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Wellness Wednesday for November 6, 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:

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I am legitimately worried that my girlfriend will break up with me if/when she finds out that I voted for Trump. She has always been an incredibly sweet and kind person, but her social media since the election has become unhinged. Like, some are more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit. We basically don't talk politics at all with each other, and I have no intention of changing that, but I am a bad liar with a terrible poker face, so if she becomes suspicious there’s not much I can do (I also have ethical qualms with lying, but these are essentially moot given the concerns above.)

EDIT: She found out. She was VERY upset. I'm like 75% sure its over.

I'm sorry this happened. How are you doing?

Did you consider just not voting? Do you even live in a swing state?

I personally didn't vote because I on-principle hate the social dynamics of politics becoming everyone's new favorite hobby, religion, and spectator sport. And I don't live in the state that I'm registered to vote. And the one I'm in now a true-blue state anyways. And I don't like either candidate.

My pet peeve is the toxic interpersonal behavior of political partisans and the creepy pod-person consistency of their agendas. Not voting is the biggest fuck-you to them I could come up with.

I'm really sorry bro. Were you together for long?

We had been dating for over a year. None of that mattered. It was like it retroactively made everything we went through together a lie to her.

I'm sorry this happened. You did nothing wrong.

I'm sorry and it must hurt, but I don't see how it is possible to maintain a long-term relationship and hide who you are. You can disagree, and have different opinions on certain matters, and I've heard about couples with different political views making it work (though it's probably not easy) but if you have to hide and live in mortal fear it comes out one day - it's not sustainable, and it's not the way to live your life.

Was a conversation held? Reasons given? A good old fashioned discussion? Sorry it just seems bizarre to me that personal intimacy to the point where you'd call each other girl/boy friend can be destroyed by this. Facebook unfriending, sure. Dropping of acquaintanceship across the internet, yes, I've seen it. But breaking up with someone you're supposed to be somewhat intimate with? Over a vote? Maybe this reveals enough fundamental disagreements that you are just not compatible, but I would have imagined such things would have come to light earlier.

My best friend--been with me through thick and thin for most of both of our lives--straight up told me if I was a Trump supporter, that was the only thing that could ever end our friendship.

To me, there are far worse things than simply supporting Trump, and there's a not implausiblr chance it was simply a venting/signaling sentence, but it was still a bit chilling to hear (as someone who is most emphatically not a Trump supporter, but at risk of being assumed to be one in certain circles for simply not thinking it's as bad as the histrionics would suggest).

I do not doubt you. I think though what people imagine when they imagine "Trump supporter" is a demon of their own creation, not the actual humans in voting booths with reasonable perspectives. I think also with dialogue that (at least some) people can be made to realize this.

I genuinely think you're typical-minding here. There is a contingent of people so intent on hating Trump supporters that when there's a conflict between their idea that 1) Trump supporters are horrible human beings who support Bad Things and 2) this person I know is good and principled, they'll resolve the cognitive dissonance by sacrificing 2) to protect 1), instead of entertaining the idea that there's a remotely valid train of thought that might allow someone reasonable to consider supporting Trump.

It seems quite bizarre for me as well that this would be someone's reaction, but people can indeed be so afflicted by political derangement so as to do this - they see casting your vote for Trump as tantamount to ushering in the American equivalent of the Third Reich. It's just such an illegitimate position to them that they refuse to humanise their supporters; it's a close-to-irredeemable action that overrides much of the positive personal qualities you may have had and makes them see you as barely even human once you've done that. I am only slightly exaggerating.

It doesn't help if you never discuss it. Steel Manning her position here: she wouldn't have reached that level of intimacy had she known up front, there was an element of fraud to the proceedings.

Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."

Divorcing my wife because she fell into debt is very different from deciding not to marry her because she revealed she revealed to me late in our engagement that she'd been in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all along, even if both could be described as "Making marriage decisions on the basis of money."

This is a very obvious false equivalency and I'm not sure how you don't see it. Failing to disclose something, like your debts, that you know will affect the other partner personally is beyond the pale precisely because it is so relevant to their future wellbeing - you can't really say you care for a person and yet want to dupe them into taking on your debts.

