urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Ah, I read the OP again, we’re talking about politicians, not voters or commentators.
Perhaps this is just the right moment for electoral comeuppance, if you back a bad horse in politics you get taken down.
The GOP needs new blood that’s neither subservient to Trump nor wacko, but I guess grifters, wafflers, and “the Jews made me do it”-ers are what we get. If either party could stop being idiotic and start actually dealing with our domestic crises like adults, that would be great.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I could never have guessed that it was comprised because {reasons}
Is “I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I made a bad decision” not an option?
Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with.
I voted for Trump because he promised no foreign interventionism and I thought Trump 1 was better than Biden, and have regretted it immensely. Unfortunately, there aren't many people who are willing to listen to this; strong Trump supporters hold this to be traitorous, and Democrats don't provide much of a runway for people who had reasons to support Trump but feel betrayed, because they were already on the bandwagon of anyone who voted for Trump is evil. Retconning your vote is basically the only pathway to being respected, so it's not surprising people are doing it. Trump is a phenomenon that has to be survived, because he has a stranglehold on his base. Hopefully the country survives.
That said, unfortunately the anti-war movement on the right has coalesced around antisemites and undesirables like Carlson and Owens, who oppose this war, like the local antisemites, because they believe Iran is a necessary counterweight to Israel which is the country they actually care about. I'm anti-war for reasons that rhyme with leftist views; I hate the American foreign policy apparatus, I believe it is a force for evil in the US, and I believe it does damage to the world while not aiding actual American interests. So it's frustrating to see that the right's anti-war impulses are being redirected into a shape that blames the problems of American foreign policy on THE JEWS!!! and not, for instance, the military-industrial complex, the blob, and the deep state.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I think Trump has been uniquely bad in terms of foreign policy by a pretty massive degree, and this is absolutely the worst time for the US to have bad foreign policy. And it's not even that he's got a strategy that he's competently carrying out but it's a bad policy, it's that he seems to not have a policy and yet is doing so many erratic things that damage US foreign relations that he might as well be taking a wrecking ball to the country. Jackson was pretty bad on domestic policy, but Trump is worse on foreign policy. At least Jackson actually had a military record behind him.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.
But I did chuckle imagining young gattsuru just cutting in line with such frequency that clinicians decided he should be assessed for autism.
two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests
Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else? The blocks I had to assemble in patterns were what I remember most about when I had to take an IQ test for gifted education when I was young -- I don't think I did so well on that part.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
Hm, interesting. I think for me, maybe for my dad, it's that the situation is structured and in public speaking you're given 'the floor' and people are socially expected to pay attention to you, or at least pretend. So it's an environment where you don't have to fight for airtime. I guess I also like it because it's a situation where you're permitted to monologue without interruption about a topic, which I always find enjoyable. Even if I have to improvise -- I enjoy improvising more than most people enjoy reading a prepared speech. It's like jazz.
But it's the back-and-forth and the fighting for airtime and the having to engage in real-time with ambiguous social dynamics that I find hard to deal with. It's difficult trying to figure out how to say something that's bland enough to not offend but interesting enough to achieve rapport, and then follow up, in real time, with a useful reply that continues that pace, with someone I don't know well.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.
The 8-Bit Guy is a youtuber I follow, he makes videos on retrocomputing. He got semi-cancelled a few years ago because he's a Texan gun guy who used to have an airsoft channel and once open-carried a rifle at a shopping mall (which is legal in Texas). But he's also a big EV guy, and he did a whole series of videos about adding a solar system to his house as an emergency backup, after the Texas grid blackout a few years ago caused his heating to die, a pipe to burst, and his house flooded.
He said he didn't like the "sell your electricity back to the grid" solar deployment mechanism, because that requires you to be on the grid and doesn't have the opportunity to run independently -- if the grid goes down, so does your solar, to avoid backfeeding in an outage. But apparently you can set up off-grid electricity as a backup if you install a specialized switch in your breaker that forces the grid connection off when your solar is on.
I guess it's like you said; libertarians and tech people are pro-renewables, but also pro-nuclear, and there's not much of a place in the Republican coalition for anything but fossil fuels.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
This makes me curious where your temperament lines up with the stereotype of your subfield.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
It feels much more natural and at home in the company of close family and friends. I've also strangely never had any problems speaking to large crowds or groups. I can do that with ease when others typically run away from the stage or podium.
