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Wellness Wednesday for May 20, 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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Context: still seeing my high scoring secretary, and thinking through some things.

Married/serious-relationship'd Mottizens: not how did you find them, but what was the process like once you did?

E.g.:

  1. how quickly did things get serious?
  2. how obvious was it to you that you wanted them to get serious?
  3. and how quickly?
  4. was there something that at first you thought was maybe unacceptable that you got over?
  5. oppositely, something great you didn't notice/fully appreciate?
  6. or, was your gut just correct quickly?
  1. timeline from first meeting (i was old, she was new joining at workplace) when i wasn't thinking about new relationship TO serious thinking 2 months. From serious thinking to "Surely this is the one" 3 months more.
  2. it was neck-to-neck for my case about seriousness about each other. (she proposed first though)
  3. mentioned above.
  4. No, there was nothing that was unacceptable. but my mentality has been - whatever was or could be a problem, i was / am sure to overcome it.
  5. when two people want each other in same order of magnitude (not lopsided like man wanting woman much more than she wanting him back OR vice versa), then there are so many things which become smooth. Then there is no need to do bookkeeping of who did what and how much for whom. I think, i only realize now when that sort of thing is not needed to be done and how easy it makes life for both the persons.

Some other thoughts:

  1. i had some sort of long list of things we realized for each other - at that time, i had put something like our relationship has reached level 1, 2, and so on for 18-19 levels till i counted. after that, i stopped.
  2. for us, time didn't matter. at one time, it was a possibility that we would not be able to see each other for a long time - and it was okay. it didn't change the internal feelings.
  3. it all was a gut feeling kind of thing. i can still remember the first day when i saw her coming into the common room and saying something to someone else (i can still remember the texture of the voice). maybe it can be labeled as serious attraction at first sight and first listen. all the mind's calculations were put aside by me (as such, i tend to be analyst, just not in this case). in this case, it was - this is really the one, whatever my mind says i will manage later. whether that is a good idea in all other cases, i don't know. this is n=1 situation.

To compare:

  1. this kind of thing had happened once before. but in that case, it was a feeling only in me and not the girl. Lopsided. Would have definitely failed later on, even if it would have been an arranged marriage sort of thing (Indian context).
  2. Other time, it was partly the opposite way. The girl had serious crush on me, and i didn't have (lopsided again). We still proceeded and it was a long drawn painful experience for each of us (she remained always insecure about me, being very jealous of my normal interactions with other people, lot of long drawn mega-fights taken to extremes). Eventually, parting away was the only way out. But it remained a really bad experience overall.
  3. few in-betweens, timepasses you can say.

In short, my personal mantras would be: nearly equal levels of attraction with each other, no deep insecurities in either of the persons, gut feeling and not completely mind / excel calculations.