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Wellness Wednesday for October 11, 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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Stick to your guns. There is no value to conceding. Because if you must concede for her to continue to love you, she doesn't love you.

There was a popular meme that ran around on twitter (I think from this guy for a while that ran something like: If she's still a feminist, you're not the guy. That matches my experience. When a woman is really into you, she is not going to care about your politics. The most progressive women in the world will make every excuse for you, if you get her juices flowing. For that matter, I can't imagine divorcing my wife over politics short of something so insane as to be absurd.

Therefore conceding is pointless. If you must concede to retain the relationship, the relationship has no value, because she isn't really that into you. Find someone who is. If she is into you, stick to your guns and she'll get over it. Simple as.

FWIW: Personally I'm closer to your compromise position in general life to begin with. If someone asks me to use different pronouns, I do, I find it polite (though despite moving in prog circles I've never been asked to use any outlandish ones). I've never actually had anyone police my use of pronouns irl, even given the occasional slip-up. But I can't imagine my wife policing my pronoun usage in our private conversations, largely because when we talk that kind of thing gets slid over in our sheer frenetic effort to empty our brains to each other at the end of every day. If she policed how I talked that way, I wouldn't like that.

I broadly agree, but I think "if she's still a feminist, you're not the guy" is too strong. My wife had a long enough history of outspoken feminism when I met her that it would have been ridiculous for her to pretend not to be one. But I also never pretended to agree with something I didn't. It worked out fine and she eventually became a stay-at-home-mom.

Most political convos start with her thoughtlessly repeating some slogan, and if I can't reframe the convo immediately, usually instead of saying she's wrong or being dismissive, I ask what it means concretely, as Gaashk suggested above. This usually makes her mildly upset and embarrassed when she notices she hasn't thought about it much at all, and so she's learned to not to do that as much. But in terms of day-to-day life or child-rearing decisions, even though politically we're worlds apart, we usually almost entirely agree on the concrete steps to be taken.

On the few times when something completely beyond the pale (from her point of view) has come up ("you really believe ___!?"), I tell her she needs to talk to me respectfully even if she disagrees, as I am doing to her, even though from my point of view, she's equally misled.

I used to have a trad girlfriend who said something like "if a man is taking a love interest's political opinions seriously in the first place, he's doing it wrong."

In my mind the phrase applies purely to the man himself, not to politics or the world at large. Tbh I'm suspicious of intelligent anti feminist women in the same way I'm suspicious of feminist men, they either lack self respect or they're trying to sell me something.

But if a woman is a feminist TO YOU, in the sense of treating you poorly because of your beliefs or making a big todo about things in your relationship, you're not the guy.

The twitter post (tweet?) is in this article:

https://extradeadjcb.substack.com/p/10-you-can-save-her

The tweet:

https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1432558778541559808

Alternatively, the tweet:

Certain bad actors feigned horror when I said feminism was "curable", but this is all I meant

If she's still a feminist, you're not the guy

Thanks Bro! Did me a real solid.

I'm mildly miffed that nobody has ever asked me to use non-natal pronouns in person (I had the misfortune to wander into some rather queer discord servers online).

Makes me feel like I'm missing out, not that I really want that particular brainworm in my local memeplex.

Well, I have misgendered someone, in a bleakly funny example where I called a cancer patient "sir" because I'd been too lazy to look at the name on the file, and in that case, she was utterly bald, wrinkled like a prune, and just about as androgynous as a human can get from being on the verge of dying from every cancer anyone can care to name. Hopefully she was too deaf to notice, or chalked it down to acute sleep deprivation.

Are 'they' pronouns and nonbinary folks not common in India? It's just about everywhere in the U.S. at this point. I've been in a similar position.