I’m one of those people who is friendly with a lot of folks and close with only a few. There’s quite a simple explanation for this phenomenon, and I experienced an example of the reason just this past week.<\/p>\n
I was in mixed gender company—one of the women assumed that I, as a man, wouldn’t care about what her wedding dress looked like; and one of the men assumed that I, as a man, would care about football. Neither asked<\/i> if I cared about wedding dresses or football. Both just assumed<\/i> that I would fall into stereotypes. (By the way, I do care a lot more about what someone’s wedding dress looks like than what’s going on in American football.) <\/p>\n
As I’ve said in previous blog entries, I don’t appreciate being put into a box. I won’t fight to stay completely outside the box. And I won’t be kept completely inside the box. I will fight to be at all times in, out, and all around the box. I will fight to be the box if I have to.<\/p>\n
Some people, who think they know me, try to put me completely outside the box. They think I am a total weirdo, that I do nothing normal and only weird or non-stereotypical things. These people know me no better than those who have just met me. <\/p>\n
The people I am closest to—my wife, my best friends—are those who have bothered to really get to know me and haven’t assumed that I fit into a neat little sociological picture of what “most” men or Asian-Americans or Christians or feminists or [fill-in-the-blanks] are. They also know I am not the anti-stereotype either; I am a mixed bag. After all, aren’t we all? Who is completely “typical” or completely “atypical”? <\/p>\n
The getting-to-know-me process usually takes several years, and I am grateful to those who have made the effort and been open-minded enough to appreciate my quirks… and the ways I am also conventional. I hope my efforts to do likewise have been equally successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m one of those people who is friendly with a lot of folks and close with only a few. There’s quite a simple explanation for this phenomenon, and I experienced an example of the reason just this past week. I was in mixed gender company—one of the women assumed that I, as a man, wouldn’t… Continue reading Assumptions get in the way of intimacy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-race-class-gender-sexuality","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}