tl;dr: have a friend who has historically always been mad when his friends got a gf/wife. He acts like he’s 15 years old and saying “bros before hoes” still. He calls me and other friends a yuppie or breeder, and he thinks crosswalks are authoritarian so he has to always be a “rebel” and make it seem like he has the most unique viewpoint in the world. He doesn’t change anything about himself, and he’s stubbornly proud of having “no filter.” This has caused every wife/gf of his friends to not like him. He will never be invited to any kind of social event because he will say stupid shit. Like, nobody has to be a rabid commie all the fucking time. Him and my gf got into a huge fight because he always talks like an asshole, and i live with my gf, so he doesnt come to my house at all because he’ll say some shit. He still brings up this fight when im around him, and it’s like get the fuck over it. I basically don’t share anything about my life that involves my partner now, because he’ll say something fucking stupid about her. He also begins a lot of sentences with “well” or “actually” which is never helpful. He literally can’t admin when he is wrong, even about the simplest shit.
This really all seemed to get worse once I started my current long term relationship, and then it got way worse when my gf got sick of his shitty attitude and how he treats everyone like an asshole. He literally just can’t be chill at all. No leftist(or similar) should be ranting constantly about every single injustice during every single social situation. That is exhausting to be around, and there is a time and place for it, but there has to be an ability to switch that shit off.
Finding and keeping relationships requires changing yourself just a bit, and making compromises, and it’s now become apparent he isn’t capable of that.
related question: have you ever dumped a long time friend? This is all a somewhat recent change, like the past 3-4 years, and it really seems to be because im in a relationship like most of our friend group, so now he’s totally alone. Ive heard him say he’s in therapy but i have to wonder if that’s true, because it clearly isn’t working. I’m annoyed by him but I pity him too because he can’t fucking change for anybody at all.
most of my friend group exploded recently when one of them cheated with another’s wife. the weird thing was that friend always said he hated that person, in fact our entire friend group thought she was incredibly toxic and that their relationship with their husband was abusive (i won’t get into details but it involved SA).
and then, after that relationship was broken up between the toxic wife and her (now-ex) husband, our friend group further fragmented when the ex-husband, while super depressed and drunk, asked another also super drunk (male) friend if they wanted to kiss, and then that male friend interpreted that somehow as somehow equivalent to sexual assault (nothing violates consent like… asking for consent before doing anything? i was there the whole time and nothing especially weird happened other than that question) and stopped hanging out with us. i think it was homophobia or less likely some kind of internalized repression.
i also had to stop hanging out with a cousin because he got randomly super pissed at my then-boyfriend while we were trying to play a game of warhammer 40k. my then-boyfriend literally moved ONE MINIATURE 7 inches before my cousin started shouting and saying he did it wrong or was cheating. i measured the move several times to make sure it was rules legal. we literally never got past thte first movement of the entire game, nothing had even happened enough to determine the outcome, no attacks were made, no objectives taken, just the one movement and he ragequit. then afterwards tried to make it about ‘respect’ or something when my then-boyfriend was acting totally normal like the rest of us that night. like yeah, we took a while to set up, because we were all casually hanign out and talking, we ALL were. it doesn’t explain why my cousin got so mad about that one movement phase for one miniature at the very start, its a post-hoc justification for their freakout.
its all good tho ‘asking to kiss - SA’ guy was an annoying reddit brain who thought chatGPT was as sentient as people (its all just statistics! we are stochastic parrots!), and my cousin always seemed to have problems with gay people, and once said something about how we can’t criticize italy electing that fascist Meloni person because ‘thats just what they believe in!’. it feels stupid to say but like the vast majority of people are just too ignorant for me to exist around peacefully apparently.
also i will always talk about communist stuff at all times and anyone that doesn’t want to hear it can fuck off. i don’t need apolitical friends, i need people that are fundamentally on the same page as me in terms of morality. its weird to me that thats such a common complaint OP had abut their example, when the misogynist stuff seems a lot more problematic.
that’s so limiting though. there’s a difference between apolitical friends and just being able to have an apolitical conversation. Someone who always sounds like Lenin giving speeches is going to be exhausting for everyone around them.
i have to mask the entire time i’m in public, i need my friend group to be a safe space. if i have to conceal my views we aren’t really friends anyway.
edit: also i would unironically love to be around someone giving lenin speeches constantly lmao
im not saying you have to hide your views or not ever talk politics, im just saying think of other shit to talk about. at this point in my life, talking about politics with most friends would just be us agreeing with each other. People need other hobbies and interests to talk about outside of politics/news.
i mean i do talk about other stuff sometimes but not as like an exclusive either or thing. theres often a political element to talk about and i and the people i hang out with unironically enjoy that kind of critical analysis.
edit: but its fine to have different needs and comfort levels, i’m not trying to relitigate your disagreements with your friend. even in the best of scenarios different people have different needs, and any interpersonal problems can be compounded by all of the toxic and oppressive systems in our world, not to mention unrecognized or untreated trauma. its a world writhing in suffering.
me too, if they were good at it
Why do those kinds of people keep popping up lately? Do they want unconditionally loving servile holo-waifus that badly that they think that denigrating living beings will somehow make those dreams come true quicker?
i think its like a trade in of self worth for a sense of intellectual superiority and knowing ‘how it really is’ like with some reactionary misanthropic new-atheists. maybe a bit of techno-worshipping ‘AI is the offspring of our species’ stuff as well.
There is an apparent appeal to some pop-nihilist types to be crudely reductionistic in a way that tries to strip meaning from consciousness, the human experience, and even life itself, all in return for standing a little taller over the rubble pile.
I’ve had some ugly arguments some such people recently, unfortunately one of them being on the Star Trek federated site that really missed much of the point of the show.
Tabletop 40k claims another relationship
The legacy of Monopoly lives on