Relationship Advice
That’s what they told us in premarital counseling! A+ advice!
Tag: relationships
Fact: The rate of relationship violence against bisexual people, particularly bisexual women, is much higher than for people of other orientations. Your sexuality does not make you less trustworthy or less desirable as a partner, and it should never be used against you or seen as a “problem” in your relationship.
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your relationship doesn’t have to be toxic to be a bad one. it can be unfulfilling, exhausting, loveless. and someone doesn’t have to be terrible to you for you to leave them. if you aren’t primarily happy in your relationship, you have a valid reason to not be in it. don’t beat yourself up because your situation “could be worse.” if it isn’t what you want, you don’t have to stay in it.
rifa:
I firmly believe that unless the couple has discussed and agreed to marriage ahead of time, nobody has any business making a surprise public proposal.
Okay except some people want a surprise public proposal.
Girl my husband took me to Spain and gave me a kinder egg on the beach, the ring was inside the capsule (Lord knows how he did that) if any feminist tried to take that away from me I may cut a bitch. Best surprise of my life.
I wish people were capable of analyzing larger social trends and figuring that a significant number of women end up getting pressured into engagements or marriages they don’t want bc the audience that comes along with a public proposal will think she’s a bitch if she says no – instead of thinking “i liked it when it happened to me, therefore it could never turn out badly for anyone, not ever!!!!”
I think what people are misunderstanding here is that agreeing to marriage ahead of time doesn’t need to be like, asking permission to propose? I surprised my now spouse with a proposal in Disneyland but before that we had several conversations about the future of our relationship, future plans for our retirements and how we’d have to get married eventually for immigration purposes. I didn’t go to her and say “so would you say yeah if I proposed?” or hash out deets ahead of time, but we had enough of a mutual understanding and communicated desire to get married that, although it was a surprise for when and how I proposed, it wasn’t out of left field at all.
This is exactly like conversations about consent, people get up in arms thinking that it means you have to have contracts and serious sit down conversations before doing anything when its REALLY EASY to simply COMMUNICATE with your partner so things like this are done properly, yeesh
“proposal can be a surprise, engagement shouldn’t be“ – saw that somewhere, thought it was the most accurate
I would add that it seems even more crucial to communicate and make sure that everyone is on at least roughly the same page before doing anything like a public proposal.
Possibly placing someone into an awkward position in front of other people is not something to do lightly. Assuming that you do care as much about the other person’s feelings as one would hope if you’re wanting to marry them.
I mean, I know that just being the type of person I am, I would really not appreciate feeling unexpectedly put on the spot in a public setting. That might be enough to make me reconsider whether I wanted to marry the person who decided that was a reasonable plan for dealing with me specifically, after all. Even if I had been totally down with the idea up to that point, that level of misjudgment/possible lack of consideration would likely give me pause.
People may respond in a wide variety of ways, for their own reasons. Which goes back to communication and getting to know/accept someone well before you even consider asking them to marry you.
(With the caveat that if this leads you to conclude that they’re more likely to agree if you spring it on them under a situation of perceived social pressure not to make a scene by reacting negatively? You should just leave other people alone until you can learn to treat them better. Especially ones you’re supposed to care about enough to want to marry.
That’s not always the motivation, of course, but in some cases it does appear to be. Not so much poor communication making things awkward, as not really caring if your behavior is making things awkward. Obviously not cool, and I’m guessing that may be more the type of scenario the OP was thinking of.)
ATTENTION ALL GIRLS: Being a ride or die means staying by a man’s side whether he has $500 or $5. Not when he cheats 10 times and you stay.
“Ride or Die” also means that if he ever hits you, he dies, and you call your bff for a ride.
Loyalty through hardship is one thing, loyalty through cruelty is another.
Loyalty through hardship is one thing, loyalty through cruelty is another.
basically:
- it is not a virtue to not set boundaries
- ignoring your own wants and needs is not a healthy way to show love
- people worth loving will respect your boundaries
- people worth loving will not want you to set aside your own wants and needs to make them more comfortable
- ‘having no boundaries at all’ describes a person who is very hurt, not a person who is very virtuous
- suffering for others’ comfort is not how you be a good person, it is just how you become very hurt
- sometimes you need to make others uncomfortable in order to get your needs met
- your needs are more important than others’ comfort
- your comfort is equally important to others’ comfort
- making other people uncomfortable is not, in itself, ethically wrong or morally dubious
can i add a thing:
what really helped me with boundaries is to realise that not having/showing them didn’t just hurt me, but also hurts my friends. and that interacting with someone that doesn’t state their boundaries is not at all ‘comfortable’ or ‘easy’. that’s a perspective that was so alien to me, i never realised other people might genuinely want to know about boundaries, and be genuinely distressed about overstepping them. but when i did, it really changed how i approached this!
