We're not publicly-launched yet, and I have refrained from sharing the URL because we can't handle people logging in and doing stuff lol (all of our test users have been hand-held through onboarding by our Head of Customer Success).
But here are some details:
1. Raised seed round in November of close to $4m
2. We operate in the Trust and Estates Space and are focusing on AI-driven solutions for people to get that kind of planning done. Have an AI agent with which users interact, have some important LLM stuff in the background too.
3. CEO is a second-time founder. CTO is a smart guy (and very much an IC compared to most tech CEOs I have encountered) who is ex-Facebook (and worked at a lot of other big name tech companies prior).
From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.”
This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any given reasoning. I’m surprised to find this in what appears to aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory.
32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.
However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.
If you're allowed to create a hypothetical question that translates a hierarchy of guards into Boolean logic, then it doesn't matter how many guards there are.
"What would each of the other 49 guards would say the 49 guards other than them would do?" It would be a pain to do the deduction from all of that info, but it seems like it would be enough enough. Maybe it would make more sense to have that guard write down the answer (and throw in a pencil and a few extra sheets of paper)...
"Label the guards, 1 to 50, starting with you as 1, the guard to your left as 2, etc. For each guard, tell me what answer they would give if I asked them if your door was safe".
If all the guards say the same thing, you're talking to the lying guard. Otherwise the liar is simply the one that answers differently.
But what are they actually used for? The only things i heard about freemasonry were from conspiracy theorists. But i never really found out, what they actually do. And the secret handshakes are performed with strangers to tell each other secretly they're unknown brothers?
Probably not, the Freemason Police patrol this internet web site daily, and he'd disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Be sure to follow up on his comment history a month from now, to see whether he's said anything since.
The last time the government found out about the Masonic Police, the leader mysteriously died right before trial and the other charges were swept under the rug. I definitely wouldn’t mess with those guys.
Sorry to break the news to you Jake but there are two orders. Those of "that era" are the actual power breakers, you guys are the peculiar but innocent window dressing.
Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.
There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.
"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize crypto-jews each other"
"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize masonic followers each other"
I have never heard this verbiage before... Did an AI write this? Or, can someone explain to me how "used to recognize followers each other" is grammatically sound?
I think you know an AI didn't generate the sentence because it's ungrammatical.
The publication in question (Acta Biomed) is oriented around "mainly national and international scientific activities from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries", so there's a reasonable chance none of the the authors speak English as a first language. This in no way excuses bad editing—the journal publishes in English, after all.
It's not grammatical. Reading the article parts of it seemed poorly machine-translated to me (and the whole thing seemed mostly a sequence of straw-men).
I recall when young, people were commenting on how most media came from centralized locations. That with newspapers, and then radio, and now TV, pronunciation was moving towards being less regionalized, diverse, yet also that the choice of words to use, the synonyms to use, was changing.
I also recall the same being said for a variety of things, such as spell checkers, and grammar checkers used in wordprocessors. Some grammar was "OK", but other forms were being pushed by (most especially) earlier wordprocessors, with grammatically valid text being marked with that wavy underline.
Now we have AI.
My point?
Kids are going to be raised in a world with AI. If it spends a decade or more spewing blather such as this, an entire slew of people will grow up, from 10 to 20 years old, 15 to 25 years old, learning to cobble together sentences in this sort of way.
Not only will they read it, but "helpful" assistants will change their normal prose, into this gibberish.
So I'm sorry mkl, it sort of will be grammatical. And no, I'm not happy about it.
Indeed. And now imagine an opinionated government controls the AI which helps formulate not only articles, blogs, etc, but even the predictive text software that facilitates writing a language very poorly suited to writing on a phone. And then imagine how much harder it will be to overthrow that government when even your own speech is subtly nudged to support the will of Big Brother. And there you have the fate of the Chinese people.
I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...")
And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry."
A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.'
I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?
I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.
Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture.
I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.
I haven't researched the actual numbers...but isn't that kind of sad?
We may get two more, not near as sizable as the last one...and if we manage things right, my kids will get some, too.
It doesn't take hardly any money at all if you start early enough. $100 a month becomes $320k at retirement. (yes, handwavey tax implications, but still, 100 a month at 7% for 44 years is $320k)
Because it’s a statement about men or because of the implied possibility they could be unhappy in their marriage?
