Dear Tee,

“They don’t love and care for your emotional well-being, for your desires, for your goals and dreams.” Yea they do love and care for my emotional well-being lol. But in their own twisted way. That is the part that you don’t get. Like how children go to a flower garden, and pick the most beautiful flower, not with the intention of destroying it, but with the intention of keeping it safe and close to them due to its beauty and the child’s desire to preserve and protect it, but the child doesn’t realize that picking the flower would be the cause of its destruction. Did the child not love the flower? Obviously the child did love the flower, it just didn’t know how to take care of it. I know my parents are grown adults, but they know nothing about how to be a parent, especially since I am literally the oldest child among all my cousins and siblings by several years.

“So an attempted suicide is a sign for them that you are having the time of your life? That everything is great in your life? That you are just bored and don’t have a better thing to do?” Precisely. My dad already has the predetermined ideology that suicidal people are idiots, so he believed that there was no way in hell that his own kid would be suicidal. Besides, it’s not like they can see me in pain. They have to see me suffer in order for them to feel like I need help. I have never shown them my suffering, I kept it bottled. So to them, it appears as if I am living my life fine. They think that everything is normal and I am happy, cause that is what I show them. So obviously they won’t think they are responsible for any sort of suffering.

“No, they expressed the opposite of values of love, care, compassion and mercy in your upbringing. You are convincing yourself that abuse is love. No, it is not.” If you ask them for help, they will obviously help. But as long as the suffering is not obvious enough for them to understand, they won’t offer those values of love and compassion etc.

“Sure, 100 years ago it was all about survival. Nobody cared about mental health. But it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true today either that one needs to be getting the highest paying jobs to be materially secured. That you need to study medicine to ensure a decent existence. So their forcing their will on you, pushing you to choose a career with highest salaries – is a bit more than a “survival response”. I am sorry, but to me it’s already greed. It is having their eyes only on the material, while disregarding anything else.” Let me make this more clear: My parents are ASIAN. It is commonly known how Asian parents are. Always comparing the kids to other kids. Always getting disappointed when their child doesn’t bring home an A+. Always planning to make their child become a doctor or a software engineer or a lawyer etc even before they are even born. Hammering in the foundations of mathematics into their head when they are a mere child to ensure that they do well in school. That is not greed. That is like a traditional thing and almost every Asian family does this same thing. That is why it is known as the Asian stereotype, which most people are aware of. This is NORMAL for us. So obviously they won’t prioritize mental health because they are oblivious to the impact of mental health.

“And how ironical that they should be worried about gold diggers and wicked women who want to take the man’s wealth. In fact, it’s not strange, because they are fixated on wealth (even if they want to accumulate it by honest means and hard work), and of course they are afraid of those who would want to take it away from them” That is a huge misunderstanding. My parents are not greedy. If they were greedy, I would have found a way to get out of this mess. It is cause they prioritize family and tradition and culture that I am stuck in this mess. Greed would have been so much easier for me to handle, cause there are so many ways I could have made enough money to satisfy their greed but unfortunately, their aim was not wealth. That is something you won’t understand until you experience this life. It is too complicated for me to simply express in words, especially since even I don’t understand why my parents are so stubborn no matter how many different examples with exceptions I suggested to them.

“You mean what other men in your religious community expect from their son-in-law?” No in general. B’s father was also the same and the fathers in the church community are also the same.

“Other men in your religious community are obviously very similar to your father, so I guess you would get the same or similar abuse that you got from your father.” But that is the thing, it is not other fathers in our religious community, it is outsiders too, even my own school teachers said the same thing when my mom enquired them about me on parent teacher conference days. EVEN THE CHURCH MEN SAID IT TOO, and we go to a Greek Church so you definitely know they are not anywhere near of our “religious” community.

