Look. You are who you associate with. All my life I have associated with desirable people, educated people, ambitious people, successful people. I don’t know druggies and strippers and escorts personally for example as close or tenured friends, but I do know men who have been involved with all the above at one point or another in their relationship history, however short or long that interaction may have been.
I’ve had the occasional renter who was not a quality person (the occasional eviction secondary to drug issues for example, or failure to pay rent, which is what financially irresponsible people do)….
The vast majority of my long tenured female friends for example, are in first marriages that have lasted decades already at this point and are still going strong.
The guy on the plane is similar to long term marrieds within my own social network. People like that aren’t here. They don’t go seeking out places like this because they don’t need to.
But that’s not true for everyone.
One of my best gfs divorced her ex husband due to his worsening alcoholism for example (he was a heavy drinker when they married but they met in college and he never left that habit behind)…after their marriage counselor advised them for the nth that as long as he’s drinking and refusing to address that problem there is no viable solution to save the marriage.
One of my closest guy friends found out after years into his marriage that his wife was using heroin, had been abused by her own father sexually since age 12, and he had no idea for years.
So yeah. I hear the war stories from both men and women and I know that people hide things and that not every marriage goes as expected, my first one certainly did not, for example.
I go by content around here. If you read a contributor’s content you learn quite a bit about that person, how they think and what they value. You get to “know” them.
And if the content is consistent? It’s true. Nobody, especially 1000s of posts in, can keep up a facade over many years. That would be exhausting. Y’all can think whatever you like about me personally, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that my content is consistent, my back story is consistent, my perspective is consistent and the way I handle the occasional pokes & prods around here is consistent.
I appreciate your comment
@Murk and I think it’s true. But my observation was not meant as a slight.
Doesn’t matter how you get there (to being your best self). Some have smooth paths, some don’t. There is an element of chance in relationships and some people learn to filter better than others or earlier in life. But that doesn’t mean just throw in the towel and give up.
Lots of men flow through SS, learn from the community here and from the cache of information here and successfully apply it in their own lives.
And they fade or recede in many cases.
But those who stay around truly seeking to improve their lives often have an observable trajectory in a positive direction. Whatever that means for an individual man. I think that is meaningful.
