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).
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Notes -
If I may insert something here (in no way intended to be a pun on sexual congress), the fact that you are "pretty sure" that the person you've been seeing is in this state of preoccupation with you may be a contributing factor into why you do not find yourself having reciprocal feelings. Perhaps especially if you are male, and I am not feeling energetic enough to close this mobile window and surf through your profile to get a sense of whether I think you are. Your post here perhaps intentionally leaves that vague.
Anyhoo, the way it seems to work is when I can't take my eyes off her, I feel it's natural, romantic, complimentary, praise. When she keeps looking at me with cow eyes, it's off-putting. When I talk about her, it's me wanting to let everyone know how real these wonderfully rare and implausibly strong feelings are, it's me on Oprah's couch feeling the beauty, at last, of pure joy. It's true love, princess; do you think this happens every day? And when I hear she's been going on about me at first it's fine you know, spread my legend, but then it's like do you not have a life?
When I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it's a magical reason to get out of bed. When I come to understand that she has been thinking of me all day I have the urge to bolt like a deer when the predator"s focus has flagged momentarily.
It's the dance, and if you're lucky you end up on both sides of this dichotomy more than once and with the same person. Too much complacency spells doom for any relationship, but then so does too much obsessive possessiveness.
You also say you're happy with whoever it is and can see that person being a good partner/parent. Well, that's excellent. You won't feel in love TM all the time, even when you do have the feeling occasionally. I find a nice slow burn lasts as long as it needs to, at least so far. Where more than a few explosive flare-ups didn't last long at all.
This probably all sounds like homespun nonsense. Maybe it is. I certainly can't be sure. And it's also true you may meet this evening someone in an elevator who hits all your buttons and for whom you might imagine you'd give up everything, without even having exchanged a word. But those feelings pass. They simply do.
Anyway, that's my take and I am not prepared to offer any pseudo-evolutionary biologist reasons for why it may be correct. I am old, at this point, not even relatively. I am getting up there. But the spark still lights sometimes.
I do think for some, cynicism and mistrust douse the ground enough that spontaneous flame isn't very likely, but again I am not familiar with your situation.
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