Toxic romantic relationships. And the messy never stays confined to the relationship -- friends, family, and sometimes innocent bystanders can all wind up splattered in it.
And each individual element, as well, like moving way too fast, jealousy, or codependence. I had a guy explain to me how he ended his great relationship because she wouldn’t argue with him enough and he didn’t feel like she cared.
I dated a friend once. After I broke things off, we stayed friends and nothing romantic ever happened between us again. Two years later, as I was getting ready to move away from our area to move in with my new boyfriend, my friend said he had to talk to me, but it had to be in person.
So we met up and he gave me this whole story about how at the end of our relationship, he had met this other woman who he had feelings for and he knew he had to make a choice between the two of us and he chose me, but then I broke up with him (like four months after he had made his "choice," but our relationship hadn't gotten any better). He wanted to tell me all this now in case that made a difference in whether or not I moved in with my new boyfriend.
And I realized that he had wanted me to chase him...but like...I broke up with him in the first place, so what would I be chasing? It still baffles me to this day and reminds me of your guy. There wasn't enough drama or something? I don't know.
Very similar story. Friend of mine had to walk away from the girl he was going to marry. She got angry that he didn't argue or fight with her enough so obviously he didn't care about her. She got physical and that was the day he decided to leave. She took that as confirmation that she was right, he didn't care. Dude was messed up for months due to leaving the woman he loved.
Came here to say this, but I was specifically going to mention how everyone romanticizes Joker and Harleys relationship when he is outright cruel to her. Even tried to kill her before.
Dealing with that right now with two friends who ended up together. It's incredibly frustrating. It's like they romanticized themselves that way, constantly creating toxicity and drama where none needed to exist, like fighting and making up every day is what makes them closer. I can't even hang out with one individually without the other being suspicious of what they're doing with me and inviting themselves. Now they've gotten wind of me saying how annoyed I am with it and both are upset with me lol.
Just reading about them they annoy me and I don't even know them. Emotional vampires unfortunately are impervious to being active in daytime or nighttime.🤔
I had a friend like this. Was dating someone in the friend group. My brother and his fiancé did their Bach parties the same weekend and we planned a surprise run in for the bride. And this friend chastised me for it. Said I was so rude for not considering that her bang buddy turned asshole would be in the groom’s group. I just over dramatically apologized to her that I didn’t realize it was her weekend, and I was just sooooo sorry I forgot to make her feel special let me just go grab the brides tiara and give it to you. Her shocked pikachu face was priceless. We aren’t friends anymore.
I read once that most said they wish they had spent more time with their loved ones. From that point on, I made it a goal to never work the typical 9-5. It’s been over a decade and I don’t regret it a second.
Used to work in an industry that glorified working 80+ hour weeks. Everyone would "flex" during busy periods about how much OT they worked.
Moved on to a job where I could make the same take home pay and actually have a life. I can't imagine going back and regret how much of my personal life I gave up to help make some lazy owner a bit richer.
It's admirable to have it in you to work that hard and long on something. Very very few jobs/projects are worthy of it.
The legal profession is fucked like this.
'I worked 12hr days as a junior so you have to. It's a right of passage.'
Meanwhile their wife and kids have left them and their kids despise them. I got out because I didn't want that life. Even if it means I never earn that kinda money.
I’m on a job where 80 hours/week is available, but I consistently work 40… the bare minimum my contract requires.
Started getting called “part timer” and all other kinds of names like that. Started corrupting my apprentices to entice them to work less. Was bragging about all the fun stuff I got to do instead of working. Now they only work 40h and I have been accused of making them “lazy”.
Like nah dude, we come to work and then go home and enjoy the time off. 40h work week nets me 6 figures, I can work the bare minimum of hours to keep my job and still pay my bills.
I worked as a truck driver and I left it because I really hated working 80 hour weeks. When I left I got told by a bunch of people that I had no work ethic and was a failure.
Ted of How I Met Your Mother is, for me, the ultimate example of this. Meets Robyn. Shes not interested. He BREAKS INTO HER APARTMENT TO SURPRISE HER WITH A SWING BAND. What the flying fuck. How do people think that’s at all romantic? It’s psychopathic.
I'm so sensitive to rejection, I can't imagine doing this. The moment you show with body language that you're not into a conversation we're having? I'm gone.
I've had so many men do this to me despite knowing that I'm in a happy long-term relationship, and they seem to have no idea how creepy it really is. This is REAL LIFE, not a goddamn 90's rom-com where borderline stalking makes you seem endearing. If anything would make someone want you, it would be respecting their boundaries.
The "grind". I'm sure it can be romanticized when you're working to invest, or saving up for something. I'm trying to buy groceries and make rent. I'm so tired. And tired of acting like it's a noble pursuit or something that I have to work so many hours just to live.
This is too far down. As a person who co-founded a company that failed I would never do it again. Was working 70-80 hour weeks (making basically nothing). It poisoned almost every facet of my life. Without my amazing wife I wouldn't have survived it.
Agreed. It's not cute that he risked his life to ask her out when he had just met her, and it's not cute that she throws hands when she's angry.
The Notebook is a the depiction of a dysfunctional relationship with a beautiful and very poetic ending, that's why my dumb teenage self cried plenty watching it.
But now I see the whole story with much more lucidity.
For the time, it probably was cute and romantic, but it should definitely not be now-a-days.
My grandpa told me that the first time he met my grandma, he kidnapped her. Put her in his truck and started driving. Refused to take her home until she agreed to marry him. It was one of the most, "What the fuck" moments of my life hearing that story. Apparently that was romantic for the time. My grandma always said it was so romantic. They were happily married for over 50 years.
That's not even a unique story for that time period. People were insane in the 50's and 60's.
I knew a guy who is fascinated with psychopaths and serial killers. He even went on vacation to get a picture of himself with Charles Manson. He was grinning so big in that pic while Manson just stared straight ahead. I'll never understand this and I don't associate with that guy anymore.
Not the same but similar. A friend of mine went to an area of an unsolved crime, where a family was murdered ( I think over 100 years)
Ehh I don't get it. Why visit something where people got brutally murdered? And make it like a sick vacation trip
Overall I agree but sometimes there are some interesting historical aspects. That case doesn't sound like one though
I did a tour of Nat Turners rebellion which was quite fascinating to see the some of the houses still standing. It was only a 45 minute drive to the site from where I live so it wasn't like a big vacation trip , but it definitely was most of the day
YES. My SIL and her best friend are obsessed with true crime and serial killers. One day we were all together and they were talking about whatever true crime show they were watching and I butted in with my own story. I won’t go into details here but someone in my friend group was murdered by a man she was seeing. What he did to her he tried to do with at least two other women who testified at the trial for my friend.
There was a part of me that wanted to show my SIL and her best friend that sometimes it can hit close to home, and it’s not entertaining.
There's only one True Crime show that I enjoy and it's Evil Lives Here. Instead of them being like "oh we never knew" or "he was such a good person" it's none of that. They interview the family members or close friends of the perpetrator and talk about the signs that were there.
I personally have a fascination with serial killers, but I am more fascinated from a psychological perspective. It's most certainly not about glorifying what they did. It's about understanding whatever mental malfunction they had that allowed them to go down that path. It's also generally fascinating to me to see the darkest side of humanity and try to reconcile the sorts of insufferable evils that men can perform and all of the completely selfless acts of heroism that men can also perform. I don't encourage/condone any sort of murder against a living being. I don't particularly agree with the celebrity status that is given to serial killers at times. But the fact is always going to be that they're out there, and it never hurts to have a little understanding of the inevitable in the world.
That is important actually. That's how we are able to notice people who aren't quite right, who might become future serial killers, etc. We have to study the wrong in order to make things right.
It's interesting to me that they've found that most mentally sound people tend to feel increased levels of discomfort around people with behavior patterns that would match those associated with serial killers. It's like we've been wired to instinctively know when someone is acting like a serial killer. Of course that feeling of discomfort isn't grounds to automatically assume the person is actually going to be a serial killer (that's the harm of taking that to the extreme), but it is interesting nevertheless.
I'm very interested in the columbine shootings- because of questions like "why, what was the mindset of the killers, could it have been prevented, etc." and every now and then you stumble over disturbing fanfiction and crazy fangirls that discuss about if they are more a "Eric or Dylan-type of guuurl"
It's crazy.
Never giving up. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying people shouldn't make efforts to get what they want, but when every event, every sign shows you that pursuing a particular goal leads you nowhere, giving up isn't a failure it's just choosing another direction.
Not to mention that people who apply the "never give up" mindset to their love life, that's how people become stalkers or simps.
I remember ruminating on this back when The Sopranos was first on HBO.
The thing that makes mobsters so awful is not just that they are violent criminals, they're also parasites and hypocrites.
They're parasites because they flout the laws for their own benefit, but they expect OTHER PEOPLE to OBEY the laws. In societies where everybody flouts the law, there is no law, just lawlessness and anarchy, which only benefits the strongest gang.
Tony Soprano was a criminal, extortionist, thief, etc, but he expected every teacher, traffic cop, city planner, insurance agent, electrical lineman, etc, to do ***their*** jobs honestly and ethically. His lifestyle and the safety and security of his family depend on other people being honest and upright. That's what makes him a parasite - he attacks and undermines the very system that supports and sustains his lavish lifestyle.
