Inferring Motive

The point at which you need to revisit your plans or course of action is the point at which something has changed or the point at which new information reveals that your underlying assumptions were in error. People slow to do that get less optimal results than people who are more proactive about saying "Wait a minute. If that detail has changed (or that fact is not what I thought it was), I need to rethink this and decide if this still makes sense or not."

That's from a piece I wrote elsewhere called When to Change Your Mind. I appear to have known this since I was a teenager.

We were good friends and had been for some months already. We probably both habitually said "Penny for your thoughts." and this habit led to me uncomfortable admitting to thinking in terms of marriage very early in the relationship while he still hurting and not over what his previous girlfriend did to his heart.

I expected him to object and loudly protest that he wasn't ready for that. When he didn't, I idiotically began telling all our friends "We're getting married!!!"

Being the sharpest bulb in the box -- the BROKEN one -- it took me six months to realize I was the only one saying it and he probably didn't feel the same. I had already given up a spiffy scholarship to a prestigious university in part because I expected to marry him and when i confronted him, his lame answer was "I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

That piece goes on to make a different point and doesn't say that I promptly dumped him. A week or so later, he was certain he loved me and wanted to marry me and we got back together.

I cynically look back on that as "I guess any girl who puts out is a big deal when you're eighteen." I never really felt he loved me.

So I did that at eighteen and in the ongoing saga of my sister, the idiot, when she was in her mid-thirties and dating her future second husband, he was living in middle Georgia where they met and she was living in Augusta and she was house hunting and asked him to move to Augusta and buy a house with her and he said no.

To my mind, that's when she should have stopped and contemplated her future, something she told him at a later point that promptly got her an engagement ring. She had found a house she felt would work for both of them, but couldn't afford it on her own and she was buying a house because she was running out of time to take advantage of a benefit her job offered for help with closing costs or something.

She could have at that point bought a cheaper house closer to work and plotted to have a baby on her own. That would have almost certainly got her a better life, because her second marriage is a bottomless pit of financial disaster rooted in his spending habits and her health problems that she probably wouldn't have if she had done things differently.

But let's back up a hair. Her entire reason for living in Augusta was apparently to play siren to this loser and lure him to where she lived. 

She supposedly vowed to herself at age fifteen that she would get a scholarship and get out of Georgia and, with getting divorced, she got a job in South Carolina. And then rented an apartment thirty minutes away in Georgia, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

So she imposed a thirty minute commute on herself completely unnecessarily and filled taxes in two states for years to fail to actually leave Georgia roughly two decades after vowing to get out of Georgia, having blown her previous shot at leaving. To lure an ugly younger guy to her whom she then complained to me for years never put out.

I knew this guy. His initial sexual experiences in adolescence were with a boy and he had few girlfriends prior to my sister going to enormous lengths to get with him for reasons I could never understand. He's probably a closeted gay guy and he definitely married her for her money.

And I've always felt like "Yes, he's younger than you, but he's ugly and doesn't put out. You make money like a man and THIS is your idea of a trophy husband??"

Which is part of why I've always been baffled she did this nonsense of acting desperate to remarry quickly instead of getting knocked up out of wedlock.

So she buys a different house in Augusta, one that works for her but not for the two of them, and continues her long distance relationship to him and he eventually moved to Augusta and gets an apartment of his own instead of living with her. And he later buys a bigger house, one that accommodates their two bedroom sets because he bought his own similar to hers when he finally moved to Augusta.

Only his was a more manly all black styling versus her more girly cherry wood. And he gets a queen sized bed while she has a king.

Zero subtext there for who wears the pants in the relationship.

And a few months later she has the conversation with him about "My biological clock is ticking LIKE THIS and you're still not ready to marry me and I need a week long break from this relationship to think about my future."

So either she's an idiot with less sense than Joe Black who only days ago was made incarnate and lost his virginity or she had some other motive for her actions, something she never shared with her own sister whom she routinely dumped on about all kinds of stuff.

If you don't know, Joe Black -- aka The Grim Reaper -- in the movie Meet Joe Black has a conversation with the chick he's seeing and realizes she's not in love with him. She's in love with the guy whose body he stole whom she met moments before he offed the guy because he needed a body. And Joe promptly decides to end the relationship and send that guy back to her.

Otherwise, he was going to take her into the afterlife with him to be by his side forever and, fortunately for her, Joe Black is apparently quicker on the uptake than most earthbound humans or she would have been dead before he realized "Oh, you don't REALLY want this. Oops!"

So late in life I'm thinking "Maybe my sister isn't quite as stupid as she looks. Maybe she's secretly a criminal mastermind and lured her coworker to Augusta to cover her tracks and then, having convinced him she really really wants him, didn't know how to successfully dump him."

Well, mastermind being charitable here. She can't be that brilliant if she got her boyfriend to Augusta to cover her tracks and then couldn't successfully dump him.

