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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How many people feel strong romantic connections with their partners? I feel like I experienced this in my first few relationships but not really in the decade since then. I'm not really clear whether you're supposed to still feel a spark in adult relationships or whether those are just irrational young love feelings that don't really pop up again, and most healthy adult relationships are just based on finding someone who's compatible and nice.
It's never been a spark for me, more of a slow steady fire that never goes out. I've been with my girlfriend for about 8 years now, and she's bare none my favorite person, there's nobody I'd rather be stuck on a 20 hour plane journey with, or spend a quiet evening alone with. Everything is just better when she's around. Spark or no spark, if you don't look at them at least once a day and think, dang, I'm glad they're here with me, they might not be the one.
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Yes. And if you're a decent looking young man with a job, settle for nothing less. Because it does exist out there and you're making a terrible gamble if you don't feel it, either of you could find it in the meantime.
I've been with my wife for over a decade, wherever we go we're having more fun than everyone around us. When we go to mass, or go to Costco, or make dinner, or drive three hours to see her parents, we're making little jokes to each other we're laughing we're discussing and debating we're judging and mocking. I've seen her naked by now, I'm still looking down her shirt every chance I get, she's still soaking wet when I undress her. When we're apart for 36 hours, the first thing we want to do is talk to each other about everything that happened.
And knowing that exists I can't imagine settling for less, because of I came across this when I didn't have it at home... Boy, I don't know.
It's much more complicated once you share taxes, chores, families. It was simpler when all we did was make love and read in bed after. I'm sure as life continues, it will change. I can't speak for your 40s or your 50s, but in your 30s? You should be in love.
I would add "neurotypical" to that. If you are unattractive or suck a bunch at something, but still want to do something, you're more focused on the least bad outcome than the best.
Would you rather be celibate for life? Have had a few passionate relationships that didn't pan out, and be single from age 34 to your death at 82? Be in a relationship with someone you find physically attractive, and who feels the same way about you...but who is also either kind of a shitbag or a stone cold shitbag?
I should have expected you'd turn up. How are plans going on your Alaska wilderness walkabout?
@Soriek , just in case you're like most mottizens: a touch of the 'tism never stood in the way of true love.
Luckily I have a lot of cool and normal hobbies like posting screeds on tariff policy on obscure internet forums.
In all seriousness I've been very blessed to have mostly had relationships with very good hearted, well adjusted women - part of why I feel guilty for not being able to meet perfectly nice people halfway.
I actually talked about this with my wife the other day. My wife is, in some ways, not a nice person; she was joking about how if she ever divorced me she'd float back into my life every time I found someone just long enough to break us up. And we laughed about women who we knew who were, you know, good enough, but who would have been no competition for her in a pinch.
I suspect, under sufficient social and societal pressure, you would probably meet these girls halfway. And under sufficiently strict social structures, I'm sure you would both figure things out. But we don't have those social and societal structures and pressures. Wishing them into existence seems foolish.
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Did you feel like you knew it right away or it kind of built/emerged over time? I've ended several relationships because I didn't feel this, but with 30 looming on the horizon I feel like I see every relationship decision with deadlines, that I can't put off long term life choices / having kids indefinitely.
As another data point that has basically the same feelings for and with my wife that @FiveHourMarathon outlines above, I can say that I felt this way immediately. We were friends for months before we were a couple and I was at least infatuated with her then, if not really in love (I don't know if "love" is ever the right word when it's not reciprocated, someone else can offer thoughts on that one). When we switched from friends to a couple, it was fast, electric, and obvious to me immediately that I was going to stick with it as long as I possibly could. We moved in together almost immediately. She was not my first serious relationship, I was in my late 20s at the time, and I'm glad that I didn't settle for one of the girls I was with that checked all the boxes but didn't light the world up for me.
Well, you guys have both definitely given me much to think about. I appreciate you adding in your own experience.
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I definitely feel you on deadlines looming. But keep in mind that you'll never be younger than you are today.
We felt it instantly, even before we saw each other romantically, but we were also much younger. It's perfectly reasonable for it to take months to get to know each other, imho, but in my humble opinion based on data from the Myers-Young Associated Statistical Survey: the peak of your relationship in raw animal feeling is going to be either the first six months of dating, or the first year of marriage. Numbers might get fuzzier for couples who cohabit or get married at unusual paces.
