Relative to my experience of love stuff, this looks like a mix up of several things. I can understand being fatigued due to caring about someone who behaves dangerously, or callously, and therefore is a challenge to have deep feelings for. I've been there, done that. But it never interferes with my OVERALL ability to love, just my ability to deal with that particular person.

The only thing I can relate to your "love fatigue" idea, is that from time to time, I have come to have the sense that in order to GAIN someone else's love, that I have to perform too many "stunts" for them; jump through too many hoops, avoid too many "red flags," and the like. I've run out of the faith required to feel "loveable" many times.

What you're describing seems different. Especially since you seem to expect someone ELSE to solve it for you.

In all the cases where I've felt emotional fatigue, I've done the same thing I do when I've suffered physical fatigue: take a break, until I feel better. I can't see where someone else coming along and doing ANYTHING, would restore my emotional energy.

Hmm. Well, I've had one primary problem in the search for a mate for my whole life.

Finding someone who I am attracted to, who actually wants in a primary way, to BE IN A RELATIONSHIP with me, specifically.

I've found plenty of people who were looking for A MATE, ANY MATE, to check off all their likes and dislikes boxes. Never yet, someone who wanted the apparently old fashioned life of BEING SOMEONE'S MATE.

I spent most of my life in America, dealing with American males and females. And I can say for certain, that males do as much or more sniping at other males as females do. Much more, actually.

In addition, despite hearing phrases like "bros before hoes" many times, I've yet to witness any males who actually followed through with the pretended idealism of that. What I've seen instead, is two things:

First, as soon as someone uses the term "ho" to refer to females, they've already established that they think of females as prostitutes, for whom they have no respect. The term "ho" is a slang shortening of the word "whore," after all.

Next, in actual events, I've always found that male loyalty to fellow males, ends abruptly when the opportunity to have sex with a female is at hand. I've never once seen an American male turn down sex with another male's official mate, if the opportunity presented. If anything, what I've seen is that most American males take such opportunities as being a chance to show that they are more valuable than their nominal "friend," who they also consider to be a competitor for mates.

This is all about social dynamics, I think.

First of all, the questions themselves: in my observation and experience, most people aren't all that crafty, when it comes to details. That is, they don't ask the same questions over and over because they've carefully worked out a logical reason why asking them will be effective, they ask them because they are in a mental bin marked "stuff to ask someone when you are trying to get a conversation going." This is why we can often get the impression that the answers don't seem to matter to the person who asked.

Some questions like these reveal the person's personal frustrations with the particular venue they are dealing with you in, as well as revealing what their ongoing fears about mates include.

Where dynamics really show up, is in how each side of the conversation reacts to the other side of the conversation. The other person asks a clumsy annoying question (from your point of view), so you reply with "none of your business;" but since they didn't think the question WAS all that intrusive or rude, they now think that YOUR reaction shows that you are hyper-sensitive, or are even hiding something from them.

I haven't myself been asked any of those particular questions, but then I don't get enough women initiating conversations with me, to have a significant test sample.

I didn't see any mention of recycling toilet paper.

My ex, and mother of my children and still friend, is recovering from treatment for cancer, and also doing well. Just saying this, to encourage you and your friend. Medical people are doing so much better against cancers now, than when I was a child.

The chemo stage was her most uncomfortable, tougher than the surgery, since it lasted longer, and was very physically challenging, but it appears to have worked.

I've come across this idea a number of times. After trying several different approaches to dealing with it, i'm at the point where I think the best answer is, that it's very complicated and subtle.

Right off the bat, both of the extreme SIMPLE answers have proven to be wrong. The extreme simple answers are

1." It's all bunk."

2." It's all magic."

When I tried the second answer (because I was with a woman who claimed to fervently believe that we each and all LITERALLY created our entire existence, on a moment to moment basis), it was a complete disaster. Mainly because the way SHE used the idea, was to declare that since we create our own reality, anything that went wrong while SHE was having a good time, must be MY fault.

But still, I saw then, and still do see today, a seemingly endless parade of people with success stories, or who proclaim that they know the secret to success in life, and that that key is to do things like...

"Believe in yourself, believe in your vision, believe in your ability to succeed, and that belief will give you the drive to actually succeed."

That's the most common admonition we all get from those who want everyone to work hard, and craft life with their own hands. But it's already more than half the distance to the extreme of believing in magic.

I have found that no, just thinking about something, just visualizing it, doesn't cause it to come into being.

I have also found that thinking about something in a different way, in an involved way, in an active way, does cause my perceptions to change. I see things which were always there, but that I never noticed, because I wasn't aware enough. Because I hadn't thought into the subject deeply and thoroughly enough.

By now, I believe that no, you can't WILL anything to become as you wish it to be. It's not the way everything works. "Everything," a.k.a. the universe, doesn't work that way. However, it ALSO isn't as simple as what goes up must come down, or that only direct action gets results.