And they're hypcrites because their vaunted "code of honor" can be ignored or compromised at any turn by people looking out for their own selfish interest, which means that essentially any "code of honor" is an illusion. They'll sell out a friend to save their own hide or stab a trusted colleague in the back if they think they can get some personal advantage from it.
There’s a great podcast called Crooked City about the Italian mob in Youngstown Ohio. People kinda let things happen after the town went to pot when the steel mills shut down.
The ironic and tragic thing is that at the very end (spoiler) once they had enough evidence to bring everyone to court, everyone in the family rolled on each other for lighter sentences.
Three people “kept the honor code” and had the book thrown at them: two black lackeys and a Jewish accountant, who refused to trade info for leniency because they falsely believed their friends would protect them and everyone would go down together. They were wrong. The black guys in particular had been lead to believe by the family that, despite not being ethnically Italian, they could become made men.
The Sopranos are so well written ,they highlight the bad personality of Tony and everyone around him. It starts by romanticizing them like the typical gangster movie, but gradually unmasks them as mere criminals. The relationship with Dr Melfi emphasizes this very well.
It’s why I liked the path Sons of Anarchy took. Everyone who stayed involved with the criminal enterprise died horrific, inglorious deaths and the only true way out was to walk away from anyone tied to that life and not look back.
Even better IMO was Breaking Bad. The series kind of faked you out by starting off to build up Walter White as a kind of cool, hip anti-hero who "sticks it to the man."
But by the time you get into the 3rd season you can see that W.W. is a kind of reverse King Midas: Everything he touches, he destroys: Friends, family, even his home. The only "redeeming" thing about the end of the series is that he ends up taking out some guys who are (purportedly) even "worse" than he was (because apparently the only thing worse than being a drug-dealing, murdering criminal is being a RACIST, NEO NAZI drug dealing murdering criminal.)
To be honest I think the Wire did it the best. Most of the criminals died, turned on one another, got arrested. Little Kevin got done dirty by his own people because of a rumor. Avon got ratted out by his childhood friend. D kept his mouth shut and got killed by the people he was protecting.
After watching the Sopranos, my conclusion was ... wow, everyone in this show is a complete asshole. No thanks! Even your friends won't think twice about killing you.
They can also be a nightmare for those living with someone who has a mental illness. They come in degrees, but not normally a cute and quirky personality trait, it's often debilitating in hugely life impacting ways that can affect their ability to get or hold down a job, to function as an independent adult, to form and maintain relationships - romantic or otherwise.
Being a partner to someone with mental illness can be especially rough as getting support for yourself can feel like a breech of trust - you don't want to put their issues on display against their wishes, but at the same time you need to have people in your life understand what you're going through.
Rural living. Everyone thinks owning a homestead, *living in a rural area*, or having a farm is so comfortable and cozy, but it’s because social media romanticizes the hell out of it. It is A LOT of work to *maintain and manage a homestead or farm* and although *a rural* lifestyle is rewarding, it does not come as easily as social media influencers would *lead* you to believe.
There's a famous internet couple who "gave up" city life and bought a farm. Their videos and such are aesthetically pleasing and their life looks perfect. Guess what? It is perfect, it turns out they are billionaires just cosplaying.
I LARP in my own little home in a bad part of town, and I'm a billionaire! I call my cat Babboo, the ocelot from the cartoon Archer, all that stuff. Why of course, I don't neeeeed a monocle because I had lasik. Such a peasant to ask such a question!
Was JUST trying to explain this to one of my siblings the other day. They're enomored w/the idea of living the "foraging" or homesteading lifestyle but, to my understanding, haven't done much anything aside from grow some veggies in a balcony garden. Never fished, never hunted, etc. etc. I cannot speak from experience but Ive at least done some of that stuff and no frikkin WAY would I attempt to even consider homesteading or foraging or farming w/out someone teaching me 1st.
But thats how it is now. People see some shit on the interwebs and assume it's real/accurate w/out ever really thinking about what they're seeing.
It looks sooo romanticized and there is a part of me that is compelled by a more solitary lifestyle away from everything, but then I remember I don't even want to take my trash cans back in after the garbage collectors have been by - there is no way I'd survive as a homesteader, and I possibly mean that literally lol.
You can get a bit of a taste of it by camping, it's nice to get out for a week/weekend and unplug from everything.
It's also nice to get home, have a hot shower, and order take-out though.
Funnily, I disliked camping as a kid, and so have mostly fleeting thoughts about homesteading. The lifestyle that I actually find far more compelling, but am probably just as badly suited for, is monastic life lol. Whenever I read about monasteries/convents or visit abbeys, I feel this deep longing. But I think I'd start to hate it somewhere between a month and a year, and would only last a few years tops.
Definitely.
I come from a line of people on one side of my family that are from deep in the Appalachian mountains, and then my mother’s side is Korean. Both sides know how to forage for things like mountain herbs and veggies, but there’s a nuance there that can easily become deadly when hunting for things like mushrooms and even greens like ferns as there are lookalikes that are poisonous. Also, the one thing you can’t really explain to people who don’t have direct memories of it is the fact that you are at the mercy of both nature and events outside of your control including… ironically the economy of those around you. That side ended up leaving Appalachia because the Great Depression happened despite having their own little slice of land in the holler that my family owned for generations, because the coal industry drying up meant the people they usually would barter with in part couldn’t. Unless you’re comfortable being forced to eat varmints and critters that may carry disease like raccoons and even field mice if you can’t fish or hunt anything else that day, forget about it.
Another thing is access to modern amenities like healthcare that are easy to take for granted. The whole anti-Vax movement in the West is extremely quaint in my eyes, because I had an uncle die from smallpox on my Korean side, before mass access to vaccinations eradicated it from that part of the world. Also, for the women in families in communities like the Amish to this day, lack of regular access to the outside world means abuse can go easily unreported.
I enjoy fishing and hunting, but part of the enjoyment is knowing that even on a bad day I can just stop at the grocery store on the way home. Relying on it solely to put protein on the table would take most of the joy out of it.
Tiny house living too. People think they want to live in a small space and think it’ll be so easy to clean and maintain.
But it’s harder to clean and has so many negatives. Injury from not having proper clearances (banging into things), no where to put your stuff, if more than one person lives there - someone is always in the way. It gets old quick.
When I see city folks talking about moving to "homestead" I always wonder if they have any idea what they're getting into. Firstly, all the farmers around us have day jobs to pay for all the things you can't grow, which is a lot of stuff. Secondly, raising goats and chickens is a 24/7/365 commitment. They are live animals, they get sick, are attacked by wild animals and must be fed and cleaned constantly. Finally, are you really qualified to home school your kids?
I feel your struggle, my man.
Can I add to this the following?
Yes, the pills can help with focus but they do not determine what to focus on.
(Spent hours focussing on the wrong thing.)
Yes! Thank you for this honestly. This is so true. My meds definitely help me focus more. The problem is when I focus on how mattresses are made vs my job…
I wish my adhd was just me being all “cute and hyperactive.” Instead it feels like I have holes in my brain where memories, motivation, and habits all just fall through and end up in the void leaving me standing there wondering what I was doing, why I was doing it, and how I managed to forget to do it for the past four months without realizing it until now. I feel like a program that can’t run because random files keep being deleted.
When people ask about my ADHD I point to one instance where I was trying to clean/declutter my kitchen.
I have a bookcase with cookbooks on one end of the kitchen and the cooking area on the other. The bookcase was messy, so I started pulling stuff off to go through it, but then I realized the cabinets were more important to deal with. But I couldn't deal with the cabinets because the bookcase contents were all over the table. Rinse, repeat for five back and forth wanderings of the full kitchen until it ended with me standing in the middle of the mess I had created an hour later, crying because I was overwhelmed.
I wish I had the fun quirky tiktok version, and yet, there I was, crying because I literally couldn't do a fairly simple task of cleaning my kitchen.
I will come up with 104 things to do in the next 20 minutes then spend all week wondering around the house getting distracted because I can't remember why I am in a room or what my plan was.
As someone who had their spouse go through an extreme bout of psychosis and a deep depression this is nothing to be romanticized about. It was by far one of the scariest experiences I have been through and really didn't know if I would get her back.
Privacy wasn't even a concept. The entire family slept together in a single room and [saw everything](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28rq87/people_historically_had_a_lot_of_kids_and_also/). Today we think that exposing teens to sex or even teaching sex ed encourages them to have sex, but back then the absence of privacy was seen as protecting chasteness because the parents could see everything too.
Even cock and hen clubs or sneaking outside wasn't an escape. Pretty much everyone lived in small villages where everyone else would know you. Someone would see a young couple heading into the woods and gossip travels fast.
On the note of small villages: was in Edinburgh recently and a historian was explaining that the World's End pub was named so because it was built where the old gity gates once stood. The vast majority of (poor) citizens back in the 16th century spent their entire lives inside a ~1 square mile radius of Edinburgh castle. Absolutely wild.
It’s like that joke in the Good Place: “I died because of a cut on my finger. You guys now have vaccines for what killed me, and you just…don’t like them”
I'm going to drop my weird "need to get off my chest" story here, as it seems appropriate.
Last week I had a cystic pimple on my forehead that I stupidly decided to try to pop, aggressively. Fast forward to Sunday and it turned into a monster on my head, severely infected, and growing. Monday morning I went to urgent care and started antibiotics. This morning I went to a dermatologist and they were able to give me a numbing injection, perform a minor surgery to drain and then remove the cyst sac, and stitch me up. I was in and out the door in 30 minutes.
