Author Topic: warning someone away from marrying  (Read 1504 times)

Offline Lynn2000

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Re: warning someone away from marrying
« Reply #30 on: June 16, 2018, 10:01:23 am »
I remember on the old forum there was a "Spidey Sense" thread, and people would post stories about how they met a co-worker or something for the first time, and got a weird, really negative feeling about them. And six months later the co-worker was arrested as a child molester or something like that.

I'm sure those stories were true, but surely they are memorable because they are so exceptional to our experience. I'm good at reading body language when I've known someone for a while and been around them--I mean, better than other people seem to be at that same point--but in terms of new people or those I don't know well, I'm a terrible judge of people. Knowing this, I usually default to a low level of suspicion, just to be safe. Not like, always predicting they're probably a bad person, just being a little cautious.
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Offline Queen of the Night

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Re: warning someone away from marrying
« Reply #31 on: June 16, 2018, 10:42:02 am »
Yeah, confirmation bias can seriously skew your perspectives.  Like, over the course of 10 years, your car has stalled at a stop 3 times, so it "always" stalls at red lights; or the fact that your mother-in-law has said something negative about your cooking twice, so she "has always" hated your cooking, etc. 

Those incidents stand out and you recall them, and you don't consciously acknowledge the 27 times a day your car doesn't stall, because it's not exceptional enough to notice.


Back to the topic at hand...  I had two really good friends once who met, fell whirlwind in love, and got married very quickly and, possibly, rather unadvisedly.  Several eyebrows went up, but there was really only one friend who sat them both down and said, "Look, I love you both, but I think this is a bad idea and you are making a huge mistake."  (It wasn't me!) 

Well, of course they both stopped speaking to her, got married anyway, bought a house and started discussing a family.

They were divorced within three years.  That was ten years ago, they're both long since remarried, but neither of them ever, ever patched things back up with that one friend. 

Offline Allyson

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Re: warning someone away from marrying
« Reply #32 on: June 16, 2018, 08:38:41 pm »
Yeah, Queen of the Night, very true... Even if you are right about the partner in question, it's not very likely the friend will come to you and say "oh yes you were right all along." They're probably embarrassed and need support, not someone they might feel will say "I told you so."

Haha, Lynn I always felt that way about the spidey sense thread and others like it - people remember the times they were right or very dramatic times. I think we also tend to have hindsight, so if we find out our coworker we never thought much about was a serial killer we'll start remembering all the little weird things they did and go "yeah, I always did think he was off!" but if it turned out he had been secretly donating to charity that whole time and saved kittens on his days off, we'd remember the time he brought doughnuts for everyone.

Offline Winterlight

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Re: warning someone away from marrying
« Reply #33 on: June 17, 2018, 08:55:14 pm »
I think confirmation bias plays a very strong role. We remember the times we were right, but not the times we went to the ER saying we were having an asthma attack and it turned out to be a collapsed lung. (Yes, that did happen. The lung had been slowly collapsing for weeks and suddenly let go. That was fun. Not.)
If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,
Five things observe with care,
To whom you speak,
Of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.
Caroline Lake Ingalls