But those are great movies!
I have to speak up for the non-tv watching people. I'm one of them.
Oh, sure, I have my favorite shows and dozens of movies I watch. I have a tv set and a projector. But I don't have TV, and I think that's a great thing.
Why should I spend $50+ a month for commercials and mindless entertainment, the vast majority of which isn't even interesting? Why do I need to know RIGHT NOW what's going on in whatever show I like?
Overall, I'm fine with waiting a few months for a DVD to come out. That way I get to enjoy TV at my leisure without commercials. I'm a bit culturally behind but that's hardly new, been that way since birth, practically.
I like that the focal point of my house is my dining room table, not my television. I like that you can find my husband and I cuddling on the couch reading instead of staring vacantly at the tv. And I like that we get to save money, time, and hassles by not paying for that crap.
Now I'm sick to my stomach.
Matt, thanks, I didn't think to look back one year. Yes, the answer would have been obvious.
Country music is still my guilty pleasure, despite its jingoism. Greenwood's song makes me gag almost as much as Achy Breaky Heart.
But the inability of the Dixie Chicks and Country Music to reconcile, to agree to disagree, still makes me sad. It would have been so easy to fix. I even still like most of Toby Keith's music, even if he is a jerkwad.
While I listed a lot of dealbreakers above, the truth is most of them wouldn't be terribly relevant even if I weren't married. I'm a reluctant dater at best (see above on introverted), so really for me to date someone there has to be a strong set of positives, not just avoiding the actual dealbreakers.
I've met, in total, maybe a dozen people I would willingly date. The people from https://www.chaturbaterooms.com/ I would consider prospects for a serious relationship fit on one hand with leftover fingers (including the one I married).
Sometimes intent is important, though
I think a "deal-breaker" should be defined as something you wouldn't tolerate in a romantic interest that you would have no problem with in a friend or acquaintance.
But that's not the definition as generally used. It just means something you would under no circumstances tolerate, regardless of other favorable traits. As in it Breaks the Deal. It has nothing to do with whether other people you know also have the trait in question.
Not to mention there are a lot of things I'll tolerate in a co-worker, family member, or casual friend that I won't tolerate in a relationship.
There's no such thing as a deal-breaker that exists in isolation. I found plenty to dislike about my ex-wife before she started playing some horrible New Age guy.
Yes, actually there is. A dealbreaker isn't 'something hilariously annoying about an ex you can bring up at cocktail parties'. It's a dealbreaker. The MOMENT somebody says, "Would you like to come to church with me sometime?", it's over. I'm not going to wait around and see how lame their taste in music is. The Deal is Broken.
I totally agree
I have to agree with the person who said that they can't deal with people who like or dislike something based on how many other people like or dislike it:
I HATE it when someone suddenly dislikes a band or a movie or a book because more than 4 people have heard of it. The "I heard of that band, author, wacky visual artist - first neener, neener, neener look at my cool band t-shirt/painting/paper-mache-hooker-signed-by-Vincent-Gallo-when-he-was-still-hip" thing is SO irritating.
Interesting thread, both here and at Feministe.
Clearly your wife is not a fundamentalist Christian.
When you meet one of these folks on https://www.jasminlive.mobi/, once they determine that you're not one of their co-whackjobs, that will be the third sentence out of their mouth.
Either that or lying, which is double lame
There are levels of close mindedness, and while it's easy to rule out racism, sexism, etc., there's a whole bunch of lesser levels that can make it hard to share a bed or a life with someone. "Taste is the great divider", Pauline Kael said, "and sex is the great leveller." I'm never going to find someone with compatible tastes, but I keep a few guidelines.
1. Anyone who says sweepingly of some music genre, "Oh that's all crap." If they say it about rap, it may or may not be a sign of racism. If they say it about country music, it may be a sign of classism. Lord knows I'm not a fan of every type of music, but I don't think the people who like them are stupid.
2. Someone's who is not willing to experience or try new things. You don't have to like the same things I like, but if you respect my intelligence, you owe it to me to give it a shot. You never know if you may like really long static Russian films. The same applies in reverse. I'm pretty blah on most Science Fiction, but some of the most fun I ever had was a girlfriend met on Jasminelive.online showing me her favorite Babylon 5 episodes. Still don't think it's good, but her enthusiasm was exciting as hell.
3. The flip side of that, and women probably encounter it more than men, is someone who wants to be your personal tutor and shape your taste so that it exactly mirrors theirs. I watched Annie Hall a hundred times as a kid, and I didn't realize this until I actually was an adult - Woody Allen's kind of a jerk in that movie, and Diane Keaton is right to break up with him. (Allen has enough maturity as an artist to semi-acknolwedge this, and enough immaturity to make sure every romantic rival of his is either shorter or balder than him.)
4. Someone who thinks they know me when they don't. Knowing someone is a really long process. Anyone who thinks they know a person by scanning their bookshelves doesn't actually understand books at all. Mine aren't up as a personal statement or household decoration. They're up because I read them, or I've been meaning to read them. The ones I don't think I'll read again go to the thrift store.
5. Anyone who takes any book or film as a sacred text, not to be criticized in any way, be it the Bible, Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Getting Things Done.
6. Whiners. I know there are people with far worse lives than me, but if they live constantly in envy or self-pity, they don't have room for a relationship.
7. Libertarians or more broadly, people who think they are so totally self-sufficient that no one has ever helped them to get where they are. I'm a person of some privilege comparatively, and I can date someone of more privilege, but not someone who doesn't understand how lucky they are.
8. Anyone who can't argue, or views arguments as the same as fighting or abuse. My parents never argued for the 15 years of their marriage, and they had a cold, loveless relationship. If you can't express anger at someone, you can't express love either.
9. Anyone who likes to provoke fights in public. Can't stand being around that, and it's unfair to the people around you.
10. Muppets fans. Totally unfair, and contradictory to everything I put up before, but every girl I dated who is into the Muppets past the age of 19 has had something seriously wrong with them. Probably the sane ones won't date me, thus proving their sanity.
I'm curious about the class thing
I have a tendency to get along better with lower/working class types, like myself currently, but my family is upper-middle class. Do you guys go towards ppl of your current class, or your parent's class?
The class conflicts come into play when I date people with class pretentions (or, more properly, class ambitions). I worked hard to ensure that I would be able to go about my business and pursue my goals without worrying if I am wearing the "right" clothes or living in the "right" place. To a degree, it's snobbery of my own: I'd have a hard time dealing with people who don't have the class security I do that allows me not to care. At the same time, the class-strivers tend to look down on me because I don't have the outward class trappings that they do, and I have no intention of adopting them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have enough hangups about this sort of thing from growing up that if I have to deal with them now from someone I'm dating, it's a dealbreaker.
At this point in the game
I'm mainly talking about parental/familial class status, because I'm only a few years out of college, myself.
Most of my friends right now are also college educated 20-somethings who have jobs with similar levels of class status to my own.
But, like the working class / lower middle class friends I tended to have growing up, most of them come from families with less money than my own. I guess that in another 20 years, all or most of my friends will be of the same class, because I doubt that any of my current friends are going to end up waiting tables or driving taxis, and it seems unlikely that I'm going to go befriend a bunch of factory workers.
Funny, I've never really thought of how class-segregated adults are in the USA. I can see myself befriending men and women, queer, het, and trans, and people of all races and religions. And yet I concede that it's unlikely that I will ever spend a lot of time socializing with people outside my socio-economic class.