Whirling D

OK, here is a lame logistical question. This afternoon, during our last text, I asked her if we would be able to talk in cyber real time and a video call at some point either today or tomorrow, and she said “maybe this afternoon later”. I know she usually likes talking while she’s driving, because she likes the company while she drives, so I said to her “maybe you could give me a ring on your hour drive home, and I can try to keep you company…” She never did respond. I am learning to interpret that as her way of saying “OK”. Thinking she was going to leave somewhere around 7 PM, which is her usual time of living up there… Which means she might already be on route. But she hasn’t called. She might she might be delayed. I don’t know. I’ve got other stuff to have to do, so I’m wondering if I should just call her or text her and ask her if she’s on her way yet and if she wants to talk. She didn’t actually agreed to call me, so I don’t know if it would be too pushy to just call her up like I usually do. What do you think?

You may be right. I want her to be happy in her career, obviously, but I also want her to respect my life choices, as well. They are no better or worse. Just different. I think you get that. Interesting to think though… She’s pretty much at the top of her profession. She doesn’t really have a lot more. She needs to prove, so from that perspective, I don’t know who she really feels she needs to impress. That’s why I relate to rainbows perspective on it… This is really more about her ego, I think, that it really is about her saving face within her profession. I think she’s got her profession, pretty much in the palm of her hand, if you wanna look at it that way. I just don’t wanna feel the way I do about it. My ego has taken a hit. I don’t want to feel that way. I also hope I haven’t alienated her with my attitude, which I believe is a valid attitude. It’s just not her attitude. I do think she is likely thinking, the same thing that I was, and that she thought she found this guy that just loved her just the way she is, but then the crack started appearing… And I think her fantasy has started to crumble a little bit, and now she’s left with the reality that she’s with an imperfect guy, that has lots of problems, and who won’t be able to fix her life the way she had hoped. Same for me. I started to wonder about this fantasy thing when I was with her a few weeks ago. The look in her eye, and I’ve seen it before with my borderline lady friend, was one of looking at me, as if I was going to be some sort of savior for her. I’ve seen that book before, and it’s not necessarily her looking at reality, I don’t think. I was probably looking back in the same way, so I think I understand it.

Yes, I am starting to further understand what you are saying as well, cat, but I also still relate to what rainbow is saying. It’s still not a favorable characteristic for her to feel that it could be a bad reflection on her how I look, no differently than it’s not a great reflection on me that I would probably not feel that she was as hot for my friends to see, if she cut her hair short. People aren’t perfect, I’m not, she’s not, we got to get over that. I hope she can.

And?

Believe it or not, I’ve been trying hard to do just that… Which happens much more easily, when I am with the doctor lady in person, with the exception of conversations like the one we discussed. She is really easy to like most of the time, although, that has been changing a bit… she’s Been quite a bit more angry over the last week, and tired… She even joked about maybe having Lyme disease and I joked about maybe it being mono. Maybe it was just a bad week, who knows. Our weekend was OK, but not great last weekend… It was rainy, she was grumpy for part of it, and then we had these conversations. The road was getting bumpy here, and I just hope that she still is trying to drive forward. But then again, I hope I can continue to drive forward, as well. Eventually, you have to start deciding whether you’re on the same road. It should be simple to figure that out, but it isn’t always easy.

Yeah, I can imagine what a bride might think, if one of the bridesmaids was grumpy about having to wear their hair up, like the other bridesmaids were asked to. Point well-made.

Well, I guess that could be seen as true, but I just wondering now if I may have botched that curiosity about a future with me. But she still seems mildly interest in talking with me… Although that seems to have been tapered off fairly dramatically… But it’s Tom Petty sang… 🎶 love is a Long Long Road 🎶. Or something like that. I would enjoy working toward a future with her, but I guess we still have a lot to learn about each other, and whether little battles like this will turn out to show too much incompatibility. I can’t imagine most couples don’t bump heads with each other like this about stuff like this.

So in that regard, I probably think no differently than she does in regards to something like this. She just has a higher platform from which to validate her needs… And that is her professional reputation. She makes no hesitation pointing that out. 🙂

I do, and the not so flattering part of my ego thinks that she would appear to be “hotter“ with her longer wild hair. I’m not proud to say that, but I do believe I would feel that way.

