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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I’m astonished that anyone ever managed to date without dating apps.
I’m a 25-year-old man. This year I have been living a very social, outgoing lifestyle. To explain what I mean by that, this is what I’ve done in the past month.
These weren’t all with the same friends. I have lots of friends and I make new ones fairly often.
I’m hoping to eventually find a girlfriend, and other than dating apps it’s common advice to be very social and meet new people. I do. (Not only for this reason, I also like it.)
The problem is the demographics of those friends. I made a spreadsheet of everyone I’ve done social activities with lately and it was like 70% men and 25% women who are in relationships. Even though it was like 60-70 people, only a handful were single women. And of course being single and female is not the only criteria for being a good match for me. I’ve still yet to go out with a woman I didn’t meet online.
I don’t really understand how anyone did this in the Before Times because I don’t really think my situation is that unusual. I think it’s normal for a man to have more male friends than female friends and it’s also normal for many people in their mid 20s to be in relationships.
For people who regularly find or used to find people to date by means other than dating apps / the Internet, how does it actually work? Is my problem that my milieu is really unusual for having a low ratio of single women? Or is meeting people to date at general social activities unusual for everyone, and “cold approaches” more common than I’d assumed?
Dating apps have destroyed the horniness component of social events. They haven't just enabled a new style of dating, they have completely cannibalized the previous setting.
Second, call me a broken record, but : "Self-delusion, self-delusion, self-delusion". If you do an activity to date women, women smell your desperation and run away. If you do an activity because you like it, it will cater to your gender, and therefore be mostly male.
Choose an activity you can see yourself liking that single women also love. Lie and delude yourself into believing that you are doing this activity purely for the activity and not for the single women. Force yourself to show genuine interest in activity, until you eventually start getting interested in it. Now, that you're convinced you are not doing this activity to date, engage with the rest of the social group without any care for their gender. Why would you care, you aren't doing this to date. Overtime, you genuinely forget that you chose the activity for the women. If you remember, then gaslight yourself. Now you have single female friends who see you as the safe man around them. You have never made a move on them because you do this activity for self-actualization and not for women. Your platonic female friends notice that you have been single for a while. They ask you if you want to date their friend. You are reluctant because you don't do this for the ladies. But well, you are single, and their friend does seem cute. What's the harm. Afterall, you might have gaslight yourself, but self-delusion is eventually just that, delusion. You don't TRULY believe that you're happy being single. 1 date, 2 dates, 3 dates, and eventually you meet a woman who likes you back. Maybe it works out. Congrats, you now have a girl-friend.
Wait what ? How did you manage to get past women's walls, all while having started as a desperate single man ?
It's classic method acting. Play the long game. Self-delude. By the end of it you have a partner. And guess what, you are just as likely to have found some real friends and a genuine hobby in this process as well.
never drink your own koolaid. Your milieu didn't just happen. You drank your own koolaid that women like self-driven men who work on themselves. Yes they do, as long as it is the things that they find attractive. And as long as that drive puts them in common spaces with them over prolonged times.
Consistency is key. Especially if you want to find a partner rather than just get laid. Pick 1. You did so much dude. Just rock climb, a LOT MORE. Like 3 times a week. You aren't going to date any of your rock climbing female-friends. But they might set you up with someone eventually. Keep your thirst out of the gym. bring it to dinner parties they invite to you later.
It is likely that it will be more or less understood that you will never have a partner. You aren't making a million a year, you don't have enough charisma for a career in politics, AND you are fundamentally disgusting on a deep visceral biological level due to autism or shortness or something like that. The best you can realistically hope for is someone that holds their nose and endures that disgust due to religious or personal convictions.
Are you charismatic enough to convince people to more or less go through Hell basically to make you happy? Are you able to hang in a contest of wills against a Navy SEAL or better yet the Saigon monk who calmly burned himself to death? Are you OK with being maimed, even killed, by your partner? Being a nurse and caretaker to someone who's addicted to something and only using you as an enabler? If you are OK with all of these things - and a goddamn saint to boot, AND you never make a social blunder large enough to be described in words - congratulations. You have The Right Stuff to be in a relationship.
Climbing Mt. Everest is probably easier; I think K2 is on a par with being in a relationship. Or maybe Everest - if you're doing it without oxygen and maybe solo.
Is this sarcasm ? So other than ~0.1% of the world population, no one else is worthy of a partner ? What kind of utter bullshit is that ?
You need help my man. I have seen the ugliest, most useless bums find a partner who genuinely loves them, have kids and live a content life. Relationships are literally the easiest thing. There are exactly as many men as there are women. Every ancestor of yours had a relationship. It's that simple.
Dating apps is not real life. Social isolation is the real disease. Get out there, meet people, be yourself, and lose some of that cynicism. God, nothing kills a vibe like deep cynicism. Give it enough collisions, and eventually something will work out. The rich, charismatic, virtuous and attractive might find a partner with fewer collisions, but there is no upper limit on how many times you can roll.
It's not that bad out there man. If you are white, and in such a deep resentful rut, then just move to a South-East-Asian country. You'll find someone who loves you for what you are (white) and what you bring to the table (citizenship). No, that's not gold-digging. She will still love you, in the truest sense with deep gratitude for the life you provide her. Go be happy.
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