So the Summer Solstice of 2026 concludes the 30th year that spouse and I have been married. We're in the queer bin, no offspring, two cats, and have both had miscellaneous careers, now on the bumpy path to elderhood.

Relationship advice - ups, downs, and all arounds, is a perennial theme of Tildes discussion.

This is your opportunity to throw down your questions about how to manage keeping it together this long.

Full disclosure: I've had two glasses of wine for our intermediate celebration (we decided to have a small one on the actual date since it's a Monday, the blowout is Friday night), so the immediate answers may be a little fuzzy.

Spouse and I are trying to get bids from local solar installers and we'd appreciate some crowdsourced knowledge from Tilderinos. Questions first, then some context...

• In the current market, is "no, your equipment can't talk to the Internet" actually an unreasonable demand?
• Is there a term or phrase we should be using to look for, or guide installers towards, solar setups that fully function without Internet access?
• Are there any equipment types -- microinverters, for example -- that definitely will not work due to architecture?
• Are there battery controllers, or central inverters, that are known to play nicely (read: can be expanded later) with batteries from other manufacturers?

For each installer, we start the conversation with "it's essential that the system work entirely offline, without Internet." We're flexible on nearly everything else: system size (probably ~15kW), number of panels, battery, etc. Our first concern is making sure that a 25-year investment is not dependent on some company's cloud servers; secondly, that we're not inverting our dependency graph by making our electric power reliant on the whims of our ISP. There's also the privacy angle. But we're not looking for a totally off-the-grid setup, just trying not to lock ourselves into a bad purchase.

So far, one third of the installers (3/9) have immediately told us we're unreasonable and to just go away. Two others said "sure!" and ghosted us afterwards. One was a little more forthcoming, saying that the equipment requires periodic connections to the manufacturer for monitoring and they couldn't provide a warranty without it. The last two provided bids, but it's difficult to tell if they're telling the truth given the conflicting info we've seen.

Some people here know me, I’ve been open about having been a virgin until I was 24. I didn’t really think about this too much before I had sex, in that there are various skill levels. The person that I lost my virginity to was my age, but she had been having sex for over 10 years. We had a fling for a few months, so for a while she was the only person I was having sex with. I had nothing else to compare that to, and so to me what I was doing with her was the baseline of what sex was. It wasn’t until I started having sex with other people that I realized that she was actually significantly skilled in the area, and was quite a bit above average. So in that way, I lucked out on how I was introduced to sex.

Subsequent sexual partners have been lackluster. For a bit I thought, okay maybe they’re just not experienced even if they are quite a bit older than me and have been supposedly having sex for twenty some odd years. But after more people who claimed to have experience came my way, I started to think okay maybe experience doesn’t matter if you’re just doing the same thing over and over.

I’m going to try to describe what the issue is. Out of the partners that weren’t particularly good in bed, it feels like they can’t move their bodies very well. Like they’re stiff, movement isn’t fluid and they don’t have strong energy, there’s no vigor to them. I came to a theory that if someone can’t dance, that that translates into their performance. Because I think being able to dance, suggests that you have rhythm control, body control, and more explicitly hip control. As well as endurance. The first girl was someone that could dance, so we would dance together a lot and I think my dance ability translated to me being pretty good despite my inexperience. But with women that can’t dance I often find that they struggle to keep up with anything I’m trying to do. Like if I’m trying to set a rhythm they fight against the rhythm, not on purpose, it’s like dancing they just don’t have the rhythm.

Another thing is I last a really long time, like minimum an hour. The first girl was able to keep up with me even as the sessions went on for over two hours. A lot of other women I’ve been with are done by the 20 minute mark. Which to me is just like getting started.

So far this sounds like I’m bragging. But the point I’m getting at is that, I was not physically attracted to the girl I lost my virginity to. While we got along, generally, I also wasn’t super into her personality nor was there that much of an emotional connection from my side anyway. And since then I’ve been with women that I am both physically and mentally attracted to, but because of our lack of sexual compatibility I’m really not as keen on seeing them.

This kind of came into my brain, when I was looking at Reddit posts where people were discussing the former partners of both Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter. Both singers are known for dating unattractive men. So when I saw a user say that, if you listen to how many of their songs are about sex, they likely prioritize sexual compatibility/chemistry above anything else. Which made me realize I think I do too. Maybe it’s just because sex is still a relatively new thing for me, and it’ll dissipate as time goes on. But, I wanted to know if other people were in the same boat.