Something like voting for Trump, on the other hand, is just not super relevant to the other partner's personal life or material wellbeing outside of "You hold opinions I don't like and that makes me feel bad". Who your partner voted for is not your business in the way that your partner's debts are your business. If someone wants to abandon a relationship for that reason, it's certainly their prerogative, but it is their own hangup that's at fault.

I genuinely think you're typical-minding here.

To be fair, the mindset he describes is typical in my experience. People that invested in politics are not the majority, thankfully.

This is true, but typical-minding someone who's been described to pen comments "more hateful than the worst comments I have seen on Reddit" is probably a bad idea. And I do personally know people who have dumped friends who have voted for Trump - incidentally (or not), they themselves generally happen to be fairly shit people in my experience.

The fact that I do not live in the US certainly weighs in on this view of mine, no doubt. I was recently in conversation with solid blue tribers who did not disavow me as a friend, though we did agree to change the conversational topic.

Are politics in Japan as vicious as they have been here lately? Can you summarize the "sides"? Maybe material for Transnational Thursday.

They are not. Others here are probably more cognizant of the machinations of politics in Japan than I. On the macro level the LDP or Jimintō party is typically the winner, with only a few brief periods of upset. The LDP is weirdly partnered with (New) Komeito, which is affiliated with the Soka Gakkai sect (some might say cult) of Buddhism, which has great social and political sway in Japan (if to some degree implicitly).

There are of course randos in Twitter who have opinions, but typically elections pass without great interest, with voter turnout not great, but similar to that of the US.

It's nowhere near as circus-like as in the US. Elections do make the news and on election nights the results are covered on the Japanese TV networks (which still receive considerable viewership despite Netflix) but there's not the wild and woolly atmosphere. It's rare (for me) to hear anyone discuss politics openly, which may or may not be gor cultural reasons (e.g. desire for social harmony )

We did have a discussion. She was willing to hear me out. I am also surprised it didn’t come to light earlier. I think her logic was: “Obviously no respectable person would ever vote for Trump. My boyfriend is a respectable person. Therefore, my boyfriend obviously wouldn’t vote for Trump.”

The conversation was very 2015 Tumblr. The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”. I could probably salvage this by going full Hanania and pledging my opposition to deportations and my support for abortion, which is a quite tempting option at the moment tbh.

The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”.

There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.

Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.

If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.

If you actually are opposed to deportations and in favour of abortion, then do it. Nothing wrong with telling the truth.

Otherwise, I wouldn't advise it.

I'm not going to try and co-pilot your conversations, obviously, and I trust you know what you're doing. I would suggest if she decides to bail on you for this there may be a lack of emotional maturity worth thinking about--and which may itself be a consolation to you. This is regardless of whether you or she is the one "in the right" politically.

I would like to think, however, that she resists the urge to just walk away and rid herself of the cognitive dissonance that seems to be at play, and that this is a kind of wake-up call for her.

Tiptoeing around this is a gigantic mistake - this is going to come out at some point, and the values difference will have to be confronted. If she truly can't handle it and is going to want to force consensus, it's not going to work. I know of a guy who married a strongly religious girl who's extremely domineering in terms of beliefs, and he's slowly changing his own stated beliefs. Not just on religion, too - he's even allowed her to not vaccinate their baby daughter just for the sake of harmony. This kind of relationship dynamic where you just keep quiet and hide things about yourself to keep the missus happy isn't sustainable or healthy, I think, though it's unfortunately common.

My partner and I talked about politics very early on in the course of the relationship (homosexual relationship, take that how you will) and laid bare all of these value differences that bother most people. We knew what we were both getting into before we got too invested. Our political opinions are similarly divergent, and we had pretty gigantic blowouts about it early on - there was a point in which he linked me a BreadTube video and I did not hold back when tearing into it, to the point I had a whole script written complete with sources as to why it was wrong about everything. At this point, we have a pretty high level of certainty that neither of us is going to leave the other for such things, and while we may still disagree every now and then it's not going to jeopardise the relationship.

Come on ya'll we can be better than /r/relationshipadvice

It's possible that the advice of others is the correct way to go, and it may be the case, but don't do it prematurely. People are freaked out right now and the average woman is more vulnerable to that. She may calm down acutely, in which case the fight is not necessary. Like most she will probably calm down in the long run but it would be a serious question of what time horizon you need for people to go normal.

