So is every kind of criminal.
And so is every saint.
What gives you the authority to decide which is which?
At the very least, this person is your friend, so I'd think you owe them even more commitment and analysis than "average joe off the street."
I didn't say my friend was a he.
Women are human too.
Matter of fact, knowing it was a bad action. Didn't feel bad. Knew that it was bad though. Yes attitude matters, and it's because behavior reflects attitude that I find it so very sad....who is this person I consider my very good friend?
Do you think that is an even bigger part -- that you felt like you knew her... and now she's done something outside your expectations of her character, so it's been disenchanting? And if she did this, what else might she do that you did not expect? etc.
Let's avoid talking about "feeling" right now -- since many people can not feel anything about a particular action but still choose by force of will and intellect to follow a particular code -- what is her choice of response to her action? What is her resolve for the future? How is she handling it with her SO? These things are signs of character (or not) as well.
I don't care how my friends act towards others on a superficial level. But when it's something deeper I've got my thresholds. I want to feel mad at my friend.
That is permissible. We all feel things.
All the deep conversations we ever had seem pointless now.
Why? Do you think she's a complete fraud... or is she just complex and conflicted? Why is anything she might have said now false?
(Maybe this is more an NT thing, but we can detach truth from the speaker. The assumption is that the dumbest person can say something true and the smartest person can say something dumb, and the truth is in the words and ideas themselves, not the imperfect human attached to them.)
Was probably my closest friend and that helped justify that I am and that made me feel understood....then did that. I wan't to feel mad but yet I don't...but I think I lost so much respect...feel a void. It's all making me very cynical and nihilistic...were are the people that think like me anyway....do I just hold people to too high standards?
Why can't you allow yourself to be disappointed with people?
It's okay to be disappointed with people when they let you down, isn't it?
I'm not moved by disappointment, but by a need for congruence. If I always talk about cheaters as people I don't like, why would my friend be an exception? I don't choose sides. My values ARE my identity.
Okay, here is another question, then: Why do you have to label someone who cheats as a "cheater" in character, and then label "cheaters" as people you are not allowed to like?
You never had a chance to accept your friend. As soon as she violated one of your ideas, she was automatically dumped into the box of "unlikeable." Why not have a more nuanced approach?
The problem is that everyone, including you, is human, and to generalize someone so much is inevitably either going to dump everyone into the box of "unlikeable" OR it's going to remove some decent but flawed people from your life and might leave some very bad people in your life who merely haven't broken one of your personal rules.
I try very hard to see each person as an individual. Instead of labeling and boxing them, and THEN deciding what to do with them, I just deal with them as a unique person. It seems to give me the most flexibility in maintaining relationships with others.
What you are describing isn't weird, I have heard it from other NFs before. I'm still trying to get a grasp of how you get into that bind. I mean, I guess the best analogy I can empathize through is the intellectual thing -- where if someone shows a deplorable lack of honesty or intellectual capability, I can no longer trust them as much with their ideas. And I think I remember feeling very let down when I was a teenager by people who either proved themselves to be intellectual frauds or people who were not consistent with their own professed moral code... I almost didn't even care about the code itself, it was the inconsistency that was hypocritical to me... I remember getting depressed over it... but I guess at some point I accepted that (1) I might not be seeing all the forces working on that person and thus judging them fairly and (2) might not really understand why they did what they did. So I needed to be more gracious and open.... especially because I no doubt could be judged by others too similarly.
