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Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 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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I mean, contrary to popular belief, Indians can and do have relationships before being packed off to an arranged marriage (and even those are usually family sanctioned dates more than the bride and groom seeing each other for the first time on the day of the wedding, at least out of the boonies).

As for how I've dated, well, it's usually been people in my med school, or a friend of a friend. The girl I was seeing for the longest, almost five years, I met at a friend's birthday party. Current girlfriend, well, let's just say our plan to do a research paper together ended up involving another kind of biology, but we met in the maximally nerdy manner of both being in the same local study group for a medical exam.

I've tried Tinder and managed to squeeze a handful of dates out of it, but it didn't go anywhere. I imagine it's even worse than the West, about the only person I've met with any success on it was a doc buddy of mine, who despite the shared degree, was hogging all six of the packs. It's an utter wasteland as far as the eye can see.

I'm pretty charming, so I have no issues just flirting on and off in person or sliding into DMs later. It's that HR meme personified, you just have to be funny and provide plausible deniability.

Now, the last question depends strongly on where and who you are. There are sections of richer society that are almost as libertine as the West, but the UMC in general doesn't usually do one night stands, perhaps after a few dates, and the lower you go, the longer it takes to get past kisses and heavy petting. Sleeping around a lot will likely get you heavily slut shamed, and even the wildest women I've dated would be considered pretty tame by American standards. My slag of an ex, has what, maybe 10-15 notches on her belt that I know of? At most it's like 20. But things are only getting more liberal, and horny medical students or young doctors are usually independent enough that it's not a big deal and they can usually put their past behind them when it's time to settle down.