Sheepclothes
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User ID: 2217
Sheepclothes
1mo ago
Get ducks
Sheepclothes
1mo ago
Im younger, less long distance, not about to engage, but otherwise in the exact same boat. I have nothing helpful to say sorry. My current thinking is that this is just something introspective people have to suffer through.
Sometimes i whish she gave me a reason to break up with her. Maybe i need to be challenged by my partner in order to have something else to pour energy in. I love putting energy into the relationship.
Sheepclothes
2mo ago
First, watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HUzAukj2jMQ&t=15s Small channel but excellent, very well researched truth seeking etc. Watch it, especially if you buy into negative red pill narratives about women.
What comes next is regurgitation from what I learned from this channel, again he makes sure he uses the most up to date and replicated studies.
Thinking that your average looks and non-super charisma increases your chance of getting cheated or left is insecurity, and is its own thing. This is statistically wrong belief. These things don't raise the chance of your partner cheating on you or leaving you. On that point, since you're a Motte user, you probably like numbers and statistics. While numbers and statistics can't fix you, I find they help realize underlying issues.
On to the facts:
Men cheat more, and for different reasons than women. The most common reason to cheat for men is that they are horny. The most common reason for woman to cheat is that they are unhappy in their relationships.
I'm not going to dig up the exact numbers here, so just trust me or look them up yourself.
If a woman; is content in your sexual or romantic relationship, does not have a mental disorder like bipolar, is college educated and has a secure attachment style, She will not cheat It's just a vanishingly small chance. Men are the fallen creatures who bang people just because they see the opportunity.
If not everything here applies, you either should be happy if she leaves you, or you should work on improving those aspects of your relationship.
Leaving you for someone else is essentially cheating, but first ending the relationship. So I think most of the same applies.
The numbers are really on men's side when it comes to this. As long as you are a good boyfriend, you're golden.
Of course, that's just numbers. The numbers on getting over being anxious about your girlfriend leaving you are much worse. My best advice from myself and friends: Don't burden your girlfriend with it by not being honest with yourself and with her. Talk to her about it while framing it as the pernicious disease it is, and not something lacking in her, which is what she will interpret it as. Never ever delude yourself into thinking your fears are legitimate. Unless, you know, she's hanging around more with her best male friend than with you or something like that.
Sheepclothes
2mo ago
He got you too huh
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
You make some good points, but are you a parent though? Im fully aware of the exact statistical difference this partnership will have on my offspring. I only care how succesful and capable my future children are, insofar that future me will care.
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
Tests and some fudging to protect privacy
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
Class and inteligence are both very heritable. Choosing my partner is by a wide margin the most control I have over how my children will turn out. I am trying not to live with regret, which is why I want the perspective of parents who have already made tge choice.
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
No idea. I gel with her perfectly well thats not the problem.
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
That was very beautifully said. I will notify you when I marry her.
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
Yes and yes. That is a much healthier way of framing things, immediately makes me feel a lot better about having children, thanks!
It still however leaves the fear that i will feel alienated from my own children and the belief I have failed in endowing them with the capacity to achieve great things.
But it could just be projection from my much more intelligent father never saying he was proud of me or something.
(We are not married)
Sheepclothes
3mo ago
Married men of the motte, I need a sanity check.
To put it bluntly, my partner is lower status and less intelligent than I am. 110 vs 125 IQ points. middle class vs upper middle class.
We've been together for a year and our relationship is otherwise great (unrelated mental hang ups i have posted about here before aside). I can see myself marrying and being content.
Unfortunately, I am a pretty HBD-pilled individual, and the concept of my future children potentially being less intelligent and of phenotypically lower status fills me with dread. (The woman in question has many many positive qualities I DO want my kids to have.)
Is it over? Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc? Are doubts like this normal for a young guy who's maybe getting commitment anxiety?
I come from a family of fairly accomplished people. Upper middle class academics and some geniuses. Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.
My children would inherit this.
Now I should add that her family is of perfectly average to above average intelligence. The biggest difference is that they have very little intellectual curiosity. Abysmal levels of general knowledge, archetypical shape rotators.
(They do have their own opinions and are independent thinkers but they are deeply "practical people")
I thought this wouldn't bother me, and it doesn't, in the relationship. But I dread my kids being like that.
