u/ThisGuyTrains

In the last few years I've had a bombshell divorce. Lost a parent, house, dog, a very serious relationship post-divorce, best friend. In the midst of all of that, I've had a honeymoon cancelled last minute along with two vacations after that cancelled last minute as well.

So yeah, I need this, and I can't rely on other people so I'm taking my first ever solo trip. I'm a 37M and I work my ass off, but don't have the finances or time off to take a trip to, say, Europe.

I have my reasons for Fort L, so I'm sticking with it and plan on going at the end of this month. July 30-Aug 2nd.

I know this is encroaching on hurricane season so I plan on having insurance on the whole trip. But as a solo guy who just wants to go disappear somewhere and relax, with some laid back and inexpensive fun thrown in, what advice do you have for me? I think one of those days/nights I might wanna socialize with someone who's also on vacation, this is so out of my comfort zone but I want to come home from the experience feeling like I grew from it.

I'm booking this to be as simple as possible with an Uber to and from the airport being my only car situation and I wanna stay on the beach, already have a hotel picked out.

Sorry if this isn't allowed.

Cheers and happy America weekend.

Or at the very least, a number of people are.

37M on Hinge in a big city. With my search filters I’ve pretty much run out of people. I’ve had the maximum distance set at 10 miles and have a new person pop up occasionally then I’m out of people again.

Just a personal thing, I dated someone long distance prior and don’t wanna do that again for a while at least.

Anyways. I purchased Hinge+ just out of curiosity and I was gonna expand my search to more like 15-20 miles. Didn’t even need to do that, I kept my settings unchanged at 10 miles and I was getting a TON of people I’ve never seen before and maybe 30% of them I’ve liked, with a lot in common.

Anyone else experience this?? If it actually withholds people because you haven’t paid then that’s legitimately bs.

37M
We are both regulars here around the same time multiple times a week. So we’ve noticed each other before.

Not only is she really attractive to me but she also has great form and seems to be taking the gym seriously vs doing it for clout and posting about it. I was watching her form today for squats and RDLs and noticed she’s even tracking everything in a notebook which I thought was really cool, vs sitting on her phone doomscrolling between sets.

Anyways, I’ve always struggled with approaching women, since online dating has always been my gateway to relationships.

Women of this sub or even men who have the confidence/experience I lack, what tips would you have to start a brief conversation in this scenario? My only instinct would be to wait for her to be between sets(duh) and say something like “sorry if this is weird, but you’ve got one of the best squat forms I’ve seen in a long time, whatever you’re doing keep it up!”

A quick Google search confirms that when you send someone a message(via clicking on one of their pictures) when it’s sent their profile disappears and it’s supposed to “like” them the same way as if you would have just swiped right.

Countless times now I’ve done this, only to have their profile pop up again shortly after. Sometimes after swiping on 5-10 people or sometimes the next day.

What’s the deal, does the message not actually “like” them or? I’m curious because I don’t know if I should send another message as if the first one doesn’t always go through? The second time around I’ve just been swiping right in their profile is all.

Got my first paddleboard and they had these hard shell cases to put your phone in and I bought it. Started thinking about it and I’ll have to carabiner that case to my paddleboard which is kinda annoying but it also doesn’t fit my wallet and keys in it.

I already have a life vest with no pockets but I was thinking about some sort of a leg pouch to go around my quad, or a waterproof fanny pack?

What do you guys do for this?

37M. Throwing myself back out there and I had a lot of good luck on Facebook dating in recent years compared to other apps.

It’s showing me people so damn far away though no matter what I have my settings on. I currently have it set to 10 miles away(I’m in a big city) but only 1 out of every 20 or so profiles will be that close and the rest are like an hour away…

Is this a new problem on this platform? I don’t remember this issue from a year or so ago?

You were supposed to be different. Almost every single relationship I’ve been in, for the last 15 years, has had almost all green flags but at least one lingering red one. I ignored them, for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because they felt outweighed by all the good I saw with each person.

Sometimes those red flags ended up being the direct reason for the breakup. Sometimes they played a minor role. Other times they had no part in what finally ended us.

You were supposed to be different. After multiple engagements fell apart and eventually finally feeling like I had made it by marrying someone only to have that conversation be up being a lie from the very beginning… I found you. We almost missed each other, too. Sheer luck.

You checked every box that I’ve ever looked for and it felt so… easy. No stupid fights. Communication compatibility. Intimacy in and out of the bedroom. Friends and family adored us. Simple weekly errands always turned into a date. Everything was so perfect.

I loved you more than you could know. But you still left. Suddenly and for a reason I will simply never accept as the truth… You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, I do not understand this but I don’t need to. I’m not the one who walked away but I’m the one who has to somehow put myself back together after this.

You really make a guy want to stop trying.
I’m so tired of this…

Someone I used to talk to a lot deactivated their account a long time ago, but I kept our convo. So I’m used to seeing “Instagram User” and no profile pic in my messages history.

However, recently I’ve noticed a couple of times it’ll actually display their name like it used to, but the profile itself is still unavailable if I go to it. They never did reactivate their account so I don’t get why it’ll periodically change back to their name?

Someone I used to talk to a lot deactivated their account a long time ago, but I kept our convo. So I’m used to seeing “Instagram User” and no profile pic in my messages history.

However, recently I’ve noticed a couple of times it’ll actually display their name like it used to, but the profile itself is still unavailable if I go to it. They never did reactivate their account so I don’t get why it’ll periodically change back to their name?

Broke up in the most unfair way. No cheating, no abuse, no fighting. Nothing happened… she just decided it’s best for her to focus on her career right now and doesn’t feel like she can do that while worrying about her relationship taking up too much of her time.

