Yeah, I think part of the allure is "no matter what you're going through, that person will be there for you to take out your problems on and they'll understand and empathize and commiserate with you!" And like, especially because of the way I tend to see relationships as transactional where emotion-dumping is concerned, my reaction is "well I'd love to have someone like that but I can't imagine being that person for someone else, and that's not fair."
Yeah... and because people, especially other people, are not automatons, this abstraction (of being perfectly understanding and empathetic) rarely makes it into reality :P Most (all?) people aren't perfect at handling emotion-dumps, ranging the whole gamut from "mostly pretty good actually but sometimes has bad days/weeks because people do" to "is ok with this occasionally but not to an overwhelming degree" to "can handle certain types of emotion dumps" to "must be told explicitly that an emotion dump is about to happen and then it's fine" to "does not really want to hear about your emotions actually," and if you've grown up thinking that your significant other WILL be able to handle this completely effortlessly like ChatGPT or something, this is a problem! (The family member I alluded to above occasionally sends me texts about how she has to lower her expectations about what she expected romantically... which... I agree with, yeah, given that what she expected was someone who would be endlessly patient and validating towards her. I mean... she's not endlessly patient and validating herself either!) I lucked out in that my significant other and I tend to be pretty well matched up in what we expect from each other and what we are willing to give, but it's definitely true that a) there have been rough patches and times where we got hurt and had to communicate about what we needed because the other person did not in fact intuit it, and b) there are whole swaths of people for whom either of us would be absolutely terrible significant others because we wouldn't match up in this way :)
That is to say, I think you are actually thinking about it in a more healthy way than a lot of people :P :)
I guess with kids my internal stereotype is "even if the kid isn't going to be a perfect Quester themselves, you made another human being, that's pretty impressive!" But then again, my siblings and I turned out pretty well, so my parents probably think they're fortunate compared to families that had more challenges.
I think kids are pretty amazing and definitely a lot of work, but they are also their own people and a lot of who they are is, well, themselves. I think for most kids (obviously there are special needs and so on), as long as they feel loved and aren't neglected or abused, that takes care of a LOT. (That being said, this is a high bar for some families... in my own family, there's a lot of generational trauma that has had to get worked through. My spouse was lucky enough that his mom did the working through of all her generational trauma before it got to him, ha.)
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Yeah... and because people, especially other people, are not automatons, this abstraction (of being perfectly understanding and empathetic) rarely makes it into reality :P Most (all?) people aren't perfect at handling emotion-dumps, ranging the whole gamut from "mostly pretty good actually but sometimes has bad days/weeks because people do" to "is ok with this occasionally but not to an overwhelming degree" to "can handle certain types of emotion dumps" to "must be told explicitly that an emotion dump is about to happen and then it's fine" to "does not really want to hear about your emotions actually," and if you've grown up thinking that your significant other WILL be able to handle this completely effortlessly like ChatGPT or something, this is a problem! (The family member I alluded to above occasionally sends me texts about how she has to lower her expectations about what she expected romantically... which... I agree with, yeah, given that what she expected was someone who would be endlessly patient and validating towards her. I mean... she's not endlessly patient and validating herself either!) I lucked out in that my significant other and I tend to be pretty well matched up in what we expect from each other and what we are willing to give, but it's definitely true that a) there have been rough patches and times where we got hurt and had to communicate about what we needed because the other person did not in fact intuit it, and b) there are whole swaths of people for whom either of us would be absolutely terrible significant others because we wouldn't match up in this way :)
That is to say, I think you are actually thinking about it in a more healthy way than a lot of people :P :)
I guess with kids my internal stereotype is "even if the kid isn't going to be a perfect Quester themselves, you made another human being, that's pretty impressive!" But then again, my siblings and I turned out pretty well, so my parents probably think they're fortunate compared to families that had more challenges.
I think kids are pretty amazing and definitely a lot of work, but they are also their own people and a lot of who they are is, well, themselves. I think for most kids (obviously there are special needs and so on), as long as they feel loved and aren't neglected or abused, that takes care of a LOT. (That being said, this is a high bar for some families... in my own family, there's a lot of generational trauma that has had to get worked through. My spouse was lucky enough that his mom did the working through of all her generational trauma before it got to him, ha.)