That's fascinating -- me too. I hate smalltalk and I struggle to make connections with a stranger, but I love public speaking even if it makes me nervous. My father is the same way, he is a teaching professor and an extremely animated one, but also extremely introverted and hard to get to know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not
Was it a concern at one point that led to evaluation?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
It's disagreeable town, with autism town being a bit of a side hustle.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
The fact that he's actually Bulgarian makes the professor's anger about it being a Communist uniform more explicable -- Bulgaria also suffered as part of the Eastern Bloc.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
Distressed students pointed the costume out to their principal, Joe Powers, but Powers explained to students the boy was dressed as a Communist-era East German soldier, Powers wrote Monday in a note to staff.
"I tried to explain the context and time period of the uniform to the students who spoke with me, but apparently the student who wore the uniform may have told people it was from the 1940s," Powers wrote.
A video of the male student goose stepping during a school Halloween parade — accompanied by a chorus of boos — has since made the rounds on social media.
On Thursday, in an email to parents, Powers acknowledged the situation should have been handled differently.
"As more information has come to light, including additional video of the incident and through conversations with our staff and students, we realize that this has greatly impacted our community and acknowledge that we should have handled the incident with greater care, and communicated more clearly with the school community about the nature of the incident," Powers said.
"Let me say clearly and plainly that what occurred caused harm to many of our students and staff who recognized this as an act of antisemitism. Let me also say clearly and plainly that intolerance, bigotry, and bias-based behaviors have no place in our school," Powers said.
Cassie Creswell, who has a child at Jones and is a former chair of the Local School Council, said Powers should have immediately made the student change out of the costume and called the student’s parents to have a serious discussion about the situation.
"I’m very concerned," Creswell said. "I have been tracking the rise in right-wing extremism in the suburbs for a while now, and this is a real thing, and it’s connection to actual physical violence is a real thing and to have the response from the school be what it was, it’s very disturbing."
Special support staff were scheduled to be at the school this week, and safe spaces would be made available "for students to process the harm they’ve experienced," Powers said in his email to parents.
This sounds like an onion article.
One the one hand, the student's parents were really dumb for letting him go to school dressed like this. On the other hand, the principal was really dumb for not realizing this was going to cause blowback, and not realizing that, since he was already embroiled in a dispute with the school board over him not being obsequiously leftist enough as per the article, this was going to be politically dangerous to him.
On one foot, Creswell sounds like she'd be fun at parties and probably gives out toothbrushes to kids on Halloween. On the other foot, I love that the principal was just autistically explaining to the students that this was a Communist soldier outfit, not a Nazi soldier outfit.
No, you haven't been harmed because a weird kid did a weird kid thing and you took offense to it. Grow up.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
But that isn't special
Well, try telling them that.
Even worse are the people who apparently have diagnosed (or suspected?) BPD, and then openly brag about it. Even on dating profiles.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
German 27%
Autistic 67%
help?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
It's a pretty unique level of weaponized stubbornness and autism to wear a military uniform for a defunct, abolished country on a university campus that looks like that, and then have the gall to get upset that people are thinking its some kind of NeoNazi thing.
Sweetheart, the fash won the drip game and the boys who are into ideological military uniforms want something edgier.
That said, I'm genuinely confused as to whether this is a student or something, because "arms engineer" implies this is a graduated and professsionally accomplished person. But they're on a college campus and this is dead to rights college femboy energy.
It cuts against the theory of absolute female mate-status-optimization, but sometimes women meet a man in just the right situation and just the right time where he does appear high-status and confident, and they make a real love connection and she locks onto him as worthy and hers despite any evidence of his low status. Falling in love with someone just does that to people.
This seems to happen more often for women from lower-class backgrounds, where, say, a middle class guy who nonetheless sucks might be perceived as higher status in a durable way that’s not amenable to correction based on behavior. I guess what’s in her head is that she got her prince, and now she needs to hold onto him.
But you really can’t eliminate the power of an actual love-connection from this — maybe he’s abusive and doesn’t contribute anything, but when they go on a date he looks her deep in the eyes and tells her she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, or has a sense of humor that lines up perfectly with hers. The lows might be low but the highs might be really high, for reasons beyond just “good in bed.” The guy who hits her might also be the only person who’s ever made her feel truly seen in some particular way, which might be fake and manipulative but might also be strikingly real (because people are complicated messes and evil coexists with good). It’s hard to overstate how powerful that can be.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.