I purposefully summarized that, I don’t want to get too into details with it.

Point being, I decided to download Bumble again for the first time in a long while, mostly just to maybe feel something and see what it’s like again. And oh man, did I feel something. Nausea. Legitimately felt like my nervous system screamed “uhh, sure you wanna go through this again?” and decided to drop my blood pressure along with making me feel hot and uncomfortable.

I’m 37. Been through the wringer in my romantic life all the way back to 17, divorced, but I felt a much stronger connection to this gal than anyone else in my life. And poof, just like that, after a simple blindsided conversation, back into the minefield of today’s dating world.

I think the clear sign here is I need to wait a while, possibly a long while, before hopping back into this nonsense. In the meantime, anyone around my age have any advice or guidance? I’m not a bar hopper or hugely social, so the apps are certainly my best bet but ugh…

Cheers.

Not using a burner account for this because at this point it doesn’t matter and I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit in this category, but since we are still talking and kind of on the fence about this actually ending I figured here is a better place than the breakup subreddit.

I recently lost someone incredibly important to me and the hardest part about this is I didn’t do anything wrong. As a matter of fact, neither of us did.

We were together for almost a year and she taught me so much about what love is supposed to feel like and how comfortable we were with one another. She taught me a totally new way of communication between partners and something I’ve been yearning for my entire life. She taught me so much and I started to see so many glimpses of a very happy future with her.

I’m divorced, been through the wringer in terms of relationships and life in general in recent years, and meeting her was one of the best things to ever happen to me.

Suddenly, though, I had to sit through the tough convo with her that ultimately meant we aren’t together anymore. Her career has ground to a halt and in order for her to get back on track and pursue her goals she can’t really do that without charging forward and putting everything she has into that.

Of course, that meant cutting out the one thing that said it never wants to be a stressor or to get in the way of things, that he wants to be the stress reliever instead… me.

I’ve gone through maybe half a dozen REAL breakups over my life, from a wide range of scenarios, but this one hits so much different. This is one of those breakups that makes you think “there’s literally nothing I could have done to prevent this…”

I was the romantic type. The nurturer. The listener. The one to put your needs above my own because you’ve had a hard day and need a break. I basically applied as many principles and characteristics as I possibly could in this relationship and I still come up short.

I feel like everybody has one of these relationship breakups in their lifetime and I don’t know how to handle this so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

TLDR: My girlfriend suddenly called off our relationship to work on her career and I’m really struggling to handle this.

I bulked up from 195 to 226 last year, lifting weights and eating everything in sight. Packed on a lot of muscle in all the areas I wanted like my chest back and shoulders, then started my cut. Goal was to get back down to where I started, but my god this stuff is way harder now at 37.

I would do good for a day or two, then crash. I would Uber Eats food at random times, hit the vending machine a lot at work, etc. it’s been almost 8 months since my original goal expired and I’m still hovering around 215-220 routinely.

Woke up and saw myself in the mirror today, just disgusted. I still have almost all of that muscle I put on but I’m also fluffy as hell now and I hate it. Girlfriend says she doesn’t notice and loves the upper body gains I made, but you can’t help but wonder. I have a vacation coming up where I’m definitely gonna be shirtless on the beach and the thought of that just made me sick.

I dunno this is just a rant post I guess. Cheers yall, stay hungry!

Been together 4 years now and she’s always been like this, but now that she’s out at bars with friends a lot more it’s starting to bug me.

Whenever we catch up or give each other updates either right after something happens or when we catch up the next day, I always seem to just get surface level info from her while I’m giving out details. I feel like it’s normal to delve further into things for lots of reasons; clarification, continuing conversation, generally how talking works…

The event that made me snap and make this post, is tonight she got hit on at the bar. That’s it. That’s literally all I got out of her.

She just said “Tonight’s been fun! Taking off shortly. I got hit on a couple times!” So when I asked “oh? Haha care to elaborate more?” And she just shut me down by saying “I mean what else is there to say?”

Like idk maybe let’s talk about that? What happened? What was said? What did you say back? Literally anything?

These kinds of convos happen with her all the time and I don’t know how to confront her about how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like she enjoys telling me things without giving out details, and I don’t feel like I should have to poke and prod to get into the conversations more.

She’s done this before when she visited a friend out of state back in January, too. Almost every night I asked her about her night she would say “it was good, we just kinda hung out.” Meanwhile a few weeks later she would randomly mention things that they did or things that happened during those nights. Like why not include those in the convos? I don’t understand. It always feels so watered down and borderline avoidant.

Been through the whole rigmarole of ED supplements over the years, from daily 5mg to the 20mg as needed.

I’m 37 I used to take them in my late 20’s and early 30’s as a nice boost, had a lot of memorable sex during that time because of the lasting effect from those pills.

But I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like they help much anymore and now I’m on the other end of the spectrum and suffer from ED most of the time.

I know it’s not my girl, my libido is still through the roof and I’m very much attracted to her. The only common denominator I can think of is my fitness level has plummeted in the last 5 years. I still wake up with morning wood hard enough to hunt with.

I’m 5’11” and 215lbs, pretty muscular but my GOD do I hate doing cardio. Typical guy. So I feel so gassed very early into sex sessions and I feel like that really hurts my performance downstairs.

Those of you who’ve had success fixing ED by getting in shape and/or upping your cardio, what do you recommend that helped you most? Right now my cardio days usually consist of about an hour of steady state, so basically I’ll get on the treadmill on a very light incline and go for about an hour at a brisk walk. When I try to do intervals(sprints) anymore, I give up so quickly and I know I shouldn’t.