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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So I've been with my girlfriend for 2 years now and I'd like some advice.
First some context.
When we first got together, we both had the classic puppy dog infatuation phase with each other. Absolutely head over heels with one another and I never wanted to stop being around her. But as time went on I discovered some pretty major red flags about her, for example she had (emphasis on the past tense here) a VERY extreme response to stress and had full meltdowns in ways that were incredibly hard for me to emotionally handle. And this led me to what I've been defining as the paradox of relationship advice, stemming from the tension of two common pieces of relationship advice:
But ultimately tl;dr. What do people think here about the paradox that I've laid out.
Bonus context: To her credit, she made real results here. She did some serious self-reflection, and we did couples counseling together and really made an improvement.
My issue now is that I'm noticing more and more deal-breaking issues that I feel like really need to be addressed, and she does keep trying to make improvements, and really does improve. But I feel stuck feeling like things still feel wrong, and I can't tell if this is due to:
First bullet says don't try change the other person, the second bullet says try to change yourself. A characteristic of someone is their willingness or desire to change in order to help their relationship with you; this is something you shouldn't go into a relationship expecting to change about them. They either will or won't change themselves to help the relationship they have with you, and your efforts to influence that will have minimal effect at best. So find someone who is willing to change for you (rather than someone you find attractive that you believe you can change into the kind of person who would change for you) and change yourself to help your relationship with them. This doesn't seem paradoxical.
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