> I can assure you nothing of what remains in my brain was shaped by society

> I lack the words to stress how much this is intimate and personal. Now to each his own brain, some people might have very few emotional attachment, I'm not like this

So are you a robot then? Wherever you are from, your mind is a product of your influences and local culture and customs, just as much as it is also a product of your schooling and your family life. Given that we humans just absolutely love to meddle in the love lives of others, I can promise you that some of that cultural training includes guidance on how to structure your romantic relationships, and it almost certainly proscribes one man and one woman.

Unless you have spent a considerable amount of time examining these beliefs and have specifically chosen to reject the ones that your society has given you, I would argue that your brain is very much not your own in that sense.

If the opposite were true then things like propaganda would have a much harder time existing. We would have a perfect, rational world society that I dearly wish existed. Appeals to emotion would fall on deaf ears! How amazing that would be!

Instead we have entire countries full of people that live or die because of "cultural differences" aka the shit that society pollutes your mind with. One might argue that we are watching that play out with Ukraine vs Russia right now.

> Stop, you have no idea about my personal life.

You told me how you feel, so I do in fact have a small tidbit of information on your personal life

One of the most prominent customs of Americans is that we pretend to have no culture or customs on a national level. Of course, we actually do project a culture, and whenever that becomes apparent, many Americans are unhappy, because that culture isn't aligned well with their personal values.

Do people really believe that? Like, every fourth AskReddit thread seems to ask questions specifically of Americans. Which means someone thinks we're different enough to make a thread about it (over and over again...), ergo we have our own culture.

Maybe I've just traveled to much, and I have certainly rolled my eyes at some of my less informed countrymen, but I have a hard time believing people could think that our culture is somehow a baseline.

I agree that we project our culture a ton, and I really wish we wouldn't. It's so annoying to try and share something cultural with a foreign friend only to find out they already know and have opinions about it because they saw it on Friends

My take is that a lot of USians will vociferously defend the differences in regional cultures within the US - East vs. West, coastal vs. flyover, state vs. state and so on - as both a conscious and an unconscious response to questions of national cultures and norms. When someone claims the US is "too big" or "too diverse" (and isn't using the latter as a dog whistle) you see some of this implicit balkanisation of the US into incompatible units.

Of course the consistent reaction of Americans to the use of terms like "USians" is a big giveaway to the fact that there's a national identity and thus culture. As, I guess, is the habit of down-playing of any such thing lol.

Unfortunately the few I wrote before is a minuscule amount of my experience with emotional and physical intimacy.

I'm sorry to insist, I had the displeasure to be off rail from the norm on extreme levels. Even deep introspection about norms and cultures would not register on a graph compared to the event that I had to go through.

I fail to describe more in details, but you're looking at the wrong layer, I'm talking about psychiatry/neurology levels, not social constructs.