasn’t just bigots. Safer sex as we know it today was directly from the AIDS scare.
AIDS was no less than a death sentence. It was incurable, untreatable, and the cancer after-effects were pretty nasty. Broad research and public transparency took a long time to take hold and that left regular people speculating for years.
Even medical doctors turned away suspected AIDs patients, because everyone was pretty scared.
For a bit, even as a kid I remember it being on par or scarier than nuclear war because so much was unknown.
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.
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.
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.
He did the best he could with the information he had at the time. Yes, it is sad, and it may even feel more a "selfish" life in many ways in a "modern" society. (I would say "Western" but that would include the retrograde, homophobic dictatorship the US is currently).
"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!
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.
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.
I hope his wife is getting the support she needs to deal with this very challenging situation he's put her in.
It must be very difficult for her to have to deal with her husband suddenly revealing that he wants to live such a bizarre and sexist fantasy full-time, especially considering they have a daughter together who will be also affected by this, perhaps even more adversely so.
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?
>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"?
Both of their parents certainly had that view, as does the wider society.
If you think that is very toxic, that is the tip of the iceberg.
To really put icing on the cake, they do it because they have plenty of examples of how badly people screw up their lives if someone isn’t doing that for them.
looks around at the opioid crisis in the west right now. Not that we would have anything like that going on.
There is no perfect, just different trade offs. And everyone usually cringes at the trade offs everyone else makes.
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.
Recognizing that people face difficulties because of their responsibilities is not the same thing as encouraging them to abandon those responsibilities.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 haven't presently read Wolf's essay on account of it being paywalled. However, I think I get the gist of it, and Scanlon's view too, from the abstract and some commentary.)
I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".
If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.
Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.
I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.
You might really appreciate reading some of Bishop Butler's sermons, which are not pay walled. When I briefly studied Moral Psychology, I was taught that Butler is sort of the under-appreciated bedrock of Moral Psychology. His perspective is on the surface religious, which is perhaps why he is not considered among Locke and Hobbes as a foundational thinker of the Enlightenment. And yet his methods are just as rational and philosophical. He tries to construct a taxonomy of what you call "emotional-logical beliefs."
Thank you for engaging. I'm having a good time talking with you.
Maybe I ought to read older texts more often...I do not fully understand what Butler means by terms such as "plain"! But that was a good read.
I do wonder which instances Butler imagines "sudden anger" to be useful in. I would think it rare that immediate action without consideration is good, but where it is good, I do not think the actor is acting in anger so much as he is acting in a justified instinct. It is probably more correct that the actor acts in anger when the action is bad. To be precise, I am talking about the actor's intention, whereas his action may turn out to be good or bad in that split-second. I don't believe that people should be judged on what occurs but only what they tried to do, while keeping in mind that "ideal intention" and "actual intention" are distinct (as good intentions pave the road to Hell!).
I do like how Butler described "deliberate anger" and its role in addressing wrongs committed unto people. I had to ponder what I myself meant when I brought up emotional-logic, because I have not understood it so well that I never confuse myself, but I suppose that is what Butler is describing: logic that addresses emotions, or allows emotions. In fact, if logic is not subservient to "cold-bloodedness", emotions are presumably a major component of the logic we perform every day, at some level or another.
I'm not religious, nor atheist or the like. I consider myself agnostic, but I think to be a proper agnostic one has to work to earn the title. Extending the notion of agnosticism to its logical conclusion, I find that we should all be agnostic in all matters: never professing knowledge to anything that we are ignorant of (which ultimately must be everything, because who knows anything nontrivial?). That's an extreme position, and would require a dense discussion, but it can be moderated to suit the circumstances. It suffices to say that, on momentous matters such as God, we must be ignorant. This doesn't preclude positing axioms, accepting them on faith, and performing logic, however. Indeed, we all require faith in some way or another. Anyways, I've found that freeing myself of the expectation of believing a certain way has helped me better appreciate all manner of religious, spiritual, mystic, etc. schools of thoughts. God is the greatest of the unknowable things, so any way we discuss Him shines light on some mode of life.
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’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.