It's still shocking to me that it won the nobel prize. I understand the harsh experiences and conditions of the instutionalized and that people genuinely did 'improve' in the sense that they didn't express wild emotions any more, but the null hypothesis for any such change, especially when it came with cognitive impairment, would obviously be that you've butchered them and something about their internal experience has been seriously degraded. I wonder at times whether the lobotomy was a product of behaviorism, or of the medical neglect of the mentally ill. Probably both.
unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual
This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual." Even within a particular orientation there are obvious features that seem culturally determined, like of course the tension between the "I want me a woman as thin as a rail" guys and the "I want that venus tummy" guys.
a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones
Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?
I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't seen fucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women.
I will say that I think straight men love the general body shape and appearance of women more than they love the vagina, specifically. I guess 'pussy pics' are a thing, but it's telling that the main thing men want to see in a woman is really something more like the curves, the breasts, the buttocks. Even more than that, there's an angle on the female body positivity movement that's 'vulva positivity', because a lot of pornography selects for ladies with minimal labia minora, which suggests a kind of genital minimalism in men's attraction to women. Perhaps this contributes to why gynandromorphilia is so common as a thing that it has a whole porn category?
(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)
Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!
Chest hair specifically is very male, and it wouldn't be suprising to me if, in recent primate evolution, it became one of the primary selection points for males to tell themselves apart from females. Perhaps this remains as a sexual preference that subtly encodes heterosexuality. You might say something about breasts, but lots of women naturally have small breasts. Some men even prefer it -- "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" is apparently a lesbian film (TIL), but I've always heard the phrase online as a joking discussion of male preference for the small-breasted. It's not a wild leap from "this small-breasted lady is hot" to "this pectoral gentleman is hot" or even "this individual who once had breasts but no longer does is hot" (although mastectomy scarring can jarring to a lot of people), but body hair serves as kind of an immediate "THIS IS MALE, CANNOT BE REPRODUCED WITH, ABORT" signal in the broad and crude sense that lots of evolved preferences are. Noticable facial hair is also a major turn-off, perhaps for the same reason, and this is where a lot of trans men I think explicitly try to simulteneously mascmaxxx and minimize their attractiveness to the straights by growing a beard.
Women naturally have some level of hair (usually quite light, but sometimes darker) on their arms and legs, and while I think men overall prefer them shaved, I don't actually think it's actually a massive turn-off or an intense male fascination the way some feminist takes consider it. Obviously our distant ancestors didn't have any issues with females growing hair all over, so this is probably a recent adaptation in geological time scales and I presume the sex differentiation in hair was very crude and focused on key, noticable differentiators that could be sacrificed without harming survival.
I have a lot of chest hair, and my hair is very dark, women comment on this sometimes. My girlfriend said she showed a picture (fully clothed, so I guess it was just the hair peeking up over my collar) of me to her aunt, who exclaimed, "he's hairy!" Whether this is evidence of my androgens being high, a genetic inheritance from... someone, or just luck of the draw, I don't know. But I will say that this makes me polarizing, and only the true androphiles can understand my appeal.
For that specific comic
Ah, I see. I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Frankenstein is Incel
Interesting. I've always encountered Frankenstein discussed in exactly the opposite way among feminists, because it was written by Mary Shelley and some feminist interpretations discuss it as an allegory in favor of women's unique role in creating life because trying to create life without them resulted in a Monster (which is, of course, rather a conservative interpretation in a lot of ways, but nevertheless a popular one).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
It also doesn't help that society's entire concept of romantic relationships is gynonormative.
What do you even mean by this?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s.
I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert
But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with.
Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it. I thought you were talking about the straight-to-gay people here (I guess you call them the 'bihackers'?) and I was genuinely confused for a few minutes because I thought you were saying "they could only shove down" in the sense of "avoid throwing up because of" same-sex interests for short periods, and I was trying to discern how that was different from your next sentence about the guys who were no longer grossed out by gay sex. It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.
bihackers
I thought about making a matrix joke, but then I realized that making a matrix joke about gender and sexuality wasn't particularly original.
(or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).
Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina? I will admit that I've found some people who call themselves trans men attractive, but this is on the "I have changed literally nothing about my appearance--I am now wearing masculine clothing but I've done nothing irreversible--I am a proud trans-masc-femboy and this is a masculine pink skirt I'm wearing" spectrum of trans men, or in other words the ones where they could just say 'I am a woman' and no one would think anything of it. When male-pattern hair or surgeries start getting involved that's where my brain nopes out. I suppose that's a long-winded way of saying I'm not attracted to trans men.
