A woman goes to the philharmonic in New York City alone. She meets a guy who is also alone. He asks her for a date, she goes once, doesn’t want to go again. She doesn’t return his calls. He sends an e-mail demanding to know why. Woman is so astounded she posts it on the Internet.
Read An investment banker’s cover letter for a second date, on Reddit.com.
Story suggested by a Lovefraud reader.
athena – when i had my phone numbers changed to unlisted it was not only to prevent him from calling me, but also to prevent me from waiting on a call that may or may not come, it freed me to leave the house and breathe again..congrats on 4 weeks please hang in there – dont go in the trash lookin for trash, because you WILL find trash.
Congratulations ATHENA!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOPIE!!!! four weeks NC, that is wonderful!!!! Congratulations!!!! TOWANDA!!!!
Ox
Thank you. As I get practice with this NC thing, I have learned there are two kinds of contact.
1) no contact TO the spath. That means we don’t respond, we don’t call, we don’t email back, we don’t text back.
2) no contact FROM the spath. This is when we are so fucking serious about changing our addresses, phone numbers, whatever, that the spath CAN NOT contact us
#1 finally lead me to #2. I’m getting there. If I don’t get his messages that are intended to f me up, I’m wayyyy better off.
Hugs to YOU for helping ME.
Athena, there is a third kind of NO CONTACT as well, and that is to NOT RENT THEM SPACE IN YOUR HEAD….it will come as well when you are getting better at 1 and 2. It also includes listening to other people tell you about them.
The only reason to not keep all of these 1-2-3 is if you must keep in contact with them because the law says you have to to co-parent, and/or there is a safety issue where you need to know where they are to protect yourself. Even then, MINIMAL CONTACT is best! It does get easier, and when the NO VACANCY sign goes up and you kick them out of your head and heart! You are “HOME FREE!”
Thanks for reminding me about #3 Ox…
So…on that note then….I think I’ll go make myself a sandwich and work on my novel. It’s nice to have all this room for imagination in my head now that there isn’t a maniac running through all the rooms and flickering the lights on and off at random. Suddenly, there is creative space!
By the way, I told Ajax about your son today. He’s getting into this stuff and has been reading WWLP and the Sociopath Next Door. He’s a philosophy major, so this stuff pulls him in and he cares enough to try and understand me. Anyways, when I told him what happened with your son, he sarcastically said that you should have known that any good mother would go on a killing spree with her son—duh. That’s how good mom’s do it. And when he sent someone after you to try and kill you, you should have known that a good mother would die to prove that she was sorry for turning him in to the cops. Then he could forgive you, after you were dead.
It might seem random for me to bring this up, but I was telling him about LF and how helpful and knowledgeable the people in here are. Your experience is what makes you one of the ultimate spathinators, so I had to explain to him what happened. As it turns out, in the course of his studies for philosophy, there is basically NOTHING that reflects and understanding of this MAJOR disorder. Philosophers try to develop ideas about ethics and morality without even knowing that one shoe doesn’t fit all. This new perspective has inspired some interesting philosophical papers for him so far. Maybe there will finally be a little crossing over between philosophy and psychology with regards to the Cluster B personalities.
Oxy
Right-O on that. This could be the title of a new blog post.
Athena
Panther, I think that the study of philosophy and ethics is very necessary to a good education, and unfortunately too many times that is skipped in schools. I don’t think that the teaching of ethics in college is going to “give” anyone ethics if they don’t have them by the time they get there, but people who do have a moral compass can have their ethics finely honed by studying it.
I remember a sociology class I had in college and the teacher was some “touchy feelie liberal creep-o” that said all that was WRONG with our society was that if a kid is caught stealing and “labeled” a thief then he was ruined by the LABEL, not by the ACT and that labeling him a thief was what made him continue to steal. It was a “WTF?” moment for me sitting in that class.
If he is not “labeled” a thief he will, according to that sociology prof, quit stealing and grow up to be a wonderful adult but if he is labeled he will Grow up to be a criminal.
I was an older student at the time I had that class, and I didn’t buy this guy’s theory, but surprisingly enough, neither did the “kids” in the class either. I still don’t buy the theory that “labeling” is what makes a thief or a murderer…according to this dogma everyone is wonderful and will always choose to do what is right as long as no one punishes them for whatever they choose to do. HOG WASH! Unfortunately, too many people seem to believe that “there is good in everyone” or that everyone is simply the result of their childhood…but I hope that as medicine advances and the DNA is analyzed more that theory will be shown to be false.
