HereAndGone
15hr ago
Sorry, it's the whole "pfft, caring for kids is so easy-peasy even the stupidest woman (but I repeat myself) can do it!" thing that is not making "hey, being a wife and mother is indeed an important work that should be allocated a higher status than it is". If you're trying to fight decades of "staying at home and having kids is wasting your talents, your value and your life" teaching, then repeating "child care is unskilled labour any fule can do" is not gonna help.
Long excerpt follows:
The outlaws grumbled and scuffed, kicking at stones. A hoarse voice bawled from a safe shadow, “Na, Willie, sing us a true song. Sing us one about Robin Hood.”
"Who said that?” Cully’s loosened sword clacked in its sheath as he turned from side to side. His face suddenly seemed as pale and weary as a used lemon drop.
“I did,” said Molly Grue, who hadn’t. “The men are bored with ballads of your bravery, Captain darling. Even if you did write them all yourself.”
…An aging rogue in tattered velvet now slunk forward. “Captain, if we’re to have folk songs, and I suppose we must, then we feel they ought to be true songs about real outlaws, not this lying life we live. No offense, Captain, but we’re really not very merry, when all’s said —”
“I’m merry twenty-four hours a day, Dick Fancy,” Cully said coldly. “That is a fact.”
“And we don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Dick Fancy hurried on. “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back—most of them—and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We don’t rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every month to leave us alone. We never carry off proud bishops and keep them prisoner in the wood, feasting and entertaining them, because Molly hasn’t any good dishes, and besides, we just wouldn’t be very stimulating company for a bishop. When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at the archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.”
…“And as for righting wrongs and fighting for civil liberties, that sort of thing,” Dick Fancy said, “it wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, I’m not the crusader type myself, some are and some aren’t—but then we have to sing those songs about wearing Lincoln green and aiding the oppressed. We don’t, Cully, we turn them in for the reward, and those songs are just embarrassing, that’s all, and there’s the truth of it.”
...He opened his eyes. Most of the outlaws were chuckling and tapping their temples, glad of the chance to mock him. Captain Cully had risen, anxious to pronounce that part of the entertainment ended. Then Molly Grue cried out in a soft, shaking voice, and all turned to see what she saw. A man came walking into the clearing.
He was dressed in green, but for a brown jerkin and a slanting brown cap with a woodcock’s feather in it. He was very tall, too tall for a living man: the great bow slung over his shoulder looked as long as Jack Jingly, and his arrows would have made spears or staves for Captain Cully. Taking no notice at all of the still, shabby forms by the fire, he strode through the night and vanished, with no sound of breath or footfall.
After him came others, one at a time or two together, some conversing, many laughing, but none making any sound. All carried longbows and all wore green, save one who came clad in scarlet to his toes, and another gowned in a friar’s brown habit, his feet in sandals and his enormous belly contained by a rope belt. One played a lute and sang silently as he walked.
“Alan-a-Dale.” It was raw Willie Gentle. “Look at those changes.” His voice was as naked as a baby bird.
Effortlessly proud, graceful as giraffes (even the tallest among them, a kind-eyed Blunderbore), the bowmen moved across the clearing. Last, hand in hand, came a man and a woman. Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear. The woman’s heavy hair shone with a secret, like a cloud that hides the moon.
“Oh,” said Molly Grue. “Marian.”
“Robin Hood is a myth,” Captain Cully said nervously, “a classic example of the heroic folk-figures synthesized out of need. John Henry is another. Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl. Not that it isn’t a remarkable trick, of course.”
It was the seedy dandy Dick Fancy who moved first. All the figures but the last two had passed into the darkness when he rushed after them, calling, hoarsely, “Robin, Robin, Mr. Hood sir, wait for me!” Neither the man nor the woman turned, but every man of Cully’s band—saving only Jack Jingly and the captain himself—ran to the clearing’s edge, tripping and trampling one another, kicking the fire so that the clearing churned with shadows. “Robin!” they shouted; and “Marian, Scarlet, Little John—come back! Come back!” Schmendrick began to laugh, tenderly and helplessly.
Over their voices, Captain Cully screamed, “Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!” But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.
Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white. “Nay, Cully, you have it backward,” she called to him. “There’s no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!”
Then she ran on, crying, “Wait, wait!” like the others, leaving Captain Cully and Jack Jingly to stand in the trampled firelight and listen to the magician’s laughter.