I know totally normal women who are saying nobody should have sex with men anymore. It histrionic nonsense. If you can tolerate taking Trump non literally you can tolerate this haha (again assuming it has hope to be temporary).

I know totally normal women who are saying nobody should have sex with men anymore

The definitions of "totally normal" are getting stretched really wide nowadays.

Wokeness is widely popular with women and necessarily involves holding together a lot of contradictory opinions, so the training is out there. Consider the modern dating market - women still want a man who is masculine, pays, etc. but they also want feminist girl bosses at the same time. These things don't work together, but they manage.

Cultural acceptability is what is normal. Lots of culturally acceptable believes are unwise or harmful, however.

Goatse levels of stretch.

nobody should have sex with men

getting stretched really wide

There's a joke in here somewhere but I'm not the one to make it.

It's possible that the advice of others is the correct way to go, and it may be the case, but don't do it prematurely.

I don't think anyone is saying it needs to be brought up proactively, just pointing out that if it does come up it'll be ok in the end no matter what happens.

I know totally normal women who are saying nobody should have sex with men anymore.

I know it's kind of off-topic, but I would not call those totally normal women lol. Anyone who says that unironically is crazy.

I know it's kind of off-topic, but I would not call those totally normal women lol. Anyone who says that unironically is crazy.

If they are still saying it in a in two months they are crazy, for now? Just angry.

Women tend to interact with the world in a more bubble and consensus oriented way, the ego damage when that gets popped leads to immature defense mechanisms aka the batshit insanity. Most people will course correct.

It's crazy on day one. It's a wild overreaction and a normal, well-adjusted person would understand that.

Ehhhhh I think you underestimate how consensus reality holders feel about things. Most of us here aren't really about that kinda thinking but it is wildly popular, and plenty of otherwise well adjusted little to no other abnormal belief people are shitting absolute bricks right now.

Note that I didn't say "if you're shitting bricks about Trump winning you're crazy", though. It's very specifically the idea of "all women should punish all men by refusing to have sex with them" that I called crazy (and it is). A normal, well-adjusted person isn't going to immediately jump to punishing half of the country because of an election result.

How many Jewish/Italian/Irish/Black etc... women do you know.

They'll say it, but only a fraction will actually believe it.

My wife is black, is upset about the election results (more than I think she should be tbh), and she isn't saying stuff like that. Of course, if she was crazy enough to overreact on that level I wouldn't have married her. /shrug

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Me IRL

You absolutely should not lie to her about it. If she cares about politics more than she cares about you, it's not gonna work. When you're in love, politics don't matter. When she's really into you, your disgusting politics will be at worst a charming and amusing idiosyncrasy, never a fatal one. As the saying goes: "if she's still a feminist with you, you're not the guy."

That said, there are more and less attractive presentations of the same politics, and different sets of politics which cash out to the same voting patterns. An intelligent, reasoned, lived-experience-based argument for why you vote the way you do will get you further than just the bare fact that you voted for Trump, or a negative or tribal logic for your vote. If she is attracted to you, she wants to make excuses for you, give her one and she'll spin the rest out herself.

-EDIT- Started with a lead paragraph about myself that went nowhere. I removed it.

Other commenters have said the right thing to say - "If you're so incompatible at a values level, it's good to get it over with and move on." That is thoroughly correct. But, I'd like to highlight some operational level considerations for you.

You talk about her social media. What about her IRL social life? Does she hang out with Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers? Does she work in a job that is heavily PMC captured? You could very well be the most important single person in her life, but the collective importance of the 20 other people she spends most of her time with outweighs you. Social pressure is as real a force as gravity except for people who have committed to truly Outsider status. And those people often come with their own pathologies that make them difficult to build a relationship with.

If you're ever worried about your relationship status with your significant other, you've probably already lost. If you're married it's a little different. A lot of folks will limp it out until the kids are out of the house. Many won't. You should look back to see when you started worrying about anything besides being the best possible partner you could be. Once it gets externalized ("was she actually angry about x? Did she not like friend y? Can I convince her to z") you've entered a bargaining based transactional relationship with an account balance. Account balances can go up to infinity, which means they're never "full." They can also drop to the negative for long stretches and have you paying out interest only payments.

On the bright side, your ethical qualms about lying are excellent. No matter what happens in the rest of the external world, it's always 100% within your own power to maintain your honor and integrity. You'll done fine.