Narcissism? Does my girlfriend secretly disgust me? Am I giving this too much thought? I really want some outside opinion on this, preferably by people with children. This is obviously something I can only talk about on this forum.
Sheepclothes
5mo ago
For sure. I was pretty tired while writing my post, so I didn't do a very good job of expressing my overall intent with it. What I had was an extreme, and unhealthy reaction to my girlfriend's normal past.
There really is a part of the male ego that many of us have to vary degrees that just wants to be the fucking best, period, completely unthreatened by those losers in the past. But then if they were losers, that devalues her!
You hit the nail on the head here. I was definitely struggling with swinging between these two extremes. To fix that, I had to do a lot of work with empathy, understanding why my girlfriend got together with these people and why she left. But I could only start doing that after I got over obsessing about details in the past.
I still try to focus more on how great I am and not how bad they were, as that's healthier. It's all a crutch to get to the ultimate end goal of becoming fully secure in myself and not thinking about her past any more than a mentally healthy person normally would. Getting older should take care of that. For now, it beats feeling bad all the time.
Sheepclothes
5mo ago
Is it real and good, though? If you have a partner, is she "pure"? Restricting myself to virgins is not a viable life strategy, and way harder than fixing this. According to others with this condition who have tried, it doesn't even help. If anything, my monkey hindbrain is using this as an excuse to break up with her for other reasons. I'm open to admitting that.
Sheepclothes
5mo ago
A couple of months ago, I made a post about my struggles with retroactive jealousy/relationship OCD.
https://www.themotte.org/post/825/wellness-wednesday-for-january-10-2024/178374?context=8#context
I'm happy to report, I've beaten it (and waited a couple of months to be sure), without breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very, very hard, but I came up with an effective strategy that was successful, my girlfriend was supportive in her way too. If you go to Reddit communities about this thing, it looks pretty dire and terminal, but there is hope!
So here's a quick summary that might work for other modal mottizians:
The process was first to never ask another question about her past relationships, no matter how innocuous, never trusting my subconscious to not have an ulterior motive. The disease is categorized by an escalating need for certainty that can never be fulfilled. This was the hardest step and where most people fail. I managed by committing myself to ask these burning questions, tomorrow or a month, and see if I still cared to know exactly how often she cuddled with her ex or whatever. Also, I told my Girlfriend not tell me even if I asked, which mostly served to make the commitment public and easier to keep.
The second step was trying to fix the bad world model I had that caused the issue in the first place. Which was also very hard. I talked to a select few of my female friends and asked very personal question about their past love life, questions that I would have like to ask my girlfriend but didn't let myself. It really put it into perspective how ridiculous and unproductive my probing was, and how woman just didn't think like that. Reading about internet woman's experiences also helped.
The third step was exposure therapy, where I went through some bad scenarios in my head and came up with answers to questions that would hurt me the most. This was and seemingly didn't work at first. I felt like my confidence levels plummeted those weeks, and I felt like I was losing my pride.
Finally, since I hated that, I just started acting like I was amazing. Being completely shamelessly confident in my sexual and relationship abilities. Stating out loud how I'm way better than other guys in this or that. Just being super cocky. Because fake problems require fake solutions. And it worked amazingly. Obviously, my girlfriend didn't mind me saying those things, because she believed it too! That's the great thing about woman, if they love you, you are their one and only.
Positive delusions, are said to be good in relationships. I couldn't just will it into being, though, I couldn't just stop caring about her past either. I firmly believe I had to go through the previous steps, my heroes journey, to really get me to believe in my new truth. It's all fiction, and I needed to make myself a story.
Sheepclothes
6mo ago
Bump, Please someone answer this. I have the exact same issue and both gpt4 and google are not helping.
Sheepclothes
8mo ago
It looks close to as good as it can get. Everything beyond this, a model needs more than just information from videos and more instruction than a text prompt to increase in usefulness. I can't believe temporal consistency was solved this soon, I thought it would take another year minimum. But I guess that's because other companies video generation is just so bad. Googles whiff on Gemini and now this really cements that OpenAI is easily more than a year ahead of the competition.
