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?
it's always like this. lots of men competing for relatively few women . work , school, work-family outings are different in that the social aspect is mostly taken care of: everyone comes from the same sort of social milieu or cut from the same cloth, or without the baggage that comes with prior relationships .
Where did all the women go, nunneries? I don’t actually believe this, women will see a number of men approaching them sure, but the population isn’t 75% men / 25% women.
It's a truism but they're going where men don't. All those activities that you'd never consider, and if you did you would dismiss as at the best a bit girly. The girlier the activity the more women will be there and the less men will want to go even in the knowledge the there are lots of women there. At the top end you have "wellness" classes that counsel eating as the salve for your neuroses, or losing weight and getting fit by sitting still and breathing. There'll be a few men there. At the far end you have a club for knitting bootees for premature babies. They won't be at the model railway hot sauce tournament, where even if you're not remotely interested in those things you probably wouldn't be uncomfortable if you washed up there by chance.
Adding on to your spear-not-net fishing advice, the most pragmatic suggestion I can think of would be shops, specifically food shops and supermarkets. Firstly you have to go there anyway. Second you can probably get some indication (and give some indication) of who is more likely to be single by whether they have a basket and are browsing the wine section or if they have a trolley and they're loading it up with mascot breakfast cereal and lunchables. You can somewhat narrow the demographics by time of day too - retirees, school mums, working lunchers, unemployeds, school mums again, working diners, weekly family shoppers, then finishing with evening drinkers - or by swapping the supermarket for the health food shop or the bijou bakery. To some degree the times and places that you shop will naturally select for your own matching demographic. And third you have a lot of opportunities for open-ended casual interactions and brief conversation starters, and the people are in flux so there's less of a weird sense of imposition in sparking those brief conversations that there might be in a bar or cafe where people sit at one table for the duration of their visit.
If it's going to succeed though I'd say it's probably best approached as a low stakes strategy where the expected outcome is weighed heavily towards buying the ingredients for a nice meal, weighed moderately to sharing a pleasant moment with a stranger, and minimal expectation placed on landing the woman of your dreams after five minutes cruising the bog roll aisle. The advantage is that you get endless repeat chances plus the opportunity to raise your culinary skills in the meantime. You also have a baked-in face-saving retreat of the need to complete your shopping the moment any promising interaction risks becoming awkward, unlike a bar where you might have just bought a fresh drink or a social group that doesn't finish for another hour or more. It's a bit like talking to someone in the street but without the sense of interrupting their travel.
[Caveat: I've never done this but I have had pleasant interactions with women in the supermarket regardless, and I'm an introvert with resting fuck-off face who lives in a fairly socially reserved area and skates through the shop on rails to get out the door as soon as possible.]
Wellness classes represent the top end of that spectrum?
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