Agreed

But dude should check in with his wife if he's just gonna not come home suddenly

I met a fellow in my neighborhood by happenstance. We happened to be crazy similar. He was really cool.

I felt bad not really getting around to checking in on him more often. I was shy and afraid of what I didn't know, or making a fool of myself. But damnit he was a really cool guy...

Occasionally I'd catch him with his garage door open and we'd have a chat. (You gotta understand, nobody interacts in this neighborhood.) We met because I was out running in the rain like a crazy guy (we rarely get rain lol) and HE decided to introduce himself to me as I ran by his house LOL.

So anyway...I saw he hadn't responded to my Merry Christmas text.

...And just a week ago or so I got a text from his wife that he had passed away from an aneurysm 4 months prior.

When I brought her flowers for him, she told me he had said that he thought. . .that I was very cool. . .

Why I'm sharing this:

I know it's awkward sometimes trying to make new friends as an adult, but also it's foolish to simply assume tomorrow is guaranteed. Do that hangout. Plan the game night. Talk about random stuff in the backyard. Whatever.

You will never regret more time spent in fellowship and good company.

I would have been a really good friend to him if I just reached out more...

The loneliness epidemic is absolutely real, and this isolating society is killing us all by design and it breaks my heart.

That is all.

The real story is the women setting up their husbands with each other 🥰

Hey, wanna hang out?

Didn't even kidnap her.

And they say chivalry is dead.

That seems kind of like the standard procedure around here (Germany) too. When you sell something online, the expectation is always that the buyer comes to the sellers house to pick up the item. I've never seen anyone do that "let's meet at this random parking lot" thing americans tend to do.

But you did kidnap the baby

That is what the story is about, yes, women have a fear of harm from men. I assume you know why.

That's why she brought her baby. No one is going to kidnap someone with a baby. To much hassle.

I also choose the gay bear

Yeah, the US got a lot of hubris talking about how other countries are dangerous, and then I see posts like this every month.

A fun probability fact I like is around the question "what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?", so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it's basically zero.

However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult's life is effectively 1, — i.e. it's almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.

The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it's something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it's not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It's no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.

If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that's a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I'd be exposing myself to. If that wasn't something that was available, it wouldn't necessarily mean I wouldn't pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.

The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it's also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I've never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It's only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.

Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just "risk of being kidnapped", because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I've been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.

Having sold a few things online, it's fairly common for one person to chat online and another to have over/receive the money. The person chatting is the person who is most interested in the item; the person handing over is the person who has the time on the day.

I still don't understand sports fans and how they interact with each other.

"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

imply same hobbies or something

They're both into the same team so probably wearing a Jersey or something for game day. Something to talk about. The situation with the spouses was also an easy ice breaker.

They kidnapped each other.

Do you need to know where your partner is 24/7?! That feels suffocating. These people even have location sharing turned on and she knew he was at Buffalo Wild Wings before she even asked

It's an hour, man. Don't be weird.

Sort of? If you are in a trusting relationship who cares? It's simply convenient to check where your spouse or kids are without having to wait for a response.

The only reason me and my wife don't do it is because we don't trust the apps not to scoop up our location data and sell it to everyone.

Built into iOS. It’s called “Find my Friends”. You can (temporarily) share your location with other iOS users. For example, if you’re going to a festival with friends you can set it to share locations for the duration of the event so you can always see where they are. You an also choose to permanently share your location with family members.

I know tons of couples that use apps that let them look up each other's location.