The surreality of other people

[kiya]

So, a bunch of people on rasfc were discussing, in the usual newsgroup-disorganised way, the whole "Can God make a rock so large He can't lift it" notion. As it happens, arawen and I touched on that in a conversation about two weeks ago (I think we got there from 'tired of dealing with people who think that one's faith can be refuted by reference to a god that is completely irrelevant to it'), and he made a comment I found amusing about the physics of the question.

So, in fairly normal way, I posted a comment to that effect into the thread, identifying arawen as my boyfriend because, inane as that word is, it adequately contexts who I was talking with, within social norms of identification, for purposes of continuing conversation.

Though apparently, the matter was quite notable to someone, who has proceeded to interrogate me at length about why I referred to my boyfriend, whether this meant there was some sort of weird philosophical disputation involved with teinedreugan, why I felt the need to not anonymise my relationship into functional nonexistence, or some other such stuff. It's gotten increasingly bizarre. (The latest bizarrity is about whether using such a specific identifier is too much information and who's to judge such a thing -- which leaves me with a sort of wicked, trollish impulse to use accurate words that properly describe the relationship, the ones that I don't use because people find them alarming. I have not responded to this, as he has indicated that he does not want to talk with me about it, or for that matter brooksmoses, he just wants to make little snide pot shots in the hope that someone will agree with him somewhere, I guess.)

And this is all because the fellow knows I'm married and not monogamous, and thus there must be some Profound Deep Reason for me to mention my boyfriend, other than, y'know, it being normal to refer to one's partners in conversation as such, at least on my home planet. It was apparently this mention that led the fellow to claim my bafflement at the question of why I had not consulted teinedreugan (about his opinions of snarky dismissals of asinine philosophical masturbation attempting to refute a god none of us has any personal interest in) was disingenuous. (That was a godawful sentence. Oh well. I'll parentheticalise a chunk for clarity.)

Apparently, just treating a partner as a partner is remarkable, bizarre, a marked case worthy of comment, to at least some people -- it seems that most of the rest of the thread thinks he's the person who's making no damn sense, which is reassuring for a change. It was suggested that it would be superior to refer to him as a friend, to avoid raising the possibility of some sort of profound philosophical war about the nature of irrelevant deities, but even if I didn't find that to be an offensive suggestion, I am really not comfortable with the notion that I'm responsible for controlling someone else's deranged imagination. Herd your own invisible pink unicorns, please.


Also, in the context of this the synchronisity of this post amuses the hell out of me.

Comments

[redbird]

It sounds as though you're being entirely reasonable; I assume someone has pointed out that $weird_poster is not asking the monogamous folk to refer to their spouses/partners/lovers simply as friends.

When I have Profound Deep Reasons to mention one or more of my partners, it's not because we're discussing old philosophical chestnuts, it's because I'm talking about something in which the relationship itself is relevant. Like my recent post about introducing adrian_turtle to some old friends of mine.

[luellon.livejournal.com]

I think that poster has issues with polyfoo and should be laughed at for closed mindedness.

He's your boyfriend and should be identified as such, so should husband, wife, partner, etc and accurately, dammit. To minimize or "hide" the relationship behind the word "friend" is rather rude to friends and rude to you and respecting your relationships.

::cheers:: go, Darkhawk, go!

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I've been having repeated WTF reactions to the other side of that conversation, for whatever it's worth.

[kiya]

I am sort of nonplussed by the recent (Monique Mudama's) attempt to translate it to me, at the moment, but figured that, what the hell, I have terrier-like tenacity and I'm not afraid to use it.

[oldsma.livejournal.com]

I like "friend", because I am not good at putting lines bewteen things that are scattered around a complex landscape, and I don't think people need to get in my business anyway. But then, I don't understand people for whom "boyfriend" means something less than "friend", so don't go by me.

For me dealing with other people's relationships, the significant distinction is "we are a social unit" or not. Using a complicated set of terms based on nuanced distinctions that mean a lot to you but not to me often doesn't tell me that.

MAO

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

(here from polyamory)

This kinda reminds me of a poster I encountered on another site recently who felt that, if you mention your boyfriend in any context whatsoever where you are already known to be married, that automatically counts as TMI about your sex life--and yes, he actually specifically said that this was because poly relationships are based on sex. Makes me wonder if that's what the individual you dealt with was thinking.

[kiya]

I honestly suspect there's something like that involved.

I've been hammering on the whole referring to a partner as a partner, just like any other normal person, what the hell are you on about here? point.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

The wacko sounds like he is profoundly jealous or crazy or a moron and/or some combination of those.

Then again, I've heard of people who get upset if a gay man or woman refers to their boyfriend/husband or girlfriend/wife, resp., complaining "why are you pushing your sexuality in my face", while probably blithely talking about *their* SO. Idjits and bigots. *sigh*

[kiya]

The thing is, it is not my normal expectation that he's an idiot. So this whole thing has been extremely bizarre to me.

There's some sort of weird double-standard involved, where referring to my husband is unremarkable, but referring to my boyfriend is remarkable, or something. I really cannot for the life of me tease out what it is, and he's insisting that he's not making up vastly different rulesets, or was before he claimed to not want to talk about it.

[sunflowerp]

Sounds like he might be of the "why don't you sneak around, like normal people?" school of don't-get-poly. Non-monogamy? Natural enough, and only mildly reprehensible. But not hiding it, or trying to or pretending to? That's just sick!

That has to be one of the strangest poly-misconceptions I've run across, but it's disturbingly common.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

The thing that occurred to me, when I went to look, was that he might have thought that you'd specifically asked your boyfriend about it after it had come up on the newsgroup, rather than just happening to have talked about the same thing earlier. I could kinda see where it would seem odd to specifically seek out the boyfriend instead of the husband, given that neither of them is a theological expert or anything. (Not that it would be odd, if the boyfriend happened to be around and the husband wasn't, but I could sort of maybe see it seeming a little odd for the boyfriend to be handy instead of the husband in a Usenet-reading environment, when presumably not much special is going on; the assumption there being that not-special time is spent with the husband, where time-with-boyfriend is designated special and therefore you will be doing something more interesting than Usenet.)

But then the later weirdness, specifically about mentioning rather than about asking, seems to indicate that that's not in fact what happened.

Blast. It was a nice theory; I liked it.