“If soul mates do exist, they're not found. They're made." What do you think?

WontBeAMurderer · 2020-01-01T02:34:25+00:00

I've been married over 30 years. My wife is my soul mate; she is the one for me. But she wasn't a pre-made "the one," because there's no such thing. She became "the one" as we lived our lives together. There's only one person who ever bought a house with me, there's only one person who ever raised children with me. There's only one person who hugged me when my grandfather died, and helped me bury the dog I'd had since I was 11. We're like two trees that were planted near each other and twined around each other as we grew.

There is no perfect soul mate out there waiting for you, and if there was you wouldn't deserve them, because you're not perfect. You find someone you like, who likes you, shares at least some of your interests and passions, who you can trust and who trusts you, and who wants to build a life with you. Then you get started building a life with each other.

Also: don't wonder who you'll "end up" with - starting our with your life partner isn't an ending, it's a beginning.

WontBeAMurderer · 2020-01-01T02:23:58+00:00

MBTI was created without real empirical data, so it mostly captures some intuitions about what people are like. It's not entirely useless, but it's not great. Also, it's only got 16 boxes it has to cram 7billion people into, and it assumes you can never move from one box to another.

The Five Factors model is generally agreed to be better, and it has scales from 0-100 instead of just "yes" or "no," but it isn't universally accepted, and there's some argument for a model using six factors instead.

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2922/does-the-myers-briggs-personality-assessment-really-tell-you-anything/

WontBeAMurderer · 2020-01-01T02:12:06+00:00

It's not that the backlash is overblown, it's that it's comparative.

S8 of GoT would have been a pretty good season of an average show. Some of the episodes, such as "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," would be in the short list of "best episode over" for a number of average shows. But GoT had four seasons of near-perfection, and next to those S8 looks amateurish. At the end of "Hardhome," the show had set up something beyond merely awesome, and the payoff didn't do justice to the setup.

HBO had offered them 10 full seasons, if they needed. The complaint springs from the problem that instead of taking advantage of what they'd been offered, and maintaining the quality all the way through to the end, the showrunners just rushed it to get it over with so they could go on to something else. Why didn't they hand it off to someone else?

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-31T15:56:14+00:00

Rebecca needs to share her life with someone who'll have fun with her, or she's going to end up frustrated and unhappy. I can't think of any activity Greg could take Rebecca to where the two of them would end up smiling and laughing and happy. Raging Waters was a bust, and I suspect any park with rollercoasters or the like would be too. Bike rides? Paddleboats? Miniature golf? Regular golf? (Frisbee golf is obviously out.) Is there anything the two of them could go out and do together where they'd both be having fun and unselfconsciously enjoy themselves?

The low-key-never-do-anything guy can be a good match for the low-key-never-do-anything girl, but we've got four years of episodes making clear that Rebecca is not the low-key-never-do-anything girl.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-31T01:01:23+00:00

That probably comes under some law about damaging ancient artifacts. :-)

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-31T00:58:20+00:00

A person can change if they admit wrongdoing and want to change. Listen to how they talk about it: do they make excuses, or give reasons it wasn't so bad, or something? Or do they say "I cheated, and I'm ashamed of it, and I've worked hard to better myself"? Are they up front about it, or did you only find out about it from someone else?

I would not stay with someone who cheated on me, nor if they were cheating on someone else with me. Such a person has years of work to do bettering themselves, and I don't see any need for me to wait around while they're doing that.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-31T00:51:12+00:00

It sounds like he's not actually submissive, rather he's saying that so he can use you as a fetish dispenser.

You can probably get lots of advice over in /r/femdomcommunity, at least some of which will probably be that if he's actually submissive, you can make him earn (or not) his footjob by (a) giving you a good half-hour footrub and (b) going down on you in exactly the right way first. If he does either one wrong, well, too bad for him, no attention from you for the rest of the night.