Reality is a collective aggregate of all manner of things, beings, feelings, ideas, space, and on and on, all rushing through time and being changed by whatever the hell time actually IS. And just as there are physical and real reasons why rivers flow in the funny back and forth, winding or churning, seemingly random back actually rigidly obeying all the laws of motion and gravity and density...so too, our lives, and our existence is subject to, as well as a cause, of all sorts of turns and flows and eddies and so on in our, and in other people's' lives.

So no. Life is NOT all rocks and hammers and nails and dirt and so on, and nothing more. And no, it's not all unicorns and happy endings, and acts of human mental will, either.

If you fail to imagine that the pavement exists, when you jump from a high place, you'll find that the pavement is there, nonetheless.

On the other hand, if you fail to imagine that someone could be wonderful, you wont ever look; and although the wonderful person really is there, you'll never bring them into your life, by recognizing them.

So yes, your life DOES VERY MUCH depend on your thoughts and beliefs. But no, you can't think your way out of a real paper bag, you have to mechanically get it off.

I ALWAYS go by instincts and feelings first, so I would trust your judgment. But I do wonder:

What is a "storage trailer?"

I'm only asking because I keep seeing these new things being advertised, like "Pods," where people with too much stuff, who want to reorganize, rent a storage THING, and park it in their driveway to use as extra home space.

Might be innocent, but again, go with your intuition.

I've actually had to go the other direction a fair amount.

I grew up with a strong anti-wastefulness sensibility, especially on my mothers side. She was herself, the twelfth child in a depression era midwest family, who ALWAYS wore only hand-me-down clothes, and who kept pretty much anything that "might be useful later." And our family was never well-to-do, so there was never any such thing as "that one works, but it just looks old, so we need to buy a new one."

Believe it or not, in 1965, we were still using a washing machine that required us to pull the clothes manually out of the tub, and push them through huge rollers, to squash the water out, before taking them out into the back yard, and hanging them up with clothes pins. When something was broken in the house, we would try to repair it ourselves, or live without. No doubt, a fair amount of my fix-it skills and interest are a result of that.

Coming out of that background, I've had to force myself TO throw things away. Not only when they are broken, that's tough enough. But I have to also throw things away that are perfectly good, but no longer useful, because nowadays we aren't allowed to GIVE most things away any more. At least, not without spending more than I can afford, in order to do so.

Also, I spent a great deal of effort to alter my thinking on things like household supplies. I will never again buy bargain brand toilet paper , paper towels, or even cheap dish detergent.

For two reasons. One, because the cheap stuff isn't a good economic choice: it doesn't work half the time, and when it does, it takes twice as much to get the job done. It does no good at all to save thirty percent on a roll of paper towels, if it takes more than twice as many of them to clean up the mess.

And as for toilet paper, and good tasting food, I realized that my life consists of moment by moment experiences of RIGHT NOW. It does NOT consist of experiences happening in the future. There is absolutely no way to save money on toilet paper, and suffer using sandpaper because it's cheap, so that some day I can...what? Say I "earned" a comfortable tukas for my 70's, by having a thoroughly bad time of it until then?

Charmin all the way.

But no. I try not to waste anything. I bought special soft spatulas, so that I could easily make sure to get as much of the sauce out of a jar of spaghetti sauce as I could, before putting the jar in recycling.

It's quite possible to suffer a bit of what is called "Stockholm Syndrome," from being plagued by a stalker for some time.

I think it may be the natural result of the stressful work of trying to figure out a set of "rules" to cope with and combat the stalker. The victim works so hard to find the delicate balance of actions to avoid danger from the perpetrator, they can suffer a sort of tunnel vision, and continue to try to follow the "rules" when they don't have to, or in aspects of their life that the "rules" were meant to defend from intrusion.

Nightmare Before Christmas. Not a Halloween film to my thinking.

Although I have as intense a hatred for overt criminals as anyone does, I have to reserve judgment on this.

The assumption at this point, is that the police have correctly identified the criminal, and are using this method to terminate the pursuit. The assertion that no one has been "seriously injured" yet, isn't comforting, because I've seen a number of other "clever" short cuts to dispense justice, which seemed to be win-win ideas at first, ending up causing serious problems.

I approve of the way that some well-trained police here in the US will use a specific highway move to end a high-speed chase, by bumping the pursued vehicle in a planned way that causes it to spin out. That can backfire as well, if not done correctly, and especially isn't used in high population areas. The Brits appear to be doing this in the middle of busy city streets, which could be problematic.

I notice that in some of the films in that link, that the perp didn't JUST fall down. Sometimes they crashed into other things and people, who might have been innocents injured by the move.

So we'll see.

Applying logic alone, that judgment is for you to make about your own personal use of the site. Not one to make about anyone else's use of it.

It's like gardening. Some people do it to pass the time. Some do it to try to grow their own food. Some do it to alter their local environment, and change the wildlife where they are. Some even do it out of a sense of obligation or guilt.

I myself use dating sites to first of all, look for a mate; but as side benefits, I get all sorts of new understandings of how people think, as well as opportunities to improve my communication skills.

