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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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
It's entirely possible that my views will change later, but I was asked to specify, so I did. There is nothing "digging in" here, and I also think that these values were not particularly rare until recently, and I also think that values cannot be changed so easily, and if they were changed easily, then there's not much weight to your principles in the first place. I understand you've had a lot of casual sex, so the viewpoint is probably alien to you. But yes, sex is different to me. It would be convenient if it was not, and it would be convenient if I liked tattoos or fat women, too.
Edited to add: The softening of my young Earth creationist views took literal years of seeing with my own eyes that the Bible is not literally true, that bad things happen to good people for little reason, years of seeing other Christians mention that the "Inspired Word" meant that the Bible could be fallible in a multitude of places, and finally punctuated with taking some geology classes that laid out the evidence for an old Earth irrefutably. The equivalent for sex would probably be to try to get into a bunch of relationships. That is probably ultimately what I need, and it fits with other commenters' advice to just stop thinking so much and go out and do things.
I went without having sex well into my twenties, for what it's worth, largely because I saw it as a sacred act at the time but also because I was terrified of screwing up (no pun intended). And of various other parts involving intimacy. It scared me. I sometimes wonder if my own mystification of sex was a smokescreen for that. But yes, getting outside one's head does wonders.
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