I think you're right, and I find your principles easy to follow up to the last paragraph. I do have difficulty extricating myself from disputes occasionally.
To be more specific, I'm perfectly happy to agree to disagree, or to bow out if everyone has started repeating themselves, but where it gets tricky is the (thankfully rare) situation in which the other person always seems to misinterpret what I've said, and in a slightly different way each time.
It's tedious, time is getting on and I've got other more interesting and urgent things to do, but simply not to respond seems to imply that I don't mind the other person believing that I believe X, when in fact I don't, at all. And while I'm fine being disagreed with, I find being misunderstood really hard to handle. (At an emotional level perhaps I believe that if only people understood my point of view they would inevitably agree with it, but rationally I realise this is not the case.) At that point it is quite hard to resist saying, "Look, I've got to go to work/pick up the kids/get some sleep, but here is my last shot at saying what I mean clearly - goodnight and good luck." I've done that, maybe half a dozen times in my online life - but I agree it's not very satisfactory.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-10-20 04:21 pm (UTC)To be more specific, I'm perfectly happy to agree to disagree, or to bow out if everyone has started repeating themselves, but where it gets tricky is the (thankfully rare) situation in which the other person always seems to misinterpret what I've said, and in a slightly different way each time.
It's tedious, time is getting on and I've got other more interesting and urgent things to do, but simply not to respond seems to imply that I don't mind the other person believing that I believe X, when in fact I don't, at all. And while I'm fine being disagreed with, I find being misunderstood really hard to handle. (At an emotional level perhaps I believe that if only people understood my point of view they would inevitably agree with it, but rationally I realise this is not the case.) At that point it is quite hard to resist saying, "Look, I've got to go to work/pick up the kids/get some sleep, but here is my last shot at saying what I mean clearly - goodnight and good luck." I've done that, maybe half a dozen times in my online life - but I agree it's not very satisfactory.