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Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

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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Had a second date today. She's great. I mean, great. Just objectively an obscene number of things in common, but different enough to be interesting, and the chemistry was there. Never felt this way really, although one other time was in the ballpark (...and then I moved out of state).

Unfortunately, she learned today that she's "definitely" leaving the state for work related reasons, permanently, in a month. If I had any sense, I'd've walked away when she gave me this news, early on in the date, along with the suggestion that I do so. Instead, I'm going to just ignore this fact, I guess, despite my dating goal being "a very serious relationship at a minimum" - next date Saturday. Why ignore this fact? Well:

  1. there's some reasons (omitted for anonymity) to believe it's more "probably" than "definitely"

  2. genuinely enjoying the dates

  3. market research

And it's not even a "well, let's at least get laid" kind of thing (or I'd just text my ex instead of being back on the apps...). I wouldn't be shocked if we do sleep together, but I might actually try not to, in the interest of not getting hurt more than necessary. Might, anyway.

At a minimum, I think I've just found the bar by which future secretarial interviews will be judged. At a maximum, hell, I work remotely and make rash decisions sometimes - maybe I leave the state, too. I "definitely" won't do that. Even if she stays, I think long term she leaves, but by that point it'd be not crazy to imagine following.

I do in fact realize the above is rashly strong, I really do. The saner takeaway here is that I should approach dating more seriously, more optimistically, and with higher standards - women like that do exist. But damn, if not for the atomization of society, the tendency of high achievers to move around so much; if we'd met in some small town before the internet, the outcome would, with reasonable probability, be the obvious and happy one.

I did some napkin math. With 3.5M people in my greater metro area (~1 hour driving radius), I estimate 22 potential matches (though she clears a bar more than a bit higher):

| constraint  | frequency | dating pool |
|-------------|-----------|-------------|
| human       |           | 3500000     |
| female      | 2         | 1750000     |
| 25-34       | 5         | 350000      |
| 99% iq      | 100       | 3500        |
| attractive  | 3         | 1167        |
| attracted   | 3         | 389         |
| politics    | 2         | 194         |
| single      | 3         | 65          |
| personality | 3         | 22          |

I can't decide if 22 is good news or not. I lean "good news" but finding 'em is a bit elusive.

99% iq looks like a major bottleneck. Are you that certain you can't be happy with 90%?