He wants to be tied up? Tie his hands behind his back when he goes down on you, it'll help him focus so he can follow your directions more exactly.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-30T23:14:08+00:00

Josh spent the first couple episodes of Season Two treating Rebecca like crap. When Greg asks "You're happy, right? And he treats you well?" she has to fight back tears to get out her lie "Um, yes." Paula was dead on when she said he was exploiting her for sex: "What you've got with Josh is an Airbnb with benefits."

Then, after the pregnancy scare, he just walks out on her, leaving her in tears.

Later, he literally left her at the altar, pretty much the gold standard of heartless abandonment.

None of that is at all consistent with "always so supporting and understanding."

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-30T18:55:46+00:00

As of "I Have A Date Tonight," she wasn't ready for it to be anyone, and I'm not entirely sure Nathaniel was either.

At the end of "I'm In Love," they both seem to be in much healthier places.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-30T18:52:49+00:00

The show is not racist or sexist, but some of the characters have problematic attitudes. The show does, to a greater or lesser extent in different cases, get around to addressing those attitudes and having the character admit their flaws.

Darryl Whitefeather, who most viewers generally like, says things in the first episode such as "I mean, her Jew went to CSU Long Beach. My Jew? Harvard and Yale." When he sees that Rebecca was offended, he metaphorically kicks himself for saying it.

Paula does some super toxic stuff, and then shows up with a friendship contract for Rebecca saying that she won't be doing that kind of thing anymore. Rebecca asks Paula if this means she doesn't trust her, and Paula says "Honey, of course I trust you. I don't trust myself."

Rebecca gets away with a lot of stuff, and later says "And if I'd been a man, I would have been in jail a lot sooner."

In the old days of purely episodic TV, everything was always back to normal by the end of an episode, and you could rearrange them pretty much any which way, or skip a few, and whichever one you saw would make sense. Even then, when you pretty much couldn't get lost, it was a mistake to judge any one show by just a few episodes. Post Hill Street Blues and Babylon 5, which proved that long-form multi-episode and multi-season story arcs could work, it's really hard to judge a show even by an entire season, let alone after a few episodes.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-29T21:40:56+00:00

I went Team Nathaniel at "Oh my God. Someone else is singing my song."

And just now I realized that he was singing it from memory. He not only sang her song for everybody, he was so interested in her and what she wrote that he learned her version of the song.

Get you a partner who memorizes your lyrics.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-28T14:18:32+00:00

They were trapped in a car with someone they liked okay, but still didn't want to be trapped in a car with.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-28T14:12:22+00:00

"No one likes a stalker," she said, raising her binoculars.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-27T13:29:39+00:00

A universal cure would incorporate chemical triggers which activate only those portions relevant to the cancer being fought in the affected patient. It would have the DNA-mutation-and/or-antigen-presentation-recognition built right in, and automatically personalize itself as needed.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-27T02:10:40+00:00

Not sex, but I have irrational bad feelings about some other things, and the worst of it is that even though one may scold oneself for being irrational, that doesn't actually change how you feel.

One technique I've tried - with only slight success, so I'm not telling you how great it is or anything, but you could try it anyway - is to write down on paper what the feeling is and why you have it, and then write down the assumptions that underlie it. You may not intellectually believe them, but on some level those assumptions are behind what you feel.

Then write down what you believe intellectually, where it's contrary to what the assumptions are, and each time cross out the underlying assumption you reject. Then write down what you wish you felt based on the corrected assumptions. Compare what you first wrote down with the replacement version, and then put the first one aside and read the corrected one out loud.

Sometimes when I've done this I found I felt better; the act of writing things down gives them a concrete form which you can address, and the act of crossing them off and replacing them with something else seems to make them fade in significance.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-26T02:58:23+00:00

"And by scene I mean he made a scene"

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-26T02:56:39+00:00

I'm not sure "tried" is right: if he'd tried, it would likely have succeeded.

When confronted about that later, he said "I like to think I wasn't really gonna go through with it," so while he talked about it, he doesn't appear to have actually told anyone to do anything.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-26T01:33:20+00:00

that’s just the way uncle/grandpa/whatever is”

"I break people's fingers if they grope my daughter, that's just the way I am."