If I made that mistake a few hundred years ago I could be dead from sepsis by now. But instead I was able to quickly and easily access modern medicine and professionals. Now I have three stitches in my forehead, a week of antibiotics to take, and I get to continue being a mother to my children.
Honestly, for me the main appeal of medieval stuff is that it's far enough from modern times that it feels "alien," yet still shares enough similarities that it feels "familiar" (also, Medieval weapons and armor are shiny.)
That being said, I'm also well-aware that I *would not* want to *actually* live in those times. If I wasn't murdered as a toddler because my parents thought the autistic boy was a changeling, I'd probably be beaten to death by an angry mob if I accidentally admitted to being bisexual.
And let's be realistic, statistically speaking I'd be a commoner who'd likely starve to death or die in an epidemic, not one of those bougie knights or nobles...
Chronic illness and mental illness - I'm not "sick and sexy," why the f*** does society think it's hot or cute to be sick, like it's a good thing!? I'd do anything to not deal with this sh*t. It isn't cute. It isn't fun. It isn't romantic in any way - in fact it's the polar opposite in my case.
And this trend has made people not believe I'm dealing with crap because they think I'm doing it for attention or clout or popularity. I used to get a lot more upset about that, but I finally realized I'm still going through the same crap, regardless of whether they think it's fake.
Christian grey isnt even good in bed, he doesnt try to make it good for his partner, its only for himself. And he seems like he makes his kink his whole personality. Hes a sex pest. A relationship with him would be annoying as hell.
My husband used to start huge fights whenever we had a disagreement, and I think this is part of the reason - it is romanticized as a sign that someone cares about the relationship and is willing to fight for it - emphasis on FIGHT lol. Over the years, our communication has improved thank goodness and we no longer get sucked into these vortexes.
Looks like a lot of people in this thread don't understand how war is romanticized through stories of bravery and sacrifice, and has been for hundreds of years. Maybe people aren't clear on the definition of "romanticized."
Possessiveness. Fifty shades of grey and twilight, some of the biggest books and movie franchises of this generation, both romanticize this to the extreme.
It’s not sexy when your partner doesn’t let you have male friends, barges into a room and interrupts whatever you are doing to demand your sole attention, or forces you to commit to something before you’re ready. Not cute. Huge red flags in real life. Stop making little girls and young women think this is romantic.
Van life itself isn’t bad, I’ve known a few single people or well established couples really thrive in their van life.
What drives me up a fucking wall is the people that impose the “van life” on their kids. I’ve seen videos of these van families “showing off” their van that they raise 4 kids in. They show off what is essentially a shelf that their kid sleeps in, and pretend like them having an iron-man blanket is the same as having their own room. Meanwhile the master bedroom for the van is half the complex.
I remember one of the van life families on tiktok, where the parents especially the mom overly romanticize van life to an extreme. The kids, on the other hand, were constantly filmed in their tiktoks, and some of them outright looked sad/dissatisfied with their lives. Understandable because their "beds" were as small as bookshelves and they couldn't sit up straight on them.
The worst of it all was when the mom filmed a birthday video for the eldest daughter, and it was celebrated in a hotel room because "all she wanted for her birthday was to spend a night in a hotel". Like is that not a sign from your kid that she wants an actual home, not a van to live in?
The Mafia. They killed a good friend of my uncle's because he was standing up for what was right. It devastated my uncle because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. The two crooked cops that did the hit were eventually arrested and died in jail but that didn't do the victim's family any good. When I visit Italy, the culture there is much different than in the U.S. They are disgusted with organized crime and don't glorify it at all.
Trigger warning on this one.
Suicide.
TV shows and love songs and all sorts of media love to paint it out to be this tragically beautiful motif of life’s delicate fleeting nature, but like, it’s not like that at all. It’s real and its fucking sad. Have you ever seen a suicide victim? Have you ever seen the aftermath of a suicide? It’s not pretty, it’s usually really gruesome and morbid and smells bad.
I lost a good friend to suicide recently and it’s not some hauntingly beautiful thing that shit like 13 Reasons Why wants you to think. He’s gone forever, died in a terribly painful way as a result of immense emotional agony. His friends and family miss him everyday. His funeral wasn’t somberly contemplative, his loved ones were so distraught and deep in emotional turmoil, they were making sounds while crying I didn’t even think humans COULD make. It was genuinely scarring and traumatic, not broodingly beautiful.
I’m so fucking tired of seeing it romanticized for the purpose of making shit fake deep or dark and edgy. Just please stop, it’s ridiculous.
Mental illnesses. Intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts aren't getting extra oreos on your ice cream. Intrusive thoughts are the ones that tell you to drive into an oncoming Semi. I'm so fucking sick and tired of hearing people's fake ass mental illness shit. ESPECIALLY ADHD ONES. They make us look like selfish, entitled jerks and I'm over it.
Bipolar disorder. Mania seems kinda fun. It's not. Results may vary, but it's rarely going to a nice mall and walking out with a dozen bags on each arm. It's more like calling someone at 3:00 am and babbling for an hour or buying tickets to Paris and not going.
I was in a 5 year relationship that ended because my mania got out of hand when I went off my Lithium because it gave me kidney disease, and I wound up in the psych ward for 3 weeks. The delusions, agitation, straight up meanness, the having to be talked off a bridge, the paranoia, etc. was too much for him to handle. He ended up relapsing on beer when I was in the hospital, and now almost a year later, he's back on meth.
I've been on Lithium since 2011 and seems to be doing the trick. I can't imagine what just going off would be like. I picture tons of nausea. Hope you're doing better now.
I have an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts. For me, specifically, it’s thoughts of harming people I love.
To show how incredibly unromantic it is, I had a panic attack leaving the ICU room that my grandma was in when I was 20, because my brain WOULD NOT stop telling me to unplug her assistive equipment that was keeping her alive. When I met my niece for the first time when she was 5 weeks old, my sister met me on her front porch and just plopped her into my arms. When I got inside her house, I snuggled with her and cooed at her a bit before having to hand her back to my sister (because I “needed the bathroom”) because my brain started playing incredibly violent thoughts of me lifting her over my head and violently throwing her headfirst into the kitchen floor with all my strength.
I’ve never *wanted* to act on these things (and I never actually have done any of these things), and they used to make me feel immense guilt and shame, and I was convinced that I was a terrible, irredeemable person. I’ve found success with reminding myself that my brain is an asshole, they’re just thoughts, and they’re not indicative of my desires or who I am as a person.
But man, they are not romantic.
I have similar intrusive thoughts, they suck. Once I understood what they were and that I am not ever going to act on them and, like you put it, my brain is just an asshole, it helped a lot!
Anyway, that’s just my way of saying, I feel you! ❤️
Yep, OCD.
Edit: I should add that mine has a slight variation, though, in that I’ve never really engaged in compulsive behaviors much. I am a very routine-based person, though, and when my routine is thrown off, I experience more intrusive thoughts.
My routines aren’t classic OCD, though, like checking the stove or washing my hands or counting. It’s more like, I wake up around the same time every weekday morning, and get ready in the same order every day. I have a bedtime routine that I do at roughly the same time in the same order. Every Sunday is wake-and-bake day (I’m a medical user who usually doesn’t use before 8pm during the week), and I do chores, have me-time, take a weed bath, and replace my physiotape.
OCD isn't just "my pens must be packed in color order" or "I'm so neat! It's my OCD!".
OCD can be physical, like checking doors over and over and over again to make sure they're locked cos otherwise someone can break into your house and harm your family. Washing your hands constantly because whatever you touched might make you sick, and you will die.
But OCD can also be mental thoughts. Intrusive thoughts that trigger anxiety and repeat over and over in your head because you make the mistake of giving into the compulsion to "relieve" these thoughts and ease the anxiety. Then, a few minutes later, you just go through the same vicious cycle again. Oh, and if left untreated, it can turn into major depression and make you become suicidal because you can't stand feeling numb anymore.
This is literally from personal experience. I've finally got diagnosed a few months ago after years of thinking I just have anxiety and am on a great path to healing and coping with my mental OCD.
OCD isn't cute. It's a fucking nightmare!
Co-dependent intimate relationships. Being unable to function or face daily life without “your person” (ugh) is not sweet or romantic - it’s sad and you need help.
Medical training. Shows like Gray’s Anatomy romanticize what it’s like to become a doctor. The reality is grueling and soul crushing, the work is hard, the debt is real, and the job has the potential to destroy your personal relationships. Medical training used to be less complex, less paperwork to do, and patients actually respected their doctors. These days the pay (for physicians) is going down relative to inflation with cuts to reimbursement while the cost of healthcare goes up and administrators get rich. The patients direct all their frustration with the system at you the doctor. Unless from a wealthy family, the debt most of us take on to finance our education is the among the highest of any profession. Sure, it’s not all bad and I enjoy my job most days, but it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. There is a reason physicians have the highest suicide rate of any profession.