Also, why is it horrible?
It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic, when it contains even only a hint of something someone could possibly understand the wrong way.
It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.
It is currently culturally fashionable to construe things in this manner, so unsurprising. It is humorless and lacks common sense. Reasonably intelligent people understand context. They do not flatten all of reality and reduce everything to their favorite pet paradigm, projecting uncharitably all sorts of weird baggage onto the most innocuous of statements.
So now you can't make a quip about wives unless you also make a quip about husbands (or else generalize it to "persons") though even these are now too restrictive for some. Heaven help you if you dare observe that there are differences between men and women, complementary differences no less, that lead to humorous tensions between them and peculiarities particular to each that surface within their shared lives.
Shall we raise a toast to ourselves, savaged men (and women!)? Humor is dead. And we have killed it.
Common sense is dead. Certain groups of people lack self and/or social awareness to notice that they've replaced religion with ideology. For example, we criticize religion for shaming many parts of our sexuality "Welcome to church, you're a sexual being and you should be ashamed". Now that's been replaced with "You're a man, you should feel guilty because you're from the oppressor group." etc.
Welcome to Western society, you're privileged and you should be guilty and ashamed.
OK I do think there is an issue with wokeness in society. But, I also think there is a problem with anti-wokeness that can be seen here with people chomping at the bit at the first (poorly attributed) use of "misogyny". Women aren't even mentioned, and the only way I see them/misogyny even entering the equation is if you make the rather odd pair of assumptions that an unhappily married man must: 1) be married to a woman, and 2) be unhappy exclusively as a result of his wife. You could attribute it to the result of the woke hivemind's effects, but you could also very much not! It's effectively an unintentional strawman...
I think there is probably a happy medium of wokeness that can be reached via measured discussion between respectful adults. I think in real life (at least in my experience) people are willing to have those discussions, and are much less polarized and divisive than the internet/cancel culture might have you believe.
The expression "privilege" itself makes people feel attacked and get defensive. If you say the same exact sentence replacing "privilege" for the definition and it greatly changes how people react to what you say
That's a good point. There's absolutely no reason to feel bad about being privileged. You should be happy! Perhaps spread some of that happiness around, make the world a happier place. Everyone wins.
There's a slight implication because it only covers men that women are the source of unhappiness (e.g. the nagging wife trope), but I agree it's trivial and likely unintentional. Agree with sibling, just as applicable as "happy married people are happy partners, unhappily married people are great philosophers".
I'm surprised you've never heard of a woman being unhappy because her husband wants her to do/be one thing, and she wants to do/be another. "Nagging" isn't always the stereotypical annoyance.
You're clearly passionate about something here, but it's not totally clear what it is or why. It might be interesting to read what you have to say, but you need to chill, organize your thoughts, and stop calling other posters idiots for disagreeing with you. Right now it feels like we're catching half of an angry shower argument against someone who's not here.
I can tell, because I've made posts like this before, and I always regretted it later. Have your angry argument in a journal or text file (Lately I've really liked Markdown with source control). Then revisit it later, and add in the side you're arguing against. Then revise it so that you're actually making a clear point, and remove all the personal insults. Then post it here, because I want to read it. But until then, I have no idea WTF you're on about or why you're so defensive of a very-long-dead philosopher.
What? I found their post informative and yours extremely patronising. They're not defensive about Aristotle, they are pointing that the quote seems to be misinterpreted because it's about relationships between men and woman.
> But most of all, dear friends, that quote is 2,300 years old! Was Aristotle misogynistic?
Yep
> In his work Politics (1254b13–14), Aristotle states "as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject".
> While Aristotle reduced women's roles in society, and promoted the idea that women should receive less food and nourishment than males, he also criticised the results: a woman, he thought, was then more compassionate, more opinionated, more apt to scold and to strike. He stated that women are more prone to despondency, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of having a better memory.
_________
> apparently nobody has ever read the great philosophers.
The introductory paragraph makes it seem like the extent of your claim is he noticed the same behavioral trend as most psychology surveys:
> Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too.
I think you’re really stretching the word “misogyny” when you’re using it for people who accurately describe reality and view male and female well-being as equally important for society.
You are a misogynist. This is literally the first sentence. Your post is shamefully misleading.
> Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife.
