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Wellness Wednesday for January 28, 2026

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).

Jump in the discussion.

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He seems to regard the protesting as mostly a harmless social activity that he groups together with going to record stores and restaurants. I get the sense his wife is basically dragging him to this ("I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting") and he is playing the role of an agreeable husband that regards this like his wife dragging him to a museum or board game night, so he is happy to go there and shout obscenities for a few hours in between other tourist activities. I know it sounds cliche, but there is just such beta energy radiating off the entire post.

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?

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.