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.
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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.
Women are quite different than men, and I can easily imagine some woman is going to be attracted to an able man even if he's on crutches and despite him being fat.
Could you live with yourself if you married someone you were attracted to, then they suffered serious injury so you then proceeded to abandon them and find a healthy partner? Senator McCain could, but he was a special kind of person.
Our crutch using hero wasn't ordinary, and even then, his frat brothers at Harvard told him more or less that finding someone that would be loyal to him would be extremely difficult if not impossible. The guy was a hell of a man, character wise, and it was a huge uphill battle. His own words: "I have a lot to offer. Admittedly, fat cripple is a tough sell."
McCain is...an interesting person. Perhaps an asshole for how he left his wife. I'll grant him a bit of latitude for having endured hell in a PoW camp though. I wouldn't leave my wife if something like that happened to her, though.
Another thing: In high school, I found myself attracted to a girl who liked to swim and hike. She was big into swimming, had a nice body and was fit, very blunt...and very bitter and cynical. She had been burned in a house fire as a baby. While the surgeons did amazing work, she was left missing an ear and with a third of her face looking like Freddy Krueger. It was her sadness that was more a turnoff than her face.
In these kinds of cases I've read that people often stop being that sad after finding a partner.
Well, he's believed to have been beating his new wife for years and having been blackmailed over it. I think he's instructive.
Both he and his father sold their souls in government service - McCain Sr. for helping cover up the Liberty incident, McCain Jr. for helping with the cover-up of the highly embarrassing POW/MIA scandal.
I don't know how my burned friend is doing. She has had a partner, now. She still seems rather bitter and cynical - and also nerdy and blunt.
As for McCain: certainly an interesting guy. You can't knock his strength of will in Vietnam; he refused early release and chose to keep getting tortured by the Vietnamese. Whatever else he did in life, that has to be admired. He was a strong-willed, wealthy man and very much a skilled politician. He was also an asshole in his personal life.
I wonder if this is some sort of implication: you can be an asshole, as long as you are extremely determined and also very socially skilled? I mean...almost everyone reading this will not even come close to McCain's level of political skill or power. Sure, he was born on third base, but the guy had to run home. And run he did.
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