8/26/2005

When I say you are weak, you take it as a great insult. It should not be. One of your problems is that you take the meanings of words from the society's common standard as your own. When I say "weak", it has a much deeper meaning than its common sense meaning. (I just checked the dictionary. The meaning that's closet to what I mean is, "not able to resist external force or withstand attack", which is quite true in your case.) So, if we want to understand the deep root of things, we have to go to the root of everything first. You really need to develop your own understanding and definition of meanings of words, or otherwise you are always subject to the confusion of ideas, and be "weak".

For example, we have discussed the issue of infidelity. At first you simply think infidelity means sleeping with someone other than the spouse. When we explore it further, you exclude the case when the other spouse knows and agrees of the sleeping event. And later you decide it's OK to sleep with someone of the same gender but not OK with opposite gender. As we continue, your definition changes, and now it only includes the cases when the sleeping with an opposite gender hurts the other spouse. What do you mean by hurting? Intentionally or unintentionally? You say any sleeping should count as intentional, because you know it hurts you. I say it does not hurt me if you sleep with someone else, and therefore what you do I do not count as infidelity. So your definition for infidelity has to revise again. You say it hurts you because of the possibility that I will leave you for the one I sleep with, but then on the other hand it does not apply to you because you will never cheat on me and you will never leave me. That sounds like double standard first of all, and further confuses our effort to definte infidelity. We have to explore it even further. In the end you will realize that your understanding and definition of infidelity does not really exist like you previously thought! You have simply adopted the meaning from the society without ever questioning it, probably from when you were a teenager. So it is time for you to learn to not take anything for granted, even the meanings of words. You need to make up your own mind of what each concept means, and decide for yourself what you want or not want.

Incidentally, one of the dictionary definition of infidelity says, "unfaithfulness to a moral obligation". So two people does not share the same moral ideas, the unfaithfulness cannot be decided. I, for one, do not consider sleeping around to be breaking any moral obligation, so my definition of infidelity is different from yours.

When I say you are weak, you need to ask yourself, what do I mean by "weak". Only after you have done this exercise with all words, you will realize that weakness might not be such a bad word. Also, remember, words only mean what they mean to mean. Words are only pointers to the truth they try to represent.

You are still so confused. I don't know if this is a good start....

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