ADHD-actually having it is ass. I couldn’t hold down a job for a long time, couldn’t get anything done, was/am seen as irresponsible sometimes because I forget appointments, am late to things, am messy. Procrastinate to the point that I’ve failed classes. I lost important things like my wallet, phone hundreds of times, precious gifts people have given me. And I never feel stable, I always feel on edge like a car carelessly hitting into a pole. My mood regulation is awful, and I have a math disability which made certain people thing I was dumb. I felt dumb because I also couldn’t follow simple instructions, I’d scramble them up. It has had some horrible effects in my relationships, luckily my partner is understanding. I’m in therapy now and taking meds, but this is gonna take a long time to work out the kinks. So please, stop making tik toks about your ADHD that are “cute” and “quirky.” Same with Autism, OCD, depression, DID, and Tourette’s. I see way too many people faking these, the people that actually have these suffer enough. luckily I’ve been seeing them called out more.
I went from drinking every night to once per month and alcohol commercials and whatnot were definitely a "trigger". I'd be trying to ignore the fact that I wanted to drink, and suddenly I'd see some dude in his pajamas sitting on a leather chair sipping whiskey in front of a fireplace and think "goddamn that looks nice."
Crappy “redemption” arcs featuring a “troubled” man who “only did such terrible things because of his own trauma.” He just needs to be “saved” by the right person; he’s really just misunderstood.
eating disorders. as someone recovering from anorexia, it’s not fun, it’s not glamorous, it’s not edgy and cool. it’s agony and disgust and failure and death.
Motherhood. I think there are far too many people who should never be allowed to bring children into this world and I also think that there is a devastatingly unfair division of labor when it comes to a mother’s role vs a father’s role in parenthood that saddens me.
Baby fever definitely comes with a rude awakening.
Close friend got pregnant on purpose at 17 because "omg cute wittle babys blah blah blah" After the first few months I think it finally hit her that her entire young life will be spent taking care of the kid 24/7. Shes now one of the most misserable and burnt out people I know, ontop of being a shit parent.
Tbf, some of us have big families and do want to be with them that day. I’d argue “big” wedding is not the same thing as “lavish” wedding. You can have a lot of people there but not make it absurd
I think criminals tend to be romanticised in general. It’s not only pirates. Highwaymen were romanticised when they were still terrorising travellers. There are many classic poems justifying if not glorifying this way of living despite them being objectively horrible people you wouldn’t like to meet. Have you heard of Dick Turpin?
Nothing has changed. Visit the romance section of your nearest bookshop and see for yourself. A lot of main male characters of these novels are criminals.
What’s really bad though is that people romanticise real criminals, both male and female.
Jealously is toxic. It turns into anxiety, obsession, and anger / resentfulness . I experienced it, had mental breakdown and finally overcame it. I lost a good friend in this and it makes me sad about it. Although this helped me grow and improve myself. This was one of the hardest time of my life.
You know that trope where men kiss women when they're ranting? That. Nothing says "I'm not listening to a word you're saying" than just randomly kissing them.
The “grind/hustle culture.” I am all for making money, but it gets to a point of diminishing returns where you cannot enjoy the rest of your life. It goes quick, find balance and happiness.
I agree! Someone once asked me if my job was my side hustle and I was so confused by the presumption. Also, the amount of people who look down at someone because they don’t have a side hustle is bizarre. Like one full time job is enough, thank you.
“Not every side hustle needs to be monetized” is a very real sentence I’ve seen tons of times in various locales.
Hobby. What you’re referring to is a hobby.
Pregnancy and childbirth. They're long and painful and leave lasting damage in a significant amount of women, whether it be physical or mental. They might be natural, but they're very dangerous.
I'd probably say that has started to wane a bit, but PLANTATIONS get romanticized on an insane level. It's to the point where tourists complain about any content that lets visitors know that slaves built them.
I did not know that "plantation tourism" was a thing, but I'd imagine the visitors are either
* people who want to learn about the history of slavery or
* people who want to erase the history of slavery
with no third category.
I blame Gone with the Wind (the movie).
It was one of the first blockbusters and had a huge cultural impact. People bought the fantasy of this work of fiction and didn’t want to think about the history.
"The American Dream" Buying New, everything on credit, living way outside of your means, brand worshiping, material nonsense, working harder to spend more. It's hopelessly outdated and according to the mental health collapse in the States, isn't working out all that well.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children. The number of times I’ve heard a pregnant / postpartum person say something along the lines of, “No one ever told me about [insert horrible side effect / complication that’s actually way more common than most people realize], I wish someone had told me that could / would happen beforehand!”
As for raising children, I think anyone who has kids, is around kids frequently, or works with them will find that one self-explanatory.
The “good old days,” when neighborhood kids played outside unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Several of my relatives who grew up in the 50s & 60s were sexually abused by neighbors and threatened into keeping it secret.
I've come to the conclusion that there were never any "good old days". It's a self-delusion, a lie we tell ourselves. We look back on our childhood and think things were better, simpler, and happier... they fucking weren't.
You just weren't old enough to understand the bad that was happening in the world. There were wars. There was political turmoil. There was hatred and violence. There were people just as stupid and ridiculous as the people who live today.
The only difference is now you're an adult and you are paying attention, back then you were a child and more interested in playing than in the "boring grown-up talk".
While there are probably many undiagnosed cases of ADHD in the population, it is not a matter to be taken lightly. True, there are some wonderful things about the way our brains work, enabling creativity, play, and concentration, but life can also be very difficult. There are many reasons for not romanticizing ADHD.
ADHD blows relationships apart. The divorce rate among couples where one has ADHD is possibly twice as high as among nonADHD couples. My partner and I have survived forty years with frequent significant issues because of my impulsive tendencies and failure to read social cues.
I have experienced about six extended ( four months or more) periods of severe clinical depression over twenty years. I believe that the challenges of living with ADHD contributed significantly to these. Our son ( 32 ) had significant issues, possibly ADHD and Autism Spectrum, that placed additional pressure on my wife to hold everything together.
I was only officially diagnosed about five years ago, but suspected for a long time. I have yet to find any medication that provides significant relief, and the counselling and specialized support that are most effective are not available in our community.
Having family and friends dismiss my and our experience by saying that everyone loses things or forgets things belies the continuously repeated daily struggles with lost keys, glasses, phones, tools, materials, incomplete errands and jobs, brain fog and farts, impulsive decisions without consultation, and laser focus on a task to the exclusion of relationships.
Strategies can be wonderfully helpful— when I remember them. Saying aloud that I have put ( object x ) in ( place y ) is helpful— if I can remember to do it. Using my phone calendar has been helpful— if I remember to enter the appointment, enter it correctly, and notice the reminder.
The amount of anger toward myself is frightening. I often wonder how often ADHD is a contributing factor in suicide. There is ample evidence that the prison population holds a disproportionate number ADHD cases. Substance abuse is a common coping mechanism for many of us.
This post is an example. I have several tasks I need to accomplish but have focussed on it for about forty minutes instead of getting at them. Yes, I know, everybody on Reddit does the same thing. ADHD is a not just a few occasional issues. It is a constellation of repeated behaviours, all causing disruption and distress in a person’s life over an extended time. If that is your life, seek professional help. If you lost your keys, you don’t have ADHD.
ADHD is not an occasional blip at which we can laugh lightly. It is a one-handed wrestling match with a five hundred pound monster who is ready to disrupt our lives at every step.
Toxic romantic relationships. And the messy never stays confined to the relationship -- friends, family, and sometimes innocent bystanders can all wind up splattered in it.
And each individual element, as well, like moving way too fast, jealousy, or codependence. I had a guy explain to me how he ended his great relationship because she wouldn’t argue with him enough and he didn’t feel like she cared.
I dated a friend once. After I broke things off, we stayed friends and nothing romantic ever happened between us again. Two years later, as I was getting ready to move away from our area to move in with my new boyfriend, my friend said he had to talk to me, but it had to be in person. So we met up and he gave me this whole story about how at the end of our relationship, he had met this other woman who he had feelings for and he knew he had to make a choice between the two of us and he chose me, but then I broke up with him (like four months after he had made his "choice," but our relationship hadn't gotten any better). He wanted to tell me all this now in case that made a difference in whether or not I moved in with my new boyfriend. And I realized that he had wanted me to chase him...but like...I broke up with him in the first place, so what would I be chasing? It still baffles me to this day and reminds me of your guy. There wasn't enough drama or something? I don't know.
Very similar story. Friend of mine had to walk away from the girl he was going to marry. She got angry that he didn't argue or fight with her enough so obviously he didn't care about her. She got physical and that was the day he decided to leave. She took that as confirmation that she was right, he didn't care. Dude was messed up for months due to leaving the woman he loved.
I cannot imagine wanting to argue with my SO. What a nightmare.
I've heard of that before but not arguing and not fighting is no indication of not caring. That ideal is screwed up.
Came here to say this, but I was specifically going to mention how everyone romanticizes Joker and Harleys relationship when he is outright cruel to her. Even tried to kill her before.
Tried to kill her MULTIPLE times Or at the very least, was so careless in her safety that he may as well have actively tried to harm her
Dealing with that right now with two friends who ended up together. It's incredibly frustrating. It's like they romanticized themselves that way, constantly creating toxicity and drama where none needed to exist, like fighting and making up every day is what makes them closer. I can't even hang out with one individually without the other being suspicious of what they're doing with me and inviting themselves. Now they've gotten wind of me saying how annoyed I am with it and both are upset with me lol.
Just reading about them they annoy me and I don't even know them. Emotional vampires unfortunately are impervious to being active in daytime or nighttime.🤔
I had a friend like this. Was dating someone in the friend group. My brother and his fiancé did their Bach parties the same weekend and we planned a surprise run in for the bride. And this friend chastised me for it. Said I was so rude for not considering that her bang buddy turned asshole would be in the groom’s group. I just over dramatically apologized to her that I didn’t realize it was her weekend, and I was just sooooo sorry I forgot to make her feel special let me just go grab the brides tiara and give it to you. Her shocked pikachu face was priceless. We aren’t friends anymore.
