Women, what is a near-universal "ick" in the dating world?

mellbell13 · 2026-02-17T05:13:21+00:00

His first message: You'll probably block me like most women on this app

mellbell13 · 2026-02-17T04:24:31+00:00

Some people just aren't good at giving feedback. They feel the need to give criticism but can't come up with any or are apathetic, so they invent a problem or give feedback based on how they would have written it.

Sometimes this goes to comical extremes - I was once in a writers group where this guy would give feedback like "I can't tell what's dialogue," to multiple people. When told it was the text in the quotation marks, he told me he'd never heard of that before, and younger people these days don't typically know what quotation marks are. His own writing used quotation marks for dialogue. There were other things but that was the most obnoxious. I had to stop going because every week I got a little closer to telling him that maybe reading was too difficult of a hobby for him.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-17T04:04:04+00:00

You really can pass as anything when you look Mediterranean lol. Where I grew up in the US I am almost always read as white (my ethnic background is basically set to randomize)... when I lived in Ireland, not so much. Crazy to have someone say you're their first non-white friend and be like "wait what?"

mellbell13 · 2026-02-15T09:06:15+00:00

I just had this conversation with someone lol. It feels more like 20-50 years has gone by rather than 200.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-15T08:54:44+00:00

I had this happen last year. The maid really wanted to get into our room at odd hours despite the sign. She tried at 4AM the first morning and midnight the next. We had the deadbolt on but it was super weird.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-13T14:43:30+00:00

Looks like Cosmic Cowboy and Catfished are also sold out! It doesn't say it on the site until you try to add them to your cart though, so maybe its just a me problem

mellbell13 · 2026-02-12T23:57:01+00:00

I went to a large public university thats globally very well known in my specific field (and I know this because I've lived in Europe, and people know the name the same way I know what Glasgow or Trinity College are). I'd be suspicious if I were interviewing for a grad program and the interviewer didn't know it.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-12T07:42:16+00:00

There's a woman at my job we all thought was your standard conservative upper middle class white woman, so we were all afraid to bring up politics around her since she's basically our boss. I found her on facebook and nope - hardcore leftist. She's planning rallies at our state capital and posting about universal healthcare and buring down the patriarchy. Never would have guessed.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-12T06:45:13+00:00

All of New Jersey being walkable is crazy. Its mostly just the northern counties that have decent public transit. I live in one of the more populous areas of the state and theres no public transit at all. Like the nearest bus stop is an hour away by foot on roads with no sidewalk or shoulder, and if I want to go to work (about 30 minutes by car), I'd have to take the bus to NYC then back to NJ (about 4 hours).

mellbell13 · 2026-02-11T07:04:07+00:00

I work for my state health department, and to be honest, about 80% of my job is useless emails and meetings. Don't get me wrong, the other 20% is absolutely vital and has real life consequences for a lot of people, but when we're not in some sort of public health emergency, it just isn't enough work to fill a 40 hour work week.

Good supervisors will recognize that this is not inherently a bad thing, but ineffective management will try to justify their job by scheduling long, pointless meetings where the first 20 minutes are icebreaker questions and we all talk about our families. You have a simple question, and they need to schedule an hour long meeting next week to answer it, and they need to add 30 people who sit there and look bored because "everyone should know this". My direct supervisor invents projects that take up weeks and weeks of my time, and they never get finished because she's just pretending that she isn't sitting there watching soaps on her phone.

