"Healthy relationships" aren't free of problems, they're healthy because people put in work to maintain them, which includes staying on top of any long-term concerns and addressing new ones as they come up.

:yea: I agree with you on all that

My off-the-cuff armchair psycho-analyzing (which very well could be wrong, I'm just some random on the internet) is that particular situation tapped into people's own personal relationship traumas- men feeling like their partner refuses to acknowledge their emotions as valid, women's intentions being misunderstood due to toxic masculinity... and so on. And then once you're in that head-space it really is hard to pull yourself out of it, especially when other people visibly roll up with their support for the other side, which makes you go into a defensive crouch to validate your own position on the matter.

Will we (collectively, as a community) learn anything from this? Oh hell nah.

Personally I got entrenched because I experienced a lot of people saying the negative interpretation wasn't valid because "she said..." And then they'd go on to quote something that wasn't directly in the text. There were people talking about misogyny and how the guy felt like he owned her or wasn't comfortable with the fact with her having had other partners, which was also just invented whole cloth. It's something that can exist in the meta-text and be part of a larger discussion, but it is not present in the text itself and arguing from the position that it is and those who don't see it are guilty of doing it, was something that ticked me off.

That's something that generally frustrates me. It is not nice when you are having a disagreement and the person you are disagreeing with is not willing to engage with your arguments. It really sucks when someone is telling you you are objectively wrong, but whatever they're quoting isn't actually present anywhere, but is instead, at best, their interpretation, which they pretend is the text itself.

That combined with dismissals like saying the people disagreeing just don't understand how attraction works for women (which is also some weird gender essentialist "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" bullshit) as if it's unique to women to have attraction be more than looks, and dismissals like saying you have sex with your spouse as if that's what people giving the negative interpretation we're saying, really pissed me off. Just immense condescension assuming people who disagree with you don't understand really basic shit, instead of engaging in good faith and actually trying to understand why the people disagreeing with you are disagreeing.

It seemed to me like a thread were a bunch of people came in pre-conceived about the whole thing, and then refused to interrogate their own views because they're leftists and therefore their opinions are correct, and therefore they never need to stop and reconsider, and therefore everyone who disagrees with them is wrong on a personal or ideological level. That's not extraordinary, it is what usually creates struggle sessions here.
This time was just extra frustrating because the people doing that kept claiming the other side was being unreasonable, but as far as I can tell most people that say they can see how the dude understood it how he did, also say they can see what she tried to say.
That was dismissed by a lot of people and I really hate it when things like that are just dismissed and then followed up with variations of "whats your argument tho?" Or accusations of bigotry. It's poor form, it's rude it's not good for site culture.

Clearly it wasn’t very well worded if it has caused as much of a stir as it has (and her friends also agreed that it was) and she didn’t mean to make the compliment backhanded.

It was from R*ddit, meaning it was 100% fiction. Why people were wasting their Sunday arguing over fake Internet shit from R*ddit is beyond me.