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dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week agohow would you feel if your parent arranged a date for you without discussion or consent, and posed it in such a condescending way? The parent is communicating contempt and violating boundaries, nothing about this seems acceptable…
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
How would I feel?
Being a bit cheeky lol, but I can expand.
If my parents did this to me I’d be furious, but I also have always had this teenager-like aversion to everything my parents do even into my 30s. Whenever I do anything that reminds me of my parents it sends me into a bit of a spiral. Even when they’re good things my parents do. My parents are nice, good people. Like I’ll notice myself being helpful to people like my dad does and I’ll be angry that I’m being like him (it’s not quite that general, it’s not like general altruism makes me angry lol).
It’s also really difficult for me to know exactly how I’d react in this scenario because I’ve been with my partner for over half of my life now and we got together in high school.
So I’ve never really not had a partner since I was 15 and I already hate everything my parents do for some reason and am cognizant that it’s an unfair reaction.
Another thing I know is that some older folks (gen x and older) tend to communicate differently, especially over texts like SMS, than younger folks (millennial and younger). So I try to account for OP being 22, assume they were 25ish when they had OP so they’re 47ish. People I’ve talked to in that age range tend to seem more cold over text without meaning to. (An example, just replying a 👍 seems rude or sarcastic, but it is somewhat typical from them and they don’t mean anything by it.)
So when I read this, I try to get rid of my innate aversion to my parents, imagine myself feeling desperate and unloved, and try to be very gracious in my interpretation of the text. When I do all those it, at worst, seems like a weird thing to do unprompted. But I have no idea how OP’s father talks to them outside of texts. I don’t know what their relationship is like. I don’t know if this is violating boundaries because I don’t know what sort of boundaries they have. There are even cultures where this sort of thing is more normal and I don’t know if OP belongs to any of those cultures or a culture like what I grew up in where it’s not normal.