I typed a long message, then asked my wife what she thought about the concepts raised.
She informed me that you might be metaphorically pulling my chain.
If you are, well done! I was fooled. Though tricking someone as socially oblivious as I isn’t that much of an achievement, I still appreciate the joke.
If you are not, I am happy to discuss the philosophies of committed relationships, but my (very inexpert) main points would be:
one should honor all commitments
commitments can be ethically renegotiated with the informed consent of all involved parties
at the end of the commitment (ie, death in this case), termination or renegotiation is also fair (even if the same commitment is the end result)
That said, I also have a religious belief in life after death, and that includes marriage, though I also believe we need to choose each other again in the next life. I didn’t really want to get into that in a random funny post, but there you go.
My sincere apologies to you for creating a situation that might have pressured you into sharing something private or that the context made you uncomfortable sharing. I thought people might be amused by me being informed that you were joking, but I did not mean to discomfit you.
Thank you for responding. If you would like to continue the previous conversation in private, please feel free to message me; and if not, please know I leave this thread with no negative feelings toward you.
edit: Added a word that hopefully made it seem less like I was blaming the other commenter.
No discomfort here. If I felt uncomfortable sharing, I would’ve just not responded. Since you gave such a serious response, I figured I’d do you the courtesy of giving a little more context to my original post (i.e. consider the pottery scene in Ghost).
A little more context on views
If ghosts exist in any meaningful form, I don’t think they could have sex, nor is that something they would be particularly interested in. I see sex as a physical thing driven by hormones, and ghosts wouldn’t have a physical form. My view of the afterlife is one of intellectual progress, not physical appetites, so marriage in the afterlife would be more based on companionship than anything.
So if my SO appeared to me after passing, it would be to warn me of something I’m doing that I shouldn’t that could jeopardize our ability to be together in the next life. Or perhaps to encourage me to let go on my deathbed so we could be together again sooner.
I tend to leave religious views off my posts, especially in a community like this where we’re mostly here to joke and have fun. So I keep my posts largely secular on SM, because I don’t think religion is something that should be openly debated, it should be discovered through a connection w/ the divine, and weighed against scientific evidence (I believe God is subject to natural laws).
While I don’t share your religion, it looks like our general views largely align.
I agree with your policy of generally not sharing religion or other similarly contentious topics here, but I appreciate that you made an exception for this conversation. Also, you taught me that you can label spoilers!
In case you’re not familiar, some of what you said makes me think you might like the literary works of Terry Pratchett.
I typed a long message, then asked my wife what she thought about the concepts raised.
She informed me that you might be metaphorically pulling my chain.
If you are, well done! I was fooled. Though tricking someone as socially oblivious as I isn’t that much of an achievement, I still appreciate the joke.
If you are not, I am happy to discuss the philosophies of committed relationships, but my (very inexpert) main points would be:
edit: corrected an individual word.
I was joking.
That said, I also have a religious belief in life after death, and that includes marriage, though I also believe we need to choose each other again in the next life. I didn’t really want to get into that in a random funny post, but there you go.
My sincere apologies to you for creating a situation that might have pressured you into sharing something private or that the context made you uncomfortable sharing. I thought people might be amused by me being informed that you were joking, but I did not mean to discomfit you.
Thank you for responding. If you would like to continue the previous conversation in private, please feel free to message me; and if not, please know I leave this thread with no negative feelings toward you.
edit: Added a word that hopefully made it seem less like I was blaming the other commenter.
No discomfort here. If I felt uncomfortable sharing, I would’ve just not responded. Since you gave such a serious response, I figured I’d do you the courtesy of giving a little more context to my original post (i.e. consider the pottery scene in Ghost).
A little more context on views
If ghosts exist in any meaningful form, I don’t think they could have sex, nor is that something they would be particularly interested in. I see sex as a physical thing driven by hormones, and ghosts wouldn’t have a physical form. My view of the afterlife is one of intellectual progress, not physical appetites, so marriage in the afterlife would be more based on companionship than anything.
So if my SO appeared to me after passing, it would be to warn me of something I’m doing that I shouldn’t that could jeopardize our ability to be together in the next life. Or perhaps to encourage me to let go on my deathbed so we could be together again sooner.
I tend to leave religious views off my posts, especially in a community like this where we’re mostly here to joke and have fun. So I keep my posts largely secular on SM, because I don’t think religion is something that should be openly debated, it should be discovered through a connection w/ the divine, and weighed against scientific evidence (I believe God is subject to natural laws).
While I don’t share your religion, it looks like our general views largely align.
I agree with your policy of generally not sharing religion or other similarly contentious topics here, but I appreciate that you made an exception for this conversation. Also, you taught me that you can label spoilers!
In case you’re not familiar, some of what you said makes me think you might like the literary works of Terry Pratchett.
Oh, I love Terry Pratchett, he’s fantastic. :)
And yeah, spoilers are great. I can be a bit wordy, so I use them to summarize my posts so people don’t get overwhelmed by a wall of text.