In my last semester at SVA, a fellow male student beat up his girlfriend in the graduate fine arts studios one night. The cops were called, and he was expelled. His roommate had this to say: "It was 15 percent her fault, but it was 85 percent his fault." His roommate was from Taiwan, while the perpetrator of the violence was from South Korea. I only mention where Chin, the roommate, was from to say that he might not have been so constrained by the bounds of political correctness when he attributed 15 percent of the problem to the offender's girlfriend.
I've thought about his statement often over the years. In my last post I go into some instances where I believed that women went adversarial on me. If I went along with the usual role I would play in the obsessive pursuits of such women, maybe I would have to own 85 percent of the responsibility for any shit that went down. When one appears before a judge and that whole system, 85 percent would mean that I would be the one to go down.
I see all the coping tactics I outlined in the previous post as something akin to taking my antipsychotic medication; as a way to manage my symptoms. One of the major points I want to bring across is that I make it my stated goal to have no love interests amongst the women in my world. I'm not against the idea of having a love interest under any circumstances, but in my current situation I don't want any woman in my world to have the feeling that I'm trying to make them over into a love interest.
I think in the examples I gave in the last post of women who started in on me, they were all playing to the notion that I was someone who could become obsessed with them and thus pursue them obsessively. I see the various subtleties of interaction they employed as defense mechanisms against such a possibility. No one has to feel bad about employing such tactics if that truly is the case. I can only imagine how frightening it might be to have someone stalk one, and for one to feel that one's life is out of control just because a scary guy is attracted to one. I do not feel as if I am entitled to hassle anyone because I might have caught them out or "busted" them for using subtle coping tactics that are less than on the up and up.
Also, I honestly don't feel as if I have any burdensome romantic attachment to anyone in my world right now. Like I said, all the tactics I related in my previous post and posts; the avoidance, the stepping back, the walking back of how things progress, the snarky songs I write, the "turning my back on love," couldn't have been developed if I didn't first acknowledge that I myself had a problem with my thought processes, attitudes, and behaviors that I needed to address in a meaningful way.
I've thought about his statement often over the years. In my last post I go into some instances where I believed that women went adversarial on me. If I went along with the usual role I would play in the obsessive pursuits of such women, maybe I would have to own 85 percent of the responsibility for any shit that went down. When one appears before a judge and that whole system, 85 percent would mean that I would be the one to go down.
I see all the coping tactics I outlined in the previous post as something akin to taking my antipsychotic medication; as a way to manage my symptoms. One of the major points I want to bring across is that I make it my stated goal to have no love interests amongst the women in my world. I'm not against the idea of having a love interest under any circumstances, but in my current situation I don't want any woman in my world to have the feeling that I'm trying to make them over into a love interest.
I think in the examples I gave in the last post of women who started in on me, they were all playing to the notion that I was someone who could become obsessed with them and thus pursue them obsessively. I see the various subtleties of interaction they employed as defense mechanisms against such a possibility. No one has to feel bad about employing such tactics if that truly is the case. I can only imagine how frightening it might be to have someone stalk one, and for one to feel that one's life is out of control just because a scary guy is attracted to one. I do not feel as if I am entitled to hassle anyone because I might have caught them out or "busted" them for using subtle coping tactics that are less than on the up and up.
Also, I honestly don't feel as if I have any burdensome romantic attachment to anyone in my world right now. Like I said, all the tactics I related in my previous post and posts; the avoidance, the stepping back, the walking back of how things progress, the snarky songs I write, the "turning my back on love," couldn't have been developed if I didn't first acknowledge that I myself had a problem with my thought processes, attitudes, and behaviors that I needed to address in a meaningful way.
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