But if that’s true, I’m still saying no to this one. It cannot work if you’re going to be in her life socially. Sooner or later you will be at a party or something and the topic will come up. Probably not Trump specifically, but some future iteration of the same. And if she feels the need to be proactively politically correct online, she’s not going to allow you to be yourself in the presence of her friends no matter what her IRL friends think. If she’s doing it for a career move, you’re going to either have to act the part or at least bite your tongue whenever politics comes up, or frankly most social issues. And I don’t see tha5 working long term

Was this supposed to be a comment to my comment, or the top level post?

There’s no reason to hide who you really are from your girlfriend, but I don’t think it’s necessary to bring it up while emotions are still running high. I’m not convinced that her political fervor is a deep-seated part of her personality. Likely, there’s more social influence and surface-level enthusiasm than you might assume at first glance, and people’s political views can change significantly over time. While it’s true that women can be more emotionally expressive, I’ve become more understanding of friends with opposing political views as I mature. In fact, I sometimes feel more distant from those who stand on the same side of the barricade.

I know this stuff is scary, but it really is better to get it out in the open. If she breaks up with you, then she was never right for you to begin with and you won't be wasting more time on a dead end relationship. If she doesn't mind, then you can be even more secure in your relationship knowing that she loves you enough to not let trivial things get in the way.

Not saying you need to proactively broach the topic. And obviously it's going to be painful if she breaks up with you. But try to focus on the long term positive, it helps some with the fear in my experience.

When someone shows you who they are (typically in times of serious stress for them), you should believe them. I don't think it's a good idea to carry on a relationship with a person who hates who you are.

Hmm. I would argue that "Who I voted for that time" is considerably different from "Who I Am."

Anything you do is part of you in that "not doing x" isn't part of you.

I did drag for a Halloween costume once. I wouldn't say that makes me a drag queen or a cross dresser.

But it does mean I'm not the kind of guy who would never do that. Such a person exists, a guy who would never put on a skirt and makeup, and we are different.

In the same way, voting for Trump "that time" doesn't define your whole personality. But it does mean you aren't a person who would never vote for Trump, which is a piece of information about you.

voting for Trump "that time" doesn't define your whole personality.

We are in agreement.

Come on dude, I expect better from you.

Sorry to disappoint. Mine was not an attempt at comeback, simply a suspicion that we actually do agree in the essentials and that any point of argument isn't really worth the candle for either of us.

clearly not to the girlfriend, who he is terrified will find out he is the sort of person who would vote for Donald Trump that time

it's part of you, you may not like how some people interpret that, but you are the sort of person who does that thing

it is at least part of "who you are"

Sure, part of, yes. But disagreeing with your choice for president needn't be "hating who you are." That's the kind of thing that reasonable people really need to get past--it's buying into a pop culture meme way of looking at the world, a tacit acceptance of the premise that vibes are some existential manifestation of selfhood.

I'm sure for many here it is outrageous to suggest that core principles can be shared by people on both sides of the political aisle, but I certainly believe this to be true.

needn't be "hating who you are."

it needn't be and yet it is in this described scenario; if you genuinely fear your spouse or close friend would end that relationship if they discovered you voted for a person for president which half of Americans also voted for, then it isn't OP or ME who is claiming otherwise, it's the person who is going to end relationships over it thus showing you the type of person she is

a person who does this isn't a reasonable person

I'm sure for many here it is outrageous to suggest that core principles can be shared by people on both sides of the political aisle, but I certainly believe this to be true.

brother wars consist of two sides of a family who agree on quite a lot of core principles and yet they fight and kill each other because of the stuff they disagree on

to be honest, I doubt you will find a single user here who believes "people on both sides of the political aisle" cannot share some core principles.

Breaking up with someone who hates who you are seems net-positive for both parties to me. I had a friend who dated a girl who cried over a beer-pong game very early in the relationship. She was overly emotional was anxious all the time. To me all disqualifiers to long-term relationship material. But I think my friend thought she would improve, she was best he could get at the time, could fix her (who knows!). But they wasted each others' time dating for several fraught years, where I think they each wanted the other to be someone they weren't, or couldn't be. Now years after the break-up now are both doing much better by all appearances by being with other people much better suited to both of them.