Hello all. I’ve read through some things on this forum before, but as you can see, this is my first time actually posting. I have what I consider to be a very serious problem on my hands which I will get to explaining momentarily and why I found a strong reason to come post about it here. Before I explain though, let me preface with a little bit of context here. First of all, though I’ve been exposed to the philosophy of Objectivism for several years now, I still consider myself very much to be learning and that I’ve got a lot to go before I’ve really got a good grip on it even though I know most of the general basics by now. Because I’m still learning so much, I may make what seem to many of you to be an obvious error here or there yet not have a clue about it. If such a thing seems to happen, I would greatly appreciate patience and your understanding that I do not mean to be unreasonable or just refuse to think or understand something, but just that especially if I haven’t heard much before about a particular topic in detail, while it is so unfamiliar to me still I may be slow to catch on and sort out exactly what you mean sometimes, especially sometimes just a particular phrasing of something may be what is confusing me more than the idea itself. So, with that in mind, I appreciate any attempts to help me with my problem. I expect this may seem like an easy thing to answer to many people, but before I come to understand fully, it may take at least a few tries from me asking more questions, for more clarifications or rephrasing.
Here is my issue. A little over two and a half years ago when I was still very new to Objectivism, having just gotten to read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged around half a year ago, I met somebody at college. Or more precisely, they met me technically. This person had noticed me around the campus before and that I seemed to be the sort of person they liked. He approached me one day and we immediately got to speaking about all kinds of things about ourselves in an almost interview-like fashion. We got along right away and were friends quickly. It was very shortly thereafter he asked to date me. Now, from what I knew of him, he was unfamiliar with Objectivism, but had already many ideas in common with the philosophy and was at least generally reasonable and I thought it was likely that if he was made familiar with the philosophy and had a chance to discuss it some and ask some questions he most likely would find he would agree with it. I know there seems to be at least a number of people around who do not think they need for the people they are romantically involved with to be fellow supporters of Objectivism in order to love them, but for me at least, I do not think it is just optional for me in being able to romantically love somebody. Normally, I would have told this person that we should just stay friends for a while longer until we got the reading and discussing done for me to get to for sure seeing if I was right about them and the philosophy. The problem here was that from what I’d already learned of this person, they had a long history of many others he had been interested in in the past telling him they should be friends for a while longer while they would make up their minds only for it to just turn into them stringing him along with no end in sight and no evident advances in them deciding that they were indeed interested in actually going forward and becoming romantically involved with him. He just ended up going through long spans of painful wastes of time and effort. Although I really was serious in my interest in him here and knew what would need to take place for me to be able to know if I could love him and stay with him thus making myself and my case different from those other people, though we had spoken of many things in the brief time we’d known each other, it still hadn’t been enough to really convincingly show how I would not turn out to be a case like them. Additionally, this was this person’s senior year, they wouldn’t be at the college much longer and it was expected he would be moving away right after graduation. Because of these things, I expected that if I tried to say that I wanted to just stay friends for a while longer, it would be taken as me just being like so many others who had also seemed like good people at first and so he would give it up as a lost cause and figure it was better to move on to see if he could find better, more promising possibilities and not much longer after he would be totally gone and I’d never even hear from him again in spite of the fact that I knew we were both very interested in each other and were both serious and didn’t want it to end up that way. So, especially being rather new to things at the time and not always having the easiest time figuring things out (example: it was back at around that same time I was still taken in by the arguments for enforcing “net neutrality” as if they were actually pro-capitalist, something I have long since realized isn’t so, but just some reference of how prone to being mislead and such I was at the time), I was confused and worried and a bit panicked about what I should do. My normal answer of what should be done - just be friends until you’ve settled the issue - was a non-option and I expected for reasons I really couldn’t see as being wrong on his part (assuming with how much seemed the same and how little would seem different that I was just yet another case of somebody who would just lead him on and nothing more) that it was so, and me not having done anything wrong to cause this situation either. Neither of us seemed to be doing anything wrong, yet here we would be losing what could be the best of people for each other anyway. I wouldn’t even expect him to want to speak to me in the future even if we did come across each other if he left me after I gave him the line about being friends (even if I did explain why I wanted to be friends and how long it was expected to take - after all, not only is pretty much every other philosophy out there corrupt and full of arbitrary nonsense thus making it hard to convince anybody not already familiar with the philosophy that This Time It’s Different and Worth It, but also I thought coming along with the friends thing it may just seem like an excuse.)
