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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   2494 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague.

Well, @2rafa, avoid becoming an unproductive complainer. Hopefully your spouse can be a good active listener without being a problem-solver, since that is a very useful skill when it's required, but it's not an easy one for many people. If there's a problem and we can't solve it then that's hard, and if there's a problem but we shouldn't solve it then that's utterly exasperating.

Being a productive complainer can bring some couples closer together, though. "Men love quests. Well not all men, but most men." If there's something reasonable he can do for you, and you make it clear what he should do, and you show proportional gratitude afterward, that's better than not asking it of him, not worse. This can require good communication in some cases: you can't grossly over or under emphasize how important something is to you, and he has to give you some feedback about problems of uncertain difficulty, otherwise "reasonable" and "proportional" can be too ill-defined. But hopefully you have or develop that level of communication anyway for a hundred other reasons.

The other time to not avoid complaint is when you have a serious problem that won't go away otherwise and that you can't just live with. For a tolerant person there might not be many of those, but if and when one comes up it's much better to complain as early as possible, when hopefully the problem and your level of upset (or in the worst case, resentment) about it hasn't had time to grow very much. If you try to bottle up negative emotions until you just have to let them out, then you end up trapped in a choice between revealing their full extent (which can come off as a blindsiding attack) or downplaying/"trickling" their full extent (which hurts communication, as well as making it less likely the problem will be resolved).

I agree with all of the above. My main issue is when complaining becomes a hobby, a pastime, a personality trait.

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