At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on
I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.
Do you see a link between reinforcing those “masculine” behaviours and it decreasing your attraction to men? Sports and roughhousing especially. Nothing like seeing a hot fit guy take his shirt off in the locker room, or wrestling with the boys, to set a bicurious man straight…
No, probably not. I think if you're really interested in the masculine form, getting close and personal with it is probably going to be erotic. But more specifically, this world is full of gay bodybuilders and straight guys with a complicated relationship to sports.
My point was not really an apologetic for conversion therapy but was a personal reflection, I guess, on masculine norms and behaviors I see in myself and male friends, which I don't think have much to do with sexual orientation. Obviously, masculine norms are a sore spot for me and neither myself nor my father are very invested in sports culture, cars, or fishing, so I'm often a little amused and a little confused at this being considered constitutive of male identity. The overall topic is a Supreme Court decision, so in that connection, you can read what I said as as an urquan obiter dictum that's not really about the topic of conversion therapy.
In my opinion, conversion therapy of that kind is essentially medical fraud, in that it’s extracting money from gullible patients (or parents) for a “treatment” that cannot possibly work. The free speech argument could be used for a priest or a self-help coach, not a licensed therapist.
I think conversion therapy is unlikely to work. That said, I have a very critical view of many of the therapeutic modalities that licensed psychotherapists often make use of in their practice, like psychodynamic and humanistic methods that are re-headed 20th century woo, but nevertheless popular. The US government actually sometimes pays for veterans to receive EMDR therapy which supposedly 'works' and is 'evidence-based' in treating PTSD, but its actual theoretical basis of bilateral hemispheric stimulation is... wildly dubious, at best, and Wikipedia lists it on the pseudoscience category (same as conversion therapy, humorously enough) because there's no evidence its unique factors do anything.
Basically all therapies are evaluated on the basis of patient self-report, which means that patients' belief that something will work may be as important as any actual therapy method. This means that a huge portion of licensed therapists are, from my point of view, just extracting money from gullible patients for treatments that aren't based on any reasonable theory of how the human brain and mind work -- and nevertheless some of those patients, afterwards, say "wow doc, joie de vivre! joie de vivre!"
I don't really love the whole teen pray away the gay summer camp thing, and Lord knows residential programs intended to cough straighten-out religious youth are often questionable-to-evil, but I have serious concerns that singling out conversion therapy as a broad concept becomes an isolated demand for rigor from a profession for whom 'rigor' means 'lots of people said they liked it.
I'm not sure what the situation is like in various countries of Europe, but unfortunately, in the US, even the licensing system doesn't do much to prevent significant ethical breaches and therapeutic abuse. There's some wildly dark quackery that licensed therapists claim is therapeutic and whose damage goes far beyond conversion therapy. Jodi Hildebrandt used her sway over Mormon couples to separate children from their fathers because dad occasionally watched a pornhub video, and also prescribed much worse in terms of direct physical abuse and starvation of children for disobedience. Nevertheless -- licensed counselor, with the stain on her record prior to her criminal conviction being her violation of patient confidentiality, not the fact that her psychological and therapeutic theories were, let's say, not on this side of sanity.
Licensed therapists are already permitted to practice therapy that includes elements of a spiritual or religious tradition if this is disclosed and desired by the patient, and many people of faith explicitly seek out counselors who share their worldview (which, given how significant patient belief in the therapeutic modality is, probably means this is more effective for them). It's hard to meaningfully distinguish this from spiritual woo, quackery, and even conversion therapy to some extent, and the freedom of speech concern is that this targets the therapeutic desires of people of faith in a way that violates the fundamental principle of psychotherapy that patients are the ones in charge of shaping treatment goals. At some point, what you're saying is not that therapists can't try to convert their patients' sexuality or gender identity, it's that patients can't desire anything that rhymes with sexuality or gender identity conversion, and that's where the freedom of speech/expression concern comes into view.
If what you're calling for is something more akin to a complete rewrite of standards for psychotherapists and counselors as a profession, or criticism of parents using psychotherapy as a worldview weapon against their children -- I'm with you. But there are some deeper concerns in play.
Yes, and I tried my best! I didn’t want to be attracted to women for various reasons. But in the end feeling guilty over it didn’t help, and there’s no real point trying to repress it.
