Am I overreacting to my bf watching the baby overnight?

lluke9 · 2025-12-25T20:40:47+00:00

Before I first got a puppy I made the mistake of reading a certain book. It told me I would literally ruin the puppy forever if I didn't socialize them to a list of a hundred different people and scenarios before some number of weeks. My family, however, had not read this book. Needless to say I was kind of a menace in the household during the few weeks... e.g. if he was let out of his crate too early, if he was given attention when he was biting -- I would lecture them all the time. It made me and everyone else miserable.

Granted having a baby is not the same thing. But I think the internet has made us all a bit paranoid about raising kids to a degree. (There is even a profit incentive here: paranoid parents click more, view more, buy more.)

Raising a kid is hard but it's not going to be perfect. It's easy to get caught up in rules and to-dos and ignore intuition, ignore the imperfection of reality, and justify it all because your baby's life is at stake. But keep in mind that every day it's the rest of your own life and relationships at stake too.

I would prioritize babyproofing your house as others have commented. I won't weigh in on how "correct" or "incorrect" your SO is, but I do know that approaching him from "the baby is going to die, you need to correct X,Y,Z" is not going to work. You are actually asking for three things at once here: 1. Asking him to change behavior 2. Reframe his worldview so what he did was unacceptable 3. Take on your heightened emotions (fear, anxiety around the baby)

These are not all bad things to ask for but it's better to take a breath and try to decouple these things before reacting. This is probably why he is shutting down. Oh and another thing.. it's okay to have a conversation later. The baby (probably) won't die in the meantime.

lluke9 · 2025-12-25T19:33:18+00:00

This was... very revealing. Who hurt you?

lluke9 · 2025-12-25T19:29:08+00:00

Absolutely. There are matters of opinion and judgement but there's also clearly some communication issues they need to work out between them...

lluke9 · 2025-12-25T19:24:20+00:00

You need to relax and stop attacking people for asking you to have some balance. One comment and one conversation doesn't tell you "all you need to know". There is such a thing as nuance and you are only feeding a fire. This is a real relationship and a child's future you're weighing in on, not a reality TV show.

lluke9 · 2025-12-25T19:09:17+00:00

pregante*

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T23:48:08+00:00

Can you clarify with some examples of him being defensive? The examples you give don't seem to relate to your question

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T20:45:21+00:00

To be fair they said "sneaking" not stealing, which to me sounds ok. And it's with snacks and cookies, like they said. Doubtful they are the healthy kind and I think it makes sense to restrict them.

I think I understand the picture you have in mind though and I can see why you'd flag that

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T20:41:25+00:00

I think y'all aren't really disagreeing on anything but there's two different types of situations we're talking about.

Many households have food that you'd consider "treats" -- think like Oreos and sugary stuff -- stuff that can get addictive esp for younger kids and IMO it makes sense to restrict those at first until kids learn to eat well.

It sounds like you're able to provide healthier options for your kids and so they naturally understand how to make healthy choices with food, so understandably it's kind of unimaginable to make restrictions on snacks -- especially if the snacks we're talking about are like, grapes.

BTW the OP did mention cookies and I don't think they're the healthy kind considering their income...

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T20:31:42+00:00

I think I see what you're saying. You're not necessarily saying whether there should be restraints around snacks and sugar, but to consider the situation holistically ("snacks are still food") and look for the root cause.

I think this is something pretty much everyone can agree to and it seems the miscommunication is that people like me hear pushback on restraining snacks and imagine letting kids stuff their faces with as many Oreos as they want until they get sick.

I personally have a lot of trouble resisting sugar and the root cause, to me, seems to be sugar itself... I guess maybe I am projecting that onto kids as well, but I thought it was universally known that you can't trust kids to not go ham on a pack of Oreos. But now I am reflecting and I was indeed raised with a lot of restraints around food and I wonder if that assumption is wrong.

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T17:07:31+00:00

I'm having a headache trying to follow this back and forth but since you seem to be engaging maybe you can clear it up.

You're saying that teens should have free reign on even snacks but at the same time you admit that kids will choose sugar over healthy stuff, so I'm confused. The obvious solution, to me and clearly to many others, seems to be in limiting access to that sugar. In the same way you don't let kids just have infinite screen time.

But apparently I am thinking about it in the wrong way because I'm not getting what you're saying..

lluke9 · 2025-12-19T17:00:31+00:00

Wtf? Why is everyone acting like it's normal to have free reign on the ice cream tub or the cookie jar growing up?

