Two interesting character studies popped up on FML today. First, one of the surprisingly few visits I’ve witnessed on FML from the classic Nice Guy:
Today, I was fired from my job on account of “sexual harassment” toward female employees. The harassment? Jokingly offering them foot massages when they were complaining about how their feet ached after a long shift, and complimenting them about their appearance when they felt down. FML
He even signs his FML “LucklessNiceGuy.” Luckless, I gather, because he came face to face with the fact that the following statements may well make women in a workplace setting uncomfortable:
- “Want to help me satisfy my foot fetish? Ha ha, just kidding, unless you were going to say yes.”
- “Rough day? Well, at least you’re hot.”
Other words than “luckless” come to mind, though coincidentally they also end with the suffix -less. Note the plural “female employees,” and marvel that LucklessNiceGuy still thinks it’s unfair that his supervisor fired him after multiple coworkers complained that he was making them uncomfortable. It must be a conspiracy, because women just can’t handle what a Nice Guy you are!
Advice to LucklessNiceGuy: Next time you’re on a first date, make a bet with yourself that you can get through the entire date without bringing up her feet and what you want to do to them, and you might just see your luck improve!
The second FML which I found noteworthy comes from a guy whose attempts to communicate with his girlfriend are stymied by her penchant for divination:
Today, my girlfriend’s response to my question about where our relationship was going was, “Let me check what my Celtic Runes have to say about it.” FML
And suddenly it occurred to me that maybe people who rely on divination and similar practices to tell them what they should do with their lives are doing so to avoid figuring out what they want to do with their lives.
It’s not like you’re required to have a roadmap for your future laid out at all times, but when it comes to a relationship, you do kind of owe it to the other person to have a grasp on what you want from the relationship and communicate it to them. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t at any given moment, but generally speaking you should think it through and by no means should you try to pull the answer out of the universe’s ass. That’s unfair to your significant other.
It takes some measure of self-honesty to determine what you want from a relationship. Our culture doesn’t exactly encourage it; instead it fills our minds with romance movie notions of everything unfolding spontaneously. But if you don’t examine your own boundaries you risk violating them, and that’ll end up a far messier situation than if you’d just been clear from the beginning. This onus on determining what you want and communicating it to the relevant persons forms the backbone of a great deal of Captain Awkward‘s (amazing) relationship advice, which is presumably why she likes the phrase “Use your words” so much.
I won’t even get into a detailed breakdown of how I feel about divination methods such as Celtic runes, not because I keep an “open mind” about such things, but because I think it’s clear enough why I think they’re bullshit. Ask James Randi about it; maybe he’d do a quick Google search and inform you that the Celts didn’t even fucking use runes.
