529. Contact With Ex-Partners, Reliability And Trust
Whenever I read in a man's profile, that he continues contact with his ex(es), I recoil. When I explained my reasons in entry 76, I only mentioned the impertinence of a man's feeling entitled to have a harem of more than one intimate partner and of not valuing a woman enough to give her a genuinely exclusive place in his life.
Ex(es) can never be converted to be the same as platonic friends, they will remain forever deactivated intimate partners. Because the special ties created by physical intimacy can never be undone. The friendship of two persons, who have never been physically intimate, and the alleged mere friendship of two persons, who have deactivated their previous physical intimacy, are fundamentally distinct and can never be the same.
But in entry 76, I omitted, that the friendship with ex(es) is also a significant indirect indication of how much harm and hurting is to be expected from such men.
A man, who is friends with his ex(es), can never be trusted to be a reliable partner in a relationship being a safe haven. His friendship with his ex(es) tells me, that he either starts or ends relationships for insufficient reasons. Therefore he is a hazard to do the same to me.
Whenever I read in a man's profile, that he continues contact with his ex(es), I recoil. When I explained my reasons in entry 76, I only mentioned the impertinence of a man's feeling entitled to have a harem of more than one intimate partner and of not valuing a woman enough to give her a genuinely exclusive place in his life.
Ex(es) can never be converted to be the same as platonic friends, they will remain forever deactivated intimate partners. Because the special ties created by physical intimacy can never be undone. The friendship of two persons, who have never been physically intimate, and the alleged mere friendship of two persons, who have deactivated their previous physical intimacy, are fundamentally distinct and can never be the same.
But in entry 76, I omitted, that the friendship with ex(es) is also a significant indirect indication of how much harm and hurting is to be expected from such men.
A man, who is friends with his ex(es), can never be trusted to be a reliable partner in a relationship being a safe haven. His friendship with his ex(es) tells me, that he either starts or ends relationships for insufficient reasons. Therefore he is a hazard to do the same to me.
A man's personality, instinctivity and his subsequent attitude towards women, is expressed and represented in the specific reasons, which for him are sufficient to enter and to end a physically intimate relationship. These reasons indicate, if he either commodifies and objectifies women or if he appreciates them as persons to commit to, to bond and to share his life with.
The history of a man's past relationships can thus be helpful to assess a man's individual choice of reasons and thus to evaluate the risk of being hurt by him. His maintained friendship with ex(es) or the absence thereof is a valuable information allowing some conclusions.
The history of a man's past relationships can thus be helpful to assess a man's individual choice of reasons and thus to evaluate the risk of being hurt by him. His maintained friendship with ex(es) or the absence thereof is a valuable information allowing some conclusions.
A man, who is determined more by his human cognition than by is animal instincts, is able to base both decisions, to enter and to end a relationship, on careful considerations and on consent. Therefore a man's careful decisions are an indication of his being more human than an animal. Intrinsic commitment is human. Animals just copulate.
Intrinsic commitment means to accept obligations towards the partner, to be considerate, responsible and therefore reliable. The decision to enter physical intimacy is inseparably also the decision to be committed. Otherwise it is the abuse of an objectified body and a violation of human dignity.
Therefore a decent, valuable, humane man asks himself, if he is ready and willing to begin a committed long-term relationship, before he gets physically involved with a woman. He asks himself, it he appreciates the person enough for commitment. If he gets aware, that he is only triggered by instincts, he refrains from touching her. He does not want to be an unworthy animal.
Intrinsic commitment includes the obligation to end a relationship only
- by a onesided decision, if the partner has become unworthy having first created this reason by committing an unforgivable transgression.
- by consent, after working hard and persistently together on solving all problems and conflicts. But this should be a very rare case, as such an blatant incompatibility should have precluded the couple to enter the relationship. As long as a couple has not forfeited the reciprocal justification for true friendship by unforgivable transgressions, they should be able to solve their conflicts and stay together.
Friendship in the true sense of the word means to see qualities of character in a person, friendship requires trust, honesty, integrity and more. Intrinsic commitment between a couple has the same requirements of character as has friendship, only the benefits of bonding, of monogamy and of sharing the life and home with exclusively one partner are added.
