theplatypus wrote:Kevin Davis wrote:as a husband, I understand and respect why he would do it.
As a non-husband, I don't. Could a married person explain this to me? If this is a gesture of respect, would leaving the performances untouched be considered a gesture of disrespect?
No, not necessarily. To draw a parallel: Buying my wife flowers would be a kind gesture. That doesn't mean it would be an
unkind gesture to
not buy her flowers, per se--just a neutral one, and certainly anything I was hoping to convey with those flowers would be lost, or at least diminished. I don't think this is something you have to be married to understand; I think interpersonal relationships in general have a greater success rate when the people involved are just considerate enough to preemptively make these kinds of choices with the other person in mind, regardless of whether or not the other person would actually be offended by the action in question. As a practice, keeping past lovers in the past is a way of reinforcing your exclusivity to your spouse, even though a reasonable person would understand that just because you sang someone's name in a song 15 years ago doesn't mean you're still in love with them.
Not surprisingly, many of the posters here are reacting to this situation the same way many people react to situations like this--they view it in terms of how far one partner should be able to go before he's "technically" done something wrong, and therefore before the second partner is allowed to exercise her right to be hurt. In their minds, since leaving references to the ex-wife present in the recording would not likely cause the current wife to simply divorce Ed on the spot, there is therefore no reason why it should be omitted. It's the same fundamental thought process at play in situations where men deny cheating on their wives because they weren't technically having sex with their mistresses, just receiving blowjobs from them. This is a fool's logic that eliminates all gray area and completely fails (or refuses) to acknowledge the complex, sprawling abyss of human emotion at play in any situation involving relationships between breathing, thinking people, and it necessitates that a reaction to anything but the most extreme end of the spectrum must therefore be unreasonable, jealous, conniving, bitchy, shallow, or whatever other adjective you want to throw around.
If that doesn't sell you, though, I'll put it this way: You can either side with me, who is one of the classiest and most discerning people on RM, or you can side with warehouse, who is named after a Dave Matthews song and whose posts look like an eighth grade girl's text messages.
