In the last post, I talked about feeling like compassion, empathy, and undrestanding only went one way. I have a knee-jerk reaction to being told to look at the other person’s point of view because, well, I do that on the regular. It’s nearly automatic for me. When I read letters in advice columns, I can come up with half a dozen reasons why people act the way they do. As a minority in many ways, I have to know more about other people’s ways of thinking than they do about me. It’s always the case. People in the minority need to know how people in the majority think, but not vice-versa.
So, miss me with telling me I need to think about other people. It’s somewhat faulty reasoning on my part because I sill have my biases, of course. But it’s not unreasonable of me to be tired of people demanding I pay attiontion to their issues without giving one whit of a shit about mine.
I know a trans man who turns every conversation into a mandate about him. If someone is talking about a bad date and describes how the woman did not interact with him at all, dropping her end of the conversation, the minute we empathized with the commenter, the trans man would write a long screed about how he was that woman–and why being trans, autisitic, and ADHD (and also an alcoholic, but he won’t admit that) was so hard when it came to dating.
I’m not doubting what he said. I know it has to be hard for him to date. But we weren’t talking about him, and somehow, he made it all about him again. And several people spent several minutes reassuring him that it was different for him and that he would find love one day.
I took a different route because he was displaying incel behavior, which made me uneasy. He had imbibed enough of toxic masculinity to believe that if he was nice to someone, he deserved a boyfriend in return. While I believe that everyone deserves love on an individual level, no one is owed it from any given person.
I tried to be diplomatic, but I said (wrote) from my own experience. I have been rejected for a long list of reasons, and there are many people who don’t date Asians. That’s just one of them. I said while in theory, yes, it’s racism and people should not NOT date someone simply because of their race, I did not want to date someone who wasn’t enthusiastic about dating me.
In other words, people are allowed not to date you for any given reason. You are not owed a date from anybody. Demanding it is messy and, quite frankly, creepy. This is all without minimizing how difficult dating is, especially when you start adding differences to the pot. But this guy was so unrelentingly woe-is-me and wresting attention no matter what, I could understand why he was having a hard time finding dates–apart from the very obvious isms he faced.
I think we need to be allowed to say out loud that just because someone is in a minority or three, they are not a saint or above reproach. I’ve said it a time or ten. Being a minority and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive. You should not attack someone’s identity, obviously, but that doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with anythinng they say.