Forget Paris

I'm really not interested in smearing my ex-husband. I'm also not interested in pulling my punches.

I use examples from my life to try to adequately explain myself. I do so because decades of being me has established it as a best practice or least worst option.

1. If I speak in generalities and don't give specific examples, people tend to not relate to what I'm trying to say.

2. If I talk about other people, I may not have all the facts and I risk libeling someone. 

I do sometimes use examples of famous people as something a general audience is likely to be familiar with and I do talk about people I've known. I typically use pseudonyms if I don't know for a fact they are deceased.

3. If I talk about me, I can decide how much or how little I wish to violate my own privacy.

There are no good solutions for the kind of writing I wish to do. I've tried different things and this is as good as it gets.

But I try to be evenhanded. The Secret Sauce says extremely nice things about my ex.

I have come to believe he was probably not faithful to me. I also wasn't faithful to him. I read the research because I never wanted to be unfaithful. I don't talk about that to point fingers or justify what I did.

I talk about it in hopes of providing useful insight to other people. I'm hoping to earn a living online and I hope creating something of value to other people will somehow get me an adequate income, though so far it hasn't.

In recent decades, romantic comedies routinely deal with themes of friction between a man and woman in a heteronormative relationship rooted in "modern womanhood" and the trend where both people typically work at paid jobs instead of having a 1950s style marriage with a male breadwinner and female homemaker.

They often do it badly and are often addressing issues already well within the Overton Window. It's reiterating already established opinions that are somewhat widely embraced and it reminds me of the principle in the Lovecraftian Mythos where stuff in magical dreamscapes is only ever from long ago.

Forget Paris is a rare instance where the plot doesn't blame one of the people in the couple. It makes a concerted effort to blame changing gender roles and that it's just hard to figure it all out from scratch if you aren't going to do exactly the same thing your parents did and have a homemaker mom and breadwinner dad.

I don't actually know why it was named Forget Paris. I mean it's a line in the movie and it's about "Yeah, we MET in Paris under unusual honeymoon-like circumstances and get over it. Real life isn't a non-stop honeymoon." But Paris is widely known as the city of love and romance and I feel the title works on a meta level of telling people "Forget the romantic fantasies we get spoon-fed from birth. That's not how you make a marriage work."

I believe my ex-husband intentionally undermined my career aspirations in a fashion very like what abusive people do. But I am seriously medically handicapped, we have two demanding special-needs sons and he was able to do that in part because a lot of his arguments were extremely superficially reasonable.

My health and our family situation weren't really conducive to fostering a successful two-career couple lifestyle.

He probably owes me thousands of dollars. I don't know how to pursue justice in that regard.

He was always financially abusive in the relationship and is probably still SHAFTING me financially long after the divorce was finalized. But I don't generally characterize the relationship as abusive.

I have an entire blog devoted to understanding my own blind spots when it comes to public life and public relations. It posits that women are raised to have private lives and men are raised to have public lives.

Properly supporting a claim in the court of public opinion is challenging and takes more than claiming "I was abused." and "Believe women." It's extremely problematic to use the metric "Believe women." because being born with girl bits doesn't magically confer superior ethics on an individual.

I suggest you be leery of anyone making strong, unilateral claims on the Internet of being a victim of abuse and "Buy my product/send me money." 

I'm absolutely not doing that. I do my best to be evenhanded and support my claims where possible, such as linking to publicly available information when talking about people I knew via Internet.

I'm keenly aware of the fact that I'm some "random internet stranger" and you have little to no reason to just take my word for anything.

I've had my chops busted about that for years on topics where I wasn't asking anyone to believe I'm abused or buy my product[1]. I was only asking people to believe I have a serious medical condition and my life depends on getting useful information from random internet strangers because the medical establishment is failing me.

And moderators actively encouraged people to bully me, told me it was my fault I was being bullied in violation of the stated rules and either banned me or effectively ran me off their forum for trying to not politely DIE on schedule so doctors and scientists can feel smart and like they deserve their big salaries.

I do my level best to be honest. Sometimes, complete honesty or full disclosure conflicts with something else, like my privacy or someone else's privacy.

I'm human and make mistakes and sometimes go back and edit posts where I realize later I misspoke. I'm a one woman shop and it's super hard to edit your own writing. You know what you meant and you reread it and you mentally hear what you meant and gloss over the errors.

I'm trying to provide original ideas for a challenging problem. I implore you to be careful what conclusions you draw and to be leery of people clearly expecting you to just take their word for something which is potentially a malicious agenda in sheep's clothing.

Footnote 

[1] Over the years, I've had countless blogs and tried to figure out how to make money that way. So you can bet dollars to donuts someone will claim I was trying to get people to pay me big bucks for unsupported BS.

When I was banned from Metafilter, I was trying to make money via resume work. I don't really care how much you think I'm telling tall tales about my medical situation, I see absolutely no reason to condemn someone to dying on the streets for talking about their medical situation while making a concerted effort to find some inoffensive skill-based means to keep a roof over their head.