Sheepclothes
9mo ago
Speed read the whole thing in a couple of hours. Focusing on the bits that interested me the most.
Made me feel pretty terrible. Very triggering to read.. But it did give very good reasons to stop being a whiny bitch around my gf.
The author was amazing at capturing the exact feeling i got when it comes to this insecurity.
Maybe i also got it because my first girlfriemd left me for a different guy too.
Sheepclothes
10mo ago
Thanks man. I guess that's one way to overcome things. I'm attempting to keep my heart unbroken, though, fearless in love and all that. So your strategy is not something I will try to pursue...
I enjoyed reading your story!
Sheepclothes
10mo ago
I think I am above average status conscious, but I don't think this is a status thing. It's mostly my ego being bruised about what it means for her to be with me after those guys.
Sheepclothes
10mo ago
I do have a bad habit of trivializing the relationship around (non-mutual)friends, and implying I'm not that close to her, pretending that I might break up eventually soon. In actuality, I am however very committed.
I think the comments to my post are bringing me to the conclusion that these new and powerful emotions are just whizzing about waiting to be expressed in whatever way they can to be. Be it painful neuroses or positive feelings of longing and affection. So I guess it's back to waiting for the tide to wash over me. It has been slowly and steadily getting better, I think.
Sheepclothes
10mo ago
I forgot to mention it. Yes, prayer actually helps me a lot of thanks for reminding me, maybe there's something ominous in how I keep forgetting that.
Yes, I am finding this my most emotionally challenging time of my life. I don't intent to shop around, and I've told her as much. The goal is a lifelong bond and something I give utmost spiritual significance too. Other women will cease to exist.
Sheepclothes
10mo ago
I have one big problem with my current relationship and I'm desperate. Basically since it has begun I've experienced constant low level pain and discomfort that increases when alone.
Before I've always had near perfect mental health which makes it worse. It's even made me consider breaking up with my girlfriend over it, despite everything else being great. None of my normal coping strategies work.
I'm having negative thoughts surrounding her previous relationships. Specifically that she has let herself be fucked by and been emotionally intimate with seemingly pathetic dudes and dudes in generall(very few though!!). It goes beyond that though and into general thoughts of inadequacy that make me want to receive constant reassurance that I'm the best she's ever had. Which I do know is true cognitively (I'm a chadlite, and have no trouble getting on dates with the rare Woman I actually meet and who interests me), but it's something I emotionally “forget” about. Again before this I would have considered myself an extremely self assured and level headed person.
These negative thoughts are plain making my quality of life worse and are a huge distraction.
Additional context: were both in our early twenties, this is my first serious relationship, not hers. I know we have great sex but for some reason I always desire assurance that it is the best she's ever had. (Which in a moment of weakness where I asked for it, she has given but it still leaves me feeling that even so the other guys did one particular thing better than me.)
Assume I'm not an idiot. Im fully aware I sound like an insecure wet noodle. Trust me, I'm not. I try my best to avoid annoying her with this and to communicate my feelings clearly. Despite successfully avoiding thinking about it, accepting the feeling and therapising myself, the disconnected pain still lingers
I'm looking for personal anecdotes and advice to help me understand what is happening.
Sheepclothes
11mo ago
The worst bullying I ever got in my life was from fellow academics over my german grammar ability.
My grandfather was a hardline grammar conservative and a locally known intellectual on it, among other things. No wonder he got choleric with age.
I grew up bilingual which i think messed with my ability to learn non colloquial grammar rules as both languages are so closely tied in my head, with blurred borders and rules. Thats why i personally think anglicization in the youth is to blame.
Sophisticated grammar checkers have been a godsend(although I didn't use one for this post.) But especially in german seem to fail me quite often.
I consider myself an above average wordcel too, the grammar part of my brain is just irrevocably broken. I'm supposedly a native speaker but memories of akkusativ and dativ classes wake me up in a cold sweat.
Sheepclothes
1yr ago
Underclass culture has become Immigrant culture. Reverse assimilation.
Answer: Nothing. It's been too late for dozens of years. Have a respectable job, and you won't have to interact with them.
The starship flights were going fast enough to get into orbit, but their trajectory was purposefully set so that after leaving the atmosphere they would crash back down.
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