I have no narrative about only evil rich people voting Republican. It is an interesting question and worth discussing, but not if I am going to be given narratives I didn’t present.

Thank you for the reminder. Vote, vote, everyone vote. Vote like life depends on it. Vote for leaders who will always decide that it is wrong to poison people with water, and if none are on the ballot, get someone better on it.

Exactly my point: this is why Trump was elected.

Thank you for the link but I know about it in some detail already. In many of these counties in the upper midwest, here’s what has happened over the last ten years. The population is almost totally white, not well-educated, but with incomes higher than average for the surrounding area. That population has aged for a…

The fact that some wealthy and well-educated voters are more likely to be Democrats is exactly supportive of my point, which is that wealthier but less well educated voters tend to vote Republican and those are Trump’s people par excellence.

Grocers of any basic sort would be okay.

No.

You’re the one peddling fallacies. People dislike things their partners do all the time, and because relationships aren’t a balance sheet of traded value, the relationship persists and can be good regardless.

Your view of marriage is weird and abnormal. That is why you’re having trouble disanalogizing.

I assume the goal is to describe a good marriage. If someone else wants a transactional one, go right ahead, it’s legal.

You are consistently the most feminist pov I see on this site, which is pretty amusing.

If fish do it, surely it is right for us.

Could not agree with you more. For some reason it’s not enough to neutrally tolerate the existence of a woman who trades sex for nail salon money - we have to actually cheer and congratulate her and take her as a role model. No. She can live her life and I have nothing against her. I don’t need to agree with or like…

Nobody is marginalizing these women. You can disagree with people’s choices and beliefs without disrespecting them as human beings.

So you DO want the tooth fairy and santa, because you don’t want reality when it intrudes on your distorted preferred view of life. Okay. Enjoy.

Absolutely false. If you are in a good marriage, these things don’t ruin it. They’re difficult problems to have but, if the marriage is not transactional, obviously the marriage survives. Someday I assume my husband won’t be able to have sex in the same way due to his age or illness, and perhaps he will lose his job…

Not to mention that their actions have consequences that reach beyond themselves. If these men are all single men who only ever date within the paid relationship, fine, but I doubt that. Some are married and some will transfer the expectations to other relationships later. No surprise that women who will date another…

That’s why when people get married they, in theory, explicitly vow to reject a whole list of typical transactional aspects of relationship. Even if my partner has nothing whatsoever of the usual “value” to give me, I will keep at it regardless. That is the “transaction”: a totally free gift.

But didn’t you just say it doesn’t work for some of your clients, and you didn’t quite believe they had tried it, as a result? I’m not saying this to be rude; I’m hopeful that you are aware that for many anxious people seeking therapy, the ability to learn to sit with their anxiety without trying to avoid can be far…

Since you are a therapist you doubtless know this already, but for some people with anxiety, trying to avoid the anxious thoughts is the surefire way to make the anxious thoughts worse. Even if the means of avoidance is mindfulness or meditation, focusing attention on breath, or all those other things that may work…