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Wellness Wednesday for September 20, 2023

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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A lot of good comments already, but hopefully I can add something useful.

Remember the story about the guy who thought his study partner was flirting with him, so he told her he was not looking for a relationship, but was dtf is she was, so she freaked out and told everyone to avoid him? Yeah. You are definitely not in the same band of awkwardness as he is, but think of him as the platonic anti-ideal.

Don't put girls you have an existing relationship with on the spot. You have actually texted her a direct question, so there's a paper trail that both of you can't pretend to ignore. @5434a has the right idea: plausible deniability. You could've tested the waters with an indirect question about "a friend" whose girl-friend-two-words asked if she could be his girlfriend-one-word and he didn't know what to answer. Or could have framed the date as totally-not-a-date and then went "haha, these people must think we're on a date together" and gauged her reaction to the idea.

Right now the best option would be to pretend you haven't written this and look for an opportunity to discuss cases like yours with a third party in a safe environment with your friend present. Ideally this third party should be your trusted friend with higher social intelligence that should bring this up with a fourth party: "Don't drink that much, Fred, or you'll end proposing to random people from your contact list! I can't be your best man if you wake up in Vegas married to 'Hannah Couch Delivery'" and then steer the conversation to convince your woman friend that a text like this shouldn't hurt an existing relationship.