Danny ChaiShould I share another lesson from marriage? Why not.
It’s hard using logic in discussions between men and women. And it’s not that men and logical and women aren’t. As you know (maybe you don’t) all logic is predicated on the premises. If you have faulty premises, you can reach any conclusion, for example. But yeah, the conclusions you make all depend on the premises you start with.
The thing is, what I’ve realized recently is that the premises we start with are often based on values, which are inherently subjective, so you can’t make an objective judgment on them. So it’s not a matter of objectively determining what’s logical and what’s not, but in dealing with the differing values.
A bad example: restaurants. I go to restaurants to eat. So all I care about is the food. Why should I care about ambience? We can go elsewhere for that. But we go to a restaurant to eat, so I care only about food. But other people value ambience, even more than the food. To me, that’s “illogical”, but it’s not really. It’s a matter of differing values, and they’re both legitimate.
Or a friend was telling me how they had a choice of going to 2 places, one east and one west, and his SO didn’t want to go west because she had just come from that direction. You could say it’s not “logical” because driving is driving. Where you came from doesn’t affect how long it takes to get anywhere else. But it’s based on a value which I think is legitimate, not wanting to backtrack. I personally don’t feel that way but whatever. It comes down to values. The value of distance being the only metric that matters and the psychological value of not wanting to backtrack.
So that’s been a thing I’ve been trying to realize more recently. That it’s not about logic vs. illogic, so I can’t frame the discussion like that. It comes down to the premises, to the values, and that’s what needs to be identified and resolved. Not that I’m good at it at all. But I’m starting to realize it more.