relationships

Do you ever get hit with one of those random deep thoughts in times of rest or waiting? Ironically, it seems like the wisest and strangest ideas come when the brain idling. These are what we call 'shower thoughts,' and there's a whole subreddit dedicated to these little gems. We've collected some of our favorite recent shower thoughts that people thankfully shared on the sub for the rest of us to enjoy. 

We've all seen that he's probably thinking about other girls meme. Well, turns out it's pretty accurate. When he's deeply zoning out, looking like he's off in some other world, it can make the significant other wonder. But most of the time, fellas are likely just fantasizing about having superhuman parkour skills, or taking a trip through some nonsensical stream of consciousness, or literally sitting there with a blank mind. Redditors of r/AskMen discussed the things they're often thinking about whenever their partners ask them, and the answers are surprisingly wholesome.

You've heard of those toxic 'nice guys,' well guess what? 'Nice girls' exist too, and they're cringey AF. Anyone who takes a scroll through r/niceguys or r/nicegirls will leave feeling like the world is just a cesspool of self-entitled assholes tangled in an endless, toxic cycle of cruelty. May these examples of cringey not-so-nice girls be a reminder to everyone that trust, communication, and mutual respect are an invaluable part of any kind of relationship. 

Warning: discussions of poop ahead.

Food is an undeniable foundation of social relations. In every part of the world, friends and families bond through the sacred tradition of sharing a meal. Who doesn't love food? But social gatherings that revolve around eating aren't a walk in the park for everyone. There are millions of people who suffer from dietary restrictions, which often makes the social aspects of eating pretty awkward. And unfortunately, food allergies aren't taken seriously by everyone. Redditor u/IBgueSt is one of the poor souls out there who lives with a number of food intolerances, which both deny her the pleasure of eating a number of delicious foods, and make her subject to frequent awkward conversations about her gut problems. In this Reddit thread, u/IBgueSt recounts how one day, she'd had enough of her fiancé's family not taking her condition seriously. Rather than walk away from a family meal at the risk of seeming uptight, she instead indulged in food she knew she wouldn't be able to stomach and ended up teaching her future in-laws a smelly lesson in dietary allergies. Was she petty or in the right? The thread of replies that followed are full of hot takes.

Twitter user @fillegrossier reminded us that even the most innocent of direct messages with strangers can lead to some seriously unhinged jealousy. After sharing an anecdote about a dude's girlfriend getting mad at their dms about seltzer, other people chimed in to share completely unnecessary reactions to innocent messages or even automated game notifications. The insanity (and insecurity) may surprise you.

Swiping through Tinder can often be a supremely thankless and tedious activity. Everyone's looking for their "partner in crime," and everyone likes pizza and craft beer. Every now and then, however, a bio comes along that speaks volumes. A bio that showcases humor and intellect. If you're lucky the photos will be stimulating, too. This is a collection of the bios we like - may we all stumble upon them in our hunt for love.

Breakups are tough on all of us, and everyone deals with them in their own unique way. Some people, like this guy's ex-girlfriend, go on the rebound and immediately get into a relationship with the first person that comes their way. This girl was clearly NOT over her last relationship!

Check out Fail Blog for more cringe stories!

The pandemic has been hard for single people out there, especially for the ones who despised dating apps before global lockdown—now it feels like the only option besides, well, staying single. We've got a big collection of relatable tweets and amusing screenshots that paint a picture of what the online dating world is like for others. If you've been having trouble romantically connecting with strangers on the internet, trust us, you're not alone.

Every day we are barraged with images of sex selling us commodities and ideas. Viral images and media tell us what is 'sexy,' but the real life manifestations of these supposed turn-ons are often just weird and awkward. Of course beach sex looks like the perfect fantasy when it's filmed at dusk with a shallow-focus lens on a miraculously empty, windless shore, but in reality, the logistical challenges of such an operation are enough to turn someone off. 

