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).
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Notes -
This comment excerpt gave me a fun idea: The Chad harem/offspring-maxxxing doctors and lawyers explain to the autist incel programmers and engineers their personal understandings of how friendship and romance work!
Even before I realized that familiarity inevitably breeds contempt and stopped making attempts at pseudo-friendship, I absolutely hated the idea of obtaining an actual friend or a romantic partner only to be constantly forced by that person to do random things in which I had no interest. It seemed like a continuation of how my parents would torture me by making me join after-school clubs and dragging me to museums, concerts, and weddings.
I assumed that any friend or romantic partner would require me to do such things. But now @daguerrean says that only an inferior, weak-willed "beta" man allows his romantic partner to lead him around by the nose to random events. So, is it normal friendship/romance behavior to drag the other party to an event in which he is not interested, or not? Has my entire life been a lie?
I do things with my partner that aren't my cup of tea all the time. She gets so damned excited that I participate with her that I can't help but enjoy myself. If it's the right person, it won't feel like you're being forced at all.
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Only boring people are bored. There are simply very, very few things I cannot enjoy when with my wife or a close friend. If I don't like it naturally, I find a way to make myself like it. The idea that every experience in one's day will be perfectly to one's own taste is a modern conceit.
With few exceptions* my wife and I enjoy almost everything we do together. We're together, so that's nice. And I can find my own way to enjoy almost anything. My wife wanted to invite all her friends over to watch The Bachelor, which is distinctly not my kind of thing. So I found the autists out there doing sports-podcast Sabermetrics analysis of the episodes, and now I had my hook. How long did Madysyn's Hug-Jump last? How did her HuJu compare to Bryttunee's? Will this affect her odds of making the final four and Seeing Sand? I make her go hiking with me, she makes it fun for herself by picking out fun hiking outfits and aesthetics.
Though, in all honesty, I sometimes feel guilty about my relationship with Mrs. FiveHour, because intellectually I buy into the idea that modern marriages are asked to be entirely too much. But she genuinely is my best friend, and that's just how it is.
*colloquially referred to in our relationship as "Harbor Freighting" after my wife's reaction to being in a Harbor Freight store and being violently and instantly bored while I vaguely browsed buying solar panels or a house jack or something else I didn't need
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My uncle – a far more accomplished psychiatrist than I –* was telling me about getting his passport renewed and the very first stamp being from Chad. I told him it was a missed opportunity that he went to Niger next, instead of the Virgin Islands.
Look dawg, your autism is weapons-grade. Distilled in a lab. It's absolutely dual-use technology, you use it for both great good and mild evil. I'm not sure that there's any advice anyone could give you that would completely change the way your neurons are wired. It's not like doctors can't be autistic, just look at @SkookumTree.
This varies a great deal. I've been in relationships where I've been subjected to stimuli as unpleasant as an ex making me watch stupid Victorian period dramas with her, and getting mad should I express disinterest or glance at my phone. I still shudder when I hear Taylor Swift, but other lovers have at least used earphones.
But the majority of my partners, and anyone I choose to call a friend, have been relatively understanding. In an ideal world, the fact that you're not interested in an activity should be both necessary and sufficient when it comes to getting them to desist from asking you to join them.
The Victorian-drama ex and I failed because she operated on the fusion model—she believed that love meant merged experience, that my dislike of her shows was a dislike of her. This wasn't true, for the record. I only started disliking her when she made my life a living hell in other ways.
Constantly forced? That's too much. I'd call that a deal breaker. But it's not that big of a deal to accompany a lovely lady to a summer market, or let her tell me about a new show she's watching.
Some claim that a partner should mirror your tastes. I think that's far from necessary. Commonality in values and beliefs is far more important than shared interests. If I want to talk about video games and AGI, that's what you mfs are for. Of course, you can get away with a little ho-scaring when you actually love each other, in the same way she's okay with you seeing her without makeup.
The man in the comment you linked is being mocked not because he is compromising, but because he is compromising on dignity rather than just preference. I have never been desperate enough for female attention to go to a protest for a cause I do not believe in. That involves a violation of my internal moral compass. Going to a museum just involves sore feet.
Relationships, like actual ships, require routine maintenance. You don't really resent a car for an oil change, and occasionally listening to something that doesn't actually interest you isn't that big a deal when you're getting mileage out of it.
*All em-dashes artisanally crafted by hand.
You placed this footnote on an en dash, not on an em dash. The difference between the two characters was recently discussed here.
And then you used an em dash later in the same comment. Such a blatant inconsistency gives your detractors a lot of ammo…
I'm only human. Self-made, in fact :(
They're both on long presses of "-" — — and I can't tell a difference when it's rendered here.
I recommend typing "& mdash;" and "& ndash;" without the spaces.
I didn’t know this was an option.
I do what @stolen_brawnze describes, even with the same fingering. I don’t smash the thumb though; it’s just more of an mp on the thumb as opposed to the p on the trill.
ETA: Ah, apparently it’s indeed not an option in software such as Word. It’s an HTML thing.
We need more musical dynamics for keyboard strokes, whenever they are mentioned.
