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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Weekly relationship advice thread go, this time I'll be the starter
surprisingly.Through an extremely unlikely chain of circumstances, last year I acquired an irregular interlocutor on one of my hobbies, shortly turned regular interlocutor, and over a ~year eventually tangled and mutated into a basically full-on long distance relationship because it turns out there are girls on the Internet, even in the most unexpected corners.
It's... not going well. Being a resigned ex-rat wizard a decade out of RL practice is setting me back a lot, and I am physically feeling my lack of social experience, recently more than ever when we are having fights nearly every day. I increasingly feel we are not speaking the same language, as it were - specifically, it turns out despite proclaiming myself a vanillachad I am really bad at displays of affection when I can't be physically present, and not only can I not make them sound natural but I can barely make them come out sometimes, because to me they always sound like empty platitudes even when I genuinely mean it, and I fear them being seen as such. My anime-protag-tier obliviousness to signals and shit is also not serving me well here, because a woman genuinely being romantically attracted to me is uh, a novel experience. As I understand there is a lot of frustration on the other side because I've been oblivious to it for a long time, and I internalized it properly very late. I can only hope it's not too late.
I sense we are approaching critical mass, and despite the repeated emotional damage (on both sides) I am determined to try and salvage this. I'm not sure how bullshit/placebo the idea of the five love languages is, but it seems like a useful heuristic here to couch what I see as my main problem - as in, me being a pretty stereotypical nerd/sperg/techie who never expected to actually have a fallible human heart. I sincerely wish to Actually Change My Mind, for reasons not limited to romantic ones, but it does not come easy even in what I consider an almost best case scenario (I genuinely wonder how she puts up with my sperg shit for this long).
How do you deal with "language" mismatches in relationships? Is it possible to learn someone's "preferred" language, or more generally properly internalize displays of affection so it comes more naturally? (e.g she obviously needs compliments and affectionate words but it doesn't come naturally to me, I'm more of a stoic/silent/protective type which doesn't translate well to LD) Is my difficulty with it a sign of
autismsomething else, like platonic attraction, since I'm led to believe it should come naturally if you truly capital-L Love someone?I'll go the opposite the other commenters here. I'm started being in an international LD relationship about 6 years ago. I arranged for us to meet for a week within 6 months of starting the relationship. After that, COVID made meeting again difficult, but I arranged for her to come visit me for some months regardless. We were married before she went back home. She moved in permanently with me in 2023.
It's super basic bitch pop-psych but the most important thing to remember is that venting from a woman is not a prompt for you to fix an issue and absolutely not a prompt for you to try and dedramatise the issue. It's a prompt for you to say an "empty platitude" like "oh, that sucks, I hope things gets better". It's hard because your rational brain is telling you the issues can be fixed, or that she just needs a different perspective. Vast majority of the time, this is not helpful.
The empty platitudes might feel empty to you, but if you actually love her then they are not empty if you're saying them to help her feel better.
Hahahaha! No. If I were to ask any man I know in a long-term straight relationship I will get the same lament; "it's like we're talking a different language". It's a miracle humanity managed to pair bond for so long. Marriage (and serious relationships that are indistinguishable from marriages) are hard, it's not a capital L Love issue; it's a two completely different human beings with different lives, histories and wildly different brain chemistry are trying to get on the same page to act as one. Both people need to learn to at least understand the other's language, and ideally talk it at least a bit.
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