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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The moderately charitable interpretation is that she feels that you have said, about her friends, without knowing them very well, that they are transparently shallow in important (to them) areas of their lives. And, by extension, that she has poor taste in friends. Depending on how important the friends have been to her, and how seriously she takes them, that could hurt a lot. It doesn't do much to assuage these hurt feelings to say that you will be base level polite the one time this might come up. You said you've so far met one, once. How often do you actually use pronouns for a person to their face? While also still thinking she has poor taste in friends, and that her friends are pretentious and shallow(one possible interpretation).
Something that she might like, and that wouldn't necessarily be a lie on your part, would be to assume an attitude of curiosity about her interpretation of her friends' actions. Why does she think they identify as nonbinary? Why is she friends with them? What does she like about them? Does she really think it likely that the two of you might have children who turn out trans or nonbinary, unexpectedly, and should be fully supported in that? That would be more cause for concern than that she wants to defend her friends.
There are people I like (nay, respect! Admire!) who are into astrology. I'm not completely sure why. My best guess is that astrology is a way to talk about personality and life event things that are otherwise harder to talk about, the way I tend to use personality systems. But, also, it seems like it might be interesting to have a respectful, curiosity rather than incrimination based discussion about it, as a thing I know very little about. But if my husband said that they liked it for some distasteful reason that implied they were bad people, I would be angry about that.
I like your advice overall, but I don't know how I could ask this particular question without making the other person feel like it's an attack.
Yes, that was phrased poorly. I meant something more like how they became friends, a story.
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