I am a divorced man, raising two sons alone and getting back into the dating world at 43 years old. I am a few months into dating this absolutely amazing woman and I’ve enjoyed it very much. She seems to be the total package in many, many ways! She is kind, thoughtful, empathetic, soft, genuine, intuitive, honest and many more beautiful characteristics. I truly am falling for her and I feel we could have a long, beautiful future, but I just recently found out she is a flat-earther. I was absolutely shocked. At first, I thought she was kidding. After some discussion, she deeply believes flat earth conspiracies, suggests that I’m just following what I’ve been told, and does not seem very receptive to learning more about it.
I cannot eloquently explain how disappointed I am, or why! It defies all logic, observable facts, and is absolutely absurd. I feel like I’ve lost so much respect for her and I cannot seem to reconcile that feeling with how I care about everything else she is. And to make matters worse, she is teaching her kids to believe the same thing. I am a very mathematical and science-oriented man and I could even sit her down and show her some basic maths, but I doubt that would go well!
How should I handle this? She seems annoyed when I bring it up, and I probably didn’t handle it very well at first. I seriously care for her but I also am struggling with respecting anyone who believes such a nonsense conspiracy theory they learned about on YouTube. Please help!
Eleanor says: I like the idea that there’s something intellectually deficient about you “following what you’ve been told”, when she learned this from YouTube, and when she’s teaching her kids to follow what they’re told – by her. This is one of the big problems with fighting conspiracy theories: they often don’t have much internal logic. What counts as evidence? What counts as falsification? Under what circumstances are you meant to believe stuff? Instead of consistent answers to those questions, conspiracy theories often give you principles topiaried to fit the target belief.
At one level, yours is a question about what role beliefs should play in a relationship. To be sure, some people can set aside deep disagreements in loving relationships (though usually the disagreements are moral or political).
But some beliefs aren’t so easily set aside.
Our beliefs aren’t just a barometer of what we think is true. They’re also bound up with what we value; our attitude to how thinking itself should work. What do you trust? What kinds of error will you risk? When will you count something as true? All of us have to navigate these questions daily as we figure out what to doubt and what to treat as settled. They’re not easy questions. As William James pointed out: “believe truth” and “shun error” are two materially different goals that tend to pull in opposite directions.
Each of us has the chance to decide what kind of thinker we’re going to be; which values to embody in our mental lives. That freedom can be the ultimate realisation of adult agency. To discover that someone you fancy has used it to just stick YouTube in one ear and be done – that would be disappointing.
So here’s my question to you: you obviously face a huge disagreement of fact. To what extent do you also have a disagreement of value? Is this a weird one-off belief that doesn’t make sense with the rest of her mental life? Or is this how you find out her answers to what she values, what she’ll risk and who she trusts?
It’s one thing to have some topics where each of you is pretty sure the other is wrong. It’s another thing to have totally different attitudes to how thinking itself ought to work. This disagreement isn’t just about whether the Earth is flat. It’s also about the whole mental ecology that gave rise to that belief.
If what you have here is actually a deep value disagreement, that might start to grate on her too. Nobody likes to feel condescended to. She’ll be able to sense it if you feel like you’re deigning to stay with her, and it won’t serve either of you to wind up in a dynamic where you’re the rational one and she’s the fool. If you’re going to be together, it has to be as equals.
A relationship can go fine despite a difference in belief. A difference in deep values is much harder. Only you know what you’re facing here, and whether you can respect each other despite it.
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