(March 12, 2019 at 5:41 am)Der/die AtheistIn Wrote: If someone you love, is usually supportive and did more good than bad ended up making a mistakes that traumatizes you for life, would you continue the relationship? What if it should've been obvious to them that they should've never done it and easy to prevent? What if they didn't get what they did wrong for years? Is it worth the relationship, whenever they feel sorry or not? If in the future you will have moments when you remember what they did, should you call out for it, even if they don't do anything wrong at that particular moment?
I don't have enough information or the training to advise you, but if you're asking for a general public opinion, I'll take a crack. First though, I'd like to point out that you seem to have a great heart for sharing and a deep thirst for knowing which I appreciate. I'm not even going to answer your question because I don't have enough info, but I will parse some assumptions in it.
1. "You love someone." That depends a lot on what you define as love and what type of love. We can have unhealthy loves like my love for french fries and chocolate. We can have unrequited love where we love someone and they don't love us back and we pine away. We can have unconditional love. Yu first need to define what you mean by what love is to you and what causes you to love this person.
2. "A person does more good than bad." I'm not sure you're measuring that right. If I were to sum up all the good things I've done and all the bad things I've done and gave each item a value of one, I would probably come up with a net positive. That doesn't way in the severity or length of recovery or collateral good/hard they've done. Besides the net some issue, human's have a tendency to ruminate more on the bad. I think one study found it was like 5 good for every bad. https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf has some great information on that.
3. "Is it worth the relationship"No one can really answer that but you. We have relationships with people for lots of differing reasons. Some are for utility, friendship, confidentiality, mentor ship, love, devotion, to make ourselves look better, as a social shield, as a social funnel, etc. Why do you want/need a relationship with this person. What need does it fill, is it somethings you can get elsewhere, without the baggage/ drama?
4. And this is a big one. "traumatizes you for life". Why would you assume that you are incapable of overcoming a hardship in your life, ever? Why would one thing one person did, have power over you for 80+ years? Things that happen to us, or because of us, inform our world view. You can let your worldview shape itself, or you can be intentional about what you do. Did you choose your breakfast this morning? Why not choose what gets you upset? You use your volition everyday, use it to choose what is in your power to control and what you allow to control you.
There is not a lot we can do to control what other people do or think. You can control the filter by which you take things into your worldview to some degree and you can control how much weight you give to inputs to that worldview. </2 cents>
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
