The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am legitimately worried that my girlfriend will break up with me if/when she finds out that I voted for Trump. She has always been an incredibly sweet and kind person, but her social media since the election has become unhinged. Like, some are more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit. We basically don't talk politics at all with each other, and I have no intention of changing that, but I am a bad liar with a terrible poker face, so if she becomes suspicious there’s not much I can do (I also have ethical qualms with lying, but these are essentially moot given the concerns above.)
EDIT: She found out. She was VERY upset. I'm like 75% sure its over.
Was a conversation held? Reasons given? A good old fashioned discussion? Sorry it just seems bizarre to me that personal intimacy to the point where you'd call each other girl/boy friend can be destroyed by this. Facebook unfriending, sure. Dropping of acquaintanceship across the internet, yes, I've seen it. But breaking up with someone you're supposed to be somewhat intimate with? Over a vote? Maybe this reveals enough fundamental disagreements that you are just not compatible, but I would have imagined such things would have come to light earlier.
I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.
It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.
It doesn't help if you never discuss it. Steel Manning her position here: she wouldn't have reached that level of intimacy had she known up front, there was an element of fraud to the proceedings.
Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."
This is a very obvious false equivalency and I'm not sure how you don't see it. Failing to disclose something, like your debts, that you know will affect the other partner personally is beyond the pale precisely because it is so relevant to their future wellbeing - you can't really say you care for a person and yet want to dupe them into taking on your debts.
Something like voting for Trump, on the other hand, is just not super relevant to the other partner's personal life or material wellbeing outside of "You hold opinions I don't like and that makes me feel bad". Who your partner voted for is not your business in the way that your partner's debts are your business. If someone wants to abandon a relationship for that reason, it's certainly their prerogative, but it is their own hangup that's at fault.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link