Stenographers use chorded keyboards.
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Reading the specification (1 2) is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… üñńâţūŗàļ.
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I'm an alt + 0151 man myself. If you have a number pad it's a simple smash of the thumb and a trill between forefinger and middle finger.
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Yesterday I dragged my fiancee to the gym. She dragged me to half priced books and Venezuelan food after we showered. This is generally considered to be what humans call a 'date'.
If one of us wished to drag the other person to an event they were not interested in, like a boardgame night, or an Emily Autumn concert, we would simply not do that and live would go on. The whole process is a negotiation. We each engage with the other's interests because we are interested in the other person. Like in any negotiation, not being willing to allow the other parties to walk all over you does a great deal to prevent the other parties from walking all over you.
As a male who likes the occasional boardgame, I would agree that regularly getting dragged to board game nights is big beta male energy if you don't. My fiancee likes plenty of nerdy stuff, but she doesn't like those, so she generally hangs out with someone else and watches anime instead whenever I attend one.
Did you find this terribly objectionable?
No, that's why we got it. It isn't my favorite, not a huge smother everything with cheese guy, and that place is a little expensive for the serving size, but it's good grub.
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Okay, I feel obligated to defend myself. I don't really find anything objectionable in doing things your wife enjoys for the sake of the relationship. It was just that post in particular that gave me a vibe that this man has no agency or convictions while his wife is a shrieking harpy calling the shots in the relationship. The other thing is, he is talking about basically dedicating hours every day of his vacation to standing outside protesting in Minneapolis in January, there is a point where it crosses over from being kind and accommodating to your spouse to being a doormat. You should do things your spouse wants to, but IMO you should also feel comfortable saying "Go by yourself, I don't want to do that." Now granted, my wife doesn't really go out, so the extent of this for me is watching reality shows I don't care for. I usually just go to daguerreotype-related things myself without dragging my wife along. I don't understand why some couple feel the need to do everything together.
I also think protests are a bit different. I think protests are supposed to imply some level of personal conviction that going to a museum doesn't. In that sense a protest is maybe more similar to attending religious services. And going to daily protests in the winter in Minneapolis is like the equivalent of attending years of church services you personally think are BS because your wife likes them.
You know, in one of your linked comments you had a list of 700 questions which I enjoyed, reminds me I've been meaning to make a survey for Motte users which I should post.
Do it! I love doing surveys.
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"I am not as brave as my wife."
This was a red flag to me. I think this entire fundamental question comes down to the fact that your wife has to respect you. If your wife respects you, she will accept your saying no to things without pique; indeed she will take into account whether you'd be interested in going to something before she even asks you to. I'm not saying you need to "dominate" your relationship or anything like that - as the other commenters note, you should always be looking for opportunities to make your wife happy, even if it inconveniences you greatly; that's part of what you're signing up for.
If seeing your wife happy is a priority for you, you'll gladly do all kinds of silly stuff that's not for you; and you won't think about the cost to you. Many are the hours I've spent loitering in quilt shops for this reason, lol. But I also know that if I tell her no, I'm not going to thing X or Y, it'll just be accepted. I feel like if your partner does not respect you, then she'll have an expectation you'll go along with what she says no matter what, and if you don't she'll feel justified in being mad about it.
I have to believe this was self-deprecating.
What I imagine he meant, and maybe I'm projecting, is that his wife does not believe that harm will come to her the way it does to men. And that's generally correct; men will swarm her if she gets pushed around at a protest. Pretti died after swooping to the aid of a woman. The Good lookers-on were horrified to learn those were real bullets. We simply expect easy mode to be turned on for women.
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Relationships are all about compromise, and give and take. You demonstrate your affection for your partner by doing things that she wants to do and you don't: after all, if they were things you enjoyed doing, you'd do them anyway. It's the fact that you're willing to sacrifice your time and resources to do something for her that demonstrates how important she is to you. The important thing is that it cuts both ways: if you're doing things for her that you don't enjoy, there's a reasonable expectation that she return the favour. But try not to think about this too much, or you run the risk of making your relationship seem cheap and transactional, a ledger that requires constant balancing. If you want her to watch a dumb action movie with you, when she asks you to come for dinner with her parents, just smile and say "of course, dear". Or buy her flowers or something. It's not rocket science. If it's weak-willed or "beta" to do things for your partner that you don't really want to do, well, that just sounds kind of exploitative to me. Good luck finding a girlfriend who's completely happy for you to walk all over her and never do anything for her in return.
I don't think this ordinary fact about romantic relationships should discourage you from getting into one. If you were to ask me to list the things about my girlfriend that most get on my nerves, the fact that she occasionally drags me along to go window-shopping with her would not crack the top ten, the top twenty, probably not even the top fifty.
If I do have a line in the sand, it's preference falsification. If my girlfriend wants me to come to some boring museum exhibition with her, I'll go along happily. If she wants me to attend a protest for some political cause I emphatically don't support (say, a "Free Palestine" rally), that's a hard no. Even the idea of a single man going to a protest he doesn't believe in just to meet girls makes me feel gross. And yes, it does strike me as a bit lame to performatively attend a protest you wouldn't attend otherwise just because your wife wants you to.
