You finally meet the man of your dreams.

Finding him was impossible…until it wasn’t. He is everything you could have asked for…your checklist has no empty spots. It isn’t just his looks, but also his ability to communicate and his intelligence.

As always, you have your emotional guard up. This time around though, it seems to be dropping far more rapidly than usual. He seems to say all the right things at the right time. The cold heart you handed him has begun the process of defrosting.

After several months of deep conversations and fun dates…you commit to him. A few days after your fairy tale beginning…a conversation comes up unexpectedly.

The smile falls off your face as soon as you hear it…“I do not want you to go off to clubs”.

This comes as a shock to you. No man in your life has ever cared about you going off…enjoying life (as you should). Your girlfriends all have boyfriends…and they seemingly could care less about it. The social circle you’ve created would immediately see this “perfect” man as a screaming red flag.

Your whole life has been filled with beautiful (at times chaotic) moments with your rowdy friends. The theme of your life is to be in the moment, to party hard but work hard. This sudden contradiction in ideas is a sucker punch to your excitement.

“Why does it matter to you if I go have fun? You already seem controlling.” The passive reply from your mouth is full of offense and dissatisfaction. The butterflies you felt were hit by a fly swatter and left for dead.

“I’ve never had a woman go off to clubs and I cannot believe this is an issue for you” is his firm reply back.

You hang up on him, hop on TIKTOK and watch as many bias videos as you can in regard to justification for this issue of yours. By the end of the night, you’re certain that he is a control freak and a narcissist. The idea of breaking it off has already begun and you’ve just started.

My opinion is right…yours is…wrong?

What started off as a cute conversation between to love birds has now turned into an ethical dilemma: Who is right when both parties create their own subjective standards for their relationship?

One of the biggest flaws within relationships is that of standards. We all have developed our own personal set of standards for ourselves and our relationships. What we deem to be fine to do in a commitment is very much personal for each one of us. To counter this, we also have certain matters we set that are wrong and unethical to do within a commitment. Ultimately, many commitments are swamped with anxiety, anger and resent from this conflict of interest. Ethics are already a sensitive subject…and two parties finding mutual agreement on them can skyrocket into many negative emotions. For many, negative emotions are just the nails being put into a coffin slowly…the end of their relationship is inevitably going to happen.

Subjective means varying, changing and not firmly set. If you are using the word subjective in regard to people…than whatever you are referring to would be dependent on each and every individual. A good example of subjectivity in humans is opinions. We all have opinions on different matters, and for the most part we are all valid in them. If I like pizza with no cheese, call me weird but I’m just as much valid as someone who likes extra cheese on their pizza. If I love pineapples on my pizza and you don’t…we both are right. I cannot tell you that disliking pineapples on your pizza is wrong, and if I did you would call me unethical and wrong. (as you should).

Let’s drag subjectivity over to our commitments and our standards within them. It’s no different than our favorite flavor of ice-cream. My set of standards are just as valid as yours. In the example above, the woman (I used you, the reader) is no more right or wrong than the man is in regard to the situation. If he says she shouldn’t go to clubs, he is right. If she says she should be able to…she is right. They are both right. They both have their subjective reasons based off their social circles and life experiences.

This creates an ethical dilemma, one that, if not fixed…can destroy a relationship.

The only way for two parties to come together and make sense of this would be to somehow find an objective standard somewhere, one that is firmly set and accurate. Since science cannot solve any ethical problems, there is no scientific peer review you can find that could possibly prove what objective standard is right for any commitment. Science has its hands tied on anything ethical…logic and microscopes do nothing within the world of abstract values such as these.

Whatever would create these objective truths would be something outside this realm. Something that would be outside logic, physics, time and space. In order to present anything ethical as factual for our commitments…it could not use science as its source.

If we all had one source of factual standards somewhere to go to, it wouldn’t matter what they felt or thought on something…they would know that following the objective standard is the only right way. What this would mean in regard to the club dilemma above is that one of these individuals would be factually correct and the other…factually wrong. Therefore, they could both look to this objective standard for assistance in these matters.

What could I possibly be talking about here?

You’re smart, I know you can figure this one out.

-Jarom