I prefer not to talk much about my background but I think it’s worth analyzing the role my parents have played in shaping my past and present habits and views.
Until I turned 18 (when my mom stopped being controlling), my parents would not allow me to meet girls my age outside of a highly supervised setting, so I rarely did. For various reasons, I didn’t rebel at the time, despite the fact that in hindsight they have been significantly more restrictive than the parents of nearly all of my other religious friends.
Also, and arguably more importantly, to this day they absolutely suck socially. My father’s circle has gradually faded until it’s mainly family and my mom’s friends’ husbands. My mom’s (extensive) social life is mainly independent of the rest of us, and it tends to be bilateral rather than an actual circle. She’s also quite willing to put distance between herself and people she can’t tolerate, such as, more recently, open Trump supporters among her acquaintances. As a child, I was told not to play anymore with certain kids for unspecified and apparently arbitrary reasons.
Unsurprisingly, they didn’t do a good job of imparting social skills to us. It doesn’t help that we were all encouraged to read well above our grade levels. I, the eldest, was mostly self-taught, reading chapter books at 5 and regularly consuming 600+ page novels (think the later Harry Potter books) in a single day, in addition to hefty adult nonfiction tomes. My parents’ ideas of recreation were also rather frugal and somewhat staid. We rarely went more than an hour and a quarter from home, rarely visited theme parks (I’ve never been to Disneyland in my life), and preferred cheap museums to anything else (I’ve never been camping in my life either). Once my siblings hit a certain age, they started to prefer lounging at home to frequent outings, and this didn’t help at all.
In any case, I’m the product of a broken parenting system that I refuse to be limited by.
It also might be interesting to note that the next sibling, who just graduated HS, is currently in the process of rapidly distancing themself from religion. I don’t know how far they intend to go, nor does it matter much to me. But unlike them, my belief is woven into me in a way that makes it impossible to abandon entirely. Pragmatism and realism is not hypocrisy, and a red-blooded man is not an angel.
Anyway, given that I was previously under my parents’ thumb (and until 15, pretty much willingly), I think it’s alright to blame them for the past, especially the distant past.
But I’m sick of not feeling in full control of my own destiny. Even now, as my emotional independence grows daily, I’m not sure how long it will take to wean myself off of their finances. It could be years.
Fully deprogramming will take a while. It’s also complicated by the fact that my belief system, while denominationally the same as my parents’, clearly differs in practical interpretations. For instance, I see having a healthy and active social life as having religious significance of a sort. And while I really would like to live in a socioeconomic milieu that’s more supportive of practical, reasonable implementations of conservative values, I don’t believe it’s realistic to expect most men, including myself, to wait until marriage (which is what age, exactly?), even if it’s nice in theory.
Can one have one’s cake and eat it too? I think the answer is “Yes, mostly”. But I don’t see myself going clubbing or anything for the foreseeable future.
I usually write up seduction-specific developments at this point, but this post is already a bit long so I’ll break it up.