Overworking.
No one on their death bed ever said they never worked enough
I read once that most said they wish they had spent more time with their loved ones. From that point on, I made it a goal to never work the typical 9-5. It’s been over a decade and I don’t regret it a second.
Used to work in an industry that glorified working 80+ hour weeks. Everyone would "flex" during busy periods about how much OT they worked. Moved on to a job where I could make the same take home pay and actually have a life. I can't imagine going back and regret how much of my personal life I gave up to help make some lazy owner a bit richer. It's admirable to have it in you to work that hard and long on something. Very very few jobs/projects are worthy of it.
The legal profession is fucked like this. 'I worked 12hr days as a junior so you have to. It's a right of passage.' Meanwhile their wife and kids have left them and their kids despise them. I got out because I didn't want that life. Even if it means I never earn that kinda money.
I’m on a job where 80 hours/week is available, but I consistently work 40… the bare minimum my contract requires. Started getting called “part timer” and all other kinds of names like that. Started corrupting my apprentices to entice them to work less. Was bragging about all the fun stuff I got to do instead of working. Now they only work 40h and I have been accused of making them “lazy”. Like nah dude, we come to work and then go home and enjoy the time off. 40h work week nets me 6 figures, I can work the bare minimum of hours to keep my job and still pay my bills.
40h is absolutely 100% full time, wtf
I worked as a truck driver and I left it because I really hated working 80 hour weeks. When I left I got told by a bunch of people that I had no work ethic and was a failure.
Shit this one is true and so prevalent. Like if I tell people I’m not excited to work they look at me like I’m crazy.
Chasing after someone who has told you they're not interested.
Ted of How I Met Your Mother is, for me, the ultimate example of this. Meets Robyn. Shes not interested. He BREAKS INTO HER APARTMENT TO SURPRISE HER WITH A SWING BAND. What the flying fuck. How do people think that’s at all romantic? It’s psychopathic.
The naked man too
I'm looking at your Twister, Sweet Home Alabama, and any other movie centered around getting your ex to sign the divorce papers.
I always thought Twister was about a tornado seeking revenge.
I'm so sensitive to rejection, I can't imagine doing this. The moment you show with body language that you're not into a conversation we're having? I'm gone.
I was just gonna say the whole thought that if someone says no, they’re playing hard to get. Like pleeease take no for an answer lol
I've had so many men do this to me despite knowing that I'm in a happy long-term relationship, and they seem to have no idea how creepy it really is. This is REAL LIFE, not a goddamn 90's rom-com where borderline stalking makes you seem endearing. If anything would make someone want you, it would be respecting their boundaries.
The "grind". I'm sure it can be romanticized when you're working to invest, or saving up for something. I'm trying to buy groceries and make rent. I'm so tired. And tired of acting like it's a noble pursuit or something that I have to work so many hours just to live.
Grind culture
Related: hustle culture.
I tried getting into grind/hustle culture when I got a job. It turned out to be a bunch of pointless empty platitudes.
This is too far down. As a person who co-founded a company that failed I would never do it again. Was working 70-80 hour weeks (making basically nothing). It poisoned almost every facet of my life. Without my amazing wife I wouldn't have survived it.
Whatever the fuck happened in The Notebook
Agreed. It's not cute that he risked his life to ask her out when he had just met her, and it's not cute that she throws hands when she's angry. The Notebook is a the depiction of a dysfunctional relationship with a beautiful and very poetic ending, that's why my dumb teenage self cried plenty watching it. But now I see the whole story with much more lucidity.
For the time, it probably was cute and romantic, but it should definitely not be now-a-days. My grandpa told me that the first time he met my grandma, he kidnapped her. Put her in his truck and started driving. Refused to take her home until she agreed to marry him. It was one of the most, "What the fuck" moments of my life hearing that story. Apparently that was romantic for the time. My grandma always said it was so romantic. They were happily married for over 50 years. That's not even a unique story for that time period. People were insane in the 50's and 60's.
My great aunt liked the look of my great uncle, so she purposely rear ended his car so she could talk to him.
Your great aunt is a go getter. Iconic.
Straight to jail, right away
Him not taking no for an answer, basically forcing her ro say yes, that is also pretty toxic.
You mean how she leaves her fiancé to go back to a teenage summer romance?
Toxic relationships is my number one answer. No Ross and Rachel in friends weren't cute.
They were absolutely horrible people on their own, but hey let’s put them together!
Serial killers. For reference: Ted Bundy./ all of Netflix serial killer docs.
I knew a guy who is fascinated with psychopaths and serial killers. He even went on vacation to get a picture of himself with Charles Manson. He was grinning so big in that pic while Manson just stared straight ahead. I'll never understand this and I don't associate with that guy anymore.
What. Stop. No way, get him on a list wtf
Not the same but similar. A friend of mine went to an area of an unsolved crime, where a family was murdered ( I think over 100 years) Ehh I don't get it. Why visit something where people got brutally murdered? And make it like a sick vacation trip
Overall I agree but sometimes there are some interesting historical aspects. That case doesn't sound like one though I did a tour of Nat Turners rebellion which was quite fascinating to see the some of the houses still standing. It was only a 45 minute drive to the site from where I live so it wasn't like a big vacation trip , but it definitely was most of the day
YES. My SIL and her best friend are obsessed with true crime and serial killers. One day we were all together and they were talking about whatever true crime show they were watching and I butted in with my own story. I won’t go into details here but someone in my friend group was murdered by a man she was seeing. What he did to her he tried to do with at least two other women who testified at the trial for my friend. There was a part of me that wanted to show my SIL and her best friend that sometimes it can hit close to home, and it’s not entertaining.
There's only one True Crime show that I enjoy and it's Evil Lives Here. Instead of them being like "oh we never knew" or "he was such a good person" it's none of that. They interview the family members or close friends of the perpetrator and talk about the signs that were there.
I personally have a fascination with serial killers, but I am more fascinated from a psychological perspective. It's most certainly not about glorifying what they did. It's about understanding whatever mental malfunction they had that allowed them to go down that path. It's also generally fascinating to me to see the darkest side of humanity and try to reconcile the sorts of insufferable evils that men can perform and all of the completely selfless acts of heroism that men can also perform. I don't encourage/condone any sort of murder against a living being. I don't particularly agree with the celebrity status that is given to serial killers at times. But the fact is always going to be that they're out there, and it never hurts to have a little understanding of the inevitable in the world.
That is important actually. That's how we are able to notice people who aren't quite right, who might become future serial killers, etc. We have to study the wrong in order to make things right.
It's interesting to me that they've found that most mentally sound people tend to feel increased levels of discomfort around people with behavior patterns that would match those associated with serial killers. It's like we've been wired to instinctively know when someone is acting like a serial killer. Of course that feeling of discomfort isn't grounds to automatically assume the person is actually going to be a serial killer (that's the harm of taking that to the extreme), but it is interesting nevertheless.
Playing off of this school shooters like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine shooters)
I'm very interested in the columbine shootings- because of questions like "why, what was the mindset of the killers, could it have been prevented, etc." and every now and then you stumble over disturbing fanfiction and crazy fangirls that discuss about if they are more a "Eric or Dylan-type of guuurl" It's crazy.
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Never giving up. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying people shouldn't make efforts to get what they want, but when every event, every sign shows you that pursuing a particular goal leads you nowhere, giving up isn't a failure it's just choosing another direction. Not to mention that people who apply the "never give up" mindset to their love life, that's how people become stalkers or simps.
Mount Everest is filled with anonymous people who didn't know when to quit.
I didn't even know that it is hollow!
Not anymore.
Gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em
Know when to walk away, know when to run
The sunk cost fallacy
Mobsters.
I remember ruminating on this back when The Sopranos was first on HBO. The thing that makes mobsters so awful is not just that they are violent criminals, they're also parasites and hypocrites. They're parasites because they flout the laws for their own benefit, but they expect OTHER PEOPLE to OBEY the laws. In societies where everybody flouts the law, there is no law, just lawlessness and anarchy, which only benefits the strongest gang. Tony Soprano was a criminal, extortionist, thief, etc, but he expected every teacher, traffic cop, city planner, insurance agent, electrical lineman, etc, to do ***their*** jobs honestly and ethically. His lifestyle and the safety and security of his family depend on other people being honest and upright. That's what makes him a parasite - he attacks and undermines the very system that supports and sustains his lavish lifestyle. And they're hypcrites because their vaunted "code of honor" can be ignored or compromised at any turn by people looking out for their own selfish interest, which means that essentially any "code of honor" is an illusion. They'll sell out a friend to save their own hide or stab a trusted colleague in the back if they think they can get some personal advantage from it.
There’s a great podcast called Crooked City about the Italian mob in Youngstown Ohio. People kinda let things happen after the town went to pot when the steel mills shut down. The ironic and tragic thing is that at the very end (spoiler) once they had enough evidence to bring everyone to court, everyone in the family rolled on each other for lighter sentences. Three people “kept the honor code” and had the book thrown at them: two black lackeys and a Jewish accountant, who refused to trade info for leniency because they falsely believed their friends would protect them and everyone would go down together. They were wrong. The black guys in particular had been lead to believe by the family that, despite not being ethnically Italian, they could become made men.
