My wife is very rule oriented, she likes to understand what her place is, and make sure she is living up to the explicit and implicit (with a limit only of her vivid imagination) tasks in order to fulfill her role, as long as she understands the reason for the rule.

I am much more chaotic and didn’t give a fuck about rules for a long time because its all external and alienated. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed an ethics, not morality, that if anything is much stricter than what is “necessary.” But my own ethics have, to the best of my ability, good reasonable justifications, with a high standard for logical consistency and self growth and actualization, whereas I still see those externalized rules, especially the ones that seem to undergird the logic of private property, oppression, imperialism, patriarchy, racism; to still be external and alienating, if not just corrosive to the human spirit.

My ethics compel me to.do things that others wouldn’t dare, their morality compels them to do things that I can’t even comprehend. Its like no matter what the rules are, I’ll always find damn good reasons to be feisty. This of course plays beautifully into my afore mentioned rejection dysphoria which isn’t chronic but still acute; and comes on strong in moments of self assessment of just these dynamics.

Its almost like people are impossibly complicated, but maybe that’s just me