This is literally it. If two healthy people can’t work-out their issues together like-so, or rather if the idea isn’t appealing to both, any intimate relationship is all-but-dead.

Your SO should look good, sound good, taste and smell good to you, or you’re gonna spend a lot of extra effort forcing things to work. Hardly anyone has that effort to spare for any long span of time, and they’ll often revisit a cost/benefit analysis that shames them and creates its own problems.

This is literally what’s happened until now and a big part of how we got here. The only things the government knows how to do about this is to arrest people, both parents and children, and make schools more like prisons.

Welp, you’ve nailed why I find it so ironic/hillarious when I’m told, at length and in excessive/invented detail, that I haven’t internalized/accepted my own failures enough.

Mind you, it almost never involves (even meta-physical)injury or inconvenience to anyone else, so there’s a lot of lip-flapping from people who can explain everything they have a problem with except for how what’s being complained-about is any of their business or problem.

I spent enough of my life believing I was myself toxic that I just doubled-down. My mental-health suffered, but we’re at a point like a stand-off. I have an exit-plan and conditions that will trigger or prevent it, and I hope she does too, but with medication and therapy, I mostly feel like I’m where I want to be. Without it, my relationship would be irrelevant next to all the un-hinged shit I would get up to anyways.

I myself am not all that attached to the truth so much as I occassionally have to remind certain people that trying to convince anyone of utter-falsehoods and “non-disprovable” gibberish is boring, wasted effort, or worse. There is no upshot to abusing those who love you, at least not on a one-way street, and modern society has places if you really want to play the stupidest-possible games of bumper-cars.

Psychopathy? Autism? BPD?

I stay medicated and too busy doing right by my family to dwell on it, but I have enough emotional depth that I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just decide to try to think and act like an unhinged psychopath one day(WAY before I met my wife…) in the hopes of avoiding abuse & despair. I’ll tell you this much: Whatever the case, that last part definitely didn’t work-out.

Love-bombing a love-bomber can get epic, but then there’s the fallout when the one drops the act and is terrified by the possibilities that: you weren’t acting, you were just matching their energy and can meet them down in the trenches before they can actually drag you down, and/or you knew what they were up to and refuse to be made to have a problem with it(see “weren’t acting”).

Now you’re stuck with a bait-and-switcher who cannot grasp that you might not be pulling the same trick they just failed to land.

If this sounds like a lot of drama and a massive pain, it is, and that’s why its not recommended over disengaging once you’ve realized what’s happening.

You new to greentext or what?

Real gaslighters LOVE the opportunity to further twist facts, or maybe its compulsion. Its better to either disengage entirely or focus on one or two key points their bullshit cannot change

You’re regurgitating pro-corporate, pro-offshoring talking-points as if they justify lying-to and manipulating consumers. That’s not just saying “yes, and…”

You quoted someone-else’s yes-and, and picked a particularly-shitty someone to quote. You could have just taken the L, but wasted 5 paragraphs to wrap-up with “but oh btw, this is all meaningless”.

I prefer to buy local yes, but I’ll take Canadian, Mexican, or anything made in South America as close-enough to “Made in America”. As it is, there’s a great many (quality, price irrelavent)products that won’t reach me from those places, couldn’t tell you if quality versions are even still made in the Americas today, what with logic like yours deciding the supply-chain behind closed-doors, but I can get them from any number of SE Asian countries by way of my local Big-box.

If I’m going that route, I prefer to cut-out the middle-man -I’m no stranger to alibaba/ali-express, and all sorts of niche sellers around the globe, except:

As you say, I often don’t have the budget for quality, origin be damned. End-up having to modify or retrofit things I buy instead. If I’m lucky, they last long enough for me to obtain better versions, probably used. Local second-hand does just fine when Local-made is unobtainium, and has the virtue of not enriching the big-box stores that try to put everything smaller out of business.

Fair-enough. The difference between flirting and ribbing like you mention amounts to whether the parties are platonic, interested in eachother, or even then, aware of eachother’s feelings.

I’m not trying to sexualize what isn’t; From our vantage point its irrelavent and not our business until the artist & characters make it so. Odds are really good that my vocabulary just failed me, failed us all, on my earlier comment.

Oh noes, I matched your energy and like a quarter of the words you’ve spent expressing it. I’m the bad-guy now.

Imagine going into nature looking for bad-guys.

I’m probably older than you, or at least my adult children still answer the phone when I call and I’ll almost-certainly spend time with any grand-babies when that day comes.

“Out-of-touch” isn’t the flex you think it is either. Oh, and “flex” comes from workout-culture - its probably older than either of us.

JFC dude/dudette/whatever, calm down.

Does your hippy-ass even know what a camp-site police-call is? (hint: it’s not the one where law enforcement get’s involved, at-all) I’ll bet you hate scouting with a burning passion too.

I like my crickets chirping, frogs croaking, crows cawing, maybe even an owl hooting around sun-rise with a cigarette, an energy-drink, and a mild(or not) post-bourbon hangover. I’ll bet you have a problem with that too.

If that’s not the persona you’re trying to portray, realize its exactly what’s coming through in your comments.

You’re ego is sprinkled all-over the place here, and it looks a lot like self-fellation resulting in un-solicited jizz and excrement. I guess at least its bio-degradable, but you need a shower after this hike as much as any gym-bro, and likely smell worse for the lack of exertion-sweat to compete with all that “not”-ego.

It was always going to be a pain in the ass, and likely an expensive one. Took 40 years to make clear that leaving them alone would be worse.

Is she method-acting/workshopping for a role as one of those characters who is just oblivious to all the male attention they get, or just throwing out there that dating isn’t hard either, so there’s no down-side?

Whatever the case, this is either something-like flirting for them, or just rude. Too rude to be within snapped-like-a-twig distance of a woman who is, by comparisson to “Margot” at least, built like a brick shit-house.

Unintentional “why does the larger one not just eat the smaller one?” implication/reference, but I’m leaving it. With as much as I do NOT miss gynecomastia, please rest assured that I believe y’all are troopers.

We get it, you’re the bottom of the triangle. That a flex where you’re from?

“one”

You mean like the blog/“study” quoted by another here to support the notion that USians won’t actually pay more for local products? The one rigged, run and published by capitalists to justify off-shoring production?

Someone here is indeed quoting those capitalists, and its not the top-left stick-figure.

The few Made In America products with a 200% premium over the overseas competition I am aware of are not short on customers.

Of the many, many, many, “66% off from the factory” overseas products out there, almost none reach American retail shelves without a markup that gets them within 25% of the price of their “locally”-produced counterparts.

Your “certain companies” set-up those consumers to fail, in order to convince share-holders that their brands wouldn’t suffer from off-shoring production.

You should try being more selective with your sources.

What you’re missing is that actual “Made In America” products, the ones that don’t just get a nice label based on a technicality, usually are made by workers paid a living-wage, so long as those products aren’t burgers.

Sucks for the burger-flippers, but without those other products, there are fewer living-wage jobs available to them to escape the minimum-wage trap.

Fewer well-paid workers results in fewer well-educated children. Resulting in more of the cognitave-dissonance-but-accidentally-maybe-doing-one-thing-right voters OOP has a problem with.

… but by all means, attacking certain “buy-local” people for only understanding the part of the message where one speaks with their wallet, and using the wrong, “patriotic”-and-not-en-vogue phrasing … yeah, its super-important work being done in these three low-effort panels without nuance or elaboration, yo.