HereAndGone
15hr ago
Thank you, kind person!
While we're on the tangent of Tolkien's works, what finally clicked for me about the difference between GRRM and JRRT is this part from "The Last Unicorn", which I only thought about today, where Schmendrick the incapable magician is captured by a band of outlaws. Their leader, Captain Cully, aspires to the whole 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the greenwood' trope but in an ironic/deconstructionist way: he wants to write his own 'folk ballads' about the heroic Captain Cully and his dearest ambition is to have them collected by a travelling folklorist and included in something like the famous Child Ballads. The other members of his band point out the disconnect between the folkloric Robin Hood and the reality of being outlaws in the woods.
So far, so grubby realism GRRM: there are no heroes, all the stories are fantasies, the reality is mud and violence and grinding poverty and trying to scrape by, and the ones who claim to be the noble heroes as of old are liars and fantasists.
But then Schmendrick manages to pull off some real magic, without intending it, without knowing what will happen. And he evokes Robin and Marian and the Merry Men, and the outlaws run after them, calling them to stop and come back. Cully tries to bring it all back down to the grubby reality which is the only reality they can have, but Molly Grue tells him no. People want the fantasy and the heroism. In a sense, that is what is truly real, not the grubbiness of his petty ambitions. So far, so JRRT 😁
HereAndGone
16hr ago
Interesting story, but is it written by a teenager? Because "Evelyn is possibly, maybe, internally melting into a puddle of awwwwwwwwwwwww" is not generally how women in their forties who are foster parents react (I say this as a woman older than forty).
Or historically, for middle-class men, long engagements were the rule. Some careers wouldn't allow you to marry, or put impediments in the way of marriage: can't bring your wife (if you have one) out to India with you, can't marry locals, have to wait ten years to get leave back to Britain and then marry a suitable woman there:
Early marriage was seen as an impediment to a young man’s career and marriage was forbidden in the ICS before the age of thirty and made very difficult in the Indian Army. A marriage allowance was not paid until an Indian Army officer was twenty-six, and it was customary to seek the Colonel’s permission to marry. He could refuse, and mostly did, until the young officer had achieved the rank of Captain. In The Officer’s Wife, an angry Gerald recites to Daisy the military’s informal rule: subalterns cannot marry, captains may marry, majors should marry, colonels must marry.
Others involved lack of economic advancement for the man, e.g. the stock figure of the poor curate waiting for a living of his own before he could marry, see the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the long engagement.
And other men simply did not wish to marry 'early' (before the age of thirty*); there's a fair amount of fiction where a forty year old man ends up marrying an eighteen to twenty year old woman simply because now at last he's found 'the one'/he's ready to settle down since it's time he was married and had an heir or her family consider it an advantageous match where he's financially established, and it's nothing to do with emotional attraction.
*From a collection of ghost stories published in 1927, where the tale is set in 1905, so clearly this kind of attitude was socially acceptable since neither the narrator nor the audience feel the need for him to justify why he's not married beyond "I wasn't ready":
‘It’s twenty years ago, 1905, exactly twenty years, in the winter. I was very hard-working, very absorbed and very successful for a youngster. I had no ties and a little money of my own, I’d taken all the degrees and honors I could take, and I’d just finished a rather stiff German course in Munich — physical chemistry — and I was rather worn out.
‘I had not begun to practice and I decided to rest before I did so.
‘I recognized in myself those dangerous symptoms of fatigue, lack of interest in everything and a nervous distrust of my powers. And by nature I was fairly confident, even, I daresay, arrogant.
‘While I was still in Munich a cousin I had almost forgotten, died and left me a house and furniture.
‘Not of much value and in a very out-of-the-way place.
‘I thought the bequest queer and paid no attention to it; of course I was rather pleased, but I decided to sell.
‘I meant to live in London and I had not the least intention of an early marriage, nor indeed of any marriage at all.
‘I was nearly thirty and sufficiently resolute and self-contained.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
Eh, back in the Good Old Days, women were getting married early and still having babies into their forties. See Queen Victoria: married at twenty-one, first child nine months later, last pregnancy aged thirty-eight, widowed at forty-two. My own mother had her last child aged forty-two, and she only got married in her early thirties.
