Natasha Tori Maru

Do you think you can accurately see someone's soul from a few dates in?

From perfect. I can be a right little shit! Online is very different to real world - although I have met some great people online who were as they appeared. All of these strategies and ways of being were hard earned, I had my trial by fire and made many, many mistakes along the way. I dare say you just see a better version of me now that I have grown. They say "beware wisdom that is unearned". My shit was earned. Through suffering - yes, but crazy resilience and self belief. I guess this process developed a deep sense of self trust and connection. So I remain clear in who I am and what I want. I am very different in real life to how I might present online. I am not a very serious person I know there are others out there like me, there just have to be! Finding them would be the difficult part. There is simply SO much less face to face interaction these days compared to when I was younger. That makes it hard. I have no clue how to find someone like me. I have the same trouble from the other side of the yin/yang coin

Someone linked this to me, haven't gotten around to it ( if any of you stupendous souls want to dive in )

In the autobiography of Steve Jobs, people around him said that he creates a "reality distortion field". His narrative was so strong that people believed it, even if it made no sense and wasn't real. He had a strong, powerful, compelling narrative, and many people around him accepted it as reality. This is a type of frame control that doesn't use overt coercion - although this is a description of an interpersonal effect and not necessarily a deliberate frame control technique he consciously employed. I think he just did it.

Depends how you approach dating. All my best, deepest and longest lasting relationships were with men who I was great friends with prior. I still love those men (even if not romantically) and speak to them regularly. I approach it like friendship; I see one friend for coffee on a Tuesday, squeeze in an impromptu river walk with another Saturday morning etc. Whatever I can do to keep up connection and mutual care/fun. I just do the same with dating, as I firmly believe establishing a basic friendship is the fertile soil for a great relationship. I am slow to warm up, my feelings and attraction develop over time. I like to see men in different situations & experiences and how we both react separately, and then contrast this. I like to allow attraction to develop alongside knowledge of the person. I don't necessarily think "You need to be friends first", more that a strong romantic relationship usually benefits from the qualities of a good friendship. This method avoids some pitfalls I fell into when younger in less mature relationships - I get to prioritise liking the person before I idealise them and it assists me in observing character as attraction develops. I get to test compatibility through normal, ordinary life and I get to witness interactional patterns over time as opposed to isolated behaviour. When I was younger I was much more inclined to fall for my idea of a person's potential, or my own fantasy a life with them.

There he is Appreciate the input

There might be some gentleman around here who know about how it works in a beneficial way Thinking of maybe @aurum As someone on the receiving end of it done poorly - it feels like someone trying to force control and transmits low intelligence, stubbornness and insecurity.

I'm on it boss. Master origami pretzel mode myself into perfection. Conditioning? Dissolved

🤣🤣🤣 Get ready

This thread is the definition of unhinged ⊙⁠.⁠☉

I don't want to straight pathologise him; but he really displays a lot of the markers for body dismorphia

I see that there are women who do play by the paradigm he operates from. I simply don't fit that. It's a flaw to flatten an entire sex down into generalisations with no nuance.

I get that, but AION isn't trying to understand anything about me. He is trying to force me to fit into his model of how women work, and when I claim that's not me, that's not how I work, he is incapable of accepting that claim. This is why I think it's weird. And mansplany. And once again applying a sweeping generalisation to all women and how they work. No nuance. Just "all woman work that way"

I don't know what this is about. It seems confused. You don't know any of my wants or needs from men??? I never said or made this explicit. I never claimed life wasnt fair or complained about it. You can have your needs. And it's perfectly fine to want to be part of status hierarchies. I am saying I don't go for those guys. It's your choice not to believe it. You express so much indignation because I don't fit your model. I just don't fit your model.

Not quite, I probably didn't formulate my point clearly enough. I’m not arguing that a persons understanding of their own inner experience should automatically be prioritised over another persons interpretation (or that self-report is infallible). My point is much narrower: when we have an inference about someone’s internal state, and that person tells us our inference doesn't match their actual experience, that should be treated as evidence worth considering. It should prompt some healthy doubt about whether our model is accurate (hence why I also raised about gathering information and testing against current models + updating if needed). They may be wrong about themselves, and we may be wrong about them. Neither position should be treated as automatically infallible. But in this specific case, given forum history and context (always asserting how "things are for women" or how "I am", lack of openness in this domain, lack of enquiry or probing questions, demonstrated inability to update models or drop frame, and general uncharitable engagement) my position is well founded.

Can you quote me, or give me some more of your interpretation here? It could simply be that context was lost in the back and forth, because this originally was about a specific interaction with history. I could possibly have branched off in a way that isn't specific to the initial interaction.

So my claim there is that it should be something to be considered. Healthy doubt to test our knowing. This is just a normative/epistemic claim and part of critical thinking. You don't think this is necessary?

I agree with this!

Such a naughty one, this one 😈 NGL I feel this is a result of the dairy industry's influence

Feel free to elaborate.

No, not necessarily. I never said you cannot infer and be accurate. If you read my passage again, I explicitly grant that inference is legitimate. Inference is fine; treating it as knowledge is a problem.

You can believe whatever you want via whatever inference or whatever heuristic you have developed. But it is still inferred. Not known. It is a belief. My heuristic for knowing AION has no idea how I respond internally is his continual and systematic misunderstanding of me throughout our entire history of the forum. The arrogance of thinking we understand someone's internal responses better than they do must also be inspected. This rolls back into having charitable and good faith discussions. There's another distinction underneath this: holding a model of someone vs remaining receptive to evidence that your model is wrong. Models of others are provisional until we have further evidence. AION has a model of how he thinks I would respond. That's fine. But I supplied direct evidence about my actual response, and instead of treating that as information capable of updating his model, he dismissed it. So in this instance it is reasonable to know I (and my internal responses) am being misunderstood.

Perhaps that is the intention (to display his knowledge around general female tendencies) - but the rhetoric used changes the entire statement. And the rhetoric used is to make an assessment about how I work without consideration of outliers and the great variation in people's psychology. AION moved from describing a population-level tendency to making a personal psychological claim about me, while simultaneously dismissing my own report about myself. If you inspect the phrasing: "I know your internal response better than you know you do." Also note - "doubt that" doubts what I personally asserted about myself and how I work. I am being told how I work. There is no listening to what is being said. Compare that to a statement that would not be so personally targeted: The above would be a more nuanced display of general knowledge & tendencies of female psychology. _____ It is fine to make general statements about how some women work. But it is a trap to think all women work the same way. Just as it would be as unfair to say all men are simple slaves to their sex drives and will abandon their wives at the first sniff off younger puss.

@Valach haha Omg! Again trying to tell me how I feel or how I work! How can you not see this? Literally mansplaning. Surely you are aware enough to see how weird you are being?