So, in what seemed like a very difficult and foggy situation for me on what I should do, I finally in what short time I had to consider it concluded that I would go ahead and agree to date him then and introduce him to myself and how I was serious and different from past cases and introduce him to the philosophy when we got a good chance to get to it. I made it clear right away pretty much that this was the case. I let him know I cared for him very, very much, but that there was something we’d need to settle ideologically before I could really be able to love him and know if I could seriously stay with him permanently. So over two and a half years this was the reasoning I’d been going on. We got to know and interact with each other a lot more and grew very close, but things have typically been very busy and we never got around yet to seriously getting into the philosophy as a whole, though we have discussed our positions on specific instances and topics plenty and there was an effort made for a while to read some other books I recommended reading first before getting into Rand (the list was done this way as it was the order I read them in and part of the deal was wanting to get to know and understand me and my development ideologically too.) Also complicating the issue has been that there is one particular issue which he believes there are strong reasons he can’t just outright tell me about, though not for lack of trust in me, trying to misrepresent who he is by keeping negative information about himself from me or anything bad like that. Because I lack access to this aspect of who he is and I also haven’t gotten to really go over the philosophy with him, I’m not able to be so sure about exactly how reasonable or not he is as far as the content of that secret stuff goes, though it is technically possible both that I could eventually find out what that secret information is and/or finish discussing the philosophy with him and thus finally be able to fully finish making an overall judgment of him as a complete person. So, two and a half years this hasn’t been accomplished yet though we have gotten to know each other better and grown close while operating on a decision I made in a bit of what seemed like murky conditions to me morally when I was confused and panicked and didn’t yet have the best of understanding of the philosophy to be sure.
I’ve been running on that reasoning ever since and having not yet figured out a better answer been ok with the old conclusion until recently I was discussing my relationship with the only other person I have really known so far who is familiar with Objectivism and admittedly, I think they still may be more familiar with the philosophy than I am. Right now I’ve still only read Rand’s fiction and numerous free online resources like excerpts from the Ayn Rand Lexicon online and things from the ARI website and I’m presently halfway through OPAR, but haven’t read any of the other non-fiction books by Rand like this other person I have been speaking with who has along with having read all of OPAR before and having been familiar with and working on learning the philosophy for at least a few years more than me it seems. So, seeing as they may know more about this than I do and that they generally have had good judgment in my experience with them, when this person raised objections to how I’ve carried on my relationship, I decided it was worth at least giving the issue more consideration again. My first effort was to try to tell my mate that after two and a half years and all his experience with me that I hoped by now he could see I was indeed different from those others and that I was serious about my interest in him and so now I was proposing to (with the full intention of this being temporary, probably not too long even) separate from being romantic partners for the time being while he would take care of getting to the readings and at any point during this he was free and even encouraged to go ahead and ask me questions about it and I would answer to the best of my ability and/or point him to places answers could be found. This suggestion though I quickly found out after I made it had problems.