Without the qualities to be friends, two persons are not suitable to each other for intrinsic commitment. When people at one moment in time are really suitable as true friends to get physically involved and share their life in a monogamous arrangement, then their commitment is for better or for worse and ending it can only be justified by very good reasons. Therefore whenever someone and his ex are still true friends, their commitment has never really ended. Intrinsic commitment only ends, when reasons impede friendship
A man's intrinsic commitment makes him reliable and predictable, because he allows the woman enough influence on how the relationship impacts her life. She is not the victim of decisions imposed upon her out of the blue as she is by objectifying jerks, instead she is involved in all shared decisions.
A man's friendship with his ex(es) is a big red flag.
When a man perceives and experiences no difference between a friendship, which has always been platonic, and the friendship with a woman, with whom there had been physical intimacy in the past, this is a clear indication of his animal instincts being so strong, that he is innately determined for the objectification of women's bodies. It means that physical intimacy does not automatically create intrinsic commitment.
1. It can mean, that he has exes from any kind of promiscuous non-committed arrangements, no matter if it was an affair or friends with benefits or whatever. He has commodified and objectified a woman based upon reciprocity. Had he dumped her, she would probably refuse to remain friends with a jerk. But mutual abuse is nevertheless abuse, and entering a physical relationship without commitment is a dangerous attitude indicating the predominance of the man's instincts.
I can never trust a man to be committed with me by physical intimacy, if he has a history of using others without commitment.
2. He still wants his ex, in spite of her having committed a transgression. He maintains a friendship for her, even though she is unworthy. He still craves for her body, in spite of her unworthy personality. This means, that her personality is not significant. Either he is not free to commit or the non-physical qualities of a woman are generally of no significance to him.
3. He has dumped her for insufficient and selfish reasons, but she wants him back and has forgiven him in spite of his being unworthy and a jerk. He probably wants more than he is willing to give. He is probably unable to need and appreciate a partner as much as is necessary to motivate him to invest enough time and effort into a relationship. Instead he has developed the habit of discarding and replacing as the easy way out.
Whatever he has done to his ex(es), he is prone also to do to me.
In all three scenarios, such men are a hazard, there is a very high risk of being hurt by them. Men, who have dumped women for insufficient reasons or who have committed other transgression, get fatally wrong signals from those women, who still accept and treat them as friends. Instead of being punished by the appropriate rejection as unworthy jerks, they learn to misinterpret the inappropriate friendship as if there were nothing wrong with their behavior.
Every ex, who reacts with continued friendship to a jerk's transgressions, implicitly reinforces readiness to repeat such transgressions on the next woman. While ending all contact with a jerk does not stop him from behaving as a jerk, at least this does not encourage him.
On dating advice sites, sometimes people are warned about new contacts talking bad about their ex-partners. I disagree. I have more trust, when a man feels hurt by specific behaviors of his ex and when he can convincingly explain, what efforts he did to repair the relationship and why it failed. While I of course cannot know, what really has happened, a man's feeling hurt and treated badly by his ex indicates, that he at least subjectively was not the transgressor and whatever behavior he feels hurt from is something, that he hopefully has learned not to do upon others. When a man talks too well about an ex, this makes me suspicious, because people learn more from their own suffering than from getting away with making others suffer.
In all three scenarios, such men are a hazard, there is a very high risk of being hurt by them. Men, who have dumped women for insufficient reasons or who have committed other transgression, get fatally wrong signals from those women, who still accept and treat them as friends. Instead of being punished by the appropriate rejection as unworthy jerks, they learn to misinterpret the inappropriate friendship as if there were nothing wrong with their behavior.
Every ex, who reacts with continued friendship to a jerk's transgressions, implicitly reinforces readiness to repeat such transgressions on the next woman. While ending all contact with a jerk does not stop him from behaving as a jerk, at least this does not encourage him.
On dating advice sites, sometimes people are warned about new contacts talking bad about their ex-partners. I disagree. I have more trust, when a man feels hurt by specific behaviors of his ex and when he can convincingly explain, what efforts he did to repair the relationship and why it failed. While I of course cannot know, what really has happened, a man's feeling hurt and treated badly by his ex indicates, that he at least subjectively was not the transgressor and whatever behavior he feels hurt from is something, that he hopefully has learned not to do upon others. When a man talks too well about an ex, this makes me suspicious, because people learn more from their own suffering than from getting away with making others suffer.
