Aspie1 wrote:
Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Try a different Red Pill for just a second - I am not being snide here, just old, and sharing a perspective.
There are quite a few families in which one or both parents deliberately sabotage one child emotionally, so that child will never marry, so the parents will have a live in caregiver in their old age - or just a companion who can't leave them.
First off, "different Red Pill" is coming off as a bit snide. But that's fine; I get it. It'd be better said if you said "try looking at it from a different angle". Otherwise, it sounds like something people in my extended family used to say. When I told them how my parents weren't giving me enough freedom, they said: "Listening to your parents is the best kind of freedom!"

Which is basically a non-sequitur.
I think you're wrong about the second part. My parents said they
wanted me to get married someday, so it wouldn't make sense if they intentionally kept me from doing so. If anything, it was the
extended family and my parents' friends who told me all these things about what marriage will be like. All while pressuring me to get married too.
In a nutshell, "freedom" was kind of a dirty word in my family. Which made the social studies classes, with their spiel on America being a free country

, a giant slap in the face.
Yep, any mention of red pill anything by a female is going to risk being seen as snide, since the trope has been appropriated by a social movement that doesn't particularly like females (putting it mildly). Which is a shame, since the actual movie The Matrix isn't about gender roles or gender privilege, it's about the nature of reality as a whole. Anyway, that's why I included the disclaimer.
I'm not a point-belaborer, I don't see arguing as a legitimate form of entertainment; so it's pretty unusual for me to come back and respond after making a point. But: you're taking what your parents say as literally true, when they say they want you married. If they really did, they wouldn't be working so hard to present it as a bad thing. Which they are.
One of the hallmarks of any kind of controlling relationship is that the controlling person, or group, says one thing and does another, or says one thing one moment, and says the opposite thing soon thereafter. (Often when questioned about what they first said; this is called "countering".) Workplaces, for instance, always seem to promise advancement with their mouths, while their actual policies do everything possible to prevent it. Your family's opposition to the very word "freedom" is, TBH, a huge red flag. Their response about true freedom being absolute subjugation to their will? Makes me shudder and want to run. They're arogating to themselves the role of God.
Cf. "crazymaking".
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/co ... crazymakerAnyway, I like your posts in general, and I do wish you well; none of this is intended to upset you or put you down; I'm trying to answer the question you posed in the thread title. And no, absolutely, I don't want to push you towards marriage. You know what you want, in that regard. I just suspect you'd like to be sure you've made up your own mind about it, without internalizing any manipulation. That makes total sense.
_________________
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."
-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!