Good insight. My partner is strong willed, more of a Dagny. She respects me and wants to make me happy, does not like guessing what I want because we’ll just end up with stuff we both don’t like. I have a lot of respect for that. I think hers is the better way.
I now see the conflicts between her and my parents and often she’s like: why don’t they just say what they want? She gets the feeling they do stuff for her/us, but she wants them to do things they like! Of course we really like it if they want to see our children because they like to be with them. Not always because they want to help us out or something indirect. I mean, that’s wat love is right?
Yes it’s tough to know, and often comes down to very different foundational assumptions about behaviour and how to judge it.
My wife is Jewish and was I raised Catholic. I’ve noticed quite recently that she definitely judges actions more in terms of effect and I’m more concerned with people’s motivations/intentions.
And funnily enough I just noticed this explicitly in the Old Testament:
Leviticus 4:1-35 deals explicitly with sacrificial atonement for unwitting offences. The section note in The Jewish Study Bible says: “A basic postulate of Israelite thought is that inadvertent acts are just as harmful as deliberate ones, the need to atone for them just as real, and the desire to do so, once they are realized, greater.”
Trying to live in a relationship with a Christian philosophy only works if both parties in the relationship have the same mindset.
It’s a shortcut to being abused if one partner turns the other cheek, and the other keeps on slapping them.
I’m still not sure if this identifies poor partners or a poor outlook.