Training. I sold things at a market on weekends and told my kids it was “remedial sales and social skills training”. I’m still not a social butterfly by any stretch, but fake it till you make it helped me to be more comfortable talking to people.

I like it on corn. Cheese grits with cheddar & nutritional yeast; on popcorn OMG like it better than Parmesan (and I say this as a woman fascinated by cheese) and on corn on the cob.

I do not like it on tofu as sub for scrambled eggs. Nope. Mostly use it for grits and popcorn.

How much better of a world? I’d be happy with half of what I have if it meant literally everyone else in the world could have that much, certainly. Move 4 more people into the house and give up half the money, half the clothes, my car, of course I would do that if it brought the same level of wealth to every single person, it would be not great at first but wow can you imagine how fast it would get better, if nobody was terribly poor? I’d bet that by the time I was old we’d personally be better off than before the split.

No, my kids are certainly diverse in sexual preference and one is transgender, but I didn’t have any sort of unacceptance. I grew up around drag queens and “theater people”.

Maybe in the other direction, honestly - I didn’t see the trans one until they literally came out by telling me, my conception of womanhood is so broad that my kid looking like a 40 year old butch lesbian did not ping any trans radar so I was surprised when they said they wanted to be a man. Not mad or anything but it took awhile to process.

Nobody else has had to “come out” or worry about the race or sex of who they are with, they can bring home whoever they are going out with and we don’t blink, it’s fine.

Cook red lentils with collard greens, mustard greens, or kale, seasoned how you like. Grill sourdough on one side in butter on the cast iron; pour lentil stew over the bread on the untoasted side, eat with all the utensils, knife, spoon, and fork or chopsticks. Yum yum.

Or simple cheese toast if not feeling like cooking. Toast bread, add cheese, broil till melted.

1375? Die from malaria, I guess? Be eaten by an alligator? Or oh no, hasten the demise of the Tocobaga with my exotic biology? Either they would kill me or get me sick, or vice versa. Also, fall on my ass when my house disappeared.

I would follow the river to the bay, I guess, and see if I could find anyone, or anything I might be able to eat.

I didn’t ever marry my ex, was irritated at how discriminatory legal marriage was back then, and we had kids so were a family anyway.

My husband now? He really wanted to be married, and “stepdad” is a different legal status than “mom’s boyfriend”, it smooths things when he had to do school pickup or doctor visit. So since he pushed and as I did see an upside we did.

Also you can’t foster or adopt here unless you are married - unmarried man in the household is a known risk to the kids he’s not related to. Statistically, it raises the risk of the kid getting hurt so single people can, or married couples but not unmarried hetero couples.

I am with you logically, I don’t need it, and don’t feel different and it’s weird for the state to license families. I understand religious marriage but am not religious.

Ten? Anyone, if I have it on me. I don’t, usually but have done that for random panhandlers, instead of spare change.

100? That’s harder. Any friend or relative who hasn’t asked me for money, again, if I have it and they don’t.

1000? No. That is “questions asked” territory for anyone.

Hmm.

Honestly John Rys Davies, based solely on Dominic Monaghan’s description of him ordering dinner when filming Lord of the Rings.

"John Rhys-Davies… took us to a restaurant. And it was when we’d only just started to get to know John. And we sat down at this huge, long table, and he said, “I think I will order the food for tonight.” And we said, “Oh, ok, on you go John.” And you know, we were having a conversation, and the waitress came over, and John ordered food that would probably have fed 35, maybe 40 people. And there were about 12 of us. And he just said, “We’ll have nine lobster and 15 shrimp, and 12 red snapper, 15 filet mignons, and some grilled mushrooms. I’ll have 12 onions and a wild boar…” You know? All this kind of stuff - just like, “Pheasants, and grouse, and - do you have partridge? Bring the partridge.”

Standing on the side of a road (a real road here in town) with a group, waiting for a bus, when the ground underneath us starts to rise - it’s not the ground, it’s a giant spider! And as it emerges and starts lumbering down the road we realize it is also our transportation, the bus stop was the bus.

I think that was the weirdest moment I have experienced.

I learned to be cool in hot temperature by being still, in the shade, with a breeze, it’s very hot and humid here but also windy usually.

Trees help so much. It is noticeably cooler at the park than in the city.

In the house when there is not air conditioning, roofed porches and opening the windows with fans pulling air through the house helps.

I’m reasonably good at surviving pregnancy and childbirth, and nursing. Think all my other skills are only useful after the agricultural revolution.

Every month or two I’d say, maybe 8 a year? Not big arena shows, usually one multi day festival and a few concerts at smaller venues, and yeah if there is live music at a bar that is always preferable to TVs or recorded music. Generally don’t buy merch, no. My kids sometimes do.

Warrior had such an awesome intro, we never skipped it.

No, I would have no idea. It’s a standard notification? You can’t choose the sound? If it was a ladies site I’d say “vibrate” would be the obvious choice, but for a gay men’s site, no idea.

25 is so young. For me, I just had casual relationships until something “stuck”, for lack of a better word. Stayed with my ex for 25 years, with my husband now for 11, we are so happy together and the sex is still good. Husband said he knew at the start he would be serious about me, I didn’t know until it lasted and got better and I liked his family, and his kids liked me and all our kids got along (more complicated situation when older, obviously) AND the sex stayed good and we still felt affectionate and loving.

I would say, at your age, it’s entirely possible you just haven’t met someone yet who you can feel that way about. You do have to be open to it if you want it, if that makes sense.

And I need to add- it’s not a requirement for a full and happy life, if you don’t want to pair up you don’t have to.

Not as far as I know. My mom was Christian and read plenty of mythology, visited Egypt and learned about their ancient gods, it’s my understanding that they just aren’t supposed to worship or believe in other gods. Not that they are supposed to be ignorant of the past or of other current religions either.

I don’t know about more fundamentalist sects, but she was Christian her whole life, well read and into learning about history and religion in general.

I’ve been reading the responses and it reminded me of the class I took called Business Communications, where they emphasized that CYA style communication was absolute nonsense, your responsibility when communicating is to convey information in a way that can be received, and if that doesn’t happen it’s your fault, not the recipient’s, you can’t control them only you.

So if this is just one person who misses all the questions, sure, it’s them, but you still need to figure out how to get your answers. If it’s everyone, it’s you. Maybe these questions aren’t amenable to email, maybe it’s your format, if you want answers (and not just to prove you asked in some sort of gotcha game) you need to ask the people who aren’t answering why they aren’t.

Everywhere I’ve worked, people answer these by choosing a different font color and writing answers back in the email, but there are not a lot of questions by email. Maybe a note to “provide answers in BLUE” with the word blue in blue font would help?

I don’t see how buying or not buying is going to hit the guy who is doing this.

As long as you aren’t buying trump-coins or whatever they are called, or a Tesla.

This does sound like she has depression, and needs to address that before working on the relationship.

If it was not so obvious, I would have said she’s checked out of the relationship, but reading the whole post, I don’t think that’s it, it’s more like she’s just checked out of life in general, so I will hope she gets help and finds her energy and libido and joy again.

Then they can work out a schedule to balance the effort. Some of our “rules” are:

If I cook and you eat, you clean, and vice versa.

We make the bed together.

If the toilet paper runs out replace it!

If the dogs or cats need water, fill it!

Outdoors I do everything (garden, weeding, flowerbeds out front) except mowing and edging, husband does those.

I make all design decisions for the house because I have a better eye, husband makes all vacation plans because he’s good at that.

I’m sure there’s a million ways to set things up to leverage individual strengths and talents and still be balanced enough but none will work without commitment from both people, you do have to want it.