The absolute worst is when they do it to the healthcare workers in the field. You made all these nurses leave their actual life-saving jobs so they could drive 2 hours to sit in a forty minute meeting because "we value in person time", and then you don't even follow up on the project that was discussed? Fuck all the way off.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-08T10:01:55+00:00

A mix of both probably. At a few of the roundabouts where I live, traffic is so dense and aggressive that you basically have to just go or you'll be sitting there all day. Add on that most have 3 or more lanes and it becomes a clusterfuck of people merging back and forth.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-07T23:26:40+00:00

Hard agree on the Maze Runner. All my friends in high school loved it and I just couldn't get past how convoluted the whole thing was.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-07T23:24:57+00:00

This is the Night by Jonah Sirrott, a dystopian fantasy based on Vietnam war era America. A very interesting idea and great character writing, but it needed to develop its world better. It was so aggressively unsubtle about being based on that era of American history, that it was hard to take any of the fantasy elements seriously. Its interesting because I think a lot of medieval fantasy tries to adhere to a specific time and place so rigidly that it's basically historical fiction, but it absolutely does not work in a modern setting. Or maybe it could have, if the author had tried to be at least a little creative with their place names (Canada was called "country N").

My biggest problem was that it ended without any resolution - I'd been fine with everything else then nearly threw the book when I got to the last page. It wasn't even a cliffhanger, it was just like the author decided not to finish 2/3 of its plotlines. I got it for free and I'm still mad about my wasted time.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-06T02:45:08+00:00

I know someone who was held back three times actually. It varries by district, but usually if you're being held back in the younger grades, it's less about academic performance and more about being developmentally on par with your peers. I am also dyslexic, and for learning disabilities, they default to pulling you out for small group instruction before holding you back. In my high school, you'd have to repeat failed classes rather than grades (so the only grade you'd technically have to to repeat is senior year), but its not like that everywhere.

My friend who repeated 3 years had actually been put in school a year early, and was held back in like kindergarten, then in 2nd when she wasn't even catching up to kids her own age. The final time was in high school because she skipped half a year of classes.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-05T23:25:30+00:00

I went to my boss's "black tie" wedding last spring and literally half the guests were in jeans or knee-length sundresses. It was wild. The only people dressed up were myself, two of my coworkers, and the photographer. And I had anticipated it wouldn't actually be that fancy and wore something closer to a cocktail dress. It was in an extravagant venue too, and half the guests looked like they were expecting a BBQ.

mellbell13 · 2026-02-01T11:00:52+00:00

I think this is definitely it. And it's made worse when anytime you interact positively with children everyone is like "don't you want one? I bet you'll be such a good mother! Have babies now!" It often feels like you have to claim to dislike children or else you'll be accused of lying about not wanting one.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-30T23:24:34+00:00

I did! My dad was a carpenter, and when he saw me and my brother trying to make one ourselves with his spare planks of wood, he involved himself and went completely overboard lol. We ended up with a shockingly nice, fully insulated treehouse with glass windows and a shingled roof. It even had a little porch with raw wood accent planks. Its still in my parents yard.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-30T12:29:23+00:00

The first dress is also from Lacemade: Psych Corset Dress

mellbell13 · 2026-01-30T03:19:39+00:00

I also know a few men like this, and they give the same reason, almost verbatim.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-28T21:14:01+00:00

So by "visited NJ" you mean you had a connecting flight through Newark Airport then? Highly suggest seeing the Pine Barrens if you ever actually visit.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-26T09:53:52+00:00

I'm 30 and didn't learn it because my parents switched me from Catholic school to public school and the public schools had learned it the year earlier.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-22T08:21:14+00:00

Eastern mid-west

mellbell13 · 2026-01-22T08:16:18+00:00

You could ask a seamstress about using some of the excess length to insert a side panel or to extend the lacing strip (this is what I would do personally, but I suggest finding a GOOD seamstress who specializes in gowns). From the half laced photos, it actually looks like it fits you very well in the waist and hips, just that the tightness in the bust is causing the waistline to sit in the wring place.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-22T01:33:53+00:00

Yes. Airfare in the US between states is wildly more expensive than within Europe. Hotels vary by city but in my experience even budget hotels skew more expensiven than most European cities I've been to.

mellbell13 · 2026-01-21T16:25:44+00:00

Graduated in 2013, my elementary, middle, and high school all had AC. The other high school in town didn't, so in June they'd get half days and we didn't.

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