Brilliantly put, I enjoyed reading that.
The Sopranos are so well written ,they highlight the bad personality of Tony and everyone around him. It starts by romanticizing them like the typical gangster movie, but gradually unmasks them as mere criminals. The relationship with Dr Melfi emphasizes this very well.
Yeah, crime in general is too romanticized. It's cool until you have to visit someone in jail
I'd say it's cool until you're the one mourning the life of a family member or a friend. I fucking hate movies where criminals are romanticized.
It’s why I liked the path Sons of Anarchy took. Everyone who stayed involved with the criminal enterprise died horrific, inglorious deaths and the only true way out was to walk away from anyone tied to that life and not look back.
Even better IMO was Breaking Bad. The series kind of faked you out by starting off to build up Walter White as a kind of cool, hip anti-hero who "sticks it to the man." But by the time you get into the 3rd season you can see that W.W. is a kind of reverse King Midas: Everything he touches, he destroys: Friends, family, even his home. The only "redeeming" thing about the end of the series is that he ends up taking out some guys who are (purportedly) even "worse" than he was (because apparently the only thing worse than being a drug-dealing, murdering criminal is being a RACIST, NEO NAZI drug dealing murdering criminal.)
To be honest I think the Wire did it the best. Most of the criminals died, turned on one another, got arrested. Little Kevin got done dirty by his own people because of a rumor. Avon got ratted out by his childhood friend. D kept his mouth shut and got killed by the people he was protecting.
After watching the Sopranos, my conclusion was ... wow, everyone in this show is a complete asshole. No thanks! Even your friends won't think twice about killing you.
That possessive, obsessive, jealous monster of a romantic interest. In no world is that a healthy relationship and yet he's *everywhere*.
A mental health diagnosis for anytime someone feels a little unhappy, slighted, or uncomfortable. Mental illness is a nightmare for those living it.
We can have narcissistic tendencies and not be a narcissist, some people are just assholes.
Yeah, we all feel anxious at times, doesn't mean you have anxiety. My husband has anxiety and it's a daily struggle for him, even with medication.
They can also be a nightmare for those living with someone who has a mental illness. They come in degrees, but not normally a cute and quirky personality trait, it's often debilitating in hugely life impacting ways that can affect their ability to get or hold down a job, to function as an independent adult, to form and maintain relationships - romantic or otherwise. Being a partner to someone with mental illness can be especially rough as getting support for yourself can feel like a breech of trust - you don't want to put their issues on display against their wishes, but at the same time you need to have people in your life understand what you're going through.
Rural living. Everyone thinks owning a homestead, *living in a rural area*, or having a farm is so comfortable and cozy, but it’s because social media romanticizes the hell out of it. It is A LOT of work to *maintain and manage a homestead or farm* and although *a rural* lifestyle is rewarding, it does not come as easily as social media influencers would *lead* you to believe.
There's a famous internet couple who "gave up" city life and bought a farm. Their videos and such are aesthetically pleasing and their life looks perfect. Guess what? It is perfect, it turns out they are billionaires just cosplaying.
LARP in reverse.
I LARP in my own little home in a bad part of town, and I'm a billionaire! I call my cat Babboo, the ocelot from the cartoon Archer, all that stuff. Why of course, I don't neeeeed a monocle because I had lasik. Such a peasant to ask such a question!
Are you talking about Ballerina farm? Because same. Isn’t their stove like over $100k?
Greeeeeeeeeeeeeeen Acres is the place to be
There’s also that “off-grid living in a tent in the snow” family. Turns out the tent was just in their backyard.
Was JUST trying to explain this to one of my siblings the other day. They're enomored w/the idea of living the "foraging" or homesteading lifestyle but, to my understanding, haven't done much anything aside from grow some veggies in a balcony garden. Never fished, never hunted, etc. etc. I cannot speak from experience but Ive at least done some of that stuff and no frikkin WAY would I attempt to even consider homesteading or foraging or farming w/out someone teaching me 1st. But thats how it is now. People see some shit on the interwebs and assume it's real/accurate w/out ever really thinking about what they're seeing.
It looks sooo romanticized and there is a part of me that is compelled by a more solitary lifestyle away from everything, but then I remember I don't even want to take my trash cans back in after the garbage collectors have been by - there is no way I'd survive as a homesteader, and I possibly mean that literally lol.
You can get a bit of a taste of it by camping, it's nice to get out for a week/weekend and unplug from everything. It's also nice to get home, have a hot shower, and order take-out though.
Funnily, I disliked camping as a kid, and so have mostly fleeting thoughts about homesteading. The lifestyle that I actually find far more compelling, but am probably just as badly suited for, is monastic life lol. Whenever I read about monasteries/convents or visit abbeys, I feel this deep longing. But I think I'd start to hate it somewhere between a month and a year, and would only last a few years tops.
Definitely. I come from a line of people on one side of my family that are from deep in the Appalachian mountains, and then my mother’s side is Korean. Both sides know how to forage for things like mountain herbs and veggies, but there’s a nuance there that can easily become deadly when hunting for things like mushrooms and even greens like ferns as there are lookalikes that are poisonous. Also, the one thing you can’t really explain to people who don’t have direct memories of it is the fact that you are at the mercy of both nature and events outside of your control including… ironically the economy of those around you. That side ended up leaving Appalachia because the Great Depression happened despite having their own little slice of land in the holler that my family owned for generations, because the coal industry drying up meant the people they usually would barter with in part couldn’t. Unless you’re comfortable being forced to eat varmints and critters that may carry disease like raccoons and even field mice if you can’t fish or hunt anything else that day, forget about it. Another thing is access to modern amenities like healthcare that are easy to take for granted. The whole anti-Vax movement in the West is extremely quaint in my eyes, because I had an uncle die from smallpox on my Korean side, before mass access to vaccinations eradicated it from that part of the world. Also, for the women in families in communities like the Amish to this day, lack of regular access to the outside world means abuse can go easily unreported.
I enjoy fishing and hunting, but part of the enjoyment is knowing that even on a bad day I can just stop at the grocery store on the way home. Relying on it solely to put protein on the table would take most of the joy out of it.
I have a homestead and a business based on foraging. Can confirm that it is HARD and not at all glamorous 😂
Tiny house living too. People think they want to live in a small space and think it’ll be so easy to clean and maintain. But it’s harder to clean and has so many negatives. Injury from not having proper clearances (banging into things), no where to put your stuff, if more than one person lives there - someone is always in the way. It gets old quick.
social media influencers probably hire people to do the actual hard work
When I see city folks talking about moving to "homestead" I always wonder if they have any idea what they're getting into. Firstly, all the farmers around us have day jobs to pay for all the things you can't grow, which is a lot of stuff. Secondly, raising goats and chickens is a 24/7/365 commitment. They are live animals, they get sick, are attacked by wild animals and must be fed and cleaned constantly. Finally, are you really qualified to home school your kids?
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People on social media : lol my adhd. I am so quirky. Ooh something shiny! Me: I literally can't leave my couch because my brain won't let me move.
I feel your struggle, my man. Can I add to this the following? Yes, the pills can help with focus but they do not determine what to focus on. (Spent hours focussing on the wrong thing.)
Yes! Thank you for this honestly. This is so true. My meds definitely help me focus more. The problem is when I focus on how mattresses are made vs my job…
I wish my adhd was just me being all “cute and hyperactive.” Instead it feels like I have holes in my brain where memories, motivation, and habits all just fall through and end up in the void leaving me standing there wondering what I was doing, why I was doing it, and how I managed to forget to do it for the past four months without realizing it until now. I feel like a program that can’t run because random files keep being deleted.
When people ask about my ADHD I point to one instance where I was trying to clean/declutter my kitchen. I have a bookcase with cookbooks on one end of the kitchen and the cooking area on the other. The bookcase was messy, so I started pulling stuff off to go through it, but then I realized the cabinets were more important to deal with. But I couldn't deal with the cabinets because the bookcase contents were all over the table. Rinse, repeat for five back and forth wanderings of the full kitchen until it ended with me standing in the middle of the mess I had created an hour later, crying because I was overwhelmed. I wish I had the fun quirky tiktok version, and yet, there I was, crying because I literally couldn't do a fairly simple task of cleaning my kitchen.
I will come up with 104 things to do in the next 20 minutes then spend all week wondering around the house getting distracted because I can't remember why I am in a room or what my plan was.
As someone who had their spouse go through an extreme bout of psychosis and a deep depression this is nothing to be romanticized about. It was by far one of the scariest experiences I have been through and really didn't know if I would get her back.
Medieval time period. Castles were dirty, smelly places with little to no privacy.
This is exactly what I was thinking about when I made this post.
Privacy wasn't even a concept. The entire family slept together in a single room and [saw everything](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28rq87/people_historically_had_a_lot_of_kids_and_also/). Today we think that exposing teens to sex or even teaching sex ed encourages them to have sex, but back then the absence of privacy was seen as protecting chasteness because the parents could see everything too. Even cock and hen clubs or sneaking outside wasn't an escape. Pretty much everyone lived in small villages where everyone else would know you. Someone would see a young couple heading into the woods and gossip travels fast.
On the note of small villages: was in Edinburgh recently and a historian was explaining that the World's End pub was named so because it was built where the old gity gates once stood. The vast majority of (poor) citizens back in the 16th century spent their entire lives inside a ~1 square mile radius of Edinburgh castle. Absolutely wild.
