christiefan915
Catalyst
No, I'm not the writer of this article. But reading this woman's experiences with her boyfriend reminds me a lot of certain posters on JPP. I highlighted parts of it and put the link on the bottom since the whole article was too long to post.
My boyfriend is a conspiracy theorist. He’s my age, 30s, graying but boyish. Shy but not socially impaired. He likes short girls with short hair and short tempers, and I’ve always liked emo engineers. He’s read the cult doorstopper “House of Leaves,” paints his nails black, makes great art. He also believes in conspiracy theories. I didn’t find that part out until just before our self-quarantine.
It was the weekend after the Super Tuesday primaries in March, and we were arguing about Bernie. “You wouldn’t support him if you knew the truth,” he said gravely, both of us stumbling home late from the dance club where we first met four months earlier after chatting on a dating app. “There’s some really disturbing stuff you should read.” I laughed and leaned into him on the cobblestones, the New England streets quiet, wind-swept, goose bumps poking through my fishnets. He went on. He didn’t trust the media. The deep state was out to get us. Everyone was in on it, or in my case, complicit. I had to open my eyes. At first, I believed he was joking. Then I wanted to believe he was joking. Then we both got very quiet.
I didn’t know what to think. He was smart. He had friends. We were happy. Now, realizing I’d fallen for someone who believed stupid things on the Internet, I felt like the stupidest person alive...
My gut told me to run, but I felt guilty. I didn’t want to appear closed-minded, intolerant. For exactly one weekend, I wrestled with what to do...
I forgot, for days at a time, about the conspiracies. We baked cupcakes, repotted his plants, noodled on his MIDI keyboard. I let him in on the Jewish jokes on “Seinfeld,” his favorite show. And then we’d put on a Disney movie and he’d point out the hidden sixes in the logo as proof the company was steeped in the occult. We’d play board games like Azul and Watergate and he’d say, “Want to know what really happened during Watergate?” and I’d sigh.
One time, bent over a puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge, he informed me, “The global elite traffic in human flesh and blood.” He explained how famous people kidnap children, then torture them to death to harvest chemical adrenaline from their veins. The punchline is: They drink it.
“It’s real,” he insisted. “Hunter S. Thompson exposed it in ‘Fear and Loathing.’” “He was high out of his mind when he wrote that,” I said.
It mattered to me, a lot, that my boyfriend couldn’t separate fact from fantasy. I couldn’t be in a serious relationship with someone I couldn’t take seriously, right?
The first warm day during our self-quarantine, the two of us drove to a park and walked out by the water. The trail was crowded with families in scarves and homemade masks hugging the edge of the path. I hadn’t brought a jacket and I was wearing his. We looked like a cute couple, with our matching bracelets and rings he’d made out of plastic, the occasional hand in the other’s hair. But then he steered the conversation to red shoes in celebrity Instagram photos, the code word “cheese pizza,” the numerology of 33, dropping his voice whenever someone passed us.
“I’m the one ignoring evidence?” he said. “You won’t even look at the links.”
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious the mainstream media hasn’t reported on any of this? You know they’re all paid to lie.”
I was a smart, rational person, and my boyfriend liked that about me. He was always going on about my “big, sexy brain.” But at the same time, he distrusted experts, scholars, professionals, people who knew things. People like, well, people like me...
I looked ahead at the row of trees disappearing into the horizon. I was a critical thinker, sure, but when it got down to it, I was trusting. I relied on others to know more about the world than I did. My boyfriend assumed any so-called experts were out to mislead, never mind how implausible the ever-expanding scale of deceit...
Now, at his place, on his futon, winding down with wine and cop shows, I evaluate him in the screen glow, his cheekbones, black hoodie, cute goatee. I think of how he rubbed my stomach and made me soup when I was sick. Memorized a few Yiddish words, my drink order, how that Smiths song goes. Taught me to skip stones and drive stick.
Joe Biden comes on the television and my boyfriend says this one’s definitely a body double, you can tell because his ears look smaller. “Might even be a clone,” he muses. “The real Biden’s been dead for years.”
The tone in his voice is impossible to decipher. I wonder, with a surge of hope, if he’s trolling me, if this is all an elaborate ruse, like when he pretended for weeks he didn’t know how to peel an orange and I didn’t know what to believe.
There’s that feeling that everything is collapsing, that somehow I’m the one going crazy, that reality is whatever you want it to be, and nothing is as it seems...