“Yeah, she encouraged your music development, i.e. your hobbies, which your parents probably thought was bs. But that’s the trick: we often fall in love with someone who is different than our parents in one area, but very similar in another.” Can’t you ever consider the possibility that you could be wrong? B’s encouragement and etc were just a brief scratch on the surface examples of what made her different. She was there for me whenever I had to deal with my parents’ hour long calls that I had endure. She provided me with the emotional support I needed to endure my parents. She helped me plan for a future together, where she studies to become a nurse while I study med and etc. Idk if she was lying but she also agreed to help me quit med if necessary after she becomes a nurse and fund my education for music or computers once I am ready. She made me feel valued. She made me feel like I had a good friend. Someone that I could go on adventures with. Someone who was willing to risk their happiness and make sacrifices to help build me up from my lowest point. In the beginning of our relationship, she did provide these things, even with the issues that led to our multiple break ups. Even if all of this was fake, it doesn’t change the fact that my reasons for loving her were not cause she was similar to my parents. But the annoying thing is that you will use these same examples to say that I was using her to meet my unmet childhood needs that I expected from my parents, which is completely wrong.

“By your morals, do you mean that the first girl you date should be your future wife? Because that “rule” too is something you learned from your father. It’s an invented rule.” No, my moral is that only one girl deserves special treatment. Only one girl deserves to be treated like the queen in a boy’s life. I do not want to be in multiple relationships, and end up loving each girl and breaking up until I find the right girl. I want to be able to make the right girl feel special. To know that I patiently waited until I could find her. To make her feel like every other girl are just normal classmates or colleagues but this one girl means so much more to me. To make her feel like every other girl is worthless compared to her. To make her feel like I would never cheat on her or find interest in another girl, because she is the most amazing woman in my life. I want my gf/wife to feel as if no one else deserves the honor/privilege of being my partner, and I should feel the same way too towards my partner, therefore making each of us that special person in each other’s life .

It is like the issue with body count. A typical man do not like women with high body count, and that goes both ways, cause if your partner slept with 30 guys/girls before they met you, you are no longer that special to your partner, especially sex wise, because he/she got the same pleasure from other people and therefore you become just another guy/girl that can sexually satisfy them; you are not that special.

“But as I said, your attempts to make her understand you and your needs – even though she was totally unresponsive – prove that it was an unmet need. You couldn’t just let go.” Again I say to you, I didn’t let go of her cause of my moral, not cause of my unmet need. I wanted to turn her into that special person in my life. Someone I could pour out 120% of my love into and never regret it. I didn’t want to hesitate when it came to loving her. Obviously I was wasting my time, but I didn’t realize it when I was fighting for the relationship. I just thought that everyone had flaws, and so if I could help her fix her flaws, she would become the perfect woman for me.

“It is very clear from your words (and from your inability to let her go) that you were trying to meet an unmet childhood need through her.” This is becoming foolish now. I wasn’t expecting compassion or pity from her. I just wanted her to understand HER FLAWS. Not understand MY ISSUES. I wanted her to FIX HERSELF. I wanted HER to IMPROVE, so that she would become the PERFECT WOMAN for me. That is completely unrelated to my unmet need because if that was the case, I would be trying to make her understand MY ISSUES and sympathize with ME. Instead I tried to CORRECT HER. I wanted to FIX HER.  I wanted to sympathize with HER and keep correcting her when she misunderstands things about me like assuming that I was cheating and etc, cause these misunderstandings were the core reasoning behind her foolish decisions.

“Because what they did is not love and care. It was cruelty. Even if they didn’t understand it.” YESSSS what they did is CRUELTY. But it STILL DOESN”T CHANGE the fact that THEIR INTENTION was to show LOVE AND CARING. They didn’t hurt me with the INTENTION of hurting me. They hurt me with the INTENTION of helping me. It is similar to how a child gets a beating or another form of punishment from their parent when they do something wrong. Technically, the physical beating harms the child and causes the child pain, but the parents did it to teach the child a lesson, to teach them to not repeat the mistake.

