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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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?
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.
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