To begin with, past experiences he has had make it so that trying for any significant amount of time to be “just friends” now or something similar would not only be excruciatingly painful, it could even be very dangerous in his present condition to his psychological well being and in turn consequently his physical well being and that of other people perhaps too if it was tried. (Though it hasn’t been directly stated, I strongly suspect if other people were to start getting hurt from this I would be a very likely person to be hurt.) He is *not dangerous* in any way right now at all, it is something that would *become* a dangerous situation if we tried to do this how I had originally proposed. He’s told me that the kinds of changes to his way of thinking that would be required for this are where the trouble would come from. (More specific details of how and why this is have been given to me, but it involves private information which I consider to be up to him to decides who is and who is not told.) He would definitely be willing to do the reading with me, he already had agreed to before, just we hadn’t gotten to it yet. The problem comes in doing the reading apart. He tells me he knows how to handle complete breakups already though and that those don’t pose any especially high problem in spite of how much that is painful too though. Furthermore, if we did completely break up now, he would be open to maybe if some time in the future I wanted to try to date him again possibly doing so, but when he breaks up with somebody, he has to completely cut them from his life essentially, meaning he couldn’t do the reading even later without me because that could lead to some of the same complications as trying to do it under the expected “temporary separation” situation. And if the readings still weren’t done, then the things over which I had separated from him still haven’t changed and I can’t try to even in the future be with him again. The kinds of psychological issues involved here that prevent safe reading while not dating each other are indeed an area of not being totally rational in how he has ended up coping with these past experiences, however they are one of the things which I think could easily be corrected if he did do the reading. But if he tried to do the reading apart from me he doesn’t think he’d be able to even get far enough into them to solve the problems before the problems set in and he would never end up finishing the reading anyway in addition to now have large problems on his hands and possibly who knows who else’s hands either.
Speaking with the other person I know who is familiar with Objectivism they suggested trying to get him to go to therapy while doing this as a sort of preventative measure, to try to handle it and prevent it while the reading is being done apart from me, make it work that way. It was good thinking I thought, but I must say in case anybody else was considering suggesting something like that, already knew it wouldn’t work due to the fact that this guy has a very, very busy work schedule and no funds available to afford such either. Additionally, by the time he maybe could get time and money to do so, I think by then it will be too late. There is not very long the current state I am in with him can go on as it is, a sort of murky point where just exactly what we are to each other right now is hard to say exactly.
The specific objection that came from the person I’d been speaking with about how I’d been going about my relationship were the claim that in spite of the fact that I made very clear what my actual feelings were and why, it was still dishonest to be in a relationship at all with him if I didn’t yet love him, regardless of other circumstances and even if that really was the ONLY way I might ever get to love him and have a truly unquestionably legitimate relationship with him. I believe the argument has been something along the lines of in spite of what I’ve said about caring a great amount but not quite yet loving the person I’ve been dating, I’m lying in my actions still anyway. It seems this person says even under these or any other circumstances for an adult it is not legitimate to be in a romantic relationship for any amount of time, even temporarily and even if the only way in order to get to love, for anything less than love. As for the complications that arose with me trying to temporarily separate now, I was told to hurry up and get to the section on independence in chapter 8 of OPAR and I did, but reading that section it seemed that what was spoken of was about not taking what other people claim just on faith, having your mind just leech off whatever somebody else concludes by whatever manner they conclude it and instead working to grasp information with your own mind. So, that didn’t seem to settle the issue now for me either. I have discussed this quite a lot as best as I could with both of the other people I’ve mentioned here and not been able yet to really be sure about this whole issue and come to a solid conclusion on what is the rational course here and why that is and how exactly this is to be determined and why. So, because the discussion with them didn’t seem to be getting me much further in my understanding I’m asking here now in hopes maybe somebody else who knows the philosophy will have something to say about this which will help me see things more clearly.
I apologize for the lengthiness of this message, I’ve never been very good at being concise. This is actually the condensed version too. Anything else I’ll try to answer as and if need for the information arises. I appreciate if you took the time to read this all.
) The person I’ve spoke of knows this and has no problems with this at all. Due to this though, there isn’t really exactly some divide of dating versus marriage for me, I take from the time I start sort of “officially” being in a romantic relationship with somebody to be quite serious already. This is part of why for me I normally have higher standards than just a fair amount of mutual attraction before I even begin to be romantically involved with somebody. I think usually I wouldn’t want to even move past friends before I loved somebody and was in fact convinced I most likely would want to stay with them for life (and them convinced of the same for me. If it is significant, this other person did already love me though since we’ve started being in a relationship. I have not had any such complicating issues as secrets that may or may not ever be fully exposed, though the information of the exact philosophy I support has been slow going on getting conveyed due to busy schedules and such.)
I don’t think I could well have a relationship with somebody who didn’t both due to how big I am on reading and that I want to share my own writing with who I am in a relationship with. So reading a lot isn’t a problem itself at all.