Aspies/auties and f***ed up beliefs

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I find the tradition of the father giving the bride to the groom to be archaic and very distasteful.

My daughter is no more my husband's property than my son is. Her getting married doesn't negate the father-daughter relationship, either.

Any father that is offended by a man not asking for his daughter's hand in marriage has issues IMO.

He's merely presenting a fact, not suggesting that's the way it ought to be. You're "putting words in his mouth," so to speak. No one is advocating "pimping out" anyone.

... I was asking because he showed a preference for the lesser held belief.

Well, we ALL have issues, regardless of who we are or the nature of our relationships. I see nothing wrong with a prospective son-in-law and father-in-law desiring mutual respect. It might not be REQUIRED, but asking for blessing of a father-in-law is a sure way to solidify that relationship.

The way you worded your second statement is interesting to me, describing your daughter by using a POSSESSIVE pronoun. Agree with it or not, you have a sense of your daughter and your husband belonging to you. It's something so ingrained to us that it is extremely difficult divorcing those relationship from our language. You could have said, "the daughter I gave birth to" or "the husband I married." Their is a sense of possession there, but it is a sense of protection and preserving the well-being of those who belong to us or whom we belong to.

I respect your opinion, of course. I just happen to disagree. I see being courteous and polite as noble attributes, something we all desire from each other. If someone wants to be "initiated" into my family by taking one of my children, they do well to win my favor.

The way I see it, it works both ways. I think women are more likely to form tighter bonds and form those bonds sooner than men do. I learned that if my mother expressed even the remotest hint that she disapproved of any of my girlfriends, the relationship was doomed. I hated her for that, but she had a keen instinct for that kind of thing. Mandi was different. She was my mom's adopted daughter from the first day I brought her home. Which made dating her kind of icky. However, it was the relationship that progressed to the next level. There is definitely something to that whole "asking for his/her hand" thing. Even if the father-in-law has issues, what does being polite and courteous hurt?

He showed a preference for being a nice guy and showing respect to a woman's father. That in no way is remotely like any kind of approval for "pimping out" kids.

Everyone's ideas on respectful behavior is different and only loosely based on the culture they grew up in. There are, of course, going to be extremes on either end.

I like to know if someone is one of the extremes.

In my experiences as part of my university's autism training center, both as a student and as an employee, there is one particular fellow whose beliefs are more extreme than others, to put it mildly. I've known him for about 4 and a half years now and here are some of the beliefs he's loudly voiced that I can recall.

1) He believes that the internet should be shut down as it promotes terrorist activity
2) Whenever someone sneezes or cough, he asks if he/she has swine flu (two years later)
3) This one is a little bit jumbled, but he has some wild ideas about why the Nazis really surrendered during WWII. Sometimes I don't that even he can keep track of what he's saying.

Being a little strange is what makes us who we are, but we just have to convince others that we're not strange enough that we can't have a civilized social life!

I see. So you think it's perfectly acceptable to attack or abuse other users with lazy strawman arguments/questions?


I'm just kidding! Point taken. I understand what you're saying, but it is easy to get that approach confused with intellectually dishonest means of pursuing a valid discussion.

lol Sorry about that. I'm aware that I have a strange way of obtaining information.

I see that as... only applying to people who think in words or find words easy to translate their thoughts from. I use "my mother, my father, my friend, my cat, etc." but none of them even remotely imply a sense of possession over them. Remember that especially on an autism forum you're going to find a lot of people who don't think in words at all, and use the words in that way because that's what the convention is in the language in question. In some languages that "my" thing isn't there, but in English and many other languages, it's extremely awkward and difficult (especially for a person who has trouble with language already) to come up with a totally different way of saying the thing that reflects one's thoughts better. It's easier to say "my mother" than "the person who is mother to me" ("the woman who gave birth to me" is not "mother" for everyone... besides the fact that it can convey a sense of distance or even disrespect in English to say it that way), and for a person (like me) who uses language as chunks that I've learned, not individual words, it's that much harder to manipulate single words to come up with things like that. I wouldn't think to do so in most conversation. And honestly, so much of the way I think is so utterly different than the implications of the language that if I stopped to change it I'd be stopping to change everything and would never get it right no matter how much I tried. So I don't think you can use someone's use of a normal English convention to assume the thoughts that are behind that convention.

I had never imagined people would use my mother, my father, etc. as possessive statements. That someone would interpret it this way is mind-boggling to me.

It's not uncommon. I remember when I was a kid visiting my grandmother's house. My cousins lived with her at the time and one said to me "She's not your grandma, she's mine!"

Tea is right here, also. It's such a part of our language convention and so natural that we don't think of the underlying meaning.

Language is an obsession of mine. Too bad my punctuation is atrocious!

But it's true--we do tend to think of people in relationships as belonging to us and/or of us belonging to them. There's nothing wrong with that as long as we regard those who belong to us as people, fellow human beings worthy of respect and dignity. I my children weren't mine, for example, I wouldn't want to take care of them. If my piano students weren't mine, I wouldn't care about their quality of instruction.

My daughter is MINE until some brain-dead punk takes her away. And even then he's MY son-in-law. I'll find some way to cope, and hopefully I won't hurt him TOO bad.

Yeah, I've had relatives say that to me, too. Silly nonsense.

I should have said "I had never imagined people would use these and mean it that way."

I think in todays society the idea of a dowry is irrelavant because it is no longer practiced. The modern form of a dowry is simply who is going to pay for the wedding. In the bible and a lot of oriental societies the parents of the groom would pay for the wedding while in western cultures the parents of the bride pay for the wedding.

I feel that this is a matter of social obligation (this may not be the best word, but I can't think of a better one) rather than ownership.