Yeah, Ox, I totally agree. I wasn’t meaning to say that Ajax is ethical because he studies philosophy. I was meaning to say that it’s nice to be able to share with a philosopher, because in talking to him, I notice that there is a lot lacking in philosophy with regards to psychology. Just like the profi you described thinking a label is all it comes down to! I remember in one of my first convos with Ajax, we got into a little debate about ethics, and I suddenly blurted that the psychologists and philosophers of the world need to hold a convention and swap notes! When philosophy gets into ethics, they are completely forgetting that some people have absolutely ZERO moral compass. It’s really hard to be pragmatic about anything with this sort of reality slapped in your face. Coming up with a universal concept of morality is impossible, because it will NEVER be universal when all the sociopaths, psychopaths, BPDs, and Narcissists of the world will be running around going, “No it’s NOT immoral if I screw EVERYBODY over whenever I want to! Na na na!” He’s read mountains of books from the classics to the moderns, and when I handed him Women Who Love Psychopaths and The Sociopath Next Door, he immediately realized that philosophy hasn’t even considered this stuff!!!!! Since he believes that philosophy is a tool for creating a most just and fair world, this sort of information is really important for the field!
Your professor sounds….wait, what’s the word? Oh, ridiculous. Or was it ignorant? Really, Ox, was he THAT flat? Sheesh. I heard a lot of nonsense in university, but I think your profi takes the cake on this topic. Sounds like he read “The Secret” and believed every word. My mom did the same thing, then one day she announced to me that the book was wrong. She said she’d tried insisting that things were not as they were, and yet they still were the way that they were!!!! She’s so funny. When my step-father and brother wouldn’t do the dishes, she’d start repeating to herself that they WILL do the dishes. She was then very upset to learn that the dishes still weren’t done. So, she declared the book a hoax! Hehe 🙂
Panther, that is sooooooo funny! Your mom and the dishes!~ LOL I needed a good belly laugh and you gave me one.
No, actually, some of the most UN-ethical people I know were ones who studied ethics the hardest! LOL Or who could quote you the most scripture etc. Psychopaths do use “ethics” and twisted logic (gaslighting) to try to make what they do seem ethical and/or logical.
I just love the newest carp that Sandusky’s attorney is saying that all the stuff with showering with the kids was “teaching them to wash” LOL yea! right! Now his attorney is saying that “victim #2” (the one the assistant coach said he saw being raped) has come forward and denies it all…but actually, the LOGIC is, if “victim #2” came forward (he apparently has an attorney) and denied he was raped to Sandusky’s attorney, then if that didn’t happen and he wasn’t raped, and McQueary didn’t see him, PROVE HOW HE KNOWS HE IS “VICTIM#2” who was unnamed in the grand jury stuff. TOTAL GASLIGHTING all the way, twisting reality.
Trying to appear upright and moral, but just not getting it.
Yes, I knew a good many people who subscribed to the “Secret” and in fact, you could not convince them that whatever they dreamed wasn’t gonna happen just because they dreamed it….eventually they went on to another pop-culture “theory of the universe” about as silly. While I definitely think “positive thinking” is helpful, it can go wayyyyy too far into FANTASY THINKING. I think that is what hooked me (and maybe others) into the psychopath’s con was we kept thinking there HAD to be some way to make it work, to “fix” them, in fact there just is NOT any way to fix them.
Yeah, my mom is a darling. A bit odd, but still a darling. She’s now a hardcore Tea Party member 🙂 hehe
I agree that many spaths learn about psychology, philosophy, law, etc so that they can better fool everyone. Just being able to ramble off quotes, as you said, or provide the textbook definition of something on the spot makes the average person assume that you know what you’re talking about. My ex used to brag that he was diagnosed with BPD by the best psychiatrist in the world, a guy in Sweden that his wealthy parents sent him to when he was teenager because no one in Turkey could handle him, as he had the highest IQ in the nation. He would boast that he got the psych to agree with him that all men are assholes and all women are whores, and therefore he is more qualified than a shrink to tell me what is morally right. Oddly, if any of this story is true (and I doubt basically every word of it), I’d be inclined to believe that he actually MAY have managed to get tacit compliance out of a psychologist who didn’t see the uber-spath coming and was knocked off balance a bit. Either that or the psych got so sick of listening to his crap that he just started saying, “Yes, God, whatever you say, it’s all correct! Is the hour over yet? Can I collect my pay?”
And don’t worry about Ajax, if you were perhaps implying that maybe he’s a closet spath studying philosophy. By all angles, there is no way he could come out the other end as another spath. I was very thorough in my interrogation in the beginning and I’m still very alert to anything that might seem off. There is just no way. After all the crazy mad insane people I’ve encountered in my life, I think I’m finally able to clearly see the normal, decent folk in their rightful colors. He’s quite human, also quirky, and likes his philosophical rambling detours.
I’m sooooo sleepy too. I’m wandering off to bed now. It’s 1am here!!!
Good night all!!!