So an atheist is not going to be rationally persuaded to join a religious cult, and a member of a religious cult is not going to be rationally persuaded to become an atheist. But if these two people marry each other, it's quite possible that one of them will change because they love each other, and they don't want to have incompatible beliefs. Unfortunately reasoned conversation or punitive cutting-off are only rarely tools of conversion. But here’s something you might be able to exploit: very often, people’s beliefs respond to the emotional experiences they have in everyday life. I wonder whether you could surreptitiously give him experiences that might work like counter-evidence to the ways he’s thinking. Can you get him into an all-gender sporting league, or into volunteering in a way that uses your hands: an environment with people of all ages, not split by gender, where people have to be hard-working and cooperative? Can you insist on modelling what it looks like to have female friends, so women aren’t just something imaginary to be generalised about with other men online? You mention you’ve already told her you don’t want to investigate for her. Good on you. If she keeps pushing, I wonder whether you could focus on legitimating her feelings, if not her requests and action-items. The first is hard because it requires grit and optimism when you might feel low on both. You write you’ve struggled to make and keep friends or hobbies. This is about insisting that can change; that the path you’ve been on has no authority to dictate where you go next. I have long been a believer that if only I could leapfrog over emotion could I be an unstoppable powerhouse for progress. The social constructs laid out as the foundation of this book suggest I am not alone. It is this thinking that reason is the apogee that has "altogether more to do with selling us... an anaesthetised dream if an optimised future where... nothing hurts". But is this even real?

Given the inevitability of interacting with her long term, it might also help to think about how you can tolerate these feelings when you can’t change the situation. The problem with a pop-philosophy book is that the discussion felt entirely too short and left me wanting much more. I was really interested especially in her ending statements by the seeming illogicality of love and our failure to value emotion when engaging in discourse. What is love is a question that hasn't really been answered, and Gordon-Smith's musings on it were incredibly interesting. The catcalling segment was also engrossing, where men are confronted with how women don't like cat-calling yet are unable to square that with their inner narrative of women liking it and them just being normal men instead of utter creeps. The ending felt incredibly abrupt. I can't help but think this book could have been so much more because the thesis of this book is incredibly strong.After my wife hadn’t heard from her mother for a few months, I received a misdirected message yesterday, saying that she has Alzheimer’s disease and that she “will soon have forgotten her evil letters and that she let her [mother] down”. My wife never wrote evil letters. The message will devastate her.

I knew how piercingly smart Eleanor Gordon-Smith is, and what a curious and resolute interviewer. But I was unprepared for how entertainingly she writes! I read this with pleasure.' — Ira Glass Gordon-Smith does a very entertaining job of demonstrating that no, it probably isn't. We are flawed and our personal biases end up popping up everywhere we look, including inside our deepest values and beliefs. As a result, being reasonable becomes subjective to each and every one of us. Suddenly being reasonable can't equal being unemotional because even when we justify a decision as being reasonable there are likely countless emotional ties shaping what we see when we look down the periscope of our 'reasonable' lens. Eleanor Gordon-Smith is expected to graduate in May with a Ph.D. in philosophy . She was nominated for her work as an student assistant in instruction (AI) in “Introduction to Moral Philosophy” and “Systematic Ethics.”They could very well have their own dreams of creativity and autonomy. They might want to travel, or spend time together as a couple, or live on their own terms after decades of supporting five kids. And to put it bluntly – I hope they and you will forgive me – they have less time for those dreams than you do for yours.