Occam's Razor

[nineveh_uk]

Dear God, Captain Awkward, how obvious does he need to be? He's married! 2 and a half months might not be that long, but won't meet her friends, won't let her meet his, and goes home every weekend. The only script for this is to ask when you're going to get to meet his wife.

Comments

[ankaret]

My thoughts exactly. Okay, he might have a family situation he doesn't want to introduce or explain because his Grandad's dementia manifests as loud racist remarks or half his family are trying to get the other half to leave a cult or something, but if it was me I'd be asking whether his brother's name was Bunbury.

[nineveh_uk]

Bunbury reminds me that the letter-writer is a man and the other bloke is closeted was the other explanation I could think of, except I'm pretty sure that the LW is female.

[ankaret]

Or maybe it's very important to his family that he marry within his faith or ethnic group, in which case... given that they're living in a war zone, I can kind of see his point, but I can't help thinking that sooner or later she's going to ask him to choose between her and his family and discover that he's already chosen them.

[nineveh_uk]

Also possible. I wonder how much LW is being expat-blind to the culture around her. While my inclination is to think that he is a knowing cheat, it is also possible that she is being completely oblivious to the culture she's living in and he hasn't said "You know this is just sex with no future, right", because it ought to be obvious.

[ankaret]

Also, dating people who are obliviously snotty about their partner's hobbies is a bad idea in general. Either they just have a blind spot about board games or Cards Against Humanity or whatever (in which case all her friends will silently hate him, which will either fling her into his arms and leave her with no support network or cause her to go crazy trying to make them like him) or they've never worked out that some people don't like the same things they like and that's OK.

I've met a surprising number of people who got all the way through school and into the workplace assuming that there was a Platonic Ideal of Fun which matched their own tastes and anyone preferring to do something else couldn't possibly actually enjoy it, and they all gave me a headache.

[antisoppist]

They had what sounded like that one fairly recently though - spents all his time in LW's flat but wouldn't set foot in the street with him. That or he was a vampire.

I get that not everyone is a "all my friends must meet all my other friends and do everything with them" kind of person, but no weekends not ever????? My bet was boyfriend is local and views foreign LW as temporary, of loose morals, working hours only, and doesn't really count, like the way Peter Wimsey views women who are French.

[nineveh_uk]

I would place a very similar bet. At least Peter Wimsey would set out the terms at the start (though its possible that the LW's wishful thinking about a relationship and the bloke thinks it is obviously just sex).

[auntyros.livejournal.com]

Without having clicked on the link, my first thought was that this was a comment on The Archers. But sadly some poor RL woman is just as blind as Helen.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am afraid that this is not Helen Archer. Who I loathe as a person, but love as a character because she is horribly realistic in her completely bonkersness and self-deception.

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

My first thought too...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It is definitely Helen's modus operandi.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

She should have written to Captain Obvious instead.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Quite.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I think I could suspend one of these, but not everything. I would be quite likely not to introduce a new boyfriend/girlfriend to my family and friends within 3 months, but I would probably meet a few of theirs, and not go home every weekend.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Exactly. There is a dreadful not seeing the wood for the trees going on. There are a lot of trees. Trees everywhere.

[dbassassin.livejournal.com]

The disappearing every weekend is the real clue: he's attached to someone else.

I read some of the comments on the original post and was astonished to see the posts from (I'm assuming) men who went on about how they entirely compartmentalise their lives and how no one in one aspect of their life ever meets anyone from outside their particular pigeon hole for many years and I thought to myself: wow, am I glad I no longer date. People these days are truly weird.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Quite. One thing is OK, but all of them together and the weekends - there is no great mystery unless you're wearing blinkers.

I thought that was interesting, though I would say the majority of CA's commentators are women, not men. I mean, I am a person who is loathe to introduce friends to one another( what if they hate each other) and indeed delayed introducing bookwormsarah and a friend so long they had to arrange it themselves, but I do talk about other people, and present the appearance of a general life. I felt that there was a certain amount of self-justification going on in the comments that was leading people to overlook the key points of linking up behaviours that individually are not necessarily indicates of something fishy going on, but that taken together really are. But many people (including CA) weren't taking them together because they were so concerned to present the compartmentalising as normal and soemthing that shouldn't be challenged.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I rather think the man in question would be surprised to discover that the LW thinks she's in a relationship with him, too. As opposed to meeting up for a couple of hours every so often for a shag.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly. I do get the impression that she has not connected at all to the general mores of either the ex-pat community (notorious globally, surely, for shagging like rabbits) or the local one, and is totally failing to read what should be really obvious whether he thinks he is being obvious or is deliberately not being so.