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’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
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