Literally the first person I thought of when reading the title of this post

Dude I was born in the early 90s and even I assumed “Pagers” was something I am not familiar with when I read the news. The name of a city? A guy? Some ethnic group? Some new military car? At some point I thought the news outlet just meant Prague (especially since I read it in German news first). I never would have guessed they literally meant pagers. Took me like 2 news report headlines and 4 mentions on lemmy to be like “oh wait what for real?!”

You’re right, I’m from Germany

I’ve known one woman who sometimes wore the engagement instead of the wedding ring but this was very odd and uncommon. I know everyone keeps their engagement ring but hardly anyone ever wears them, let alone on a regular basis.

How did your wife deal with it?

While I don’t see the necessity in wearing a ring in the first place - yet I am a sucker for rings - what always gets me is having a fancy overpriced engagement ring that you’re supposed to wear for a short period of time and then a simple wedding ring that you’re supposed to wear forever.

I have someone in my life who chose to find all of these things “meh”. One by one. Having recorded and enjoyed playing guitar for years, they deleted all of their music and decided to not play guitar anymore. Being into third wave coffee, they now stopped drinking it because it is pointless. Biking (or any kind of physical activity or being outside) has stopped. The introvert who was already hardly seeing anyone outside of home now leaves home even less and doesn’t want to meet any people. Anything that’s nice is met with a “meh”. All energy and devotion left go into buddhism, reading about it and meditating, which is a part of their life that is growing more and more. And I am not sure what to do. I would like them to get accessed for depression, but the answer I get is always “what for?”, because they would only prescribe antidepressants. Why would therapy work. I get that they are happy and content and that everything comes from the inside and not from outside things. But it feels like everything around this person is disappearing, nothing has meaning or value, so why bother. I’m really not sure what to do. Am I overreacting? Is this what buddhism makes you like? Just a zombie who finds everything meh because it doesn’t matter?

Same, I hate muscles and fat on guys. Although that’s difficult to admit openly since a guy saying he is into heroine chic would be a social outcast, so why should it be acceptable if a woman says so. I like skinny guys and my husband is skinny af. I am by no means unattractive either.

My question to OP is - you seem to get rejected because of your looks, yet these beautiful women (by your standards) went out with you in the first place if I read that correctly. So there must have been some attraction in the beginning. At the very least they talked to you. But something along the line happened that made them not want to commit to you.

In general, we find people attractive because we like them. We don’t like them because we find them attractive.

It can very well happen that when you meet someone in your everyday life and get to know them and then happen to fall in love, they absolutely don’t fall into your “scheme” or “type”.

In The Big Bang Theory without the laugh track, Raj becomes just a huuuuuuge asshole.

To be fair, with or without a laugh track, TBBT is depressing as fuck. I feel incredibly sorry for the faith of most characters.

I used to get ukrainian emails every now and then. And then once I got a “confirm your signature to the petition” email and I checked. It was a petition to allow men to leave the country. A girl with my name signed it (wanted to sign it), and she stated wanting to leave with her 58 year old dad as the reason.

I ended up signing the petition myself, stating I wanted XY to leave with her dad as the reason.

I still wish there was a way to get in touch with her. I guess it was the same person who every now and then signed up for newsletters etc. I hope they found a way to leave. I wish there was a way I could help her directly. I keep imagining it was me and my dad stuck in a war torn country. My father has a super popular first name so the chances aren’t even that low that our dads share the same name too.

Serious question: How does a trial separation work with a child? I remember having a divorce scare when I was little and it still haunts me. I can’t imagine telling my kid “well we are separated now because we want to try out how it would be if we divorced” and letting it live through that limbo of uncertainty. Even if we get back together - that will they won’t they seems to be too much to bear for a child. We are always told to be clear and consistent with our kids and this is definitely the opposite of it.