It will decline, quickly or slowly, from there. If the peak was never very high, you don't have room for much decline! If your peak is very high, it will decline, but manage the decline well and you'll still have many good years left.
Think of it like baseball player aging curves: everybody loses half a win a year after their peak whether they're a star or a scrub. But a star who peaks at a 7war year has fourteen years of .5war declines before he's replacement level; a player who peaks at average, 2war, only has five years on .5war declines before he's worse than replacement.
Obviously I endorse a lot of what other people have said as far as deciding on love, choosing it, acting it out, surrendering oneself to it, within this advice. I could have made different decisions, or she could have.
But if you don't get it now, you'll never get it.
Yeah, i know you're probably right. i'm pretty averse to hurting people's feelings so I think I've been avoiding making a harder decision based on things being basically okay, but I know it's likely not going up from here and dragging things out would make it worse long term.
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I don't feel like I'm infatuated with my wife but I definitely feel like I love her. I believe it's perfectly normal for the initial infatuation to fade but another love to stay/develop.
Furthermore, I believe there is something to the advice that love isn't just something that happens to you, something that you feel, but it's also very much something you do and those acts in turn makes you feel feelings of love.
Kissing your wife isn't only downstream from loving them, it's also upstream. If you want to love your partner more you should behave more like you love your partner. The opposite is true as well.
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Define ‘romantic connection’.
Are you happy with someone? When something happens in your life, are they the first person you want to tell? Do you picture yourself growing old with them? Do you find yourself staring at them when they’re not looking? Do you recall tiny, irrelevant details about them that your mind made a note of because you’re in love? Do you sometimes find yourself telling your friends or family how great they are without prompting? Do you miss them when they’re gone and look forward to their return? Do you have great sex, regularly, and look forward to more? Would you unequivocally be happy with them as the mother or father of your child?
If the answers to these are yes, then I think that is a romantic connection, and that’s something certainly achievable in your late twenties or early thirties!
I think I'm happy with the person I've been seeing and that I could easily see them being a long term partner/parent. But I don't think I catch myself staring at them, thinking about them, or talking about them, and I'm pretty sure they do all those things for me, which is part of why I feel worried for not being on that same level.
If I may insert something here (in no way intended to be a pun on sexual congress), the fact that you are "pretty sure" that the person you've been seeing is in this state of preoccupation with you may be a contributing factor into why you do not find yourself having reciprocal feelings. Perhaps especially if you are male, and I am not feeling energetic enough to close this mobile window and surf through your profile to get a sense of whether I think you are. Your post here perhaps intentionally leaves that vague.
Anyhoo, the way it seems to work is when I can't take my eyes off her, I feel it's natural, romantic, complimentary, praise. When she keeps looking at me with cow eyes, it's off-putting. When I talk about her, it's me wanting to let everyone know how real these wonderfully rare and implausibly strong feelings are, it's me on Oprah's couch feeling the beauty, at last, of pure joy. It's true love, princess; do you think this happens every day? And when I hear she's been going on about me at first it's fine you know, spread my legend, but then it's like do you not have a life?
When I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it's a magical reason to get out of bed. When I come to understand that she has been thinking of me all day I have the urge to bolt like a deer when the predator"s focus has flagged momentarily.
It's the dance, and if you're lucky you end up on both sides of this dichotomy more than once and with the same person. Too much complacency spells doom for any relationship, but then so does too much obsessive possessiveness.
You also say you're happy with whoever it is and can see that person being a good partner/parent. Well, that's excellent. You won't feel in love TM all the time, even when you do have the feeling occasionally. I find a nice slow burn lasts as long as it needs to, at least so far. Where more than a few explosive flare-ups didn't last long at all.
This probably all sounds like homespun nonsense. Maybe it is. I certainly can't be sure. And it's also true you may meet this evening someone in an elevator who hits all your buttons and for whom you might imagine you'd give up everything, without even having exchanged a word. But those feelings pass. They simply do.
Anyway, that's my take and I am not prepared to offer any pseudo-evolutionary biologist reasons for why it may be correct. I am old, at this point, not even relatively. I am getting up there. But the spark still lights sometimes.
I do think for some, cynicism and mistrust douse the ground enough that spontaneous flame isn't very likely, but again I am not familiar with your situation.
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