She was brutally raped by her ex-husband for leaving him. Everyone who knew her would have been supportive if she had dumped her new guy and said "I'm SORRY. I don't really love you. I thought I did but I was traumatized and this is a mistake and I can't."

Similarly, my Internet acquaintance Jack spent like eighteen months or more trying to get me to talk to him and failing and then this happened:

We really talked for the first time and we talked comfortably, like old friends, for a few days. And then his girlfriend miscarried about a week after he finally got me to talk to him and I just knew he blamed me and he felt I was an evil woman and somehow him talking to me is why the baby died.

So Jack is chatting up a chick he apparently is imagining he would like to marry while shacked up with a chick having babies by him to try to get him to let her stay with her so she can keep her sweet rent-free arrangement and a boyfriend who cooks dinner half the time and then fate, luck, whatever hands him this gift that "The chick you think you want to marry though you have never met her is talking to you and now your girlfriend has miscarried."

And what's his decision? His decision is to stop talking to me and promptly get the girlfriend pregnant again.

He's a self-made millionaire. I don't care what his secret backstory and baggage is, he made a decision and he knew what he was doing and I decided at that time "Well, obviously, we are never getting together."

I'm okay with that. I was deathly ill and didn't really want a rich man I found attractive offering me the glorious opportunity to marry for money as the easy button in life knowing that was basically a sentence of death for me.

But if he really wanted me, that's the point at which he should have stopped and contemplated the choices he was making. And he doesn't seem to have done that. He bulled on ahead with the plans he already had.

This isn't really shocking. He was willing to talk to me in part because she was pregnant and he had left Hacker News to avoid me. 

So the subtext there is he feels I threatened by me. He's got a baby on the way, we clearly aren't going to get involved.

She miscarries, he can't find the door fast enough. 

On the one hand, it was an interesting experience where I learned firsthand that wealthy, powerful men vet women they have a serious interest in. The girlfriend he wasn't marrying was "just sex."

On the other hand, he got a passport again, probably before finally emailing me, and then never came to meet me. And essentially made up excuses to avoid doing so because the miscarriage was the perfect time to say "I don't think I really want more kids." or whatever and start looking for excuses to do business where I lived and mention to me "Hey, I have a business meeting near there. Would you like to have coffee with me?"

I went out of my way to prove to him I wasn't after his money. I felt he had baggage about women only sleeping with him because he had money.

But he not only repeatedly gave Genevieve money, he was introducing her to people and vouching for her and helped her secure employment. He did nothing like that for me.

I spent years openly homeless while on Hacker News and he did nothing for me other than let me stay on Hacker News. 

Did I value that? Sure.

Do I respect him? Absolutely.

Do I still want him? Absolutely not.

Limerance has a shelf life. You don't continue to feel in love because someone did one nice thing for you years ago.

I no longer participate on Hacker News. I ultimately got excluded from his social circle, in part because he never admitted to talking to me, being interested in me, etc.

I got excluded in part because he wasn't introducing me to his buddies like he was doing for Genevieve.

And neither was she. Genevieve chose to kick me to the curb and run around lying about me.

If either of them imagines I "still love them," sorry you're NUTS. Please get therapy.

Neither of them ever loved me. 

"True Love" means we both benefit from the relationship. 

It doesn't mean one person cuts their own throat for the benefit of the other. That's what you call a dysfunctional relationship.

Hacker News was important to me. Not burning Jack was the morally correct choice.

It was also the pragmatic choice that kept the door open for as long as possible on the no girls allowed club which I no longer hang out in because there's no upside to putting up with their shit anymore.

I've spent a lot of years contemplating why I don't hate him. I wanted a career and I felt like he made it possible for me to pursue certain things. 

And if I really want to try to justify his actions and pretend it's love, I can make stuff up about how hard it is for a woman to have a real career and he breathed life into me and so on.

But that's got the vibe of a comment I saw on Cyburbia: "When people start talking about True Love, I look for the abuse."

Because that's what people seem to mean: They stuck by me under terrible circumstances. They stuck by me when they really should have left.

I've still never met the man. I don't really expect to.

Every man I've ever met via Internet who was attracted to me seems to view me as a dream girl whom they can imagine some perfect relationship with and they start talking about wanting to marry me without so much as having coffee with me first.

And then they don't show up. And I don't encourage them to show up.

Because I'm clear that's delusional. I don't want to engage with this garbage and if some guy is deludedly dreaming about marrying me and not showing up, my goal is to burst his bubble and get him to wake up.

Jack got a passport again before emailing me. In his mind, the point of emailing me was he wanted to get with me. And then he never arranged to casually have coffee with me. 

So whatever Jack was up to, it wasn't really trying to get with me. He's wealthy enough and competent enough, if the man wanted to meet me, we would have met years ago.

The way to bet is he really wanted me to do something big for him that I probably managed to do via Internet which he saw as "loving him" in some sense and which he kind of lumped in mentally with "so then you get married."

But, no, marrying me wasn't really what he wanted.