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Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 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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  1. Stop using emojis

  2. Write shorter, more declarative sentences.

  3. Church ... for a first date. Bruh.

  4. Most importantly - Stop using OLD. Go out and talk to people in real life. You will have more success, you will have more fun, you will build interpersonal skills that transcend dating.

I've never understood OLD. If the objective is dating a real person in real life ... go do that. Why is there this odd online first step? It's like saying "Before I jump in the pool, I'll interact with a digital model of water so I understand the water better"

I can match several people this week and set up a date or I can go several years without meeting a single person I'm interested in. Online dating is clearly useful.

Yeah as a zoomer/current college student this is 100 percent correct. Of the guys in my friend group, the ones with the best success are just the strongest Hinge warriors who are willing to put themselves through the meat grinder to get a date. I've been working pretty consciously over the past month or so to make a serious attempt to talk to a girl every night I go out, but you run into a couple of issues:

-The Venn diagram of women you are interested in and women who frequent your mid college bar doesn't feature a very large overlapping zone, and other means of large-scale socialization are unreliable at best for a variety of reasons (attendance isn't guaranteed, demographics usually skew towards freshmen, often too loud and packed to hold a conversation)

-If you manage to get to the stage where you buy someone a drink, your dog and pony show has to be pretty much flawless or else you're cooked

-There's a weird lack of communication about interest, so you can talk to someone for well over an hour, buy them a couple drinks, have a great conversation, feel like you're in an unambiguous position with regards to intent, and then have them tell you they have a boyfriend (this exact phenomenon has happened to me on multiple occasions)

-Even when things go really well, there's a decent chance that it doesn't click on your end and you're your own worst enemy

Relying heavily on online dating generally mitigates the first and third obstacle, and the other two can be fixed through sheer numbers and persistence. It's a demoralizing process, but the easiest way to hit a bullseye is to throw a lot of darts.

Alright, I accept this response as a justification for OLD.

I didn't know it was this bad for zoomers. While I believe I've dated a technical zoomer, she was in a social circle that was very millennial (moment of self-reflection: perhaps that was why we got along).

If this is the case, OLD is rough sledding. There's are a bunch of articles that show how messed up the "market" for dating is (your "smothered" comments points at this).

but she's truly the most insightful person I've ever known

She's probably not. Because she isn't old enough.

Don't take this as me saying she isn't insightful. I take you at your word. But she's not the most insightful person you've ever known. Ask if if she is. She'll say she isn't. Take her at her word.

And then realize that if you still deny reality and message to her that you think she's the most insightful person you've ever known, she'll slowly start to question your reasonable judgement of other things.

Who keeps deleting their posts?

Stop it!

It’s fucking @urquan.

I call upon everyone to fully quote urquan’s comments when replying to any. He’s in this really weird and annoying phase where he just fucking deletes his posts after getting several replies!

The arc of the Doctrinal Conflict turns, and the Korh-Ah are now ascendant instead of the Czer-Ka. Utter destruction rather than containment and preservation is now the order of the day.

Shield up and power through, the weakness of the urquan tactics shall be laid bare! For the glory of Zelnick!

I've never understood OLD. If the objective is dating a real person in real life ... go do that.

Can't speak for anyone else, but for me there were two draws.

  1. I simply stopped meeting people after college, except through work (and the tech business is 99% men so that wasn't much help).
  2. When I had tried to date people I met IRL, I ran into the problem where by the time I got to know someone enough to be attracted to her, she was perfectly content being friends. Ran into it every single time I would ask a girl out. With online dating, at least it sets the tone up front that one is trying to have a romantic relationship, not platonic.

And honestly, it worked well enough for me! I'm pretty sure I would never have met my wife if not for OLD. So I'm glad I gave it a go.

The last time I met someone new that I ended up going on a date with was eight years ago. In that time, I've gone out with at least 60 people I met online. The idea that I shouldn't do online dating is incomprehensible to me. I would love to meet people, but I just don't see how that's possible. It was extremely hard in university (I never went on a date in university) and it's only gotten dramatically harder since, especially since covid.