Yes, it gets harder to get pregnant the longer you put it off, but I have half a notion modern difficulty is due to prolonged use of hormonal birth control. You spend twenty years tricking your body into permanent sterility, you are not going to get it to turn on a sixpence after you decide "okay now baby" and stop the pill for six months.
HereAndGone
17hr ago
Of course, the risks of early marriage are significant, if they pick the wrong guy things can blow up and backfire.
And the risk is genuine, even if it's small. Get married in early 20s, be a housewife and mother, raise the kids, support his career (so he can work those crazy long work weeks to get the promotions and not have to worry about cooking meals, clean clothes, nice house to invite the boss back to for the networking dinner parties, bringing the kids to the doctor, etc.) and then you hit your forties and he trades you in for a newer, younger model and you're left with no independent income of your own, no career, no job history or one that is long out of date, and probably custody of and responsibility for the kids (if they're not adults by then).
Pretty much what happened to Mackenzie Bezos, except the new model wasn't younger, and pretty much the majority opinion on here was "why the hell does this leech expect to extract all that money from her poor husband who grew the fortune while she did nothing" (supporting him by working when he was trying to get Amazon off the ground, then being wife, mother, and homemaker for the rest of the marriage counts as 'nothing').
You see why women would want to be sure they have financial independence?
HereAndGone
18hr ago
caring for babies may be arduous but is not particularly skilled work
Okay, so a big brain skilled guy like you should easily be able to handle a room full of six month old kids with no prior training or instruction, yeah? So easy that you'd like to give up your current demanding job and take on this easy, soft, job for money for jam?
I work in a place that is a childcare centre (not as a childminder myself) for ages 12 months to four years old. It's a hell of a lot tougher than shooting from the hip comments like this imagine. There are even, gasp!, government standards to hit for each developmental phase!
HereAndGone
18hr ago
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex
I know nothing about ole Artie there, but this is sounding very strongly gay. Have to go run off and look up "Schopenhauer sexuality" which is not a Google search I thought I'd be doing today:
Despite his later celebration of asceticism and negative views of sexuality, Schopenhauer occasionally had sexual affairs—usually with women of lower social status, such as servants, actresses and sometimes prostitutes. In a letter to his friend Anthime he claims that such affairs continued even in his mature age and admits that he had two out-of-wedlock daughters (born in 1819 and 1836), both of whom died in infancy. In their youthful correspondence Arthur and Anthime were somewhat boastful and competitive about their sexual exploits—but Schopenhauer seemed aware that women usually did not find him very charming or physically attractive, and his desires often remained unfulfilled.
Huh. So maybe more sour grapes than gayness there: "that bitch turned me down, well I don't care, women are all ugly in fact and stupid and dumb and don't care about important things like me and my guy friends do and they're smelly poopy-heads, why won't the girls give me a chance, I'm a nice guy! why can't I get a hot upper-class girlfriend instead of having to pay for sex?"
I get the distinct impression he would approve of the phrase "riding the cock carousel".
HereAndGone
18hr ago
New jobs created in the wake of AI displacement, as we're being assured! Employment options in the world of finance-cum-custodianship-cum environmental initiatives: goat poop cleaner-upper!
HereAndGone
18hr ago
And the fact that she was only able to kill the Witch-king through a linguistic loophole is particularly galling.
No? I think it's both funny and clever, and in the traditional vein of "devilish contracts are foiled by word-play" stories. There's always a catch to the genie's gifts, and the gifts of Sauron are no exception. The Witch-king, by this view, may in part have surrendered to the lure of his ring through "I will be truly immortal and no-one will be able to kill me", and then the loophole smacks him in the face.
That he is taken down by a woman and a hobbit is completely in harmony with how the demons are foiled in Hindu mythology. They perform penances to gain boons from the Supreme Trinity, immortality is not possible, so they ask for elaborate conditions ("nobody can kill me except...") and think they have gained because this particular set will never come to pass.
See, for example, Ravana: he asks for immunity to all except from men, because in his arrogance and pride he doesn't think those creatures are ever going to be strong enough to fight him, and he ends up killed by Rama, the human avatar of Vishnu, with the assistance of Hanuman, the monkey-avatar of Shiva.
