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 -
On the inadvisable one.
I have managed to fall for a lesbian. I knew better. She told me to know better, clearly and kindly, the way you'd warn a man about a missing step on the stairs. I agreed with her assessment in full and missed the step anyway.
In my defense, the trap was well constructed. She's gorgeous. She laughs at my jokes against her own better judgment and then looks annoyed about it, which is twice the reward for half the effort. She is a genuinely good person who would deny this under oath. We walk a lot, the kind of walks where the conversation outlasts the route. I hate walking, really, but I always say yes and go running anyway. We get the occasional drink. The odds of this becoming anything more than what it is sit somewhere near the odds of the city chippie getting a Michelin star. So what. We show up for each other anyway. That's the whole arrangement, and it holds.
The wanting is the manageable part. The hard part arrived a couple of weekends ago: something small I did while we were out drinking on a date and having a great time, well, it hurt her, badly, an ordinary gesture of affection that landed on old trauma I had no way to see. Even she ruled out blaming me, immediately, with a generosity I would struggle to extend to myself in her position. What kept me up was watching her treat her own body's distress as a non-event. No anger at me, no care redirected toward herself, just an administrative decision that this was not worth anyone's concern, hers least of all. She has since instructed me to stop worrying, and separately to stop being her shrink. I am complying with the second, mostly. The first is outside my jurisdiction. I know my limits.
(I'm told watching someone refuse care builds character. I had a character. I'd like a refund.)
On the more energetic developments, since @FtttG asked.
A lady, slightly older than me, exactly as fond of flowers as I'd suspected. Smart, gorgeous, laughs at my jokes, which regular readers will recognize as clear evidence of mental illness, though her prognosis is excellent. She insisted I book a hotel for the night of our date, that there was no way I could expect an invite home to hers. That she had standards. I booked it, privately confident the whole time that this was a formality. The hotel went unused. I consider the cost a donation toward the upkeep of plausible deniability.
Her dog is, per the lady herself, an excellent judge of character. The dog spent the evening filing me under family and the morning giving me side-eye, possibly over the snoring, possibly over what I did to her mum. We have since walked in a park, the three of us, like a scene from a tasteful European film. She acts as if I'm the second coming. I keep explaining that this is a low bar. She keeps declining to be discouraged, and there's a second date on the calendar. She's a busy lady with a life, and she makes time for me. And sends me interesting pictures while I'm at work, making me hot under the collar.
I know where the odds are better. I can read a prior as well as the next Bayesian on this forum. I fell for someone else anyway, and my great fortune is that it appears to be ruining nothing: the friendship holds, the dates continue, everyone involved is being implausibly adult about it. It may or may not work out. I try anyway, which has lately been my answer to most questions.
We were good as married in my mind,
But married in my mind's no good.
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