Well, as mentioned. I think my ego may be flattened a little bit, because I thought maybe she thought of me in a way that could do no wrong… If you know what I mean.

Thank you… But there’s part of me that agrees with rainbow… Although, I’m trying to understand different perspectives, and I’m trying to let go of this feeling I have of being dissed. 😵‍💫😵‍💫

Well, as has been said before… Is this really the hill I want to die on with her? I don’t think it is. Can I live with her not caring much for my long hair? I guess I could. It’s just hair. No differently than if she got hers cut short. I don’t think I disown her if she did, even though it would lower my attraction to her physically. But that’s only part of the whole picture, right?

That’s a reasonable anecdote, but if it’s me, you’re directing this toward, I don’t think I’m trashing her. Do I by her reasoning as to why she would want me to do that? I don’t. I don’t agree with it, and I think it’s disrespectful. I didn’t really heavily turn that conversation back around her with a pointed arrow at her… I just repeated my own philosophy on it, and that I felt that I could be respected on my own terms, and I should be valued for who I am, despite what I look like… It may be a week argument, but that’s what I believe But multiple times, I said to her I would do whatever I needed to, to make her feel comfortable, because I care about her. I don’t want to feel like I am judging her, although I suppose that’s what I’m doing. That’s what this is really all about if we think about it. It’s about judgment. Who’s judging who. I need to let that go. She believes what she believes, and she has a right to believe it. I don’t have to like it. She doesn’t have to like my hair, I guess. Not many people do.

That’s pretty much how she started the conversation, rainbow. I don’t remember if it was the first or second leg of the conversation, which happened on different days. She came over and she took the hairband that my daughter had put on my wrist months before, that I still had there just as a reminder of my daughter… And she put my hair in a ponytail. That’s when she said, “I just don’t understand why you would want to hide that cute face like that… You have such a cute face, and just like your mother says, your hair is a distraction from that“. that was flattering. I guess. Just not about my hair, which is part of the package. After that, the conversation went in the direction of how it made her feel about inviting me to professional events. As for what wise was saying… I don’t believe I am saying she is a stuck up elitist b. If I had to try to put it into different words, I think she just has an outdated philosophy about what is important on a different plane. Maybe it’s more of a Buddhist philosophy, I don’t know, because I don’t know specifics about Buddhism. I suspect within the Buddhist world, what you look like, means very little. and yes, I’m probably a little hypocritical, because a lot of the times I look at her, I find her very attractive… And I struggle with that a bit… I thought to myself, “Whirl, what would happen if she came to me one day and said she was going to cut her hair short? I don’t find shorter hair as attractive on women… What would I say to her? I would certainly say to her that I would prefer her hair to be longer, which I think I already hinted that, but what I tell her that I wouldn’t be as attracted to her with short hair?” I hope I would never say something like that. That was an actual conversation I had with myself, and I don’t know the outcome of that conversation. I have no doubt that the doctor lady still cares for me despite my long hair. I believe she told me that it wasn’t a dealbreaker, and she accepted my hair, just as it was… But, I may have damaged that care by my response to her, but I am hoping she will also respect my vantage on it. And that is, we should not judge people based on what they look like, and we should allow them to live the life they feel they were meant to live. Although, I think it’s more likely she thinks I’m inflexible and a bit snobbish in that regard. Based on the conversations here, that may be what many of you might think. As a result, I’m trying to think of things from a different perspective. This conversation may temper my distaste of her opinion, which I think is a good thing. Hearing different perspectives, and opinions I think it’s really helpful in this regard. I think you guys for that. I don’t want you guys to think that I am completely trashing this lady for her opinion. I don’t particularly care for it, which is a little troublesome, and I don’t particularly care that her mother said what she did. I think the doctor lady told me that just to prepare me for what kind of conservative backlash I might be confronted by. I was a bit amused by it, but there’s a small grain of hurt embedded in there, because I will hopefully meet this lady at some point soon, and that makes me feel like I’m already a step behind . Clearly, everybody wants to meet someone that they think is going to accept you exactly as you are, and not try to change you. I think that’s why I’m heartbroken. I thought maybe I finally found someone who is going to value me just as I am, divots and all. I may have to work a little harder to get over this hump, as many of us do in relationships to get over other kinds of humps. If she’s up for the challenge, I will try to get over this and keep moving forward. She is so decent and loving in so many other ways. None of us are perfect. I know she thinks I can be irritating, as many of you do, that I debate the crap out of everything. Even stuff she tells me related to science. She’ll tell me something that she believes is true, and I will counter what she says with something that I may have read or studied in school. She said she thought that sometimes it was irritating that I did that, but multiple times we talked about that kind of thing and I told her that it’s not a matter that I feel like I need to be right all the time. I just want somebody to be right. And I want to find out what the truth actually is in these matters. As I said, probably a year ago, my friend in Canada and I always compare different ways of doing things and compare what we believe to be true. Neither of us care who comes up with the right answer, as long as somebody comes up with something that sounds like the best solution. He learns from me, I learn from him, and we’re both happy as pigs and manure to compare what we think we may have learned. No different with the doctor lady. I hope she understands that, because we’ve talked about it several times.

