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In my philosophy class we are dealing with feminist interpretations of classic philosophical works. One of the main differences that keeps coming up is that men are more concerned with reason in their thinking and decisions, while women are more concerned with emotion.

I can’t help but be an analytical thinker. Everything that happens to me I analyze and make decisions according to reason and logic, and (usually) utilitarianism but sometimes also altruism.

For the past four months I’ve been with Sandy, and the past four weeks we’ve been living together. By the standards of the average person, this is called a fast-moving relationship. But I know that I don’t want to be with anyone else. I thought for a long time about moving in, and decided that I wanted to be closer to her, so I did. At the same time, I can’t help but think of the average: this is moving pretty fast. What if it is too fast? Sandy doesn’t seem to have this thought, but I do. I am worried that because I am not following some kind of norm, that I might be doing the wrong thing. I don’t know what the solution is. I want to find out, though, and the only way to do that is to move in with her. It also happens to be where my emotion drives me to.

Emotion scares me though, because of its non-rationality, and because every time I say something that my reason feels or has decided Sandy ends up in tears. I can’t understand why that happens to her. I don’t understand why she can’t sleep at night. I can’t explain emotion with reason and so it scares me.

Sandy, I want to be with you and stay with you. I have faith in us. But you have to understand that this is just how my brain works, and how I think about things, that’s all.

I hope that made some sense. I’m not sure how I can convince you that I’m not unsure, just scared. I never said that I didn’t want to be with you. I hope you don’t see posting this here as a cop-out but I have to go to my meeting now and I don’t have a better way of collecting my thoughts coherently. Since I probably made things worse, I’m going to go now.