This is one of those generic pieces of casual advice that literally leads people into hell.
I'm not writing this to attack you, @FtttG, but to attack that idea.
Relationships are not about compromise unless there is a greater goal to compromise for. Otherwise, this is a circular argument that is also negatively compounding. Think about this rephrase;
"Relationships are all about compromise. When I want to do something that my wife doesn't want to do, she compromises her own happiness (just a little!) to make me happy. Likewise, when she wants to do something that I don't, I do it, and compromise my own happiness (just a little!), to make her happy. The relationship net happiness is totally the same, right? Not at all slowly degraded."
The intent, genuine as it is, is to maintain system stability in the relationship. But if the "goal" is the current state of affairs, then every possible choice becomes overweight in risk because every possible choice represents a potential change to the system. Soon enough you get into defection problems. Think of this scene; Guy wants to go our for guys night, has already informed his girlfriend / wife of his intention days before, she has agreed, but, then, at the moment he is pocketing his keys to leave, she hits him with the puppy dog eyes and asks if, maybe, just this one time he can stay home and watch Netflix with her. Why? Because there is no direct relationship upside to him hanging out with the guys. Sure, sure, he needs time with his friends and all, but there's the much higher risk that some bar slut will make a move (or is that just a perceived risk?). The point stands.
My counter is that relationships are about two people working towards a defined mission. Usually, thats the having and rearing of children. When it isn't, there has to be something beyond mutual emotional support (which is stasis). Perhaps that something is being the DINK couple that travels a bunch. "Babe, we're going to hit 50 countries this year if we save and budget!" maybe it's the fitness couple - they run marathons together. It doesn't matter what the particular goal is just that The Goal is there and third party to mutual emotional support. Then, you can "compromise" because both parties can see it as a positive sum sacrifice for that external goal. The guy stays home from boys night because the drinking will impair his training. The girl doesn't nest up the couch and binge watch netflix because that means missing a training session.
I think I have to disagree here. I have no idea if I'm qualified to give any advice here, all I have is N=1 data point of 20+ year long marriage. But I don't think it requires KPI goals. I mean it's cool if you run marathons together, but it's not a requirement. People being comfortable together and genuinely interested in each other's happiness is a requirement. That's where the compromise comes from. If I want to do something, and I suspect my wife may be not ok with it, I ask, and she can say no. Or she can say yes. Or if she says no, and I really feel like I need it, we can talk about it. The key here we want to find that point where we're both happy - or at least, the least amount of unhappy - about the outcome. It's not a mathematical formula and it's not a ledger, if you start keeping balance on it, you're going to get in trouble. But it's totally about sometimes just doing something you otherwise wouldn't do because your partner wants you to. If you're going to be good long-term partners, you will be able to find a way to figure out how to negotiate those things, everybody does it in a different way. If you can not find a way to do it, then probably the partnership is not going to work out.
This sentence scares the shit out of me.
But then what happens? It's a very nice and good and smart modernist idea to think that when a married couple realizes they aren't good for one another that an amicable and professional divorce takes place.
In reality, however, divorces are some of the most (figuratively) violent experiences people have. Many, many divorced people never truly recover. Most, I'd wager, have, at least, a year or two of personal and financial setback. And, of course, outcomes for children of divorce and uniformly inferior to their stable household peers.
My whole point is that I want discourse around relationships to actually be helpful to them instead of milquetoast generalities that do nothing but sound and or feel good. Dating is one thing and breakups are fine. But when the marriage contract is signed, it's such a massive commitment that you need all the tools and good information you can get.
Why? You can't expect be perfectly happy all the time when dealing with other people - or anything, really. If the dog vomited on the carpet, somebody has to clean up. Nobody likes to clean up dog's vomit from the carpet. Somebody will be unhappy about it. There's no option to avoid it - just to minimize the unhappiness.
Hopefully you can figure it out before marrying each other. If that didn't happen, it sucks. Hopefully, you can recognize what happened and cut the losses. If you can't, it really sucks.
Don't underestimate milquetoast generalities. They are generalities because they are often true. And a real lot of people dismiss it too readily before actually examining them properly. They feel like "oh surely I do this, everybody does this" - but everybody doesn't do this, and to do this requires untrivial amount of work and attention. Including how to negotiate things with your partner that it won't cause you both being worn down to dust and ashes.
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IANAC but I believe that while daguerrean is saying that that specific instance of being drug along to a protest (and certainly the way the guy describes it) is beta-ish, the standard going along shopping/to the museum/etc. (presumably harmless social activities) with your wife/girlfriend are not necessarily.
Certainly a big part of being married is being a good sport and going along with your wife/husband to events that you might not otherwise. In ideal circumstances you'd both only ever do stuff you both enjoy but that's just not realistic unless you've achieved mythical 100% compatibility. I've certainly taken my wife to stuff that she's been less than enthusiastic about, but at least we come away with a shared experience and maybe something to laugh about later. For my part, I tolerate the occasional shopping trip.
So no, your entire life has not been a lie, and yes romantic partners will want you to do stuff.
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