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.
No email address required.
Notes -
The "don't try to change your partner" advice is more about not making your love conditional upon them changing, than it is about not encouraging them to improve. If you guys marry, it will be your duty to try to point out when she has serious deficiencies, and to try to help her work on those things. But you need to be willing to accept the fact that she may not change, and love her regardless.
So I think your point about making sure our love is not conditioned on them changing is salient.
I'd like to give you more details and ask for your thoughts as someone in a long, successful relationship.
One thing that matters A LOT to me is quality of conversation. To me having good conversations with people is one of the most important things in my life. With my friends, I get this a lot, partly because I have very interesting friends, but also because I only get updates from them ever week at most, meaning there is always time to develop where there is always something new and interesting to say.
However, with my girlfriend, we talk every day. Meaning our conversation often feels like a "What did you do today?" conversation, and it often feels surface level stuff. And I'm finding that trying to
Do you have any suggestions for me that I could change to make our daily calls more interesting and engaging?
I am midst a similar situation as you, finding such things trying as well, and my strategy has been to change myself to stop caring about how interesting I find such calls. I've learned to simply see it as just another one of the many boring, rote work that goes into making a relationship work. The way I see it, just like how having sex whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it, is one of the duties of being a good romantic partner, so too is having conversations whether or not you're, in the moment, enthusiastic about it.
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