Yawn — you name calling because you think a cherry picked quote about family dynamics defines an entire philosopher’s view is the bad faith I’ve come to expect from people of your persuasion.
Your post is more misleading than mine: you’re hanging your entire opinion on a de-contextualized cherry-picked line and using that to ignore other parts of the philosopher’s work.
Go on, scream about how everyone who disagrees with you is an istaphobe — nobody cares.
I broadly agree with your point, but then you decided to search for quotes that apparently support your argument, and you picked... Schopenhauer, in a discussion about misogyny and marriage, which is pretty hilarious.
I'm sorry, it really isn't a big deal and I don't think anyone would be triggered or offended by the quote! And of course historical context matters. The poster was just proffering a friendly reminder that to push society forward it's helpful to consider these things.
It's just like changing our default branches from master to main, honestly probably not a huge deal to any rationale person, but the cost is negligible so why not?
It's possible to be empathetic and considerate, making minor adjustments (and also not judging those who innocently don't) without being the "woke" police!
> he poster was just proffering a friendly reminder that to push society forward it's helpful to consider these things
It is totally not.
As Ricky Gervais put it beautifully, like it or not, if you categorize the people of the past with the standards of today, you are preparing the people of the (near) future to categorize you about what you say today.
Now imagine that people think of Aristotle as a misogynist, like if it is actually important, he died 2,300 years ago after all and nobody studies Aristotle because "and now let's read about that guy who hated women, because it's something important to learn: women are trash", but
By the 1930s, a new kind of human zoo appeared in America, nude shows masquerading as education. These included the Zoro Garden Nudist Colony at the Pacific International Exposition in San Diego, California (1935–36) and the Sally Rand Nude Ranch at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco (1939). The former was supposedly a real nudist colony, which used hired performers instead of actual nudists. The latter featured nude women performing in western attire. The Golden Gate fair also featured a "Greenwich Village" show, described in the Official Guide Book as "Model artists' colony and revue theatre."
Sorry if I stand with Aristotle, despite him being a man of his times, and not with 20th century human zoo.
edit: to put it simply, should we talk to German people or everytime they try to say something we should shut them up reminding them that they did the holocaust?
When I disagree with someone from the US, can I use "you are the only people in history to have dropped two atomic bombs on civilians, you are wrong by design!"?
Why Aristotle is problematic, but nobody says "he was a Trump but a lot more intelligent than Trump and actually, now that I think about it, he never said <<grab them by the pussy>>, so Aristotle was less misogynist than Trump"?
Aristotle has never been POTUS.
I understand pushing society forward, so why blame people who have died thousands of years ago for things they are not responsible of today?
Does someone really think that quoting that sentence from Aristotle will plant the seed of misogyny in people's mind?
Is this really the kind of trust we have in each other's intelligence?
I believe people can read the context loud and clear.
He was a misogynist. That’s a fact. Yes, the standards have changed. It doesn’t mean we need to throw out everything he said, but sticking your head in the sand and ignoring a basic quality of his thought because… I’d not know why honestly? It’s threatening? thats not the way forward.
That is wildly untrue. The research on whether men or women are more satisfied in their marriages shows that they have about the same levels of satisfaction.
Not really sure why the demographics of philosophers effects the impact of the statement. Most philosophers are white, would it have been more impactful if the statement had brought race into it?
If you could bring race into it somehow then yes the statement might seem more based in historical precedence, rather than some idealistic fantasy world of hyper diversity, assuming most unhappily married men are also white.
I don't really get why any of that matters though. Can't you just appreciate the sentiment regardless of how it is phrased? Seems like your trying to make it political when it just isn't.
Idk man sounds like they’re just taking a phrase and phrasing it slightly differently so that it applies to more people. You’re the one who was offended by that
That's not what he said, and I doubt it's what he meant. Many people who disagree with me are not dipshits, but the ones who are seem to take positive joy in being disagreeable.
It’s bland, safe, and lifeless. The statement has no bite.
The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.
> The original statement will be read by men and some men will connect to it right away, because rather than envision some abstract person, they are made to immediately picture a man, and in that image they may recognize themselves, like looking at a mirror.
Sorry, are you saying that the audience of the statement is on purpose only men? If so, how could you possibly support any claim that it's not misogynistic?
I really want to take your argument as a reason why it's 100% ok to phrase it exclusionary, but then I get a response like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376163 and am reminded how that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.