The most elaborate probably has to do with the avatar of Vishnu as Narasimha, the man-lion, to kill the demon-king who had received a boon with a list of accompanying conditions:
According to Hindu texts, Hiranyakashipu, the elder brother of Hiranyaksha—who was killed earlier by Vishnu's Varaha avatar—received a boon from the creator god Brahma that made him nearly invulnerable. The conditions of the boon prevented his death by man or beast, indoors or outdoors, during day or night, on earth or in the sky, and not by any weapon. Empowered by this, Hiranyakashipu persecuted Vishnu’s devotees, including his own son Prahlada. To circumvent the boon, Vishnu incarnated as Narasimha—neither man nor animal—and killed Hiranyakashipu at twilight, on a palace threshold, placing him on his lap and tearing him apart with his claws.
Eowyn being "No living man am I" is in response to Shakespeare's "Macbeth", where the condition there is 'Macbeth thinks he can be killed by no man born of woman; Macduff is born of a woman who died in childbirth/born via Caesarean section so that technically fulfils the condition'.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
The full quote is more helpful, I think:
‘Your duty is with your people,’ he answered.
‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?’
‘Few may do that with honour,’ he answered. ‘But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord’s return? If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no.’
‘Shall I always be chosen?’ she said bitterly. ‘Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?’
‘A time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’
And she answered: ‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.’
‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked. ‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’
Eowyn is trapped by a sense of futility, and her culture valorises 'death in battle' as the most fitting, and perhaps only fitting, end to a life. So she sees no way out for her but death, and the best death she can get is death in battle, and that to her seems the only thing she can control: the manner of her death - to go out in a blaze of glory rather than remain trapped in that cage for years more.
It wasn't common for the women of the Rohirrim to go to war:
Then the prince went from his horse, and knelt by the bier in honour of the king and his great onset; and he wept. And rising he looked then on Éowyn and was amazed. ‘Surely, here is a woman?’ he said. ‘Have even the women of the Rohirrim come to war in our need?’
‘Nay! One only,’ they answered. ‘The Lady Éowyn is she, sister of Éomer; and we knew naught of her riding until this hour, and greatly we rue it.’
Gandalf explains her situation - trapped in what seems hopeless, in a world where the domestic work and work of service is not regarded, and with intelligence, strength, and ambition that is relegated to 'stay in the background and stay quiet':
[Aragorn says] '...When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? Her malady begins far back before this day, does it not, Éomer?’
‘I marvel that you should ask me, lord,’ he answered. ‘For I hold you blameless in this matter, as in all else; yet I knew not that Éowyn, my sister, was touched by any frost, until she first looked on you. Care and dread she had, and shared with me, in the days of Wormtongue and the king’s bewitchment; and she tended the king in growing fear. But that did not bring her to this pass!’
‘My friend,’ said Gandalf, ‘you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.
‘Think you that Wormtongue had poison only for Théoden’s ears? Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among their dogs? Have you not heard those words before? Saruman spoke them, the teacher of Wormtongue. Though I do not doubt that Wormtongue at home wrapped their meaning in terms more cunning. My lord, if your sister’s love for you, and her will still bent to her duty, had not restrained her lips, you might have heard even such things as these escape them. But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?’
HereAndGone
18hr ago
Yep. In the book, when Merry first sees 'Dernhelm', this is his view:
But when they had come almost to the end of the line one looked up glancing keenly at the hobbit. A young man, Merry thought as he returned the glance, less in height and girth than most. He caught the glint of clear grey eyes; and then he shivered, for it came suddenly to him that it was the face of one without hope who goes in search of death.
My impression is that outside of a few extreme outliers such as Galadriel, women in Tolkien's works are mainly apt to fight only when left undefended, such as when their men are away at war, or perhaps in a situation where defeat means annihilation of their people anyway.
Time to pull out that quote from "Laws and Customs Among The Eldar"
In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There ae, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a nér can think or do, or others with which only a nís is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in time and place, and in the several races of the Eldar). For instance, the arts of healing, and all that touches on the care of the body, are among all the Eldar most practiced by the nissi; whereas it was the elven-men who bore arms at need. And the Eldar deemed that the dealing of death, even when lawful or under necessity, diminished the power of healing, and that the virtue of the nissi in this matter was due rather to their abstaining from hunting or war than to any special power that went with their womanhood. Indeed in dire straits or in desperate defence, the nissi fought valiantly, and there was less difference in strength and speed between elven-men and elven-women that had not borne child than is seen among mortals. On the other hand many elven-men were great healers and skilled in the lore of living bodies, though such men abstained from hunting, and went not to war until the last need.
