I’ll just put this out there: Would it feel less weird to you if it was your daughter?

Anecdotally, I had a friend who crawled up to cosleep with her single mom even as a teenager and student sometimes. Especially when she wasn’t doing well. Being a family of 2 brings you very close together, and also unfortunately, makes you the only super close person in their lives. She liked to cuddle up with friends too occasionally. It never seemed off or weird.

She might be hypersensitive (although this is not a recognized diagnosis), but otherwise, she is developmentally (and sexually) absolutely standard. She’s 33 now and does very well in life and with her boyfriend.

What I mean by that is that it might seem more unconventional to cosleep with someone of the opposite sex who is starting puberty. Being a girl, having a girl friend, and this girl friend liking to sleep with me, another friend, or her mom as company was never weird. All other friends also thought that’s fine. I think that’s that girl privilege where we are more comfortable with closeness. So, if you felt weird if it was your daughter too, it might just not be for you (although you mentioned you slept better). If it’s about the gender (some subconscious bias), it’s still your child. Just your child.

Last but not least, there are more than enough people around the world who share a room or even a bed with family members until a bigger age. A friend of mine coslept with 8 silblings since there was just no room. Especially with a voluntary cosleeping situation, I would rather try to focus on the benefits it gives you two - closeness, connection, a feeling of safety, and knowing you’re there for each other. Also through changes in life.

Everyone from the Friends cast

Loading a centrifuge with 24 positions only on positions 1-8

Also in general so much non SOP and GLP stuff, sloppy work, and constantly needing 11-13 hours a day to get stuff done. Like, I actually see why - they talked and snacked and talked. It wasn’t 13 hours of work, it was about 5. But still - how on earth did the supervisor, who has to make sure no one works more than 9 hours a day tops (we’re clocking), not notice there is something wrong here? You’re clocking an insane amount of time, you work slow and you don’t get everything assigned to you done. There is an imbalance from both sides and it was so obvious and no one did anything. Both sides should be fired honestly.

I enjoyed that a lot. Thanks

Feel free to add more

I wanna see them bible shitposts

Ever since I tried bronze pasta I cannot look at regular pasta the same way. I cannot buy that yellow stuff anymore.

As a fellow up the arse coffee lover - I moved away from drinking fancy coffee every day. Not just because 250 grams are, at best, at 16€ and I drink about 35 grams a day on an average day, but also because it takes away the “specialty” if you drink it daily, regularly, ordinarily. I now have a go to coffee (pre ground even) that I enjoy drinking as my “normal” coffee and treat myself to a cup of specialty every now and then, and a bag now lasts me a month. I enjoy it much more and I save a lot of money - although my go to coffee is also not the cheapest crap.

I also started out with instant coffee btw - took some with me with milk and sugar to school in a small water bottle when I was a young teenager (and girlmore girls was on so I had to get into coffee). Just reading your comment gave me a flashback to being 14 and my mom giving me the “good instant coffee”. Memories and vibes.

My dad is… complicated, and I could tell a lot of insane stories. But the memory that is haunting me is how he said “we won’t wait when war starts”, in Russian. It made no sense. I overheard it as a part of some conversation with my mother (maybe other grown ups as well) when I was a kid and I asked what he meant and he claimed he didn’t remember saying that. I believe him that he didn’t remember. But it was odd, it’s not something he would say. Neither he, nor my mom, nor their friends are political people talking about war, ever. It was said casually, but no one ever casually talked about war or politics over here. This was 25 years ago. I kept thinking about it for years and years again, trying to grasp what it meant, what it might have meant, and why it stuck with me so much, why I couldn’t get it out of my head, why I couldn’t let it go.

It was also painfully screaming in my head when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022. It’s like it was an eerie foreshadowing but I still don’t know. I have so few memories of my childhood, why did this one stay? Why do I see and hear him say this? What did he mean with “we won’t wait”? Did he mean we won’t wait for the war to start or we won’t wait when the war will have started? Both are possible interpretations in the Russian wording. What are we waiting for? Are we still waiting? What should we be doing?

I keep going back to this one stupid sentence and this memory is ringing in my ears. What does it want to tell me to do? I know I need to do something, I just can’t figure out what.

Thank you. I was really confused and had to read it a couple of times. A first read made me think the dad started jerking off with an octopus and this went downhill.

There is no such thing as a bad reason for not wanting to drive a car. Any reason that makes you not want to drive a car is valid.

I am rather susceptible to hating actors because of some role they played. I literally hated Hugh Grant for no other reason than him being an asshole to Bridget Jones. I am now scared to watch Gladiator.

Meryl Streep. Oh God Meryl Streep

My mom and sister used to say my husband looks like he just got released from Auschwitz so I feel you 🫠

Maybe it’s because your dad wants you to get a perfect person. Someone who is nice and loving and interesting and attractive and successful and rich and a good cook and volunteers and whatnot. My guess is not that they would prefer you to have someone handsome and unloving instead, but someone who is both handsome and loving. Because to them, you’re perfect. So they want you to have the (what they assume would be) perfect match. Most of this is probably not an active thought process but just some subconscious thinking.

