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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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?Girl here. @kky makes a great point about starting fights (especially with big reconciliations) sometimes being an unconscious bid to restore emotional intimacy when the relationship feels stuck.
Note that although Words of Affection or whatever are the official Love Language, the actual underlying currency is attention, intimacy and low-key daily consideration. There's solid evolutionary reason that many women respond to this, because if a partner is fundamentally not interested in a woman as a person, if he gets no great positive utility from caring for her and knowing she's happy day-to-day, if he's not the kind of guy who can notice and spontaneously help if she or a kid are struggling, then that's a very dangerous partner to risk a potentially difficult pregnancy plus years of infant caregiving with.
If paying mechanical compliments feels too weird, with many women you can also maintain feelings of relational care and intimacy in other ways:
Asking more questions, especially about her emotional state or other intimate topics as a follow-up to superficial life updates ("how did you feel about that?" "wow, was that really hard on you, given [past trend]?" "what are you really excited about this week?"). There's a list of random intimate questions called The 36 Questions to Fall In Love circulating somewhere, with some good possibilities if you need ideas.
If you ask a question about feelings, not offering pushback or disagreement about the feelings themselves, just affectionately validating. If you think she's 100% wrong and crazy in a situation, you can express generic care like "you are trying so hard, wish I could be there to give you a hug."
Remembering her answers to past questions and actively following up in a supportive way ("what happened with that big work project, anyway? were you happy with how it turned out? what is Sharon scheming about these days?"). If you can, try to compliment any admirable things about her approach and validate that her negative feelings are OK to feel.
Sharing little intimate details about your own feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, vulnerabilities as a way of requesting care from her (nothing actually icky/humiliating unless it's in the past). This is the Ben Franklin Effect for emotional labor and it works really well: just look at how many romance heroes have tragic backstories requiring the heroine's sympathy.
Engineering any little acts of care so that they also express low-key attention- so don't just send an article link, send an article relevant to something she mentioned, with a note "your mentioning __ got me thinking about __ and I thought I'd send this. I love that we can explore this together!"
Man I really have a whole talmud to properly internalize heh, thanks for the advice. I really like the idea of Ben Franklining here but that might be temporarily off the table given the current situation.
Well uh see, that's... kind of the crux here. I am very interested in her, I care for her greatly and derive a lot of satisfaction from
my savior complexdoing it (in fact I have inflicted quite a bit of my residual rat programming on the unwitting gal, to which she took pretty well even). The problem is twofold: I can't express it "visibly", and accordingly my acts of service as it were don't scan to her as explicitly romantic gestures (which she needs), even as she acknowledges the care in the same breath.I know this is going to look like a massive red flag from her but I assure you I really am that oblivious, the anime comparison wasn't metaphorical, so at least some frustration on her part is warranted here. To be perfectly blunt, I am the type of nigga to be texted "please educate me :3" at night and respond with "actually I think you're taking your lessons well so far, good job!". This has not been bad enough in the past, but the rift is growing, even as she clearly still perceives me as a potential partner and continues to reject dates IRL in my favor.
This is not to say that I don't feel frustrated too; if the above sounds like mixed signals - yes they fucking are, so to some extent I stubbornly hope that if a woman sends you mixed signals, she herself is confused and wants to be told what to think about us, and that I can learn how to drill that into her before the rift is unsalvageable.
Hard to say much without specific examples. But if this is an AFAB person and she's saying she feels cared for but not romanced, or seems appreciative but also a little disappointed, then possible issues could be
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