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).
Jump in the discussion.
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You might be right.
I asked, she said yes, but also something vaguely dismissive about labels in general. It didn't go super poorly, like she said yes, and I don't get the impression I'm going to wake up to a "hey sorry about this but". But I was hoping for it to be a little more... Romantic?
It seems like she is really intensely trying to find a life partner, and I'm vaguely skeptical that I would ever want to put up with someone forever. It's not that I go into a relationship hoping to break up with someone, but five for five, I have gotten bored and done just that. Life partner kind of sounds like a thing I would want, I'm definitely a boring suburban person and fond of routine. But also, the ADHD, it's a thing , so always hard to know if I am right about what I want.
Listen I am all ready to walk you through your entire relationship from this point forward, just to see if my madskillz actually work. Short of that, if you wisely choose to decline, I would say to you that you may possibly be approaching commitment assbackwards. Let me explain what I mean.
At some point you need to project into eternity. Do you want kids? Or, a kid? As a father myself twice over (both boys) I would say that there is nothing quite like it--you imbue them with the movies you grew up on, your music, your food tastes, your general approach to life, pretty much everything. They will no doubt eventually reject much of it, but there was nothing like that first time I sat my sons down and we all watched the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts and they asked to watch it again, eventually knowing the music as well as I do. There was the added benefit that they understood more of the Greek myths that I read to them when they were too young to know anything but sounds.
This is not me being flippant. Having children is huge. It is, arguably, why any of us are here. So ADHD. Believe me, you can not have ADHD and still get bored AF with your significant other. As it happened I was utterly smitten with my wife during our courting phase, and even now I have moments (usually improbable times such as when I leave early in the morning and see her lying in bed with her mouth open, having stolen all the covers) when I love her completely, when I would die or kill to protect her. But there are also those moments where she pisses me off, where I think WTF woman? There are moments when I walk through the city and see 20 women who I would rather know carnally than my missus. But I realize, or--have realized, late in life--that all of that is bullshit.
This romantic gloaming is, I would argue, inevitable. Do not imagine pairing yourself with a female will be roses and lust ad aeternum. Perhaps it is, for some. But I seriously doubt it.
Where does this leave us then? Other than having read the ramblings of an old man, that is?
Well, back where you are right now. I am not saying you should throw yourself onto the pyre of forever love, but I am saying: Don't be such a doubter. Marriage ain't about the one true one. It's about making a goddam decision and choosing. And just like the cheese tray that comes around, there's always a bunch of camembert, or gruyere, or Stilton, or havarti, or even American fuckin' cheddar. As my former Aussie roommate of 20 years ago (thrice married) once said: "At some point you gotta take your hand off it."
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