One redditor asked the internet to share examples of things that are supposed to turn us on, but are actually pretty un-sexy in reality, and the resulting thread is hilarious. Whether you find these responses relatable, inaccurate, or revelatory, they're sure to at least be entertaining. 

These memes won't necessarily help you forget about your ex, but they will help you mask the pain with inappropriate amounts of sass.

Just remember it can always be worse, as proven by these people admitting to the pettiest reasons they broke up with someone.

Married life isn't always what it's cracked up to be. While it's great to have the undying love and support of your spouse, there are also instances of grating annoyances and rage-inducing behaviors.  These memes really say it all.

Social media can be a good thing. Sites like Facebook and Instagram allow people to keep in touch with family and friends - a luxury that people are learning is incredibly important as the world copes with the Covid-19 pandemic. But there's a darker (and untintentionally hilarious) side to being able to share images with your followers. We're talking about the fact that people can hit the "share" button and share convoluted memes and posts that they seem to think are ultra deep. You know, "We live in a society" type sentiments. They often have to do with some very teenage feelings about loneliness and dating, and, even worse, the negative effects of the same technology they're using to share their "deep thoughts." The r/im14andthisisdeep subreddit is an impressive archive of these kinds of posts, a veritable hub of cringey thoughts that, frankly, we can't help but eat up. We've put together some of their latest and greatest offerings, but you can enjoy some more of this content here if you end up craving more.

It's always challenging to come up with a good opening line for someone you matched with on a dating app. Do you go with something totally extra or just start with the ol' hello? Everyone's got their style and a foolproof trick that works for everyone doesn't exist because, well, everyone's different. We've got a bunch of amusing conversations and one-liners people tried from the world of online dating. Maybe you'll want to use some of these or maybe you'll learn a thing or two about what not to do.

Is one's life just a series of random and chaotic events, or are there underlying patterns that determine the things that happen to us? In the late 1050s, Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was skeptical of linear statistical models of meteorology and pioneered weather and climate predictability through his discovery of deterministic chaos—the theory that though chaotic systems appear to be random, they contain underlying patterns and feedback loops which can be used to explain evidently unpredictable outcomes in weather. And so a small, seemingly inconsequential change to initial conditions can lead to significantly different results. In his 1963 paper entitled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, Lorenz claims that "two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states...If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible...In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent." Although Lorenz's deterministic chaos theory was focused on connecting cause and effect in weather to the general instability of Earth's atmosphere, the 'butterfly effect' metaphor has been used in different areas, such as quantum mechanics and (oftentimes incorrectly) in fiction. In Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, where time travel is a mundane reality and wealthy tourists can travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs for sport, one character is warned by his 'Time Safari' guides not to interfere with events from the past more than necessary, since small causes can snowball into catastrophic effects over time. At one point the character accidentally falls in the forest, but doesn't think much of it. When he returns to the present, he notices significant differences in the reality he once knew and eventually discovers a butterfly crushed under his shoe. The death of one butterfly millions of years ago had caused a catastrophic rift in time. Though this is a pretty outrageous interpretation of chaos theory, it's easy to go down a rabbit hole of wondering what other outcomes might have happened if seemingly minuscule changes to our own past life events were possible. In hindsight, it's easy to appreciate those random decisions that help us avoid disaster, but the implication that every decision you make potentially has a life or death outcome can drive anyone crazy.

We've got a bunch of examples of times people 'dodged a bullet' by making small decisions based on a feeling, or sometimes nothing at all. One person recounts the time they randomly decided to cancel a flight, which happened to be Malaysia Airlines flight 370. What at the time seemed like a mundane decision turned out to be a life-saving one. Not all of these anecdotes describe such dire mortal events—most of these stories are about the sort of times when you feel like you initially missed out on something good, but later realize you avoided an incredibly undesirable situation, like a job for a company that eventually goes out of business, or a date who ends up revealing themselves to be a psycho. You gotta wonder—were these people just lucky, or are there underlying patterns at play?