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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These are some crazy gymnastics. It reminds me of the brainwashing polyamorous people abuse themselves with to convince their monkey hindbrain it isn’t all so bad while it screams at them in protest.
Maybe your instinctual preference for purity in your woman is real and good and you should listen to it.
Should I fix myself? No, it is the women who are wrong.
Could be true, but probably not very useful advice.
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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.
Yes, I’m her one and only. And I’ll admit I’m lucky.
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If we step out of the realm of absolutes and extremes, I think we can say that a preference for some degree of chastity in a partner is real and good, or at least a perfectly legitimate preference. My personal belief is that women who have had a large number of sexual partners tend to be emotionally damaged and are probably not going to be good long-term relationship choices. Preferring someone that has a more normal history seems just fine to me.
On the flip side, like you said, it's worth noting that just getting someone that has a fairly normal history isn't actually sufficient to tamp down the gnawing insecurity about the 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! This whole mental spiral is just wildly unhelpful, so addressing it internally is worthwhile. Addressing it also doesn't mean completely throwing away the healthy alarm bell though - if you notice that someone really did hook up with dozens of guys, yeah, there's probably a problem there and it's good to not just smash that feeling.
Like so many emotions, the emotion has value, but needs to be balanced. Righteous anger is an appropriate response to some situations and a poor response to others. The correct approach to righteous anger isn't to try to eliminate it, it's to understand its origins and make sure that it's only triggering when it's actually appropriate. Likewise for the old green-eyed jealousy - you should feel like guarding your partner, but you can't take it to the extreme of getting all weepy because you're not the first partner a 25-year-old woman has had.
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.
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.
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The kind of woman who would be 'impure' a few hundred years ago is one who went against the explicit desires of her family and culture. The kind of woman who is 'impure' today is one who does what the culture guides you to do. The supposedly deontological choice is just selecting for something very different today. Nothing is absolute, and not being pure is, if it's a negative signal, necessarily a weaker one today, and not one worth trading off against everything else. Just like a culture with deep traditions about planting and harvest times need to modify those traditions when they move to a new climate.
Restating your opinion in the form of a wojak picture doesn't make it more true.
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This is an unwarranted response, I think.
I'm generally suspicious of CS_CA but he's right here.
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