> that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.
I don't "tones" have anything to do with it; in the 80s, Law, Accounting and Medicine[1] was absolutely dominated by men. If you think that introverted nerds are sexist, they have nothing on how doctors, lawyers and accountants were, nor how sexist the purchasers of those services were (often assuming that the men would be more competent).
And yet, today those professions have as many (if not more) females than males.
It's a stretch to think that general tone of an industry was responsible for females leaving the profession filled with introverted IT nerds and moving to high-powered and high-status executive professions.
[1] Other than nurses, in which men are still only a rounding error.
A long time ago this industry was built on women, the first programmers were women. It was a female dominated field. So what happened? The women stopped giving a fuck and the men took over.
The industry has plenty of attractive qualities for any sex: Good money, good jobs. These far outweigh the occasional toxic male who is easily put down these days. If women aren’t signing up, then maybe they just don’t care about computers as badly as people want them to.
Is that not part of why this industry has a problem?
In isolation, it is innocuous, and has the caveat emptor. Though, if you get slapped with, you can't be a great philosopher (for what are happily or unhappily married women other than just spouses), you can't be police, fire fighter, coder, CEO.. it's just another slap in a series if many that occur daily. So, the idea is stop with the isolated examples, and perhaps the bombardment will lessen
Leaning into society's stereotypes is one way to bend to people's implicit demands to change your writing (and quite possibly thinking).
But sure, if the metric you're optimizing is raw views and smiles and laughs, then probably the way to go is leaning into stereotypes. There's a reason those views and smiles and laughs are called "cheap".
If we are counting only heterosexual and 2 people marriages, wouldn't the number of people stuck in unhappy marriages be exactly 50% men and 50% women?
The [perceived] consequences of ending a marriage seem to provide more of a disincentive to men, so they are more likely to persist in a marriage that they feel they would be unable to leave (and then have to support multiple households, etc.). The fact that women (in the USA) are more than twice as likely to initiate a divorce seems to bear this out.
"Women divorce men more often than the other way around; this seems to bear out that men are more dissatisfied in marriage" seems like a stretch to me.
At any rate, it reminds me of the classic physics joke:
> An experimental physicist comes running excitedly to a theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm", says the theorist, "that's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here is the reason." A long logical explanation follows. In the middle of it, the experimentalist says "Wait a minute", studies the chart for a second and says "Oops, this is upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here is the reason..."
That's an interesting thesis, but it wasn't one that I was putting forward; rather I was saying that the reality of divorce for men tends to be such that they are significantly less likely to seek divorce when their marriage is unhappy compared to women at a similar level of unhappiness.
I see there are many people commenting on the ethical value of that saying.
To understand it better it is worth noting that it is a bastardization of this misquote commonly attributed to Socrates: “By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
As detailed in this ( https://qr.ae/pvP31C ) answer on Quora, Socrates never said (or was never recorded to say it, he didn't write down his philosophy) this exact thing. But there is a recorded dialogue that is plausible as the source of the simplified quote.
While less clear from what kraig911 said or from the original dialogue, the commonly spread (meme) version of the quote, which I pasted above, makes the misogynism clear. I hope further explaining that is not necessary.
It is important to note that Ancient Grece was very gender unequal, so a misogynistic quote in that social context is not something surprising, even for one of the brightest minds. That is just how society was in those times, and those philosophers did not get the benefit of hindsight we have today.
Besides, as stated above, Socrates didn't actually say that misquote. He was commenting about the challenges of his relationship with his wife. From that dialogue, it is even implied it was a conscious decision he made.
The misquote is especially dreadful because it is a generalization over the entire feminine gender. I am now quite curious when exactly in history did the misquote take its commonly known form.
I am quite surprised that of all the people commenting, no one attempted to go to the source of that meme. Instead, everyone just espoused their viewpoint. I wish HN to be a place of knowledge seeking, not a place of culture war.
There’s a lot of things like this that I blame mostly on the growth of what we’re doing here. We’re communicating in a low fidelity text only fashion and doing it without any knowledge of who each other are and how our word choices will be received. We definitely don’t know who is lurking or reading or may take offense once I hit the reply button on this form.
