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’m gonna be real with you here. This specific relationship is probably not gonna work out. However, that doesn’t mean it was a mistake. It’s learning how to be in a relationship, and most centrally, that women can be attracted to you. I get that it’s new, but it’s probably going to keep happening, especially if you keep hanging around places with women (hopefully offline soon enough).
@FiveHourMarathon is on the money with the specifics. Women love feeling special and attended to. Something he didn’t mention, but I should, is that some women experience this in the form of a fight. This is the borderline case in a nutshell. Women who get into relationships online are fairly likely to be borderline, if not maladjusted in other ways. The pattern to watch out for is volatility. She will draw away, try to make you mad, try to make you jealous, and start a fight in some capacity. Then, after the fight, she will get much more clingy and attached. Even otherwise normal women will do this from time to time, to a minor extent, if they’re feeling understimulated or stressed in the relationship, as a sort of way of venting and then getting affection, but in borderlines this is extreme and constant.
If she has concrete things she wants out of you, and providing them makes her happier, then you’re in a good spot. If she’s impossible to satisfy, see the notes above, and bail when it gets to be too much. I hope it’s not the case, there is a very good chance that it’s just the kind of ordinary fighting that men and women get up to (note: NOT a bad thing, my now-wife and I fought a ton when we were first dating, things got way better), but it’s the kind of thing that can waste years of your life and hair off your head if not handled right.
Also, love is not really best thought of as a natural expression of deep and abiding emotions. Save that for the chicks. Love is about day-to-day duties of caring for and about another human. That means doing things that feel artificial until they become second nature. Why? Because you care about the person, and you want them to be happy. It will feel good too when you get it just right. So don’t lose hope on that front, and don’t forget to ask for what matters to you, too.
Finally, for the whole “how can she like me” thing, never forget that a woman’s heart is ever a mystery to men. Frequently to other women, and themselves, too. Even if there’s an explanation, there’s no way you could ever get it, not least because you’re not gay. (I think.) So don’t stress it. It’s just how things are sometimes.
Thanks for the advice.
Not gonna lie I am seeing something similar lately, but it wasn't really there before I don't think, so I chalk it up to approaching critical mass.
This is mostly how I know what she wants, because (to damn with faint praise) she shows remarkable explicitness/honesty for a woman and has been pretty consistently patient with explaining things to my autistic ass, even during fights. It's actually a big part of why I want to salvage this because this uh... doesn't seem to be a common trait.
Basically I see my problem as, pardon the parlance, having to System 2 my way out of what is really a System 1 problem - my goal is to try and make "giving her what she wants" natural/instinctive instead of deliberative.
That's exactly how I see it to be fair, it's also why I asked whether my difficulty with it is a symptom of something else - like maybe if I actually cared or cared more, it would've been much easier to do.
Thankfully not heh, but I am
unwillinglylearning about the jo/y/s and tri/u/mphs of human relationships, although my last gf was a literal fujo so I have practice if nothing else.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link