Luthien is a demi-goddess, her mother being a Maia. She has authority to act, and it's not by physical fighting (riding around on horseback waving a sword) that she overcomes enemies, it's by magic and the innate spiritual strength and rightness she possesses. She puts Melkor to sleep using what is basically magic, though that's a complicated concept in Tolkien's work, not by fighting him to a standstill.
She does throw down Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but that is after Sauron surrenders it to her, so once again that is "I have legitimate authority here and by my innate spiritual/magical abilities I can cast this down".
And then she gives all that up for love, and becomes mortal, and dies and leaves the Circles of the World.
HereAndGone
19hr ago
Even Tolkien had a few badass girlboss warriors in LoTR.
Mainly (1) Eowyn, and she is suicidally depressed, looking for her culture's validated "glorious death in battle" as the only worthy and honourable ending to a life because she can't see any better outcome for her. Her healing comes when she puts all that behind her and sees the hope of a meaningful life:
"Do not scorn the pity that is the gift of a gentle heart, Eowyn! But I do not offer you my pity. For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten; and you are a lady beautiful, I deem, beyond even the words of the Elven-tongue to tell. And I love you. Once I pitied your sorrow. But now, were you sorrowless, without fear or any lack, were you the blissful Queen of Gondor, still I would love you. Eowyn, do you not love me?'
Then the heart of Eowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her.
'I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,' she said, 'and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.' And again she looked at Faramir. 'No longer do I desire to be a queen,' she said.
Then Faramir laughed merrily. 'That is well,' he said; 'for I am not a king. Yet I will wed with the White Lady of Rohan, if it be her will. And if she will, then let us cross the River and in happier days let us dwell in fair Ithilien and there make a garden. All things will grow with joy there, if the White Lady comes.'
'Then I must leave my own people, man of Gondor?' she said. 'And would you have your proud folk say of you: "There goes a lord who tamed a wild shieldmaiden of the North! Was there no woman of the race of Numenor to choose?"'
'I would,' said Faramir. And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many."
(2) Galadriel, and she has put the "riding around on horseback waving a sword" days behind her in her youth, which again were not so much for "badass girlboss warrior" reasons but "fight or die" reasons; crossing the Helcaraxe was not a fun stroll.
"I know what it was that you last saw,' she said; `for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!"
The one who is closest to "badass girlboss warrior" is Aredhel, and her wilfulness gets her into trouble.
(3) Maybe Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, who takes on a human-sized Ruffian with only her umbrella 😁
‘That’s right!’ put in Young Tom. ‘Why, they even took Pimple’s old ma, that Lobelia, and he was fond of her, if no one else was. Some of the Hobbiton folk, they saw it. She comes down the lane with her old umberella. Some of the ruffians were going up with a big cart.
‘“Where be you a-going?” says she.
‘“To Bag End,” says they.
‘“What for?” says she.
‘“To put up some sheds for Sharkey,” says they.
‘“Who said you could?” says she.
‘“Sharkey,” says they. “So get out o’ the road, old hagling!”
‘“I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!” says she, and ups with her umberella and goes for the leader, near twice her size. So they took her. Dragged her off to the Lockholes, at her age too. They’ve took others we miss more, but there’s no denying she showed more spirit than most.’
HereAndGone
3d ago
"Agreeing to the idea in principle" but when it comes to making it happen, it's all on OP. He has to buy a house or other dwelling in the city. She is not putting a penny towards this. Even though it's supposed to be "and then we can live together".
It well may be she doesn't want any kind of closer relationship with anyone and this is what suits her, I've read stories of "famous author doesn't live with her husband and they have two separate houses" before. Long-distance boyfriend that they have a close friendship but only have to meet face-to-face and be together for short periods at a time might be all she wants in a relationship.
But it would be kinder and more honest of her to say that, instead of a string of excuses. Perhaps she doesn't even know herself, though, what exactly she wants: 'this works, why mess with it, if it ain't broke don't fix it'.
one thing that we both agree on is that we should only calculate affordability based on my assets and income.
That's the red flag for me. This isn't "we've only been dating six weeks, it's way too soon to move in together". This is "it's been ten years, I want to be with her permanently, she won't move to where I am, I can't afford to buy a house where she wants to live" so why the hell is it "you have to pay for it all, sugarbuns" on her part?
