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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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.
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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).
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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?Been a while since I've dealt with an LDR, but some simple mechanical advice:
As a man, you probably only contact people when you have something to say to them, and typically only when you need something from them. You aren't contacting her just to chat and show general affection, you're contacting her to solve a problem (often one that rhymes with "she wants me to call her") or when you're horny or to organize something.
Your goal in an LDR is to tie her into your life, show her you are thinking about her, so that she doesn't feel so far away.
Send her pics of your day. Not necessarily selfies of you, but just of funny advertisements, pretty wildflowers, or traffic jams, or your workout equipment, or the sky, or a screenshot of your phone when a song is playing that "reminds you of her." She's the person you want to share these things with, and when you see them she's the person you think of, and you wish she was there.
Send her articles you read that you think she might be interested in, then discuss them. Ideally, she's interested in the same articles you would be reading anyway, but we can't all be so lucky, so be prepared to invest a little time finding articles she will like. "Hey, I saw this, what's your take?" Then throw in some lovey dovey before/after along the lines of "I'm so happy I have you, there's no one else I trust/believe/is smart enough/gets it/shares my values who I can talk about this with." Makes her feel valued, and brings you closer.
Utilize the work of others. You have trouble doing expressions of affection, but luckily there's a huge industrial complex online of people producing sappy content. There's an effectively infinite quantity of content on twitter (and probably other places) that's a picture of two cute animals, or an historical painting, or hell of two literal spoons, with the caption "us if we were..." She will like that.
Good luck my friend.
All good advice, thanks. These are things I know I should do but aren't in the habit of actually doing them casually, will work on it.
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