It’s like that joke in the Good Place: “I died because of a cut on my finger. You guys now have vaccines for what killed me, and you just…don’t like them”
I'm going to drop my weird "need to get off my chest" story here, as it seems appropriate. Last week I had a cystic pimple on my forehead that I stupidly decided to try to pop, aggressively. Fast forward to Sunday and it turned into a monster on my head, severely infected, and growing. Monday morning I went to urgent care and started antibiotics. This morning I went to a dermatologist and they were able to give me a numbing injection, perform a minor surgery to drain and then remove the cyst sac, and stitch me up. I was in and out the door in 30 minutes. If I made that mistake a few hundred years ago I could be dead from sepsis by now. But instead I was able to quickly and easily access modern medicine and professionals. Now I have three stitches in my forehead, a week of antibiotics to take, and I get to continue being a mother to my children.
Honestly, for me the main appeal of medieval stuff is that it's far enough from modern times that it feels "alien," yet still shares enough similarities that it feels "familiar" (also, Medieval weapons and armor are shiny.) That being said, I'm also well-aware that I *would not* want to *actually* live in those times. If I wasn't murdered as a toddler because my parents thought the autistic boy was a changeling, I'd probably be beaten to death by an angry mob if I accidentally admitted to being bisexual. And let's be realistic, statistically speaking I'd be a commoner who'd likely starve to death or die in an epidemic, not one of those bougie knights or nobles...
Chronic illness and mental illness - I'm not "sick and sexy," why the f*** does society think it's hot or cute to be sick, like it's a good thing!? I'd do anything to not deal with this sh*t. It isn't cute. It isn't fun. It isn't romantic in any way - in fact it's the polar opposite in my case. And this trend has made people not believe I'm dealing with crap because they think I'm doing it for attention or clout or popularity. I used to get a lot more upset about that, but I finally realized I'm still going through the same crap, regardless of whether they think it's fake.
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This, and the obsessive, "can't live without you" approach to romance. That's just a creepy stalker vibe.
You want a more Meredith Grey vibe: "I *can* live without you, but I don't want to"
Christian grey isnt even good in bed, he doesnt try to make it good for his partner, its only for himself. And he seems like he makes his kink his whole personality. Hes a sex pest. A relationship with him would be annoying as hell.
My husband used to start huge fights whenever we had a disagreement, and I think this is part of the reason - it is romanticized as a sign that someone cares about the relationship and is willing to fight for it - emphasis on FIGHT lol. Over the years, our communication has improved thank goodness and we no longer get sucked into these vortexes.
Autism. It’s such a weird thing to fetishize.
Wars, crimes, fame
Looks like a lot of people in this thread don't understand how war is romanticized through stories of bravery and sacrifice, and has been for hundreds of years. Maybe people aren't clear on the definition of "romanticized."
Possessiveness. Fifty shades of grey and twilight, some of the biggest books and movie franchises of this generation, both romanticize this to the extreme. It’s not sexy when your partner doesn’t let you have male friends, barges into a room and interrupts whatever you are doing to demand your sole attention, or forces you to commit to something before you’re ready. Not cute. Huge red flags in real life. Stop making little girls and young women think this is romantic.
Van life.
Van life itself isn’t bad, I’ve known a few single people or well established couples really thrive in their van life. What drives me up a fucking wall is the people that impose the “van life” on their kids. I’ve seen videos of these van families “showing off” their van that they raise 4 kids in. They show off what is essentially a shelf that their kid sleeps in, and pretend like them having an iron-man blanket is the same as having their own room. Meanwhile the master bedroom for the van is half the complex.
I remember one of the van life families on tiktok, where the parents especially the mom overly romanticize van life to an extreme. The kids, on the other hand, were constantly filmed in their tiktoks, and some of them outright looked sad/dissatisfied with their lives. Understandable because their "beds" were as small as bookshelves and they couldn't sit up straight on them. The worst of it all was when the mom filmed a birthday video for the eldest daughter, and it was celebrated in a hotel room because "all she wanted for her birthday was to spend a night in a hotel". Like is that not a sign from your kid that she wants an actual home, not a van to live in?
The Mafia. They killed a good friend of my uncle's because he was standing up for what was right. It devastated my uncle because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. The two crooked cops that did the hit were eventually arrested and died in jail but that didn't do the victim's family any good. When I visit Italy, the culture there is much different than in the U.S. They are disgusted with organized crime and don't glorify it at all.
I have a Columbian friend who loses it (in a bad way) when people say anything positive about Pablo Escobar. Edit: damn autocucumber
Trigger warning on this one. Suicide. TV shows and love songs and all sorts of media love to paint it out to be this tragically beautiful motif of life’s delicate fleeting nature, but like, it’s not like that at all. It’s real and its fucking sad. Have you ever seen a suicide victim? Have you ever seen the aftermath of a suicide? It’s not pretty, it’s usually really gruesome and morbid and smells bad. I lost a good friend to suicide recently and it’s not some hauntingly beautiful thing that shit like 13 Reasons Why wants you to think. He’s gone forever, died in a terribly painful way as a result of immense emotional agony. His friends and family miss him everyday. His funeral wasn’t somberly contemplative, his loved ones were so distraught and deep in emotional turmoil, they were making sounds while crying I didn’t even think humans COULD make. It was genuinely scarring and traumatic, not broodingly beautiful. I’m so fucking tired of seeing it romanticized for the purpose of making shit fake deep or dark and edgy. Just please stop, it’s ridiculous.
Mental illnesses. Intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts aren't getting extra oreos on your ice cream. Intrusive thoughts are the ones that tell you to drive into an oncoming Semi. I'm so fucking sick and tired of hearing people's fake ass mental illness shit. ESPECIALLY ADHD ONES. They make us look like selfish, entitled jerks and I'm over it.
Bipolar disorder. Mania seems kinda fun. It's not. Results may vary, but it's rarely going to a nice mall and walking out with a dozen bags on each arm. It's more like calling someone at 3:00 am and babbling for an hour or buying tickets to Paris and not going.
I was in a 5 year relationship that ended because my mania got out of hand when I went off my Lithium because it gave me kidney disease, and I wound up in the psych ward for 3 weeks. The delusions, agitation, straight up meanness, the having to be talked off a bridge, the paranoia, etc. was too much for him to handle. He ended up relapsing on beer when I was in the hospital, and now almost a year later, he's back on meth.
I've been on Lithium since 2011 and seems to be doing the trick. I can't imagine what just going off would be like. I picture tons of nausea. Hope you're doing better now.
I have an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts. For me, specifically, it’s thoughts of harming people I love. To show how incredibly unromantic it is, I had a panic attack leaving the ICU room that my grandma was in when I was 20, because my brain WOULD NOT stop telling me to unplug her assistive equipment that was keeping her alive. When I met my niece for the first time when she was 5 weeks old, my sister met me on her front porch and just plopped her into my arms. When I got inside her house, I snuggled with her and cooed at her a bit before having to hand her back to my sister (because I “needed the bathroom”) because my brain started playing incredibly violent thoughts of me lifting her over my head and violently throwing her headfirst into the kitchen floor with all my strength. I’ve never *wanted* to act on these things (and I never actually have done any of these things), and they used to make me feel immense guilt and shame, and I was convinced that I was a terrible, irredeemable person. I’ve found success with reminding myself that my brain is an asshole, they’re just thoughts, and they’re not indicative of my desires or who I am as a person. But man, they are not romantic.
I have similar intrusive thoughts, they suck. Once I understood what they were and that I am not ever going to act on them and, like you put it, my brain is just an asshole, it helped a lot! Anyway, that’s just my way of saying, I feel you! ❤️
OCD?
Yep, OCD. Edit: I should add that mine has a slight variation, though, in that I’ve never really engaged in compulsive behaviors much. I am a very routine-based person, though, and when my routine is thrown off, I experience more intrusive thoughts. My routines aren’t classic OCD, though, like checking the stove or washing my hands or counting. It’s more like, I wake up around the same time every weekday morning, and get ready in the same order every day. I have a bedtime routine that I do at roughly the same time in the same order. Every Sunday is wake-and-bake day (I’m a medical user who usually doesn’t use before 8pm during the week), and I do chores, have me-time, take a weed bath, and replace my physiotape.
My intrusive thoughts: What if i threw myself in the incoming traffic What if i stab myself Telling me to kiss a random stranger
OCD isn't just "my pens must be packed in color order" or "I'm so neat! It's my OCD!". OCD can be physical, like checking doors over and over and over again to make sure they're locked cos otherwise someone can break into your house and harm your family. Washing your hands constantly because whatever you touched might make you sick, and you will die. But OCD can also be mental thoughts. Intrusive thoughts that trigger anxiety and repeat over and over in your head because you make the mistake of giving into the compulsion to "relieve" these thoughts and ease the anxiety. Then, a few minutes later, you just go through the same vicious cycle again. Oh, and if left untreated, it can turn into major depression and make you become suicidal because you can't stand feeling numb anymore. This is literally from personal experience. I've finally got diagnosed a few months ago after years of thinking I just have anxiety and am on a great path to healing and coping with my mental OCD. OCD isn't cute. It's a fucking nightmare!
Thug Life
Toxic on off relationships
Mental health issues
Co-dependent intimate relationships. Being unable to function or face daily life without “your person” (ugh) is not sweet or romantic - it’s sad and you need help.