When I was in elementary school I tried to start a protest during the break by getting on the desk and proclaiming that we need to stop the discrimination of the middle finger, it is a finger like the others and should be allowed to stand on its own just like the other fingers. Needless to say I held up my middle fingers during that passionate speech. I was also very sincere about it, not emotional, but I did find it unjust. I’m not sure where I am going with this but it was weighing on my chest for too long and needed to get out finally. Thanks for reading.

People have already pointed out the legal and financial aspects. But I also want to address the philosophical aspect of your question, which I think you had in mind. And I think the answer I would give you is this one:

Marriage has the meaning that you assign to it.

I strongly believe that if we got rid of any legal and financial benefits of marriage, even if we made it explicitly illegal, there would still be a bunch (or even a lot) of people who would get married.

I would compare it to a house fire. If my house was burning (and there were no living beings in it) and I could save 5 things, what would I save? What would you save? I would take, for example, my favorite soft toy from when I was a kid, and my old box filled with diaries. Is this worth any money? No. Does it have any value? To me, it does. To you, it doesn’t. Maybe you are a very rational person that isn’t attached to anything (or to nothing material) and you would indeed make the smartest choices, saving your passport and documents and money. Maybe you would save a small gift that someone important has given you. Maybe you would save the first guitar you ever bought. You save whatever has value and meaning to you. And these things have solely the meaning and value that you have attached to it.

Likewise, people have different value and meaning attached to marriage. If you look at it from a rational, logical side - it has its legal and financial perks and benefits and if they weren’t there, getting married would make no sense. But things don’t have to make sense. The meaning we assign to rituals, things, concepts, aren’t necessarily rational. They are, however, deeply personal.

So, as a side note, please beware of ridiculing people for their views on marriage or weddings, just like you wouldn’t want to ridicule or belittle someone for other things that mean a lot to them. Always sharing the last piece of bread. Always giving a coin to a homeless person. Having a breakfast for 30 minutes every morning. A good night kiss on the nose from their partner. Drawing a dick in the first snow of the winter. Some things mean a lot to people even if they do not rationally make sense.

In the case of marriage, of course, some of the meaning comes from culture, history, and tradition. Marriage might have had different purposes than it has now, and surely the origins weren’t that romantic. (Not saying, however, that marriage has to be romantic.) But it is there. It is important to some people simply because they have, at some point in their life, decided it is important for some reasons, rational or irrational, social, cultural, and hopefully personal too. To them, it makes sense, it has meaning, it has value. And whatever marriage or a wedding ceremony mean - you decide.

So the question you should be asking is not whether or not you should get married, it is what marriage means to you. Does it have any benefit or value in your eyes? Are the legal benefits enough for you to get married? What is your stance on divorce? Do you feel like you would get “closer together” with your partner? Would you feel it would make things harder to separate? There are a ton on questions like these that you can ask yourself, I hope you get the jist. There are not right or wrong answers. The only thing that is important is that the meaning you assign to marriage is (about) the same as the meaning your partner assigns to marriage. You can both not care about a spiritual meaning, but just get married for the benefits. You can both be a type of “whatever happens, we don’t get divorced, til death do us part”. You can be “we’ll keep reevaluating whether we still belong together”. You can also be “we get married because we have children and this is practical”. Or “we get married because I am hot and you are rich and when one of us loses their asset we split”. Or “we just want a fancy huge ass party to show our love in this very moment and celebrate it with our friends and whatever comes afterwards is secondary”. It doesn’t matter what your view is, it matters that you guys agree.

Tbh I struggle to come up with an actual good and not just mediocre movie that Tom Hanks was in.

Adding to the trash list: Incredibly loud and extremely close. They massacred the book.

He is in this abomination of a book adaptation for Incredibly loud and extremely close.

I’m sorry but… Most of them? Especially since it’s his performance that has become poor. He is playing himself more and more. A similar thing happened to Johnny Depp. Look at both of them in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and then at stuff like Great Gatsby, Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter’s Island, Django / Willy Wonka, Pirates of the Carribean, Shadows, Transcendence. The acting and characters are so similar and they don’t give an effort anymore (or try to, and absolutely overdo it).

(Sorry I somehow incorporated a Johnny Depp rant in a critic of DiCaprio, their story of decline is just too similar to me. And Gilbert Grape is an amazing movie.)

God that sounds disgusting. I think, for the first time in 4+ years of sobriety, I actually feel genuinely sad for not being able to try that one out. It sounds so awful it must be good.

When my husband moved to Germany from Russia, he had no idea whether he was vaccinated as a child or not (he very likely was, but there weren’t records he was aware of and his mom died early). So he went to the doctor’s to ask for titers. They said they could test that but he would have to pay out of pocket, and offered to just vaccinate him again for free. He went through all the children’s vaccines - including chicken pox, which wasn’t around when we were kids (90s). It is the simpler, more accessible, and cheaper alternative to titers.