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by jstarfish 1202 days ago
> While I'm aware my relationship wasn't perfect, the standards promoted by those aesthetic Insta influencers were really impossible to obtain in real life.

In the 4 months I dabbled with Instagram, I was shocked by how toxic and outright false the pop psychology memes were. They were stereotypical, frequently backwards, and deliberately misapplied. And all of that is before the cluster-B LARPing.

"Your partner won't give you access to their financial accounts? That's domestic violence, and he probably has Narcissistic Personality Disorder too! What's his is yours, so just use his credit card to book plane tickets without asking and remember that him yelling at you about it is verbal abuse, so get out while you still can before he starts beating you! And remember abuse thrives in secrecy-- so make sure you tell everybody how he was so aggressive that you were in constant fear for your life!"

Sorry you were on the receiving end of [whatever your case is]. Not even the strongest of relationships can withstand reinforcement of sentiments as corrosive as Instagram, where you're a useless piece of shit if you can't/won't support your partner's ambitions of joining the jet set.

You lost your partner to a cult. They're called "followers" for a reason. It starts with separating victims from their loved ones...

2 comments

I saw a youtube short like this. It was a video demonstrating the "perfect" guy. It started reasonable, with him saying "oh can you check this on my phone? the passcode is XYZ"

Yeah, I would have trusted my current-wife then-girlfriend with my phone passcode pretty early on, no big deal. She didn't feel the need to know it, but casually telling it to her so she could do something with it is probably a thing that happened.

But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.

> But it started to veer completely weird after that, about abandoning all his friends and stuff. It turned into a giant WTF for me.

Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It's long-game triangulation, which is little more than domestic violence perpetrated by the other partner. But men are supposed to feel ashamed of themselves if they're not willing to just blindly go along with it.

The irony is, they call this sort of victim the "ideal" guy, while simultaneously deriding him as a "simp" to the rest of their cliques. It's loathesome. I pity anybody involved in the dating game these days.

> It's long-game triangulation, which is little more than domestic violence perpetrated by the other partner.

No.

Domestic violence is domestic violence.

“Long game triangulation” is manipulative behaviour. It is not domestic violence.

Domestic violence is having your mother beat your skull with one of those maglite baton torches the police use.

Saying things that aren’t violence are violence is exactly the kind of awful behaviour others in this thread are complaining about.

Domestic violence is more than one thing, and it includes psychological abuse. Not all violence is physical.
No, domestic violence is only one thing, that thing is domestic violence. All violence is physical. Other forms of abuse that are not physical are not violence.

If we have a verbal confrontation one of us has hurt feelings. If it turns violent, there is actual violence. Words have meanings.

You can care about other types of abuse. You should care about other types of abuse.

But claiming things that aren’t violent are violent steals resources - not just awareness but potentially money, police time and medical attention from victims of domestic violence.

This is massively wrong at best and evil at worst.

> Words have meanings.

Yes. Here's the meaning of "domestic violence" according to some authoritative sources:

- - -

https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/what-is-domestic-abuse

> Domestic abuse, also called "domestic violence" [...]. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person.

- - -

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-ag...

> Intimate partner violence refers to behaviour by an intimate partner or ex-partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours

- - -

https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence

> Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship

- - -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence

> It can assume multiple forms, including physical, verbal, emotional, economic, religious, reproductive, or sexual abuse.

Even still, the fixation on the passcode thing is insecurity.
Literally
I would like to see that; what should I search youtube for?
I have no clue. I mostly get warhammer, video game, and programming videos. It showed up in my shorts one day so I took a look. I have long since purged it from my history because I want to minimize the chances of getting something like that again.
You saw a weird video on youtube. Parent saw some weird stuff on instagram.

What is the point here?

That algorithmic feeds inject weird stuff into people’s brains
It's funny, I am married with a child, do my best and my wife too, but sometimes she gets dragged into meme-expectation that take her a long time to recover from. I cant see nor understand much of the source of these: Im an immigrant and I cant read her native language, and I dont know if it s a girl thing or if it's actually me not fitting reasonable expectations, but damn I wished everyone could look at their own relationship without trying to copy the appearance of others.

What seems to help is when an idolized version of relationship is suddenly broken into pieces and you discover your model was actually completely miserable and whatever you expected became trivial relative to that.

I had an ex that did this based on fantasy novels. "Why can't you be more of a man's man?" "What, from your romance novels?" "Yes!" "Ummm..."

Ironically, the thought never even occurred to me to respond with "Why can't you be more of a <insert stereotypical sought after characterization here>?"

Oh well, we haven't been together for a long time. :)

Point being, it's not just instagram or even social media at large. They've just made the situation worse. This is deep rooted in most of society and isn't going to end any time soon. Just need to find people that are strong enough to not fall victim to this (even if they don't bring it up, like our partners did).