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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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Is it possible to be weighing engagement vs breaking up at the same time ?

It's quite sensible; when you know your SO well enough to decide whether you want to spend your life with them, the best answers are "yes" or "no", not "no but I'll waste both our time dragging things out anyway".

Sometimes I appreciate her steady self confidence. Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement.

Pros: she's confident

"Cons": she's not brutally driven

her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts

Pros: she's intelligent

"Cons": she's not sharp-tongued

the brain wants what it wants.

It is definitely possible that you're not the kind of person who can be happy forever with her, and I certainly don't know you or her well enough to say you are ... but it says something that you were trying to lay down criticisms and your top three were one triviality plus two humblebrags.

The relationship feels like coasting. And some part of my brain wants jazz.

Jazz gets a lot of value out of tension and dissonance, but like any music the trick is the balance between tension's creation and its release. If you've got a partner who consistently relieves tension, then finding tension elsewhere (e.g. from your own hopefully-not-quite-brutal drive to self-improvement) is going to be much easier and more productive than the alternative of demanding/creating tension in your closest relationship.

(not to be mistaken for the alternative of creating tension via your closest relationship - I wonder if humans are ill-adapted to handle a "feels like coasting" malaise phase because historically we'd have all the tension we could want from the "when will baby start sleeping through the night and my brain fog go away" phase sooner)