If this is a move meant to make it so they can be together for good (up to marriage, even) then it should be a joint purchase. "All in your name" only works for "so if I want to do a midnight flit tomorrow, I won't be on the hook for the mortgage" and midnight flits are not "you are my forever snookums".
I am going to be a total bitch here and ask OP: are you sure there isn't a boyfriend in the city for the time she isn't with you? Friend with benefits, situationship, whatever the hell they want to call it, because this sounds (and again, we're only getting one side of the story) much too comfortable on her part for what is ten years of 'twice a month if we can make it' relationship.
HereAndGone
3d ago
If it's not making sense after ten years, it's never going to make sense.
Again, I'm diagnosing a situation based on no knowledge except what you've provided here, but it sounds like that from her side, things are fine as they are and she has no wish to change them. You seem to be the one who wants the permanent committed relationship. You say she says she misses you and wishes you could be together, but again from what you say, she's doing nothing about that.
You're doing the research online. You're trying to find alternatives and compromises. From your description, her view is "move here, not necessarily in with me, so I can keep what I already have plus be able to see you more easily and more often".
I dunno. Sounds like the saying ""In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek". But if you want this to work, maybe it can. I'm hesitant to say "start making demands" because that's a great way to start a fight, but can you ask her does she really think your problems will let you just move to the city like she wants? What's her suggestion for overcoming "I would lose her simply because we couldn't afford to be where she wants to be." Is she willing to move somewhere in the city that is within your current means, or is that also a big no-no? If it's going to be home for both of you, what assets is she bringing to this and why is it all on you to pay for a new house?
HereAndGone
5d ago
It's hard to diagnose a total stranger, but I have to ask you this: it's been ten years, has she ever hinted at marriage? Asked if you want to get married someday? Talked about friends getting married? Have you ever tried proposing or even hinting you want to marry her?
Because if it's ten years and you're not even living in the same city, this does not sound like "rest of my life relationship" on her side. I have some sympathy for her as a non-driver myself (it's easy to say 'oh just get a lift, I'll drive you anywhere' but it's a lot harder depending on family members to be available when you need that transport to a certain place or trying to get taxis or trying to fit bus schedules around 'I need to be in this place at this time on the dot'), but I can't see how you guys are working this out. Do you visit her in CITY regularly? Does she visit you?
Right now, it sounds like you are both living what amount to independent lives and she's happy with that. Apart from the whole transport and job reasons, I hate to say it, but it sounds like she's not eager to have you move in with her/she moves in with you and start living together (and maybe wedding bells in the near future). Some people can make that work, but if you want more and she doesn't - time to rip the bandage off completely. Talk to her about "do you want to be with me? do you want marriage? do you see us as forever?"
HereAndGone
5d ago
Most Americans do not think middle schoolers should be having sex with each other, even on birth control
I really hope this is so, but you know yourself: the Very Online Activist set that arrange protests with pink knitted hats and had Kamala Harris making speeches about how she was fighting for reproductive justice (or whatever the term of art is today) are the ones who like to use these examples of "so you're gonna put a 15 year old on the sex offenders list just for sleeping with his girlfriend, huh?"
HereAndGone
5d ago
Only if it's named after the city, I guess!
HereAndGone
5d ago
Oh, I didn't go next, nigh or near any Trek once Disco hit the screens. I stayed well away from Picard (once bitten, twice shy) and by all accounts that was the best decision, though even there apparently they had to go back to classic Trek roots for the ending?
Snakeroot addict ex-officer Raffi livin' in poverty in the desert because the system and The Man done her dirty and down - ugh. Yeah, drop that anvil on our heads several times so we get the point about WOMEN, MINORITIES, SYSTEMIC RACISM, WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE, why don't you?
That's not Trek, not TOS Trek and if it's gone downhill to that degree by Picard's time then we really are in the Reboot timeline and not Prime.
HereAndGone
5d ago
HereAndGone
5d ago
The implication here being that Ferengi were modeled after Jews and they work in industries of vice?
They were explicitly compared to "Yankee traders" at their introduction, so wrong minority group offended, I guess?
No idea how old any of them are, but it really is a very young woman's view of emotional reactions. Or maybe I'm just insufficiently Bay Area to get it and people really do melt into puddles of awwww! all over the place there.
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