Relationships and Romance

Talking in places like this does help, as does challenging what I’m saying so by all means, fire away.
Awesome. Now you're talkin', buddy. ;)

My advice would be to start by dropping the trash talk about you being better than others. It's insulting. Better to let observers be the judge of that, yeah?

Also, the stuff about judging yourself as a 10/10 or whatever? Maybe better to leave that sh*t in the past, too. No more talk of that. Again, let others reach their own conclusions. :)

That'd be my input.
 
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More attractive than me? Pah! I'm a god among men, kokopelli reborn; Priapus has nothing on me! I'd prove it by taking a photo but they just capture a soothing, golden glow.

Having self confidence is good but having the ability to speak disparagingly about yourself without it bothering you seems to work far better in my own, personal, experience. If you can take that weakness and make it a strength by having a laugh about your flaws with someone it does seem to bring you closer than believing you're god's gift and they should worship you, unless you can do that sarcastically i.e my first paragraph.
I had that whole 'worthless & hideous' period in life, I went through a few mirrors because I didn't like what I saw & got a few scars as a result. Now I can look in a mirror and acknowledge when I look good (usually after making some effort) and that in turn makes me feel good. Likewise when I look like sh*t I can acknowledge that too and either do something about it or just not care.
 
One last thing I want to write in this thread, and this is to no one, it's just a bitter irony that never fails to make me feel rueful at my own foolishness.

The concepts of 'the one' and of ' loads of experience is a must', they are both as crappy and pernicious as the other in my opinion.

As anyone who can remember back to, well, 2012 I suppose, might remember, I had an inclination towards the 'mystic' and the romantic (possibly the insincere romantic) and the result was I was a sucker for every bit of 'soul mate' literature or 'twin flame' ideologue you could ever throw at me. To say these conceptions led me to have unrealistic expectations of love and romance is a huge, huge understatement. If 'ones' really do exist, I bet loads of people found them and then thought "wait is this the 'one'? nah, couldn't be" and then lost them again. Your perfect 'one' in your mind will obviously never ever be equalled by anything real.

And of course, for the same reasons as others have already explained, I think the whole concept of needing tons of experience before you can know what you really want, is spurious and could cause you to throw something really special away for nothing at all. But needing to have 'plenty of experience' seems to be the staus quo.

What happened to me is I trapped myself in my own mind between these two powerful ideologies. I had something really nice, something I wish I didn't give up, but I drove myself a bit nuts thinking "I need more experience, I think I'm happy, but what if I'm not, who knows what I'm missing out on!" and then "well I wouldn't need the experience if she was the 'one', but she's not the 'one', my soul didn't ignite the very first second I saw her. HEATHEN!"

You get the picture, I was a fool's fool.

But one thing I can say with surety is that sense can spring forth out of a broken heart. Though I wouldn't wish it on anyone, of course.
 
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Your perfect 'one' in your mind will obviously never ever be equalled by anything real.
Mind if I use that quote on my ayase's Perfect Machine Partner™ advertising Vash?

Why does it have to be “long-term” and “meaningful” with “feelings” and all these other strings attached? Why can’t two people just knuckle down, have a bit of fun and then call it a day?

I hate the way it works purely because everybody has to make it all so complicated - I know a lot of people don’t like casual sex because they “feel used”, but I’ve always struggled to understand that
I agree with all of this. We have unnecessarily complicated personal relationships by over-thinking and over-analysing them to death (how does that Rammstein song go again?) It's a mental disease of the developed modern world. Hell, you don't have to look back very far to a time when people just married whoever happened to live in the same village, or a similarly aged daughter/son of one of their parent's friends. And funnily enough those relationships seemed a lot better at lasting the test of time. And now it's not only marriage that seems to require ten billion man hours of consideration before you get into it, but even dating as well.
 
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So... I cut my hair. I'd kind of let my hair and beard grow a little bit wild of late out of neglect, so I gave them their traditional number 3 trim all round. I'm hoping I'm now at least something like 0.000000001% better looking as a result. Yep, as much as that.
 
So... I cut my hair. I'd kind of let my hair and beard grow a little bit wild of late out of neglect, so I gave them their traditional number 3 trim all round. I'm hoping I'm now at least something like 0.000000001% better looking as a result. Yep, as much as that.

You could always let the beard grow then dye it, that’s what I did. It was a great natural icebreaker and got a lot of compliments, wasn’t infrequent people asked for photos or to touch it. Even had someone ask to sniff it once, you probably don’t want that particular one. The compliments were great though. Unfortunately I was too awkward and self conscious to ask for any numbers though so probably dropped the ball there.

This reminds me, I need a haircut.
 
@Neil.T over the years quite a few really, luminescent green, purple, blue, cerise, red even tried orange once. Wouldn’t recommend orange, I used semi permanent dyes meaning they’d wash out eventually. Orange lasted one wash, just wasn’t worth it. Generally alternated between cerise and blue and swapped as they were fading so got a nice toning effect starting off a great purple and changing to blue/cerise as it went down.
 
On a tangential "Are AIs lovable?" subject, I just finished watching Adam Curtis' "HyperNormalisation" (because putting a three hour documentary on is the kind of thing I do at 5am in the morning, my life is broken) and couldn't help but get a grin out of the fact that a simple psychotherapist AI someone made as a comment on how artificial AI-human interactions are immediately proved him wrong because people were convinced the machine (which was essentially just parroting people's questions back to them and interjecting the odd Louis Theroux style "How does that make you feel?") was intelligent and understood them, and felt better after talking to it. Told you so.

As for humans, it seems our days are numbered anyway:
“Right now in a number of states the laws allow a baby to be born from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month. It is wrong; it has to change,”
Finally, a policy I can get behind.
 
I was more making a joke about Trump seemingly wanting to outlaw birth itself than endorsing any other political viewpoint about the article in question. Let’s just say I am all in favour of less people.
 
Yeah I know you we're making a joke, my comment wasn't aimed at you specifically.

If countries want to decrease there populations they should just copy Japan.
Did you know in Japan adult dippers outsell there baby counterparts, there's literally more old people in Japan than there are kids.
 
Maybe they're all just too busy to engage in the luxury of sitting on a toilet.

Japanese ain't got time to pee('d)

Edit: Or seed if the topic title is anything to go by :p
 
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Surely you don’t mean... by rejecting romantic relationships?

Did you see that seamless re-railing?

But that could lead to even more children, mainly because those that don’t mind just springing them out would be more likely to be with more people potentially exacerbating it.
 
over a third of young men and more young women have no interest in sex.
Do they really have no interest in sex or do they just lack the social skills to get sex. I find it hard to believe that over a third of Japanese men are Asexual, seems like there just saying that to save face.
 
But that could lead to even more children, mainly because those that don’t mind just springing them out would be more likely to be with more people potentially exacerbating it.
I’m not sure Japan has that particular issue. Could be that their culture instills more of a sense of social responsibility in people than ours does - I’m not sure they would think it was a sensible idea to have kids they can’t afford to look after, and I’m not sure how single parents are viewed.
 
I’m not sure Japan has that particular issue. Could be that their culture instills more of a sense of social responsibility in people than ours does - I’m not sure they would think it was a sensible idea to have kids they can’t afford to look after, and I’m not sure how single parents are viewed.
As Ken’s post was about others cooying japan which instigated your response I was meaning it more it terms of other countries.
 
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