And time certainly does pass, though I wish it would not. Especially at my age.

Actually, the main reason I think I've most commonly seen for why people like to support conspiracy theories, is personal ego.

It's much the same as what people get from joining a secret society or a cult: they get to pretend to themselves that they personally have special knowledge and insight.

It feels as though you are extra important, when you are in a minority that believes an extreme idea.

This is also the main reason why conspiracy fans are so easily persuaded to change the exact details of the theories, and so willing to explain away factual errors: the main point of being a believer, is NOT THE THEORY ITSELF.

The value of being an advocate, is in the ADVOCACY.

Yes, well, the thing about this, which many (especially younger or less experienced) people get wrong, is the ORDER OF EVENTS.

That is, when you begin to become involved with someone, it is true that how successful and smooth the relationship will be, will depend on whether or not each person is ABLE to accept everything (past present and future) that makes the other person who and what they are.

However, the fact that you like someone, and want to be with them, doesn't OBLIGATE THEM, to accept everything about YOU.

It unfortunately is also not true, that "love conquers all" in such situations. The fact that you ARE attracted to, and even may love someone, unfortunately doesn't CAUSE you to be able to accept everything that is true about them. It doesn't CAUSE you to BE COMPATIBLE, in other words.

It's very much like the truth about forgiveness. Forgiving someone is NOT a simple act of will. It is an actual organic process, involving coming to actually agree with the other person on some level, for having done or been what they have done or been.

Times and economics has changed over the decades.

Things that were true when I was a kid and haven't been true for ages since, include jobs that young people are able to do for pay, to get used to working for a living. Even the paper routes are being done by adults in cars, these days.

When my own parents were starting out, it only took ONE job for them to be able to afford a small house. By the time I graduated college in 1974, it already required TWO jobs, just to rent an apartment, because although inflation had lifted the price of housing tremendously, it didn't raise the wages the same amount.

And by now, there flat out IS NO LOW INCOME HOUSING anywhere in major metropolitan areas.

And sorry, but lowering taxes on employers hasn't done anything to change that. Lots of people in business are making more money, but the cost of living is just as high as before (and rising), and wages are STILL not even beginning to climb in proportion.

So no, this isn't happening because parents aren't tough enough, or whatever. It's happening for the same reason it was that way BEFORE the 1950's expansion changed everything, too: because fewer people can AFFORD to live on their own now.

Actually, I think the problem people run into with saying "I love you," or variations on that, is because a lot of the time, "I love you" is not really what they are trying to say.

This is tricky to describe, so please be patient with me...

the big thing about LOVE, is the possible obligations that go along with accepting it or declaring it.

That's why, if you say "I love you" too early, the other person tends to be put off. They don't know if you actually mean "I enjoy your company," or that you mean "I want you to commit right now to exclusivity with me going forward." Or maybe "I'm already fantasizing our children's names."

Other people are touching in what I'm trying to get at, such as where Cranky Geezer said



That's part of the thing.

I find that I never really feel comfortable just saying "I love you" to anyone. Due to "interesting" past experiences, I suspect.

So I stick with specifics. Such as telling someone how much I enjoy something they do commonly, or perhaps how grateful I am for their accompaniment.

I keep hearing and seeing people talk about, wonder about, and make declarations about when people "should" declare love. I wonder sometimes, if making a RULE about it for yourself or others, might actually block it from happening.

I know that due to my life experiences, when someone sets up a framework that my "love" for them has to fit inside, I immediately back away, because I get the strong feeling that they don't want ME, they just want SOMEONE to take the job of the caretaker of their personal fantasy version of the world.

To each, their own style of expression, I guess.

I disagree, but what I am thinking of with this, are the people I met when I was very young, who gave me what I only much later, learned the hard way, was excellent advice.

Advice must arrive at the right TIME, in order to be understood.

VERY good people. Arrived in my life with VERY good insight and advice.

Just before I was experienced enough to understand it, so I turned them away.

Took me a few beats to figure out what in the world "JWs" referred to.

Anyway. Religious proselytizers are identical to all other pushy salespeople, and I deal with them all the exact same way.

Step one, tell them that I do not want to interact with them;

Step 2, if they persist intrusively, I give them a second warning of my disinterest;

If they continue, I explain that I will report them to the police for harassment unless they immediately leave me alone.

Bottom line, people are people. Just because someone is a member of a religious group that I don't care to know much about, doesn't make them magically different from any other human being. And all the same basic rules and procedures apply the same.

I don't know any modern architects by name. Can't say about that.

I was a fan for a while, of at least part of what Frank Lloyd Wright did. You can look up "Falling Waters," as an example of his style.

I also have a deep affection for classic American Victorian style architecture, for homes especially. They can be a great deal of fun to live in.

Not much of a fan at all, of architecture that seeks primarily to look a certain way from the outside, while ignoring internal functions and actual use. I'm not interested in living inside of someone else's symbolic sculpture.