boyfriend-girlfriend holiday

When I was at university, I went away for some Christian teaching weekends which included foodie, table football, maybe a bit of table tennis, bible seminars, more bible studies and some Christian socializing.

I do remember a 'relationship seminar' when Dan and Suzie talked about their recommendations- ... the point of starting an 'exclusive male-female relationship' as Christians call it is for marriage. It's an intimate thing that's heading towards marriage. In popular spheres, there can be disagreements with this like I remember an 18-yr-old friend who said 'what?? Marriage??? If you want to break up with your boyfriend, tell him you're going to marry him!' which makes the point that this can be freaky. But on the whole I agree with the Christian 'directors' because I generally believe that if there is no chance in the world that I'm going to marry the man I'm dating, it's a complete waste of my time.

I have some thoughts on some other things that they 'recommended' to me, however. About HOLIDAYS, they recommend that the boyfriend-girlfriend pairs DO NOT GO ON HOLIDAY DURING THEIR RELATIONSHIP as it subjects them to sexual temptation. This goes along with a list of other recommendations like if the pair of them are in a room in a university hall of residence, leave the door open, etc.
However, in the light of my direct experience of a severely disordered person, who had severe anti-social personality disorder without any sign revealing it for so long, and by the way the Christian reaction to all this has been dreadful on the whole, I am actually recommending that the couple goes on holiday together- for example, from Britain to Italy, from Britain to Russia, whatever that takes their fancy.

My recommendation is based upon how if a couple go on holiday together, they can perform a passport security check and establish each other's identity. That means, if I'm the girlfriend, I can confirm my boyfriend's name, date of birth, and his address should be written at the back, along with details about his next of kin. I know this sounds really ridiculous, paranoid and stupid, but, I think if the couple don't want to have sex they can go and have a holiday without having sex in the hotel room and return with nice memories, they should be autonomous human beings capable of deciding whether they're going to have sex or not, and also, in the normal processes of socialization people don't check their friends' identity by saying 'oy, show me your passport, is your name really your name? Is your age really your age?' Come on, that's just ridiculous.
But, sociopaths seem to be really the same as everyone else, and victims tend not to know what the hell is going on until it's all too late. It's so difficult to distinguish them and tell them apart that even Ph.D qualified psychologists such as Dr. Robert Hare fail to identify them in their day-to-day lives. They can identify the disordered persons that they study at work, but the fail to identify the disordered persons in their own private lives so they still fall victim and get conned.

In the normal processes of socialization, I just can't think of another opportunity to check the boyfriend/ girlfriend's identity apart from having to go pass the airport with a valid passport. And if the sociopath is a criminal that's being pursued, that comes out as well. Miss Sandra Boss, the corporate superwoman, was married to 'Clark Rockefeller' for over 12 years or so but her husband gave her a fake name and she didn't know and she never saw his passport or medical records until everything was all too late. I got as far as seeing the damn sociopath's Barclays Bank Card, it had his first initial and surname on it. But he lied to me and over 30 people about his date of birth, age, home address, family situation, he even gave the Church and people from the church a false forename for years and years and years that began with the same letter as his 'real' forename- how real is that forename? As real as it is in the criminal court because he got multiple criminal convictions, so I found out (which shocked me a lot).

Call me paranoid but there's about a 4% chance that a passport check will reveal worrying results and a 96% chance that a passport check will reveal normal, satisfactory results. This means that, for example, let's say you're a woman and you'll date some men in your twenties, thirties and forties, maybe you marry when you're 41, there is a high mathematical chance that you will encounter one male partner who has anti-social personality disorder (there's some chance that your men can have all sorts of problems too, looking at the figures; never mind, there's happiness to be had) and this is something that is very difficult to tell. You'll know if your man needs heart surgery, but you probably can't tell if he is personality disordered with ASPD. So, to beat the processes of socialization, I'm now recommending that- lovers go on holiday together because while they look forward to it and it's probably going to be lots of fun, just in case the relationship is not right at all, the passport will tell you. Don't always bother with the 'I love you': read his or her passport, it's usually 'his' because for every 1 female sociopath there're about 7 or 8 male sociopaths.

I think ultimately these recommendations about what to do when in a relationship should be delivered based on population statistics, facts and figures, trends in the population, etc. and to an extent, what type of partner one is likely to accept. While it's nice to aim for a prosperous life that doesn't succumb to temptation, people can't always go ahead to recommend actions based on very abstract principles. We don't live in an abstract world, we live in a world that is often very practical. And the Christian directors of Christian weekends certainly did not manage to warn me of some dangers in the world that I didn't know existed, or what to do about it.

And I'm still not impressed that Christians in general actively discouraged me from reading the sociology books and psychology books that explained problems to me (along with all the legal texts). Some of them even said, 'just read the bible and don't read those things', but there are some very SPECIFIC things about the condition of anti-social personality disorder that the bible could not possibly have told me and I relied on such information to recover. Like I've said since quite a long time ago, it puts me off when Christians leave things to God that should not be left to God (like what they can command socially, whether they have the social skills to pull social interactions and emotional bonds between people together). Fundamentally I don't think it WORKS to make-believe, to say that my traumatized self is fine because I have God when I'm really not fine, and as I identified the lack of short-cuts in recovering from the horrendously nightmarish experiences of a sociopath, I feel really really put off that some people basically want to shove me the bible and make a short-cut that doesn't actually work. That's not the correct use of the bible, and they've also discouraged me from pursuing actions that ultimately can achieve very benign things for large numbers of victims without being discerning enough to see how those things will be achieved- I don't want to talk about the details. Sometimes people don't want to think about problem-solving. I'm not one of those people.
Basically, Professor Simon Wessely would hate how the Christians treated me in this.

Anyway - Go on holiday and read the other passport (not yours) !!!!!!!!! Have a nice holiday!!!