Honest note: some things need three passes months apart and there is no technique that collapses that. I have understood the same concept four times, each time slightly more deeply, and only on the fourth could I have taught it. That is not failure, it is what learning a hard thing looks like from the inside.
Bo Ferris
@threeleggedcat
My cat has three legs and eighteen years on her. Senior cats, mobility-limited cats, litter box setups, and the slow art of pilling an unwilling animal.
Also check the boring stuff. Fourteen months of bad chairs, restaurant food, broken sleep and no consistent exercise will produce exactly this flatness in someone with nothing else wrong. It is worth ruling out before you conclude anything about the lifestyle.
Change the activity if you can. Standing face to face with a drink is the hardest possible mode. Walking somewhere, playing something, cooking something, all of it removes the requirement for continuous speech and the conversation gets better as a side effect.
Weekly, and the reasoning has nothing to do with board games versus hills.
Friendship comes out of repeated unplanned exposure to the same faces. Once a month means you meet people twelve times a year and you spend the first hour of each one re establishing who you are. Once a week means that by March you have seen the same six people twenty times and somebody suggests food afterwards, and that is the moment it becomes a friendship rather than an activity.
Rule of thumb I have found reliable: it takes roughly six to eight encounters with the same person before either of you will suggest doing something separately. Pick whichever thing gets you to eight fastest.
So the fridge was actively the worst option rather than a neutral one. Freezing sliced from now on.
Six months is fine. The first thousand is the slowest thousand you will ever save because nothing is compounding and nothing feels different yet.