As a straight man, every straight man I've ever been friends with has eventually simply made me so tired to be around them.
Like, times are hard. But then we just collectively... have unmet needs, and so many of us deal so badly with them. It just seems like straight men inevitably make it everyone else's problem.
I have heard the same old thing so many times-- to have a friend, be a friend. Reach out. Listen, be empathetic, blah blah blah. And I wind up hanging out with some douchebag thinking to myself why am I in the same room with this fucking guy. Before I know it he's drunk or desperate for a long, long hug from being so touch starved, or he lets his guard down and casually says some slur. I don't have the patience to be friends with straight men. I don't have the patience to start to try.
Yes, that's the entire point of it all. If you don't want humans to send expensive signals to each other, you need to remove their incentives to do so. As long as billionaires and the institution of marriage exist, human happiness and wellbeing will forever be ground up and burned in service of demonstrating that some people are more special than everyone else
Their inner world is a different kind of place than the one you've built your identity inside. Their interactions with reality aren't primarily epistomological, they're social. Finding truth and discerning noise and lies simply aren't part of their world; what matters is signaling which team you are on. That's it. In-group/outgroup. There is truly nothing else.
Hate to put it this way but my read is in ten years you and that kid are going to be pretty close and I kind of doubt you'll still be with your SO.
Kind-of-not-caring-that-much is a pretty normal dad thing like others have stated. You show up, you be yourself, you do what you gotta do, there's no single "clouds open up and your entire brain floods with dopamine and seratonin while angels sing YOU'RE A DAD YOU'RE A DAD" moment.
But the fact that you can just be kind of normal turns out the be one of the things your kid likes about you. They start following you around or spending time with you to get some time away from Mom. They bring you little problems and you get to teach them things about the world.
And then you blink and they're a teenager and suddenly they're too cool to say "I love you Daddy" anymore and you aren't prepared for how much that hurts.
So anyway that's how it happens. Btw for what it's worth, I don't think it was just tiktok brainrot that gave your SO rose colored glasses about parenthood: evolutionary biology has its own ways to compel women to want to have babies just like it has its own ways to compel men to go along with it. That's... why we're all here.
It goes beyond trashy. He's riling up his base with a show of violence and normalizing bloodsport. This is an intentional shift in social norms. His base laps it up-- government that's fun like a wrestling match!!??-- and it takes the place in our public life that we had reserved for sober discussion of our nation's wellbeing and handing it over to gleeful violence.
It's not "UFC bad," this is "drinking whiskey for breakfast," the context matters. They are exterminating their enemies and it's going to get worse.
Just for fun I tried reproducing this with chatgpt and it consistently messes up aligning the light beam with its illuminated patch no matter what I try. They always fail on the weirdest details
As a straight man, every straight man I've ever been friends with has eventually simply made me so tired to be around them.
Like, times are hard. But then we just collectively... have unmet needs, and so many of us deal so badly with them. It just seems like straight men inevitably make it everyone else's problem.
I have heard the same old thing so many times-- to have a friend, be a friend. Reach out. Listen, be empathetic, blah blah blah. And I wind up hanging out with some douchebag thinking to myself why am I in the same room with this fucking guy. Before I know it he's drunk or desperate for a long, long hug from being so touch starved, or he lets his guard down and casually says some slur. I don't have the patience to be friends with straight men. I don't have the patience to start to try.