What a great way to learn how people interpret behaviors as "lazy". Intriguing....

The difference between lazy and burnout lies in how much you trust the person not working.

I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as "I sit and study Swedish" to mean "I'm studying Swedish (as in right now, that's the task I'm doing)" or "I am in the process of reading a book". They don't change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren't used to it.

Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.

There are, I'm sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you're seeing.

The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I'm curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I'm dead.

I suppose I don't understand yet what you expect from a "relationship" that's different from a friendship, so it's hard to offer any advice.

If you want to have sex with someone, it helps to ask. I understand that asking has risks, so you probably want to have some sense that the other person is not going to hit you before you ask. 😉 I don't know how to magically get them to ask you, except for maybe being generally sexually irresistible. That's outside my expertise.

As you learn what you want, it will become easier to look for it and ask for it. Maybe it would help you to think more about what you want for now.

It's not clear to me yet what you want: not too serious, but more than friends, so... sex? Not judging, just trying to understand. And maybe you don't know yet.

Nothing wrong with that, but then what is your actual challenge here?

I just don't know how to (for lack of a better word) make others see me for more than just a friend.

You don't. It's complex and subtle and annoying. 😉

You don't turn someone who doesn't love you into some who does. You keep looking until you find a person who was already going to love you. And there are many, even when it doesn't seem like there are. And it takes a maddeningly long time for some folks. It did for me.

Is that the Very Irish Gambit?

It could be both! Why not?

I'm not sure. Maybe. Sometimes. I don't know.

I can only tell you that my best results have come from replying with a neutral "Thank you", then repeating the questions. I prefer it when they answer all my questions, but ultimately, if I want answers, I need to persist, and so I do.

Excellent! Indeed, I'd completely forgot about H2, H3, and so on, so I'm glad you found it comfortable to figure that out!

I read Mastering Regular Expressions about 25 years ago and it's one of the best and simplest investments I ever made in my own programming practice. Regex never goes out of style.

Enjoy!

I don't mind at all. Beyond my explanation, you might like to try to use an online regular expression checker to explore small changes to the regex to see how it matches what it matches.

Headings always match #\s+, because that's the character # followed by whitespace (\s) one or more times (+). Other text matches this, but so not all matches are headings, but all headings match. (You might have # blah in the middle of the text, which would match. If that's a problem, then you can change the regex to ^#\s+, where ^ means "from the beginning of a line".

Tags always match #[^\s], which means the character # followed by one not whitespace character. Be careful: tags match this regex, but this regex doesn't match the entire tag. It only says "there is a tag here".

Fortunately, that doesn't hurt, because your Python code could match #[^\s] and then turn that # into \# and thereby successfully avoid escaping the #s at the beginning of headings. You could even use regex to do this by capturing the non-whitespace character at the beginning of the tag and "putting it back" using regex search and replace.

Replace #([^s]) with \#\1.

The parentheses capture the matching characters (the first character of the tag) and \1 echoes back the captured characters. It would replace #a with \#a and so on.

I hope I explained this clearly enough. I see the other folks also tried, so I hope that together, you found an explanation that works well enough for you.

Peace.

The most bulletproof way to do this seems to be to escape the # characters before running the document through Markdown. It might suffice to use a regex. (Insert regex and two problems joke here.) That seems promising because headings always match #\s+ whereas tags match #[^\s].

I hope someone has an even better idea, but this ought to work.

Excessive apologies can feel disingenuous and perfunctory. That makes it difficult for me to know when an apology is genuine. That erodes my trust.

Excessive apologies can signal to me that the other person sees me as a threat, and I don't want to feel like a threat, so I feel attacked.

But I could also choose to interpret excessive apologies as a sign of past trauma, so I could choose to have compassion and patiently ask the other person to talk to me about what's going on. I can share how I feel and hope that they feel ready to discuss what's happening for them. Patience would be key.

What's normal is that you had a traumatic experience, then internalized a Survival Rule to avoid repeating the behavior that led to the trauma. Depending on your age when the original incident happened, the Survival Rule might sit very deep, causing you to follow it even without thinking and without knowing why.

All that is normal: expected, sensible, reasonable.

The rule itself might no longer be needed. Can you imagine a situation in which it would be perfectly fine to interpret as a joke something that someone says without specifying it as a joke? Can you imagine three? Ten?

Now it depends whether you mean actual DEI or the nonsense that companies do in the name of DEI or the unfortunate overreaction that some people support related to DEI due to the resistance to actual, reasonable, sensible DEI.

"... regardless of all other factors..." sounds like the second of these.