Framing the Official Relationship History

The half of the couple who is in charge, is the one who gets to take the official meeting minutes of the relationship. As long as the relationship is going well, this isn’t a concern because the official meeting minutes reflect the happy harmony of the relationship.

But on the rare occasions the relationship has some minor points of interpersonal discussion, requiring greater thought as to the structural situations in which the happy couple periodically finds itself at sub-optimal levels of unification on a temporary issue, the official meeting minutes of the relationship, become an important resource to clarify the memories of prior statements of mutual agreement, to the appropriate course of action for exactly the circumstances in which discussion wishes to take place and as the matter has already been settled before the present point of time, this entire debate amounts to a potentially offensive reopening of a closed matter, as the expectation remains that talks made in good faith will be honored and not discarded on a whim, especially when additional plans have already been made with outside parties and costs borne predicated on the original agreement, thus it remains not only a reasonable expectation that the plans of action unfolds as mutually intended and agreed upon, it is in fact going to be damaging to attempt to not proceed and therefore is doubly justified as the only possible thing to do at present.

Or perhaps put more plainly…

“We’ve already talked about this. You agreed that I could have a weekend away with the girls, you can’t change your mind on me now, I’ve already got plane tickets and booked the hotel.”

“I didn’t think you were going to Vegas though, you said it was the beach house.”

“What? No! You agreed that I could have a weekend away with the girls. The beach house was only one idea of a possible place. We decided on Vegas as a group after that.”

“I don’t think that’s how it happened, you said the beach house.”

“Okay, well now we have this problem again where you can’t remember conversations we’ve had. You don’t pay attention. I have to remember everything, and I clearly remember that you agreed I could have a weekend away with the girls.”

As you can see, if she controls the official meeting minutes of the relationship, she gets to be the one that remembers the relationship correctly. Which means she controls the entire frame of the relationship history. Which means if she’s fallen out of love with you, your entire relationship will be rewritten to frame you as some loser she was putting up with and her as the long suffering spouse. Thus explaining, when driven to the breaking point, the need to seek solace in the arms of another.

This mind control tactic is called Gaslighting.  And yes of course men can do the same thing to women too. I’ve seen victims of both sexes come stumbling onto the forum with having experienced Cardassian levels of mental conditioning.

Anyway…

If there is a patron saint of hamster, it’s Sir Humphrey…

Jennifer:  It’s nice to be Athol’s editor and ensure his postings are officially official.