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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Notes -
A question for all of you:
What does it take - what qualities of character - does it take for someone to willingly and freely choose to sacrifice to be with someone? To freely endure visceral, biological disgust just to make someone happy? More importantly: what kind of person, if anyone, is worthy of this kind of sacrifice - whether for a night or a few years or a lifetime?
Have any of you personally known anyone that you believed was worthy of that kind of sacrifice? Do any of you have anyone in your lives that you would sleep with despite being disgusted by simply because they asked it of you as a favor, or because you felt they might benefit from it? If you do: why? I have...hmm. I knew a couple of people like this who I might sleep with, disgust be damned, because I admired their character that much. Honestly, I'd see it as kind of like a combination of acting and a gross, intimate medical procedure that needed to be performed well. Although I'm not any good at the first, I am no stranger to (limited) participation in the second. One of the guys...he's a fat dude who got hit by a drunk driver at 19, wound up crippled and on crutches for life, but is a hell of a dude: a West Virginia redneck son of a union construction foreman and a nurse that made good, went to Harvard, and then returned a decade later to own real estate in his hometown and live off the profits.
That isn't what's happening when a 'disgusting' person gets love. When you see someone who's 'biologically disgusting' who has a partner, the partner just ... doesn't find them to be disgusting (potentially in a relative sense). Long-term social contact with someone can build affection that wasn't present from physical attraction! People, generally, just become physically and emotionally attracted to the kind of person who is available to them. If you're a diseased druggie without teeth and the only people who'll give you a second glance are other teethless druggies, you'll bang and develop genuine feelings for the opposite-sex junkies. And there are the rare 'perfectly attractive girl who dates someone with several congenital deformities' (they blow up on social media every so often) or the reverse, but they're just ... rare, people do all sorts of unlikely things for idiosyncratic reasons.
Now I'm gonna respond to your whole oeuvre here, because the question doesn't make too much sense and is probably a severe case of the XY problem ("how do I get people to make that sacrifice to sleep with me"). You're just, generally, comically wrong about the structure of dating / relationships.
From scott,
From secondhand anecdotes from lower-class friends of mine, Henry was not a model. He didn't eat well and go to the gym every week, he doesn't have perfect skin and hair and wardrobe, he doesn't have a top 10% job or great hobbies. He's not that charismatic. Google "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". I'm pretty sure several are uglier than you. I audibly laughed at a few of them.
And they're not particularly intelligent either. Sometimes significantly below average. Even if they have some instinctive social abilities that you don't, you're (just from your writing) smart enough by comparison that you could learn the basics by brute force if you wanted to.
What do they have that you don't have?
Ah yes, a pivotal scene from The Wizard of Oz: “But they’ve got something you haven’t got…”
I think I need to rewatch that scene yearly, with my big goals in mind.
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