I'm watching a show in which the mother advises her daughter not to ask a guy out because men don't like it if a girl is too forward. In our year of the plague 2023.
<ahem>
Women (who date men): Were you ever given this advice? Did you listen? How in your experience does it hold up?
Men (who date women): Have you ever been asked out by a woman? How did you react? Are you turned off if a "girl is to forward"?
WOMEN AT FAULT FOR POLITICAL DIVIDE: MARRY A MAGA MAN!
Ridiculous concern trolling by The Washington Post's editors, too cowardly to put a byline for the author, really showcases how #incel grievance has become normalized.
They argue *someone will have to compromise *(meaning women) or else marriage rates will tumble. I think women may have already found their own alternative.🤔
Many years ago, I bought a Bird of Paradise at a garden centre. It had lush green leaves and a pefect flower in bloom. I spent the entire summer caring for it, and it was thriving.
I was so proud. It was the first flowering plant I'd managed to keep alive for more than a few months.
One afternoon, someone I had just started dating came over and was browsing my book shelves. He stopped at the plant and...
Thanks for your support! This is my third account on Mastodon. Clearly sexual content is not welcome! So I will only be posting sanitised posts. You will have to look at https://twitter.com/LrnAbtSexuality to see my content. Apologies...
Apps are mostly shit these days, and most of my #dating luck in the last few years has been down to the Fuck Referral Network. But if you're a dude who fancies some casual sex, how do you get women to recommend you to their mates?
Our survey on friendships, sexual and romantic relationships closes soon (5/31)!
If you're 18+ in the US (& especially if you're #asexual / #aromantic / #queer),
my collaborators (Canton Winer at UCI and Hannah Tessler at Yale) and I would love to include your perspective in our study.
"'... this is just as large an existential threat as climate change.'
And if we can't find a way to curb the spread of the virus and halt the increase in cases of long COVID, [Putrino] says, those effects will bite sooner than we think."
Impact of social media and instant messaging apps on interpersonal relationships
My Perspective
Instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram Messenger, Signal Messenger etc. (primarily WhatsApp in India) do boost one to one connectivity among friends, acquaintances and family members. It also helps improve communication related to mostly once in a while transactional and sometimes friendly topics like family matters, medical, school and college education, fun side of personal life through photos and videos. Jokes and memes, through forwards, add spices to one to one communication. Group chats and social media like Facebook and Twitter strongly influences one to one communication through instant messengers.
There is another side of instant messaging i.e. the not so nice aspects. Dopamine is a brain chemical that plays a vital role in mood regulation of human beings. It seems that entire society is driven by the feel good factor due to constant availability of cheap dopamine through group chats and social media. Unless it is transactional or related to business, most one to one chats survive as long as the recipients gets positive social stimulus and dopamine influx. It doesn’t matter if something is good or healthy for us, as long as we get that quick dopamine fix.
From my experience of chatting since the days of Yahoo! Chat, I see that loss of reward stimuli and dopamine activity lead to one or both the recipients disengage at the slightest pretext. Read receipts, online status, last seen status etc. further add to anxiety and feeling unimportant or betrayed. There is lack of patience and empathy. Sharing contrarian or critical views, on matters connected to society and politics, often cause functional impairment and getting ignored or blocked.
We need to spend more time socializing because screens & social media have left us lonely & selfish. Volunteering, attending classes & events, & hobby, social, belief... groups will foster new relationships & maybe some newfound "fun".
"Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out. Too much aloneness is creating a crisis of social fitness."
In America, married people get more than 1,000 legal benefits that single people can't access. Vox's Sigal Samuel asks why people in a platonic partnership can't enjoy the same kind of benefits, and why society values friendships less than familial relationships and marriages. Do you have a "best friend?"
While we don’t discount our feelings, being fully led by them can be a slippery slope. You may feel sad that you have to walk away from a relationship. However, if staying is unsafe, allowing that feeling of sadness to cause you to stay is not wise. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded that we deserve relationships that are mutually respectful and safe. ❤️
Many people dread small talk (not us, now tell us about your vacation plans). Human connectivity researcher Georgie Nightingall says it can be a way of building deeper connection, trust and curiosity. “You can actually realize that you do want to know more rather than having that sense of like, I’m just asking for the sake of asking,” she told Vox. Here are some tips on how to improve your small talk abilities. We want to know, how do you feel about the art of chitchat?
"Somehow, I have been instrumentalized by the internet, which operates me through my phone. It often feels like the internet is reading my mind."
A beautifully-written piece by #MerrittTierce that traces the not-quite-serendipity of connection through the internet, and shows how the internet mediates our relationships - to each other, and with the internet itself.
When you hold a lot of space and give a lot of energy, sometimes you end up finding that you're surrounded by people who require a lot of space and energy but who aren't capable (for one reason or another) or willing to hold that same space or give that same energy to you.
There is so much to community building that becomes so complicated, and everyone is unhealed in their own ways. Sometimes those ways are compatible with the ways in which you are unhealed: and you find that you are able to hold space for one another, mutually, and that the space you hold doesn't open up into wounds (or it does, but the very act of holding space becomes healing, less self-sacrifice than a pouring into one another). Sometimes, though, those spaces are incompatible, and the opening of space feels like the opening of wounds, and if not at first then after a time, as though something has rubbed you raw right down to the bone after the accumulation of each time you've let it touch you. Sometimes this is just a critical incompatibility, perhaps you aren't the right people to be in community with one another at this time. Sometimes it's the result of someone not being able to recognize the ways in which they demand. Boundary holding is so vital, but often leads to the triggering of maladaptive defenses and sometimes the ending of the relationship you were trying to preserve by setting the boundary in the first place. Some people advocate for boundary setting loudly, but are also the loudest to criticize you and claim you are abandoning or harming them when you do so.
The bringing together of people and the fostering of intersecting relationships requires time and effort and very careful communication and consideration, and is sometimes the rolling of a snowball gently towards the cusp of a hill: from there it flows so holistically and genuinely and easily, and these people find each other and fold each other into their nets and the shared net of the community. Sometimes it is Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill over and over again until eventually you realize that perhaps one or more of these nodes must exist in satellite to the whole, and will not or does not desire to integrate within it.
Right now I am tired, and feeling as though critical boundaries must be held. A few of the relationships I've spent the past months fostering are crumbling for their own reasons: one because the other person is determined to remain in a power position that I refuse to engage with any further (giving the benefit of the doubt has to stop at some point, but the loss of this relationship impacts more than just me, which is hard) and the other because boundary holding is causing the other person to feel abandoned. After weeks of holding space for this person through a crisis, at the very moment I need that space held this person is pushing away and yet dragging me towards them -- unwilling to hold space but still demanding mine. And I am just tired, and wondering what patterns exist that push me to continue to forge unequal relationships in my own life, or if this is just really how most people are.
How is your dating life going for you?
How is it going for you, good, unsatisfactory, non-existent?....