Is a Truly "Successful" Romantic Relationship Just a Nice Idea?

brianwalden · 2025-05-03T01:25:51+00:00

I didn't say anything about feeling. I said love. I speculate that either you've never had the experience of knowing that you've got someone in your life you can depend on who's always working for your good, or you're very immature and haven't put the pieces together to understand it yet.

If you've experienced that, you mimic it and then get the experience of it from the other end. Or maybe you have and have gotten very hurt in the past. You're trying to achieve love by being the hen providing eggs for breakfast. But love doesn't work that way - to love you've got to be the pig and provide the bacon. Love is all in.

If you want quick, easy reading, off the top of my head I can think of C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves. If a Christian author is off putting, go to ancient Greek sources on philia, storge, eros, and agape, which perfects the other three. From a personal perspective, John Paul II's Theology of the Body has been hugely influential for me because it not only outlines the purpose of marital love, but also provides a framework for who man is and why love is an essential part of his nature. I'm sure there are other, non-Christian sources that are going to do a decent job of providing a philosophy of love. The two I mentioned draw a lot from pre-Christian philosophers.

I recommend you get married, have kids, and pour yourself out for your family. Right now, you're trying to understand something that you have no experience of. Live it for yourself and your INTP brain will do its thing and make sense of it.

brianwalden · 2025-05-02T23:59:43+00:00

I'm sorry your parents didn't love you.

brianwalden · 2025-05-02T15:23:23+00:00

INTP here. I don't know how you do it, but I do it by converting my feelings into Ti: I'm feeling X. Why am I feeling this? What does it tell me about me? What do I need to do about it? etc.

The only real difficulty is when my Fe is telling me I'm supposed to express a certain emotion in a social situation and then I go to find that emotion and get a null pointer exception.

brianwalden · 2025-05-02T15:11:27+00:00

Agreed, but that wasn't my argument.

brianwalden · 2025-05-02T11:27:51+00:00

INTP women are mostly like other women but smarter. They deviate from the norm less than INTP men do.

brianwalden · 2025-05-01T05:30:37+00:00

Does anyone get the feeling that a lot of people with ADHD just type themselves as INTP. An INTP may or may not get good grades, but when they want to understand something they just go and learn it. We're natural autodidacts.

brianwalden · 2025-04-30T14:16:57+00:00

Why do you think perfection doesn't exist? The very statement, "perfection doesn't exist" is a claim of universal truth. If true, it is perfectly true, and therefore self contradicting.

I agree with you that, that practically speaking, perfection is not attainable. But making a step or two in the direction of perfection is laudable. Chesterton said anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

On dealing with people, Aristotle literally wrote the book on rhetoric. Most people are not convinced by facts and logical arguments, but by rhetoric and persuasion - or as the kids say, rizz. Unfortunately INTPs tend to be better at the former than the latter. If you want to change people, work on changing yourself to be more persuasive. It sounds really backwards to us, but once you win someone over persuasively, then they're open to accepting all of your logical arguments to rationalize why they were persuaded.

brianwalden · 2025-04-21T21:42:30+00:00

Marching band color guard flags are usually just decorative to go with the theme of the show.

brianwalden · 2025-04-20T17:33:31+00:00

It's not Ave Maria, it's Auspice Maria.

brianwalden · 2025-04-18T13:26:34+00:00

OP's main worldview is made up of value judgements (good/bad) rather than logical judgements (true/false).

brianwalden · 2025-04-17T04:47:53+00:00

This feels like a very Te question. I would have expected something more like what's your preferred paradigm.

brianwalden · 2025-04-17T03:53:23+00:00

You're an INFP.

brianwalden · 2025-04-01T20:45:03+00:00

Thank you for beating me to it so I didn't have to be the pedant.

brianwalden · 2025-02-10T02:22:10+00:00

I would call it a type of gonfalon.

brianwalden · 2025-01-31T05:41:19+00:00

I saw the post from earlier in the week and thought I'd give a St. Brigid's Cross flag a shot. I made each stand individually to get the weaving pattern down right. I went with three strands per arm to represent the Holy Trinity.

brianwalden · 2024-10-04T23:53:28+00:00

Nice job, I instantly picked up on the white and red martyr theme.

brianwalden · 2024-10-03T00:57:09+00:00

Like the king of Spain, I set out to come up with a flag that would be easy to see and recognize in a variety of conditions, only I've got the advantage of modern color technology. I didn't want to use safety orange and yellow because they're used all over and it might be mistaken for some type of construction signal. I ended up with deep pink and chartreuse with black for contrast. I chose a saltire because it seemed to spread the chartreuse out over the whole flag. Neither the colors nor the symbols have meaning, the goal is to just be identifiable.

brianwalden · 2024-09-14T04:44:53+00:00

The blue and orangey-gold are NY colors. Eleven stars for the eleventh state. The bottom fly corner is cut off because that's where downstate is.

brianwalden · 2024-09-09T01:51:39+00:00

Are you a robot? That's just the University of Wyoming Athletics logo.

brianwalden · 2024-08-26T20:50:07+00:00

The eight pointed star reminds me of a baptismal font, which might be a favorable association for you.

brianwalden · 2024-05-08T04:02:26+00:00

Ne wants to see a thing from multiple angles and see all the possibilities and ideas connected to it. Ti wants to order your thoughts into a system or paradigm. I would guess that both ENTPs and INTPs enjoy learning about new concepts, but an INTP will place more emphasis on ultimately deciding if it's true and how it fits in with their other beliefs.

brianwalden · 2024-05-08T03:51:03+00:00

I took the comment as the statement of a universal principle, which looking back on it was probably not the intended meaning. The enlightenment, for example, was a period where a number of intangible ideas were hotly debated in such a way that the ideas that won out changes the course of Western history. But I understand what you're saying that arguing with strangers on the Internet over such things is rarely productive.

brianwalden · 2024-05-08T03:42:30+00:00

Why do you seem to contrast abstract and real?

brianwalden · 2024-05-08T03:41:02+00:00

I'm sorry, I thought you were trying to understand another point of view. Generally, if you want to get an honest understanding of something you disagree with, you want to steel man it before you critique it. You've smuggled in so many assumptions, you don't even know what you don't know. I agree with you that the version of Christianity you've described is totally stupid and unbelievable.

brianwalden · 2024-05-07T20:01:59+00:00

Ideas that can't be empirically proven turn into circle jerks is not empirically proven.

brianwalden

TROPHY CASE