BeanMan
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From Today's Denver Post...
Dear Amy: My girlfriend and I have been together for two years. This month she gave me an ultimatum: I give up hunting, or she leaves.
Every year, my best friend and I spend the opening weekend of deer season in a cabin we built on his family's land. It is the only weekend I hunt, and I look forward to it every year. My friend and I don't get to spend much time together, so this weekend has been our excuse to get together, catch up and have a good time.
My girlfriend told me this year that she doesn't want to be with someone who could kill a deer. I tried to explain that hunting helps control deer population in the absence of natural predators and that hunting is a better way of acquiring meat than buying beef slaughtered in an industrial farm and shipped across the country.
I went hunting this year against her wishes and killed a buck. She wouldn't talk to me for three days. Now she says if I don't promise to give up the sport, she will leave me. She says if I cared about her feelings, I wouldn't hunt.
I do care about her feelings, and I don't want to upset her. But I don't think I should have to give up hunting because she doesn't like it.
What should I do? ? Befuddled in Binghamton
Dear Befuddled: Your letter is why ultimatums don't usually work.
(If I could, I'd issue an ultimatum against ultimatums.) This issue will come up each hunting season; you now have a year of peace in which you can attempt to work out a compromise (and where ultimatums don't usually work, compromises almost always do).
Would your girlfriend be as unhappy if you went on this hunting excursion, enjoyed the experience but didn't kill anything? Could you square your ethical hunting argument to keep the peace at home? You could start by presenting these two extremes with the goal of taking baby steps toward each other until you meet somewhere near the middle
I would drop her like a fat hot rock.
Beanman
Dear Amy: My girlfriend and I have been together for two years. This month she gave me an ultimatum: I give up hunting, or she leaves.
Every year, my best friend and I spend the opening weekend of deer season in a cabin we built on his family's land. It is the only weekend I hunt, and I look forward to it every year. My friend and I don't get to spend much time together, so this weekend has been our excuse to get together, catch up and have a good time.
My girlfriend told me this year that she doesn't want to be with someone who could kill a deer. I tried to explain that hunting helps control deer population in the absence of natural predators and that hunting is a better way of acquiring meat than buying beef slaughtered in an industrial farm and shipped across the country.
I went hunting this year against her wishes and killed a buck. She wouldn't talk to me for three days. Now she says if I don't promise to give up the sport, she will leave me. She says if I cared about her feelings, I wouldn't hunt.
I do care about her feelings, and I don't want to upset her. But I don't think I should have to give up hunting because she doesn't like it.
What should I do? ? Befuddled in Binghamton
Dear Befuddled: Your letter is why ultimatums don't usually work.
(If I could, I'd issue an ultimatum against ultimatums.) This issue will come up each hunting season; you now have a year of peace in which you can attempt to work out a compromise (and where ultimatums don't usually work, compromises almost always do).
Would your girlfriend be as unhappy if you went on this hunting excursion, enjoyed the experience but didn't kill anything? Could you square your ethical hunting argument to keep the peace at home? You could start by presenting these two extremes with the goal of taking baby steps toward each other until you meet somewhere near the middle
I would drop her like a fat hot rock.
Beanman