“I am also stressing it because you seem to believe that their parenting style didn’t affect the way you are today.” You clearly misunderstood, cause I am saying that their parenting style DID affect the way I am today. But it doesn’t change the fact that growing up with different parents would STILL result in the SAME “deficient” personality because the parenting method might differ but their intentions, priorities, aims etc would still be the SAME so they will still be driving that same hammer into my head.

“This again is freeing them from all responsibility and blaming yourself for having certain deficiencies. As if their lack of love and empathy didn’t leave any trace on you – as if it’s all you and your “badness.” That is why I keep telling you that you are misunderstanding me. I am not freeing them from the responsibility of making me the way I am. I am not freeing them from the blame of making me this way. I am NOT saying that their lack of love and empathy didn’t leave any trace on me. It is THEIR CRUELTY that drove me to this point. BUT IT STILL DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACT THAT OTHER PARENTS SHARED THE SAME GOAL AS THEM. That is why EVEN IF I GREW UP IN A DIFFERENT HOUSE, I would STILL HAVE THE SAME HAMMER DRIVEN INTO MY HEAD. Cause their GOALS are the SAME. That is why most of us just want to get away from them. Obviously the amount of mental and emotional health deterioration would differ, but the outcome would still be the same.

“In your latest posts you seem to deny it, claiming that their parenting didn’t really affect you negatively.” No, their parenting style did harm me, but not because the parenting style was harmful, but because of the individuals using the parenting style. Another parent can use the same parenting style, even be cruel to a certain point, but if they had just realized the mental and emotional deterioration that was happening, they could have helped with the healing while maintaining the parenting style. They could still drive me into doing med and not pursuing music and etc, but if they had just given me the encouragement I needed, the understanding that I expected from them, helping me go through this process TOGETHER instead of all by myself, my mental and emotional health would have been so much better.

“You’ve shared a lot here, certainly enough that I could form a picture of what was going on.” Clearly not enough, because you still misunderstood.

“Even your own words – the way you phrased things – confirm my assumptions “ EXACTLY. Some experiences are TOO COMPLEX to be described through simple words, you have to actually experience them to understand. That is why you think I confirmed your assumptions based on “the way I phrased things”. I wanted B to understand HER MISTAKES and how to fix them, but for my parents, I wanted them to understand MY ISSUES and how to fix them. That is the part you still do not understand. I am not trying to preserve the goodness of my parents. I want you to feel what I felt but that is impossible.

I will restate a simplified version of everything so you understand better:

My parents are cruel, but their intentions were good. Due to their lack of understanding, I forgive them. But I will not waste my time trying to make them understand my issues.

I loved B because she was different from my parents. She understood me to a certain point, until she started the downward spiral after I told her about what my parents said about modern women. Because she had the misunderstanding as the core of her beliefs, every other argument we had all spiraled from that misunderstanding, for example the argument where she called my parents racists, and the argument over what my type was, and the argument regarding my conversation with my high school crush etc. I tried to make her understand so she could fix her misunderstanding and become a better woman, but that failed.

I am not fit to be a son-in-law because most fathers want a son that is mature and man enough to handle the responsibility of being the man of the house. And that is a huge responsibility, and requires leadership skills, which I definitely lack due to my lack of confidence due to my poor mental and emotional health. I need a certain level of wisdom to understand how to handle the responsibilities of being the man of the house. Being the man of the house also requires me to ignore my emotions when taking responsibilities. That is why even if I grew up under a different parent, when I am taught to take up these responsibilities, I would still be forced to bottle up my emotions. And if I am not able to carry out these basic responsibilities, there would be another emotionally deteriorating experience waiting for me when the parent becomes disappointed in me. I have been observing this in 39 families now, and it is the same thing in each of them, that is how I know that this thing is normal and the outcome will still be the same.

I am trying to make it as simple as I can so you can understand but I have a feeling that you would still not understand what I am trying to say. I wish I could explain this better.

Paradoxy