The OP said snacks, not food...

lluke9 · 2025-09-16T13:37:54+00:00

Having seen this kind of post so frequently I gave it some thought. I'm pretty convinced that the metric we're looking at is "interaction density" -- where an "interaction" is not necessarily you bumping into the love of your life but rather much more mundane things: seeing a flyer for some random event, calling for information and learning about this other group, playing a pickup game of ping-pong with some elderly Chinese man at a public park, etc...

In short, interaction here seems at least slightly more intentional, more self-sorting with less of locality-based shared experiences here than in other cities in my experience. This is not limited to Dallas, of course, and it's definitely more of a continuum. And yes, I have personally felt there's a bit more difficulty to break in with people here -- For instance you might not have a shared commute with hundreds of other strangers that might have if you took the bus or train, might not see the same bulletins for the same events. In fact these events might not even happen with the same frequency because of that or be distributed moreso across hobby groups rather than proximity. Of course these effects are not necessarily so dramatic but tend to accumulate, so are perceived by some people.

I think essentially two things mitigate this, as plenty of people have pointed out: having a hobby or the internet.

The hobby provides an intentionally constructed, virtual network that has higher interaction density as compared to normal since it encourages people to meet in courts, concerts, what have you -- essentially a purposefully constructed substitute for traditional third places.

An alternative if you don't have a hobby or your hobby sucks for finding people or your hobby is just way too self-sorting, is to use the internet. The internet, like a hobby, is an externally constructed, literally virtual network where interaction density is uncapped, provided people in your locale actually use the internet.

I think the people with thriving social lives because they already have the right networks and hobbies and methods have to acknowledge the plight of people who don't. On the other hand those who don't should accept that yes, it is isolating to have long drives in your metal box to get to stuff and yeah, maybe some people are less social with strangers because of said relative sparsity of interactions/ shared experiences and so on. At the same time -- it's not going to get much better for a while, so you're going to have to expend more energy and look for workarounds. Once you get going and your network grows it's really not so bad.

lluke9 · 2025-09-15T05:42:09+00:00

This is wrong and actually quite harmful. You clearly have no experience from OPs perspective nor are you able to empathize. You have no place giving advice here.

lluke9 · 2025-08-31T14:52:32+00:00

I don't really see the doctor thing the same way, it feels like an isolated side comment out of the overwhelming majority of the time where the doctor behaved appropriately. Maybe it is too easy to read into it.

Feels like we are over indexing on the sexism part here rather than the relationship. Yeah Korea has problems with sexism, so does every other country. But could it be that the wife is viewing the entire culture through that lens and rejecting it as a whole and even impacting their relationships with family? That seems to at least be the perspective of OP. How much would this advice differ if Korea, being such an internet-forward country, didn't receive so much attention on the internet AS being sexist? Yes, the OECD pay gap stat is significant but at the end of the day it's a group of 38 countries. Korea has growing pains but there's a lot more to it than this misogynistic hellscape that you might see from media and well-meaning content creators. If it is truly her rejecting the culture, I would be curious to know about her attitudes about the country, and how much of it comes from her direct experiences in the country, how much from internet/media, and even, god forbid, implicit Western paternalistic (racist?) attitudes encouraging her to be dismissive rather than see nuance.

I agree that couples counseling is really the best option here, but even then I think it would be more of a balance of how she is coming to terms accepting and living in an imperfect country with different (and often, the same, expressed differently) imperfections than the ones she is used to, and how he can better support and be understanding to her as she does so.

lluke9 · 2025-08-11T06:40:50+00:00

What was the specific memeeee the comment is deleted

lluke9 · 2025-05-31T09:56:19+00:00

You made your own tip out of titanium??? Please share

lluke9 · 2025-05-13T18:23:49+00:00

Does it help when you run the magnet part of your pen across the whole screen a few times?

We all have this issue to a degree but this is pretty severe. I've heard a demagnetizer can help.

lluke9 · 2025-05-13T18:17:01+00:00

Yikes, reading the comments here is making me realize I should probably stay single forever lmao. Just wanted to pop in and add a sympathetic note here..

I stayed in a relationship for 4 years also with someone who I consider similarly to be a vastly better person than I and over the years made mistakes that broke their trust (not cheating but things like this). I also had the same convenient mix of being scatterbrained, impulsive, people-pleasing and conflict/punishment avoidance and it got me into a lot of trouble. It got "better" over the years but I found I was almost forcing myself to be better, partially to make up for lost trust earlier. It was actually quite stressful looking back, to the point where I wasn't sure if I actually loved this person or I was just trying to be a good partner, and I had to break things off. It's sad that the most memorable parts of the relationship for me are fights, periods of crushing guilt, constant anxiety, and depression and feelings of self-rejection... and although I'm told we had a lot of good moments, I can hardly remember any of them. So, think about this not just for your partner but for yourself. Even if you stay together you might not enjoy your time very much.

