I sit with a group of people at lunch. They're all pretty much blue pill. (Except maaaaybe one.) Anyway, one of the ladies was trying to get the gossip on me and my SO, and asked when the next step was for us. I said we had plans to possibly move in together one day, but that day was still probably a ways off. Another lady started saying what could go wrong with moving in together, and I said with a knowing smile, "I think I'll be fine". This prompted the question "Is he easy going?".

Now, there are a lot of wonderful adjectives I would use to describe my SO, but "easy going" is not one of them. I knew when she said that, she was placing a good value on "easy going". If I answered yes, that meant I had a keeper, and if I said no, I should rethink living with him someday. Of course, I don't want to say anything negative about my SO. If I answered with "no" she would perceive that as a negative, and I didn't want that. So, I thought about how to answer for a moment, which was enough for her to notice that the answer would be "no" and precede to compare me to one of the men in our group who is in a (heading for misery) "woman-in-charge" relationship. "You're going to be like him" she said, comparing me to the way he gets told what to do in his relationship.

I wish i had handled the situation better, because pretty much all I could respond was that he's good at communicating what he wants, which at that point wasn't a ringing endorsement. So, because of that I spent some time thinking about what she said, and how I should have responded. It occurred to me that the main problem with this encounter was that I let her control the frame of the argument. She started with the assumption that "easy going" was good, and anything else was not. It occurred to me after the fact that her initial position was wrong, and if I addressed that directly I would have come out ahead. I realized that, no, I don't want someone who is easy going. If I was with someone who was indifferent to the things in his life, his very opinion of me as a partner wouldn't matter. It would speak nothing of my looks or character if he just went with the flow on everything. I want to have someone who knows what he wants in his life and strives for the best that he can have, rather than someone who thinks that everything is good enough just the way it is. Yeah, he's particular, and wants things a certain way, but that's because he wants the most he can have out of life. A guy like that, picking me, makes me a valuable person.

Thoughts and suggestions on how I should have responded are all welcome.