This conversation kind of reminds me when I first started at a public school here in the US… I was in my early 40s already, and it didn’t make any sense for me that the kids had to call me “Mr. S”. I thought it sounded silly and formal, and I asked my boss if they could just call me by my first name, which, incidentally, is mostly a girls name here, I wanted them to just call me by my first name. Oh no, you could never do that in a public school. It would be a form of disrespect. Hogwash. It’s the same as the conversation I had with one of my close colleagues about how you had to look “professional“ to be respected in my school, and that your clothes should reflect that. I once again said hogwash. I said people will respect you by how you treat them most of the time. I don’t think there’s anything more to it than that.

Thank you, Sindy. Nice to hear from you. Hope you are hanging in there… 🙂 Any dates this weekend? 🙂 Well, I think for her it comes from fear and insecurity. She’s probably more afraid than I am that someone is going to judge her harshly about something. So, if she brings some dude into a professional event, that looks scruffy, she’s afraid that it’s going to reflect badly on her and her career. I don’t know what you would call that. We all have biases like that in some form. But this one hit rock bottom for me. I don’t know how to handle that.

I haven’t met any of her family, yet, bat. She did tell me that when she told her mother I had long hair that her mother said, “he must do drugs, then“ or something like that. So, Dr. Lady said she doesn’t wanna have to deal with that kind of thing in her professional environment, but yet won’t leave it up to me to make the judgments necessary to do what I would need to do to make her look good in that professional environment, which I predict, I probably could. But then again, I’ve only known her a short while, so how would she know whether she could trust me to do that or not? I don’t know. All I know is that it leaves a lump in my stomach that I don’t know will go away anytime soon. I feel that I might have to have an additional conversation about this, and I don’t think it’s going to go over well. It didn’t seem like she had any capacity to want to truly empathize with what I was trying to say to her when we were talking about it. I think she could sense my distaste about the topic, and she turned it into, “you seem to only want to think of yourself in this situation”. She couldn’t understand how I would have no interest in appealing to people who would judge me based on those factors… And she seemed to think that this is how society is, which is true, and that I needed to be better at negotiating these kinds of environments to be able to move forward in life. Something like that. It perplexed her why I told her I had no interest in appealing to that kind of ideology, and that the community that I search would never judge someone solely on their appearance. The more I have thought about it over the last while, the more I do sense that it is controlling. I think she is going to be a controlling person moving forward. Things must be done this way, or that way, and nothing else is satisfactory. that’s probably why she has no interest in coming to my house. It’s not as well presented as hers. She’s bought into this “I am a doctor, and I can have nice things and present a certain image, and I don’t want anybody to rock that“. I think it’s a bit of a conundrum for her, because I think she really likes who I am, and what I represent, but at the same time she wants to preserve this “image“ that I think she’s built for herself. perhaps it’s warranted, because she has worked hard, but I also think she’s struggling with it, because the time and energy she has put into it has maybe not brought her the happiness that she thought it might, yet I convey to her that people can be happy with much less. I think that’s a tough concept for her to accept, because it draws question to her whole philosophy.

