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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 wish more people were introspective and aware of their internal motivations. It's annoying to have a girl say "I'm just not feeling it" after a few dates with no further feedback.

It's entirely possible she has concrete reasons, but doesn't wish to tell you because it might hurt your feelings or she's afraid you'll rage over it.

There's no point pressing it, and there plenty more fish out there either way.

My response to that is: Skill issue

Or at least for me it's usually very clear what is attractive about a woman, leaving aside near universals like looks, I prefer funny, kind women who love dogs and who I can hold a conversation with.

If they meet those criteria, I don't really see much room for subconscious deal-breakers.

Some of it's a skill issue, but I think in the typical case, and almost certainly in the case of the OP, it's an incentive issue. What incentive does this particular person have to be properly introspective about what it is that she likes in a romantic partner? Perhaps a little bit better filtering, but is it that much better than just going on the whole "am I feeling it or not" test? That much better to be worth all the hard work and effort it takes to be actually introspective instead of falling into the extremely common trap of just convincing oneself that one is introspective? For some people, they're in a situation where being introspective in some particular area actually is worth it, and so they develop the skills for it (or not, and they just suffer). But for others, it's just not, so they don't bother, and they get to live better lives with more free time and less stress because of it.