I look at our interlaced hands, the veins in them. I wonder if the stress in them can be extracted, ingested, a drug in the blood, like Hunter S. Thompson said. Would that really be so strange, so preposterous? In this world, these times, anything’s possible. I just don’t know.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/08/16/dating-conspiracy-theory-relationship/
My boyfriend is a conspiracy theorist. He’s my age, 30s, graying but boyish. Shy but not socially impaired. He likes short girls with short hair and short tempers, and I’ve always liked emo engineers. He’s read the cult doorstopper “House of Leaves,” paints his nails black, makes great art. He also believes in conspiracy theories. I didn’t find that part out until just before our self-quarantine.
It was the weekend after the Super Tuesday primaries in March, and we were arguing about Bernie. “You wouldn’t support him if you knew the truth,” he said gravely, both of us stumbling home late from the dance club where we first met four months earlier after chatting on a dating app. “There’s some really disturbing stuff you should read.” I laughed and leaned into him on the cobblestones, the New England streets quiet, wind-swept, goose bumps poking through my fishnets. He went on. He didn’t trust the media. The deep state was out to get us. Everyone was in on it, or in my case, complicit. I had to open my eyes. At first, I believed he was joking. Then I wanted to believe he was joking. Then we both got very quiet.
I didn’t know what to think. He was smart. He had friends. We were happy. Now, realizing I’d fallen for someone who believed stupid things on the Internet, I felt like the stupidest person alive...
My gut told me to run, but I felt guilty. I didn’t want to appear closed-minded, intolerant. For exactly one weekend, I wrestled with what to do...
I forgot, for days at a time, about the conspiracies. We baked cupcakes, repotted his plants, noodled on his MIDI keyboard. I let him in on the Jewish jokes on “Seinfeld,” his favorite show. And then we’d put on a Disney movie and he’d point out the hidden sixes in the logo as proof the company was steeped in the occult. We’d play board games like Azul and Watergate and he’d say, “Want to know what really happened during Watergate?” and I’d sigh.
One time, bent over a puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge, he informed me, “The global elite traffic in human flesh and blood.” He explained how famous people kidnap children, then torture them to death to harvest chemical adrenaline from their veins. The punchline is: They drink it.
“It’s real,” he insisted. “Hunter S. Thompson exposed it in ‘Fear and Loathing.’” “He was high out of his mind when he wrote that,” I said.
It mattered to me, a lot, that my boyfriend couldn’t separate fact from fantasy. I couldn’t be in a serious relationship with someone I couldn’t take seriously, right?
The first warm day during our self-quarantine, the two of us drove to a park and walked out by the water. The trail was crowded with families in scarves and homemade masks hugging the edge of the path. I hadn’t brought a jacket and I was wearing his. We looked like a cute couple, with our matching bracelets and rings he’d made out of plastic, the occasional hand in the other’s hair. But then he steered the conversation to red shoes in celebrity Instagram photos, the code word “cheese pizza,” the numerology of 33, dropping his voice whenever someone passed us.
“I’m the one ignoring evidence?” he said. “You won’t even look at the links.”
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious the mainstream media hasn’t reported on any of this? You know they’re all paid to lie.”
I was a smart, rational person, and my boyfriend liked that about me. He was always going on about my “big, sexy brain.” But at the same time, he distrusted experts, scholars, professionals, people who knew things. People like, well, people like me...
I looked ahead at the row of trees disappearing into the horizon. I was a critical thinker, sure, but when it got down to it, I was trusting. I relied on others to know more about the world than I did. My boyfriend assumed any so-called experts were out to mislead, never mind how implausible the ever-expanding scale of deceit...
Now, at his place, on his futon, winding down with wine and cop shows, I evaluate him in the screen glow, his cheekbones, black hoodie, cute goatee. I think of how he rubbed my stomach and made me soup when I was sick. Memorized a few Yiddish words, my drink order, how that Smiths song goes. Taught me to skip stones and drive stick.
Joe Biden comes on the television and my boyfriend says this one’s definitely a body double, you can tell because his ears look smaller. “Might even be a clone,” he muses. “The real Biden’s been dead for years.”
The tone in his voice is impossible to decipher. I wonder, with a surge of hope, if he’s trolling me, if this is all an elaborate ruse, like when he pretended for weeks he didn’t know how to peel an orange and I didn’t know what to believe.
There’s that feeling that everything is collapsing, that somehow I’m the one going crazy, that reality is whatever you want it to be, and nothing is as it seems...
I look at our interlaced hands, the veins in them. I wonder if the stress in them can be extracted, ingested, a drug in the blood, like Hunter S. Thompson said. Would that really be so strange, so preposterous? In this world, these times, anything’s possible. I just don’t know.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/08/16/dating-conspiracy-theory-relationship/