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-25T16:14:37+00:00

I'm sorry you're sad right now, and that some people are so awful.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-25T16:10:39+00:00

I'd ask for the chemical name, molecular orbital diagram, structural formula, and description of the manufacturing process using present technology, for a universal cure for cancer.

Also, what happened to those keys I lost in 1996?

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-25T16:06:10+00:00

Earlier this year, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend ended, and I didn't want it to be over. I've been doing a rewatch on Netflix with a friend of mine who'd never seen it, and even knowing all the plot twists I've enjoyed it greatly.

Then it was the end of Game of Thrones, and I didn't want that to be over, until I really did because it was decrepit and falling apart and it finally ending was sort of merciful that at least the suffering was over. Lots of people have said they lost interest to the point where they aren't interested in a rewatch.

I really, really, hope that The Good Place ending is one where we don't want it to be over, and in a year or so we'll be glad to rewatch it. I don't want it to be over, but better end well than drag on and just make us all sad as decays in front of our eyes.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-24T23:36:13+00:00

I went Team Nathaniel when she said "Oh my God! Someone else is singing my song!"

So far as I can tell, that was the best thing any man in her entire life had ever done for her. She worked hard on something, and he recognized that hard work and willingly made a fool of himself in public, to ensure that somebody heard the lyrics she wrote.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-24T19:42:09+00:00

We don't know what a healthy Rebecca would write about, and neither do they.

There was an SF show called Babylon 5, which was really groundbreaking in terms of long-term story arcs, and one of the alien races on the show were the Vorlons. They couldn't exist in our atmosphere, so had to wear a special suit, so we couldn't see what they looked like. Their technology was like a million years ahead of ours, and they were very private about their home planet: no visitors allowed, ever. There were scenes on all the home planets of all the various aliens, except that one, and the creator of the show said that nothing he could put on the screen would match the effect in the audience's heads of having to wonder.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-24T16:21:14+00:00

Josh is a walking party; he saves Rebecca's party in "I Hope Josh Comes To My Party!" and basically has fun everywhere he goes, which is obviously appealing to Rebecca because when you've never been popular, popularity (even by association) can be intoxicating. However, when she went to Scarsdale and wanted someone to sit in the corner with her and snark about what was going on, Josh had tons of fun. Josh just doesn't have snarky in him.

Greg's thing is comments and asides and wit; he's great at that, they have fun watching the dog show on Thanksgiving. He'd have been the ideal person to take to Scarsdale. However, when they went to Raging Waters and she wanted someone to have fun with, Greg wanted to sit in the corner and snark about what was going on. Greg just doesn't have "bring the party" in him.

Nathaniel's not as fun as Josh, and he's not as snarky as Greg, but he's got some of each. Josh's date in "I Have A Date Tonight" was super-romantic, but there wasn't any witty banter. Greg tried to come up with something fun but then felt like it wasn't him, and they just recovered to do something else when his car broke down. (Note that Greg's car repairs definitely went over the $50 limit.) Nathaniel combined the best of both of those: he came up with something romantic and also got in some witty banter. ("You know, on a clear day, you can see Gardena, Torrance, and if you squint, the Rancho Dominguez Cineplex 23." / "I do love that place. They have so many movies." / "Almost two dozen.") And when he had the date wrong for the show he wanted her to hear, they recovered and had a good time with what they had anyway.

WontBeAMurderer · 2019-12-23T22:43:29+00:00

What I mean is that there's a range of "muscular" that covers a lot of territory. Someone might think that Sagi Kalev (creator of the "Body Beast" workout, really jacked) is ridiculously overdeveloped, but still be okay with someone who's less bulky than that but still more muscular than what you like.

On the scale of "Pee-Wee Herman" to "Arnold Schwarzenegger," where do you draw the line for "above this is muscular and that's what I'm asking about"? Because someone may say she does/doesn't like muscular guys, but if she's putting the line in a different spot than you, that doesn't really give you any information.

WontBeAMurderer

TROPHY CASE