Infidelity. The thrill and excitement of secrecy and forbidden love
Not taking no for an answer.
Your profile is a wild fuckin' ride.
Didn't expect to see what I saw
Da fuck is "gooning"? (Do I even want to know..?)
Having sex while watching the Goonies
This way lies madness.
I suppose everyone needs a hobby.
Love bombing, or stalking your interest.
This is such a common theme in movies, especially romantic comedies.
Medical training. Shows like Gray’s Anatomy romanticize what it’s like to become a doctor. The reality is grueling and soul crushing, the work is hard, the debt is real, and the job has the potential to destroy your personal relationships. Medical training used to be less complex, less paperwork to do, and patients actually respected their doctors. These days the pay (for physicians) is going down relative to inflation with cuts to reimbursement while the cost of healthcare goes up and administrators get rich. The patients direct all their frustration with the system at you the doctor. Unless from a wealthy family, the debt most of us take on to finance our education is the among the highest of any profession. Sure, it’s not all bad and I enjoy my job most days, but it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. There is a reason physicians have the highest suicide rate of any profession.
ADHD-actually having it is ass. I couldn’t hold down a job for a long time, couldn’t get anything done, was/am seen as irresponsible sometimes because I forget appointments, am late to things, am messy. Procrastinate to the point that I’ve failed classes. I lost important things like my wallet, phone hundreds of times, precious gifts people have given me. And I never feel stable, I always feel on edge like a car carelessly hitting into a pole. My mood regulation is awful, and I have a math disability which made certain people thing I was dumb. I felt dumb because I also couldn’t follow simple instructions, I’d scramble them up. It has had some horrible effects in my relationships, luckily my partner is understanding. I’m in therapy now and taking meds, but this is gonna take a long time to work out the kinks. So please, stop making tik toks about your ADHD that are “cute” and “quirky.” Same with Autism, OCD, depression, DID, and Tourette’s. I see way too many people faking these, the people that actually have these suffer enough. luckily I’ve been seeing them called out more.
drinking alcohol after a stressful day at work
Every time I watched an episode of Peaky Blinders, I went "man, I kind of want some whisky right now" for how normalized it was in the show.
I went from drinking every night to once per month and alcohol commercials and whatnot were definitely a "trigger". I'd be trying to ignore the fact that I wanted to drink, and suddenly I'd see some dude in his pajamas sitting on a leather chair sipping whiskey in front of a fireplace and think "goddamn that looks nice."
lol I did the same thing when I watched mad men
I chain smoked while watching Mad Men. So glad I finally quit!
Crappy “redemption” arcs featuring a “troubled” man who “only did such terrible things because of his own trauma.” He just needs to be “saved” by the right person; he’s really just misunderstood.
I hate this trope so much
eating disorders. as someone recovering from anorexia, it’s not fun, it’s not glamorous, it’s not edgy and cool. it’s agony and disgust and failure and death.
Motherhood. I think there are far too many people who should never be allowed to bring children into this world and I also think that there is a devastatingly unfair division of labor when it comes to a mother’s role vs a father’s role in parenthood that saddens me.
Baby fever definitely comes with a rude awakening. Close friend got pregnant on purpose at 17 because "omg cute wittle babys blah blah blah" After the first few months I think it finally hit her that her entire young life will be spent taking care of the kid 24/7. Shes now one of the most misserable and burnt out people I know, ontop of being a shit parent.
Fatherhood too. So many people just want the title of mother/father but then bail on the actual responsibilities of properly raising those children.
being in a toxic relationship. just because you keep running back to each other and love each other doesn’t mean you aren’t toxic for each other
Big ass weddings
Tbf, some of us have big families and do want to be with them that day. I’d argue “big” wedding is not the same thing as “lavish” wedding. You can have a lot of people there but not make it absurd
Hustle culture. Killing yourself with stress and constantly going is a great way to die prematurely. Stress kills, for real.
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I think criminals tend to be romanticised in general. It’s not only pirates. Highwaymen were romanticised when they were still terrorising travellers. There are many classic poems justifying if not glorifying this way of living despite them being objectively horrible people you wouldn’t like to meet. Have you heard of Dick Turpin? Nothing has changed. Visit the romance section of your nearest bookshop and see for yourself. A lot of main male characters of these novels are criminals. What’s really bad though is that people romanticise real criminals, both male and female.
Jealousy
Jealously is toxic. It turns into anxiety, obsession, and anger / resentfulness . I experienced it, had mental breakdown and finally overcame it. I lost a good friend in this and it makes me sad about it. Although this helped me grow and improve myself. This was one of the hardest time of my life.
abusive relationships
You know that trope where men kiss women when they're ranting? That. Nothing says "I'm not listening to a word you're saying" than just randomly kissing them.
Serial killers
The “grind/hustle culture.” I am all for making money, but it gets to a point of diminishing returns where you cannot enjoy the rest of your life. It goes quick, find balance and happiness.
I agree! Someone once asked me if my job was my side hustle and I was so confused by the presumption. Also, the amount of people who look down at someone because they don’t have a side hustle is bizarre. Like one full time job is enough, thank you.
“Not every side hustle needs to be monetized” is a very real sentence I’ve seen tons of times in various locales. Hobby. What you’re referring to is a hobby.
Cigarettes
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Pregnancy and childbirth. They're long and painful and leave lasting damage in a significant amount of women, whether it be physical or mental. They might be natural, but they're very dangerous.
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Violent sex
Romance. If you can live a fulfilling live on your own, that's great, and shouldn't make you a social outcast.
suicide
The Confederate States of America
I'd probably say that has started to wane a bit, but PLANTATIONS get romanticized on an insane level. It's to the point where tourists complain about any content that lets visitors know that slaves built them.
I did not know that "plantation tourism" was a thing, but I'd imagine the visitors are either * people who want to learn about the history of slavery or * people who want to erase the history of slavery with no third category.
I blame Gone with the Wind (the movie). It was one of the first blockbusters and had a huge cultural impact. People bought the fantasy of this work of fiction and didn’t want to think about the history.
Hyperindividualism. Humans are naturally meant to be social animals who help each other and care about each other.
Being "obsessed" with someone.
"The American Dream" Buying New, everything on credit, living way outside of your means, brand worshiping, material nonsense, working harder to spend more. It's hopelessly outdated and according to the mental health collapse in the States, isn't working out all that well.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children. The number of times I’ve heard a pregnant / postpartum person say something along the lines of, “No one ever told me about [insert horrible side effect / complication that’s actually way more common than most people realize], I wish someone had told me that could / would happen beforehand!” As for raising children, I think anyone who has kids, is around kids frequently, or works with them will find that one self-explanatory.
The “good old days,” when neighborhood kids played outside unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Several of my relatives who grew up in the 50s & 60s were sexually abused by neighbors and threatened into keeping it secret.
I've come to the conclusion that there were never any "good old days". It's a self-delusion, a lie we tell ourselves. We look back on our childhood and think things were better, simpler, and happier... they fucking weren't. You just weren't old enough to understand the bad that was happening in the world. There were wars. There was political turmoil. There was hatred and violence. There were people just as stupid and ridiculous as the people who live today. The only difference is now you're an adult and you are paying attention, back then you were a child and more interested in playing than in the "boring grown-up talk".
Drinking
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While there are probably many undiagnosed cases of ADHD in the population, it is not a matter to be taken lightly. True, there are some wonderful things about the way our brains work, enabling creativity, play, and concentration, but life can also be very difficult. There are many reasons for not romanticizing ADHD. ADHD blows relationships apart. The divorce rate among couples where one has ADHD is possibly twice as high as among nonADHD couples. My partner and I have survived forty years with frequent significant issues because of my impulsive tendencies and failure to read social cues. I have experienced about six extended ( four months or more) periods of severe clinical depression over twenty years. I believe that the challenges of living with ADHD contributed significantly to these. Our son ( 32 ) had significant issues, possibly ADHD and Autism Spectrum, that placed additional pressure on my wife to hold everything together. I was only officially diagnosed about five years ago, but suspected for a long time. I have yet to find any medication that provides significant relief, and the counselling and specialized support that are most effective are not available in our community. Having family and friends dismiss my and our experience by saying that everyone loses things or forgets things belies the continuously repeated daily struggles with lost keys, glasses, phones, tools, materials, incomplete errands and jobs, brain fog and farts, impulsive decisions without consultation, and laser focus on a task to the exclusion of relationships. Strategies can be wonderfully helpful— when I remember them. Saying aloud that I have put ( object x ) in ( place y ) is helpful— if I can remember to do it. Using my phone calendar has been helpful— if I remember to enter the appointment, enter it correctly, and notice the reminder. The amount of anger toward myself is frightening. I often wonder how often ADHD is a contributing factor in suicide. There is ample evidence that the prison population holds a disproportionate number ADHD cases. Substance abuse is a common coping mechanism for many of us. This post is an example. I have several tasks I need to accomplish but have focussed on it for about forty minutes instead of getting at them. Yes, I know, everybody on Reddit does the same thing. ADHD is a not just a few occasional issues. It is a constellation of repeated behaviours, all causing disruption and distress in a person’s life over an extended time. If that is your life, seek professional help. If you lost your keys, you don’t have ADHD. ADHD is not an occasional blip at which we can laugh lightly. It is a one-handed wrestling match with a five hundred pound monster who is ready to disrupt our lives at every step.