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Wellness Wednesday for January 10, 2024

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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Which in a moment of weakness where I asked for it, she has given but it still leaves me feeling that even so the other guys did one particular thing better than me.

In addition to what @FiveHourMarathon and @2rafa said below, which I endorse fully, one other thing that might not exactly be helpful to think about but is grounded in reality is that one of those guys might have done one particular thing better than you, and it might have been sex. There are plenty of people that are complete losers, but actually very good at one thing - playing a guitar, shooting a basketball, fixing car engines, or fucking.

While it's completely normal to want to be just plain better than previous partners at everything, and especially at fucking, the reality is that this just doesn't matter very much to the long-run success of the relationship. As FiveHour correctly notes, time together will ultimately trump whatever natural predilection she (and you) might have had for another person's style and effort in bed. You'll get better together, but it will also just be entirely clear that there simply is no hangup around how one time, five years, someone else was good in the sack. I'm not saying that this can't possibly cause a twinge of insecurity, even years later, just that this insecurity is so utterly unimportant compared to all the good of a successful relationship that you won't care very much.

As corny and cliche as it may seem, I think the biggest thing you can do when you have these kinds of thoughts is to remind yourself that she's with you because she wants to be with you.