Same. My partner needs his quiet time and alone time and just a spouse and child (I am the primary caregiver) is so overwhelming. I never expected to become the parent of an only child, I felt like just me and my sister was so little when I was growing up. But now this is what I am stuck with. Just one child and a spouse I hardly interact with because it’s too much and meditation and peace and quiet is making them more happy than time spent together.

I’m sorry that was your shower thought

Penne al aspirine

Wait so you had to eat pasta to ease the pain or did he also recommend some pain relief medicine?

I did in another comment above!

Ideologically, I can follow your argument. I just don’t think this fits with the AA philosophy. But that being said, AA is not the one and only or the gold standard for self help groups. It’s not a one size fits all. For me, AA is almost too religious and also didn’t fit into my life back then.

In my early 20s I actually went to AA meetings over the course of probably a year. I kept it very secret, as I did with my very problematic consumption.

It was a group of probably 15-20 people, most aged 40-70. I was by far the youngest there. And let me tell you they would not have appreciated someone coming in who is under any kind of influence, including marijuana (even if it had been legal back then). Some people smoked cigarettes but even that was kind of frowned upon. At some point I mentioned that I have been getting into non-alcoholic beer, and even this was controversial, because I allegedly was masking the behavior and a slip back to alcoholic beer is easy. With that same logic, any kind of coping by using alternative drugs is just redirecting your addiction. In the group there was a strong belief that you are an addict for life and that you have an addictive personality type. And at least to me it’s kind of true. As a side note: Nowadays I am drinking sugary lemonade as a treat (something I would have never done in my 20s) and a fuckton of specialty coffee. For me, this is ok, and it works. But I understand if in their philosophy this is not a good way to go about your problems.

Anyway, at another point someone else asked about benzodiazepines to ease the first transition. This has also been controversial, and while you can get this prescribed when you are becoming sober, everyone recommended not to do it. There seemed to be a strong belief that the best (or only) way to go about your addiction is to rawdog sobriety - don’t mask, don’t cope, face your feelings and pains and reasons for your consuption. Only then can you move on, forgive yourself, ask others for forgiveness, and all of these famous steps.

There is also a clear rule that you come sober. Although this is specifically in regards to alcohol, I am really sure any other mind altering substance that numbs or excites you would have led to you being excluded from this week’s session.

Now, this is my experience with one group outside of the US. Also, I was a very shitty member and should not have been there to begin with. I made a joke, a competition out of it, I’m not even sure why I kept going there. I went there drunk, but no one ever suspected anything. The paramedics hardly suspected anything when I had 3.5%o blood alcohol, they assumed I had a slight migraine. I went to AA with literal booze in my handbag just for the thrill. I did so in university and relationships and with my family, and I was always so successful, I think I just wanted to see how far I can push my behavior before someone notices, before someone stops me, before I fuck up.

I stopped going to AA because I went abroad, but it was just a great excuse to stop going. The truth is I wasn’t ready to stop drinking quite yet. Committing to never having alcohol again when you are missing the one thing in life that you have actually wanted and you’re just 22 is just really hard.

Tl;dr: I would not recommend marijuana use in AA groups, to be honest neither during/before, nor in between meetings. It might not be the community you are looking for if you want to cope with your addiction by using an alternative drug. Whether or not it is a smart or sensible thing to do might be up for debate, but from my very limited experience with AA this would neither be ok for the group, nor go with their philosophy.

You’ve never been to an AA meeting, have you?

You guys have lazy Saturdays???

I think technology is the culprit in another way. It is not that we have too much time now as technology does all the work for you (also, really? Like, how does your life look like? I hardly have 10 minutes to feel bored, these 10 minutes take away from my very limited sleeping time). To me it seems more like we have gotten so used to filling every spare second with information, scrolling, clicking, googling, playing, texting, interacting, communicating. So much so that we have constant dopamine kicks and just cannot stand one second of being not busy. Everyone is shopping with headphones on, listening to music or a podcast. You’re on an escalator? Better pull out your phone. You’re cooking or cleaning? Turn up the volume! For real, when was the last time you just raw dogged a chore?