I notice a lot of these stories are roughly "I wish I could express affection towards the opposite gender the way they express affection" or similar lines of reasoning with the common theme being some hangup about the way they think the opposite gender understands and expresses love and affection.
I can't help but feel like this is one of the consequences of people not having healthy outlets to express their anxieties to people who have experience with and know how to manage these insecurities. How many stories have we seen of "I've been married x number of years and I just now discovered I'm poly" or "after # of years of marriage my partner says they're trans." Either community defends these "coming out" stories by saying that marriage gives them the peace and security necessary to both admit some greater truth to themselves and their loved ones, but I just don't see how whether years into a marriage or stuck in high school trying to navigate your sexual development, that being trapped in a certain social environment while deeply unhappy and uncomfortable in your own skin would somehow give anyone the presence of mind to discover some profound and hidden truths about themselves.
I remember years ago when it was starting to get popular to make fun of white Americans for being bland and uninteresting, that a lot of young white people started defending themselves by identifying more closely with whatever country their great grandmother immigrated from. I saw one time someone make a joke towards some girl who exploded and went on and on about how she's proudly Portuguese and she's gone to Portugal twice in her life and loves everything about Portugal and its people and etc etc etc. It was such a ridiculous tirade but it made me think about how young people have become so hyper-aware of and anxious about their identities that being made to feel like they're not especially interesting or attractive can have such an enormous impact on their self-esteem that they would melt down in front of people like that.
Maybe I'm wrong but if this is all really self-loathing and insecurity then there's no way this is gonna last forever. There's only so much crying wolf you can do before people notice that you're just lashing out instead of dealing with your issues like a normal person, and given the strange amount of opportunity given to greedy narcissists who use trans identity to shield themselves (like reddit jannies who delete cis-only lesbian subs, that one MtF MMA fighter punching women, etc) people are noticing faster than they normally would have.
Friendly reminder that a thread being featured is not an excuse to shit it up.
archive.md
archive.md
