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?
I'll agree here. Habituation is a powerful thing. You see it every year with first-year medical students dissecting cadavers. This being said, I am not sure just how far habituation goes; I know that there are a lot of...unfortunate-looking people that choose not to have partners because they find most or all of the people available to them disgusting. You see this more often with middle-class and up people that aren't accustomed to choosing the least-bad option and accepting that they're going to get hosed. There is probably more social isolation there...toothless druggies are one thing, but there is a fairly large and fairly invisible segment of the population that is in and out of institutions of one kind or another. Hospitals, mental institutions, jails and prisons. Fussell's "bottom-out-of-sight" class.
On to our hero Henry.
I've googled "arrested for domestic violence mugshot". Most are more attractive than I am, physically: they're probably taller than my 5'6" and most have full heads of hair. This aside, I believe he is also a liar and con man. A good one. He sells bullshit and promises the world, and seems to deliver at first. He fills his victims' heads with extravagant promises, and may well have an idea of just what kind of vulnerable women will fall for his shit. He's also not averse to committing felony crimes: for a middle-class person like you and I, a felony conviction is a crippling blow. For Henry...well, I've heard that while blue-collar workers (especially minorities) get badly hurt by felony records, the construction industry is pretty open to hiring people with records and often doesn't do background checks.
I don't think that Henry is some kind of badass charismatic mid-level drug lord or gang leader, the kind profiled in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day. Instead, he is a huckster who is able to lie his way into women's pants and prey on the isolated and vulnerable.
As for what Henry has that I do not: a willingness to outright lie and bullshit, being OK committing misdemeanors and maybe felonies that land him in jail multiple times. He is probably taller and better-looking. As for the social aspect: sure, autistic people may learn social skills almost as a second language. And some may become very...proficient, at least by certain metrics. However: in some ways, Henry the high-school dropout with a GED has better command of the English language than a foreigner that moved to the United States as an adult, learned English, and became a tenured professor of English. Sure, the university professor can dissect Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens with the best of them...but is he able to create - not just understand - the same informal grammatical constructions as Henry? Social interactions are - at least in my experience - far more informal and fluid than writing or public speaking. And even so: my writing may be good, but it isn't that good. It is not good enough to inspire someone to overcome a visceral and difficult-to-articulate ick, an uncanny-valley sensation, a "creepiness" that exists in the absence of any kind of wrongdoing that can be put into words. I will concede that it may be possible for people to habituate or to become used to this sensation, either from having autistic friends and relatives; there are also people who lack the sensation I am talking about because of variations in psychological and biological makeup. I've known people that were completely lacking in empathy (but were decent human beings); I've read of people that didn't feel fear and others that barely felt pain.
I also don't think that moral virtue comes into it a whole hell of a lot. It would be rather absurd to ask "What kind of moral virtue does it take to convince someone to buy a dogshit car from a salesman simply to make him happy", although if that salesman or anyone had that kind of saintly character, determination, willpower, and virtue it would probably be enough to make him a good salesman. Attractiveness is about as correlated to moral virtue as something like basketball skill, in my opinion...the 6'6" asshole is probably beating the 5'6" saint in a game of one-on-one.
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