Had that been said in person, even with someone we only recently met, we’d have “known” what it was meant to mean and that it was just a figure of speech to support their main point. Online, people will read every word selected and choose to vilify you for using a pronoun or some other random extreme literal take on your word choices without really considering what your intent or meaning or that you is (often there’s not much, it just happens to be the choice of words they made while typing on a tiny device and trying to be concise). It’s also not considered that online we’re intermixing generationally, culturally, economically, and so many ways. When a 50 year old person says something like the word “retarded” it may feel normal and they are ignorant of the fact that anyone under ~30 knows not to even say that word, it’s the “r” word. Then you have the other “n” word that everyone knows is unspoken except it’s found and heard everywhere because some people can and do say it steadily.
As an example, I frequent a local subreddit for my city. Something that regularly comes up is crime and homeless and such. If you have anything to post there. Someone else will invariably reply with yes but redlining, Jim Crowe, disenfranchised citizens, etc. Those are all base general knowledge and historical facts for sure. I think everyone is well aware of them. But, it’s difficult to have any discourse when the audience expects a full historical account of why the situation exists before solutions can be discussed. It’s pretty tiring and I’ve basically stopped chiming in on those kinds of things.
TLDR: communication is hard and text only is really hard.
There has to be some sort of “Streisand Effect” phenomenon that can be applied to interpersonal communications, where by mentioning a thing in conversation that you hope not to entertain, it gets entertained as a consequence of it being mentioned.
> It would be curious to examine in a psychological study if this reinforced behavior has developed more due to a subtle social reward system for the “labelers”, or due to a punishment system for the “non-labelers”.
To me it's misogynistic because when I heard it first it's implied that my happiness is tied to a woman. Since I'm happily married and very much in love I know that without her I'd probably end up being a philosopher pondering problems without answers to run away from the trauma of losing her. I've been through it before :)
For sake of mental gymnastics I'll humor you. It's misogynistic because it's rooted in I presume in my culture that women generally don't sit and ponder problems, or resort to alcohol, drugs and crime as bad as men when things go bad. Women generally move on. So that belies a certain belief that women are the cause of all problems - And that is misogynistic.
The statement does not imply those assumptions, and even if it did, it would not be misogyny. The fact there is so much discussion about this is the 'issue' here and it's toxic.
> To me it's misogynistic because when I heard it first it's implied that my happiness is tied to a woman.
Nowhere it is implied that an unhappy marriage for a men is due to women in the marriage, if I had to guess, unhappiness in marriage for men is tied to having kids.
Anyway, focusing on the fact that it says "men" instead of focusing on the fact that it says "unhappiness" says a lot about the priorities people have nowadays.
It's like reading "The Fox and the Grapes" and focusing on the fact that there's a talking fox trying to eat grapes.
I think there is a strong punishment system for the non-labelers. People that feel strongly about this stuff are really rabid, and seem to spend all their time calling people out on perceived slights.
There are plenty of layers at which it's misogynistic, but the most obvious one perhaps is that it wholly centers around the man in the relationship. Why must the wife be the source of the husband's unhappiness ("nagging wife" trope)? Why does he get to be the great philosopher if they're both unhappy?
You can say "it's just a saying, it would be equally true with the roles reversed" -- but then, why aren't they?
Sure, on the misogyny scale, it's pretty mild, but sayings like this that implicitly reinforce the male-centered world we live in are in some ways the most insidious.
The standard you've laid out proposes that any statement about a man's experience in a relationship is by definition misogynistic, because it's centers the man (and, of course, erases women). Do you stand by that?
Additionally, consider that you are the one bringing the nagging wife trope into this: it's merely one of many possibile explanations and unhappy marriage.
The difference is the original statement was not about a specific man's experience; it was a generalization about married men's experiences as a whole.
Saying "I was in an unhappy marriage and it made me a great philosopher" would be fine. It's the generalization which is an issue here.
In an unhappy marriage the other person is normally the source of unhappiness. Not always of course (I knew a guy who got divorced because he felt he'd missed out on having more relationships).
Sure, if you only look at the minutae. At a high level, a relationship is a bond between two people, so it's unfair to lay all the blame solely at the feet of the other person. You've probably done things that make your partner unhappy as well.
The mature way to approach the problem is to work together to resolve the issues -- or if that isn't possible, terminate the relationship. You can't just make yourself the victim and say it's all the other's fault.
I was thinking that this event might have been the inspiration for that part of the book?