Ah, this took a turn I didn't expect. I can understand why a bisexual man might not want to be attracted to men (while pursuing a heterosexual marriage, for example), but it's interesting that a bisexual man or trans person might find being attracted to women distressing or guilt-inducing. I really like being attracted to women because women are pretty awesome, but also my pattern of attraction is almost exclusively to femininity, so I suppose it just works to my advantage.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
When I said something about 'the sticks of men's enforcement,' I didn't particularly mean 'putting rocks in people's shoes and having them walk around,' but I suppose that's not too far off from what I meant.
There's nothing wrong with sports, fishing, working on cars, and fixing things in some vague sense, although that does lean a bit towards a red tribe and slightly older application of masculine behavior, where a lot of younger guys are fixing computers and installing cat6 in their walls, doing carpentry, and yeah, playing sports/roughhousing alongside competitive gaming or local multiplayer as a bonding ritual. I don't know about putting rocks in your shoes (and that seems very old school Catholic to me, they might as well have been wearing cilices), but it is true that men generally admire competence, doing, endurance, skill, camaraderie, pursuit of an ideal, and stoicism, and I'd count myself among them. I'm willing to admit I'm stereotypical enough to be a fan of Marcus Aurelius.
I do think that sexual attraction is malleable to some degree, and it's probably not all that hard to get someone who's 80% attracted to women to be 99% attracted to women, and perhaps even vice versa. There's probably some segment of the bisexual population for which sexual attraction can be a conditioned stimulus in one direction or another, but I suspect that it would be impossible to make a gay man exclusively attracted to women just as much as it would be impossible to make a straight man exclusively attracted to men.
I’m bisexual myself and despite my best efforts, I never felt like base attraction was something I could exert real control over. Behaviour, yes, but not the underlying desire.
Did you want to exert control to change your base attraction?
I think those are good things to think about, but it’s genuinely hard to give advice when all we know is generalities.
I don’t know what you mean by “meltdowns”, but sometimes people do have an extreme reaction to stress. How much of a dealbreaker that is depends on how serious the stress was — if your young child is brutally murdered and you writhe in fits of anguish, I don’t know that many people are going to say that’s unexpected. It depends on what the stress was, what the meltdown was, and exactly how that interfaces with your own emotional resilience. That was probably the topic of the couples’ counseling.
It’s highly common for men dating women to struggle with her emotional reactions to stress, because the way women deal with and externalize stress is just different from the way men tend to (but not always). Keeping up with the basics like engaging in active listening, supportive communication, and distinguishing venting from solutions-focused conversation is good. But you have to couple that with a sense of internal stability: often what women want from their man in an emotional crisis is a feeling of protection, reassurance, stability, and steadfastness. And knowing how to respectfully listen while guiding her away from the feeling of stress and towards that feeling of protection and reassurance is a very helpful relationship skill. You have to lead and stabilize without being domineering.
What does stand out to me in your description is that you live separately, and in fact an hour away — LDRs are always, always hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with emotional struggles, because one of the selling points of a relationship is that they’re a person who provides physical affection when you’re struggling.
We talk about women getting physical affection from their girlfriends, but it is extremely common, almost ubiquitous, for women to find being held and embraced by their man extremely calming and protective in a special way, for reasons we could write evopsych stories about until the cows come home. What I’ve found in relationships is that talking helps, but only to a point, and often finding a way to laugh, a distraction, a comforting presence, is more helpful to a partner in distress. So the struggle with your LDR may be that the most helpful element of a relationship is denied you most of the time, and that degrades things over time. Relationships are fundamentally about physical touch.
Do you video chat frequently? Sometimes just seeing your beau’s face, their smile, their eyes, can help you feel more connected. If you’re both part of the blue bubble master race, you can use SharePlay to do things like watch YouTube or short videos together, which might give you an opportunity to laugh together. That’s powerful.
But the most important thing you can do is work to make this LDR into a short-distance relationship. Getting yourselves closer together in whatever way you can is extremely important. A relationship where you can just be together, casually, without counting the minutes, is a massive quality of life increase.
Another thing that I see is that you talked only in generalities about your connection, your intimacy — what brought you two together? What drew you to her? What kinds of things do you do, when you’re in that fun and playful mood? When you’re together, what makes you inseparable? Being able to understand what you like about the relationship, and what’s unique about your bond compared to other bonds you’ve had, is absolutely essential to answering the question about whether you want to move forward with the relationship or not.
I hope this helps.
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