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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I recently watched a film regarding male loneliness and aging. Specifically, the main character was a middle-aged janitor that did not appear to ever pursue, or have any successful, romantic relationships. The premise of the movie is that he was often in a state of fantasy and delusion. He was shy and never approached women. In his fantasy he was intelligent and younger and he met a girlfriend at a trivia event.
The movie was mostly told from the perspective of his fictional girlfriend. In the fantasy/delusion many things initially seemed like reality, yet the movie seemed very eerie. As the movie progressed details kept shifting in a way that wasn’t consistent with reality (the fictional girlfriend had different careers, the parents weren’t a consistent age). The fictional girlfriend would sometimes verbalize that she was confused about details of the relationship or the events that were occurring. At the end of the movie the main character realizes it is all a delusion and commits suicide.
My interpretation of the movie was that it was trying to show the pain of male loneliness and how the mind can cope through maladaptive interpretations of reality and how the mind eventually starts to unravel when reconciling fantasy to reality.
I have some autistic traits which cause me to struggle with romantic relationships and I can see how in my past this caused me to have a maladaptive interpretation of reality. I would often place far too much blame on women for being shallow, etc. instead of looking inwards. SSC helped me get a better grip on reality and made me realize that I needed to improve myself. I have made a lot of progress on social anxiety and I’m much better at talking to people.
While my self-improvement journey led to a significant reduction of social anxiety when talking to new people (including attractive women) some new thoughts came to light. I’m now starting to question whether these new thoughts are just delusion cope:
I never really cared about getting a girlfriend, I just wanted social approval from my peers.
My sex drive has been especially low since I reduced my social anxiety. I haven’t really cared much about sex since then.
I don’t have a desire to try pursing a romantic relationship again because I enjoy alone time too much.
Most relationships require a draining amount of social performance (autistic masking) and it just doesn’t feel like it is worth the effort anymore.
My occasional social interactions are enough to satiate my social needs so I don’t need to seek deeper relationships.
I have self-diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and that is why I struggle with social connections.
How do I tell if any of these thoughts are just lies that I’m telling myself? My original strategy was to externalize my failures by blaming women and society, etc. Maybe now I have internalized my failures in ways that aren’t true.
Back when I was single and lonely I could have been at risk of tell myself something exactly backwards from that:
I never really cared about social approval from my peers, I just wanted a girlfriend
That is to say, the desire for female companionship was far stronger and deeper and more substantial than any possibility that it was invented. On the other hand, the longing for social approval, while it objectively was also very real, was somewhat ephimeral and certainly displacable (and especially displacable by romantic approval of a single woman), to the point that I can kind of imagine that if I was slightly different, I could have falsely convinced myself that I didn't really care about social approval at all, it was just a dimension of my romantic loneliness. (and to be fair, once in a serious relationship, non-romantic social contexts do change tremendously and diminish in importance. )
So, what's my point? N=1, but if you can convince yourself that maybe you don't even really want a girlfriend, you're certainly outside of what my experience with normal romantic longing was. Far enough that it's true that you never really cared? I can't tell you that. But if you're looking for an outside measurement check - the ability to hold that thought doesn't resonate with my experience of authentically wanting a romantic partner.
Yeah. Evolution really really wants you to have kids (and you probably should!), so you'll have a strong drive for a romantic relationship independent from anything else.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link