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Wellness Wednesday for December 21, 2022

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).

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When I was trying to decide if I was going to propose to my wife, I talked to my dad and brother (two people I highly respected) about things. Which is something I highly recommend you do as well. Talk to some men (I assume you're a man) who you respect and have experience with marriage. For me at least, the most valuable part of the experience wasn't advice. It was that to try to answer the questions they asked me, my own thoughts got sorted out as I tried to come up with an answer.

One specific question my dad asked me I found very helpful. He said "it comes down to this: are you better off with her, or without her?". And as I thought about it, I decided that I was in fact better off with my then-girlfriend. I had a good woman who I could be happy with, and that was what mattered. Like @janeerie, I don't believe in "the one". Getting married isn't about finding some mythical perfect partner, but about saying "yeah I'm happy with her, this will be good" and taking happiness in what you have.

What do you do if you have never met anyone who you can respect?

Hmm I am not sure what I would have done in such a case. I'm hoping that it's pretty uncommon and that most people have at least one person they respect to talk to. But if you truly have nobody, then you might need to fall back on trying to get advice from books or something?

I'm just asking as the advice hinges on that factor is all.

Sure. I would imagine it would be pretty uncommon for someone to not have anyone they respect to talk to. But in the case that they don't, my advice wouldn't work.