‘my needs are more important than others’ comfort’ is absolutely true, but can be hard to embrace. but what about: ‘if i don’t state my needs, that makes interacting with me more difficult and hurtful’?
we don’t usually want people we care about to hurt for our sake. if we find out that they did, we’ll feel really bad and guilty, like we should have been able to prevent it by being more attentive. guilt ping-pong can happen. everybody gets to feel toxic. that’s not good!also, if i don’t state needs and wishes, i leave the onus of steering everything to the other. if they care about my needs and wishes, it is now their job to gently pave the way for me, to make me feel safe enough to express them, or, worst, to somehow guess them, and none of this is making it especially easy for them, on the contrary!
it can be very hard and it’s okay that it’s hard. (like you’re not being “unfair” by being bad at stating boundaries forex.). but, basically, establishing boundaries and needs isn’t just good for me, but it’s good for both, and
in healthy relationships
will often make both equally more comfortable. sometimes it’s not ‘my needs vs. your discomfort’, sometimes it’s a win-win.
I flat out cannot be relaxed around people who I cannot trust to maintain their own boundaries. NOTHING makes me more anxious and more stressed than the idea that someone might just….not indicate something is not okay with them.
Because here is the thing: I know damn well this stuff does not go away. I know damn well that it builds up, slow and toxic and it TELLS.
And to start with it’s horrifying to think that I’ve been inadvertently harming someone. And then just to follow up?
It WILL blow up in my face some day. I KNOW this. (As in, it has happened. Multiple times.)
I cannot read minds. I am less capable than your average person of catching Subtle Cues. (And they’re not good at it.)
So Hell. Yes. Figuring out your lines and making them known and backing them up will be a huge relief to anyone worth worrying about.
How do you refuse to be monogamous with someone who won’t have sex without pressuring people into sex?
(I had trouble parsing this ask at first, so if anyone else also has trouble parsing it, I think anon is asking, “if you want to date someone, but you don’t want to be monogamous with them because they don’t want to have sex, aren’t you creating a lot of pressure for them to have sex with you, if they want to be monogamously dating you?”)
I think you need to be good at communication, and both of you need to be good at evaluating your own needs and wants and anticipating how certain decisions will make you feel. I think you kind of need those things in relationships anyway, but you definitely need them more in some kinds of relationship.
Here’s an example of a conversation (which I didn’t have, but which involves the kind of communication that happens in my relationships):
A: Having sex is really important to me, and I think in the long run I won’t be happy in a monogamous relationship without sex.
B: I’m upset about that, because I love you and want to keep dating but I don’t want to have sex. I guess we could try having sex.
A: Um. That doesn’t sound like a good solution at all? Let me try to figure out why I feel that way – so, for one thing, I expect that you wouldn’t be very happy, and I love you and I don’t want that, and also it’s hard to imagine it would be good for our relationship. And for another, I said ‘having sex is really important to me’ but when I think about it more, what’s actually important to me is having a relationship in which I am sexually desired and someone is excited about having sex with me.
B: Yeah, that isn’t going to be me. I’m really hurt.
A: I understand. I’m sorry, this sucks. I am still happy right now, for what it’s worth, I just mentioned this because I was starting to realize this was important to me. How do you feel about being in a not-monogamous relationship?
B: Scared. I might be okay with it, if it turned out not to feature the things I’m scared of, but scared.
Some necessary elements: conversations which are likely to make someone feel pressured should happen in the format that lets everyone think best (which might mean over text chat instead of in person, or in person but not at certain times.) If you need to have a conversation about sex which might make someone feel pressured, definitely don’t have it in bed and then have sex if that’s the conclusion of the conversation, give people time to think and process and change their minds and maybe discuss with other friends.
Whether this works depends a lot on how you communicate and how your partners communicate, and I am lucky to date very honest, self-aware, introspective people who I trust to be good at asking themselves “what do I want, and how will I feel if we make it happen”. That doesn’t make relationship decisions less intense and painful and awful and hard, but it means that if someone says “I think this is what’s best for me right now, given what you’ve communicated about what is best for you”, I can expect that they’re probably right, and if they’re wrong they’ll notice and we’ll talk about it.
If, like, you’re in As position but you would actually be happy to be monogamous with B if B is willing to have sex, then this conversation is harder, and that’s not one I’ve ever had to have, but I do think it’s possible if B is a person who is really great at knowing what they want, communicating it, noticing when it changes and communicating that.
not to like make a huge fucking post about shit that’s been talked to death but it really genuinely scares me how many straight girls think it’s normal to just… not like your partner. like they think it’s normal and okay for their boyfriends to openly think they’re stupid and annoying and to be totally derisive about their interests and for them not to be friends or have things in common or enjoy each other’s personalities or encourage their interests? you are supposed to be friends with the person you’re in love with. you are supposed to want to talk to them about the things that make them happy. you do not have to settle for people who treat your entire personality as a burden outside of what you do to cater to them.
Are people really like this?
I’ve only seen people like this in media, not IRL…
i honestly dont get why girls would be intimidated by or think its weird that their boyfriend has female friends like ??? the only thing thats weird is if your bf doesnt have the mental capacity to consider a female more than just someone to have sex with
if he cant be friends with a girl then he cant be trusted .my husband was living with his female friend when we met. i was friends with her too so i knew how close they were. she was the one that pushed him to ask me out.
One of my mother’s big pieces of actually good relationship advice. Look at a person’s friends, for a decent indication of who they treat with respect and feel like they can relate to as human beings. Not just with gender, but definitely that.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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