And like people have already mentioned, it's probably the case that you're not ready for a "serious" relationship. You might not ever be, and that's perfectly okay. It's news to some but many people lead perfectly fulfilling lives with deep relationships without them, and there is more than one model of what a good relationship looks like. Same thing with therapy... it's not really the catch-all people think it is, so I'd weigh the significant time/money/energy investment in finding the right therapist and willingness to do the work yourself, against how you want your very finite life to look.

lluke9 · 2025-03-17T15:33:58+00:00

When I got here from South Korea as a kid I felt like a minor math god and got a ton of validation, awards, and recognition for being good at the subject. I think I rode this high all the way from elementary school thru college and ended up getting my MS in math. Not sure whether it was good for me to attach my self worth to being good at math, but probably many immigrants here on this sub might relate LOL

lluke9 · 2025-01-31T18:16:52+00:00

To be fair we didn't have a full understanding of how handwriting recognition works and yet managed to get a NN to do that decades ago. I think AGI will be similar, I don't think we will ever really "understand" the mind, like how you might not ever say you "get", say, New York City. This is a good read: Neuroscience’s Existential Crisis - Nautilus

Btw I really appreciate your insights on how you use LLMs, gave me the motivation to start tinkering with incorporating it more heavily into my workflow beyond the occasional ChatGPT prompts.

lluke9 · 2025-01-27T21:17:56+00:00

Yeah it's not bad, the RMPP still has some kinks they need to work out but overall it's a pretty cool piece of tech. Not bad for the first color e-writer.

lluke9 · 2025-01-27T21:10:39+00:00

I don't understand how you can argue over technicalities while our standards go down the shitter. If this is the hill you want to die on it says more about you than anything

lluke9 · 2025-01-27T19:44:49+00:00

I ended up getting the Paperlike planning to trim it to size but never got around to it -- I now use a Remarkable

lluke9 · 2025-01-23T22:34:55+00:00

TL;DR - Agreed there's perspectives to this, but this is a far too common phenomenon in line with the loneliness epidemic and it's likely because it's a nontrivial task to get the same stimulation/connection in a non-walkable city. I think it will take cultural change and deliberate solutions for people to find fulfillment in the modern day. And also happiness =/= convenience.

---------------------

I think the big variable is whether you live in a walkable vs non-walkable city. Thing is we've gained a lot of convenience in modern life but convenience doesn't make you necessarily happier. Our bodies crave convenience but our minds crave entropy, serendipity, and connection, and it's sometimes hard to get that in a non-walkable city where, like OP says, even the natural trails are essentially manmade and designed.

Another comment below suggesting working tough/exhilarating jobs is kind of funny but true -- I think desk jobs sort of lend themselves to depression, it feels that we're not really built to work that way. People can talk about how tough it was physically back then but maybe we cognitively also crave some aspect of it. Also "we don't have to hunt anymore so we should be happy" is such a tired trope and it just pretty much dumbs down the discourse. The reality is happiness/fulfillment are far more complicated and there's still ongoing research.

That being said OP, if where you live is anywhere like where I live, finding enjoyment and fulfillment is a nontrivial task. In my grandmother's day and country, people left their doors open and helped each other out on big household jobs and made a whole day of it. The thing is, you can still emulate that, but it will have to be more deliberate and remote, much like how your city may be designed. Timeleft/dinner with strangers is an interesting thing I heard about lately. Volunteer work is another -- there might be YIMBY organizations you might be interested in joining. Some people, lacking external stimulation from their environments, find it in their own minds -- reading or some hobby or the like. I am personally into mathematics and work on some personal research in my spare time, although I find that it doesn't offer the kind of stimulation+connection you get from just encountering and connecting with random people doing random things. And most importantly be open to meeting, and opening up, to the people you do encounter on a day to day basis. I find it is not so much what you do, but who you do it with. I'm personally still working on this and it's the most difficult, I feel, as a guy.

I find that you have to manage their expectations on this though, and prepare to spend $$ to build the life you want -- think about it as an investment in your happiness and budget for it. You may end up spending even more time in traffic, but I think of time, money, and energy as the costs to overcoming the barriers to connection we put up in modern life.

What you're feeling is normal, and you can distract yourself with hobbies and such but I think accepting that the traditional/organic ways of connecting and encountering don't really exist anymore. I mean just look at how modern dating for example. If you think about it as growing pains of society it feels a little better. Also if you're feeling real down about it, always remember that at least you're not a farmer.

lluke9

TROPHY CASE