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[Related to:\xa0The Whole City Is Center]

I.

I got into\xa0an argument\xa0recently with somebody who used the word \u201clie\u201d to refer to a person honestly reporting their unconsciously biased beliefs \u2013 her example was a tech entrepreneur so caught up in an atmosphere of hype that he makes absurdly optimistic predictions. I promised a post explaining why I don\u2019t like that use of \u201clie\u201d. This is that post.

A few months ago, a friend confessed that she had abused her boyfriend. I was shocked, because this friend is one of the kindest and gentlest people I know. I probed for details. She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn\u2019t, so she would cry \u2013 not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad. She counted this as abuse, because her definition of \u201cabuse\u201d is \u201csomething that makes your partner feel bad about setting boundaries\u201d. And when she cried, that made her boyfriend feel guilty about his boundary that he wasn\u2019t going to do the favor.

We argued for a while about whether this was a good definition of abuse (it isn\u2019t). But I had a bigger objection: this definition was so broad that\xa0everyone\xa0has committed abuse at some point.

My friend could have countered that this was a feature, not a bug. Standards have been (and should be) getting stricter. A thousand years ago, beating your wife wasn\u2019t considered abuse as long as you didn\u2019t maim her or something. A hundred years ago, you could bully and belittle someone all you wanted, but as long as there was no physical violence it wasn\u2019t abuse. As society gets better and better at dealing with these issues, the definition of abuse gets broader. Maybe we\xa0should\xa0end up with a definition where basically everyone is an abuser.