Thank you, rainbow… That was almost the exact feeling I had when we were talking about it… Like she was making judgments based on appearance, and how it would reflect on her… I felt disrespected and devalued. Not what I expected from her or any potential partner. Everyone has their biases, and their comfort levels, I guess, so I’m trying not to be overly harsh or judgmental about it all… But I can’t shake it. I think it’s a bad reflection on her. But what does it really mean in the greater scheme of things? I can’t yet say. Will I be able to look at her with the same innocent gaze, that I once did, and with trust that I wasn’t going to be judged by superficial means, which has triggered me almost my entire life? Mind you, I kind of get it. She is in a very proper and conservative profession, and she said she has certain standards She has to uphold and a reputation to look out for. I interpreted that exactly as you did. She doesn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her colleagues. We both talked about how it’s not easy for us to trust others, because we have been hurt so many times, and we are super sensitive… Yet she went ahead and said something to me, that was kind of thoughtless… That she should have known better not to say. I don’t know how much I can trust her moving forward. does this sound too harsh?

Yeah, rainbow, I can only go by the context in which she presented it, which is… The professional environment is quite predictable, and she might feel awkward, arriving at an event with someone who presented in a way that might reflect badly on her and her choices. That’s my interpretation of it, in my words.

Yeah, for sure… I think my line is when I am made to feel that I could look “better” than I do, which is a judgment, and perhaps a bias, and that I would almost be expected to do it to make her feel better. I guess it’s one thing to volunteer to do something like that for a spouse, but quite different if you are “expected” to do it. That feels qualitatively different to me.

Well, there is a feel-good story… I wonder if they had any of these kinds of conversations in the early days, and if he felt as annoyed by those conversations as I do… 🙂 I don’t know where this all came from in my head. Part of me thinks it’s a big FU to society… “Since I don’t have anything, I’m going to wear anything I want and keep my hair long, despite your objections…” I think that’s part of it. The other part of it is that I grow up a rock and roller, and that’s just how guys that I admire looked when I was younger. Still is. If someone walked into a doctoror a lawyer, gala with a Benjamin Franklin, or George Washington wig on, would everybody freak out? Of course not, at least back in those days, that was considered the norm. It was distinguished. In the rock ‘n’ roll days, it was a right of passage to have long, frizzy hair. I always thought it was freaking cool! I wanted to be a rocker with my hair hanging in my face as a bit rebellious. Think Kurt Cobain. I thought he was the perfect rock ‘n’ roll stereotype… At least for nowadays… 🙂 I also have this earthy Crunchy side of me that believes my hair was kind of meant to grow long, so why wouldn’t I want it to grow as long as it was meant, as long as it doesn’t get in the way? It’s all natural!

Thanks. I would be proud of her and eager to attend. Maybe once in a while… 🙂 and I would do absolutely everything I could, including whatever she asked, to make her feel comfortable. Would I like it? Not even a little bit, but I would do it. My thoughts on that have changed a little bit, I think. As I mentioned, I went to my dads funeral as the only participant with a suit and purple swirly tie. That could be, because I was up in rural Canada, where no one does that, so I probably wouldn’t have been scrutinized, regarding anything matching or making fashion sense. Nobody up there is likely to be fashion savvy… 🙂

I have to wonder… If perhaps that under values, the brightness of the people who you are encountering, and how perceptive they would be to judge people on things other than how they dressed or looked… But then, again, as I just mentioned, that may be a little bit naïve of me. That’s why I never entered the business world. I just don’t know I could stomach that kind of bias.

I think that’s exactly what the doctor lady was getting at. I think she would feel embarrassed if I just went there and dressed exactly like I usually do. But then, again… I would shake hands with everyone with a smile on my face, and be jovial and engaging… Would that make a difference? Like rainbow was saying about the person that she knew who was with the motorcycle fellow… Do you really think that your business relationships would have changed one iota if you had come into one of these gatherings Arm in arm with a post hippynNeanderthal? I’d like to think people are smarter than that, but I guess I’m often wrong… 🙂

Plus… I would enjoy going to white-collar events with her… I would be proud to see her in her environment and help her feel a sense of accomplishment for what she has done with her life. I would be proud of her and wouldn’t want to miss that. Whether or not, I have long hair, shouldn’t have anything to do with that sense of pride that I would feel for her and convey to her, I’m sure. She told me that it was likely part of a cultural bias that she grew up with, and I think that’s entirely true. I am a wacko, left-leaning kind of liberal, who grew up out in the woods in Canada… and her family is apparently soft right wing urban conservative. Let’s see how that goes over… 🙂.