Danny M. Lavery, aka Dear Prudence, is online weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of the chat is below. (Sign up below to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columns here. Send questions to Prudence at prudence@slate.com.)
Q. A concerned mistress: I am a single woman who has been having an affair with a married man for over three years. The past year or so has been long-distance. He has recently told me he wants me to slowly move on. I am devastated, but this question is not about me. He is in a trustless, miserable, sexless marriage that he says he is staying in only for the kids. He is completely resigned to this dismal life. I think he needs to go to marriage counseling and to come clean to his wife about us. This situation is unsustainable for all three of us involved. I am concerned that when/if I am gone, he will turn to another woman, or worse—alcohol, drugs, or prostitutes. I care for him deeply and want him to be happy, even if it’s not with me. What can I do?
A: I don’t know that there’s much you can do! You’re right, I think, that if he truly wants to stay in his marriage, it would be better to do so honestly, to make a genuine effort to reconnect with his wife—even if just as a respectful and loving co-parent—to attend marriage counseling and to try, in good faith, to make a go of things. But if he would prefer to wall himself inside a tower of martyrdom, there’s not much you can do to help things. Coming clean to his wife on his behalf would, I’m sure you know, likely result in the destruction of his marriage, rather than the preservation of it. Drug addiction and despair are not your boyfriend’s only alternatives to the end of your relationship. He has the ability to make different choices; let him.
Q. Maintaining an old friendship: My family moved when I was 10, and I made fast friends with a girl. When a few years later my family moved to the U.S. we stayed in touch, but by college, the friendship had slowly drifted into silence. Two years ago, she emailed to invite me to her wedding—I couldn’t go, because it was 9,000 miles away, but we started talking again and even met twice when I made it back to India. She’s great, and it’s wonderful to be back in touch with her.
She’s told me that she’s been diagnosed with anxiety and depression and that it can be very difficult for her to be social—she has often had to cancel plans with other friends at the last minute because she’s too overwhelmed to step out of the house. It’s true that these things aren’t really understood or treated kindly in India. More often than not, when I send her emails or WhatsApp messages, she won’t respond, but a few times a year, she will contact me out of the blue and everything’s chatty and normal. Ordinarily, if a friend doesn’t answer multiple emails or messages, I’ll let things lie at whatever her comfort level is. In this case, I want to be a good friend, but I don’t know how to deal with depression and anxiety, and I don’t want to ask her because I shouldn’t be making her explain herself—it’s not fun to talk about your illnesses. I don’t want to make her more anxious, but I would like to reach a place where it isn’t just me talking to her whenever she wants but almost never when I want.
A: If you two lived closer together, or saw each other on a more consistent basis, I could understand wanting to establish a more equitable line of communication, but if you two are only emailing a few times a year, I don’t know that you have the firm foundation required to have a talk about reciprocity. If she gets in touch with you every couple of months and you two have a pleasant conversation as a result, I don’t know that you have a problem, exactly. It’s not as if she’s calling you at inconvenient times in the middle of the night demanding you get on the phone; she’s just waiting to email you when she wants to talk. Her occasional email-related flakiness may be related to her depression, or it may have something to do with the long-distance and low-key nature of your friendship.
Q. Flower girl drama: My boyfriend and I have been discussing marriage to the point of laying out tentative “what-ifs” for the wedding. While he is an only child and so are both of his parents, I come from a large family. Three of my older siblings have daughters who would normally be flower girls. While we are not close, they would come to such a big family event. My problem is their mothers—one sister hasn’t spoken to us in two years, another is very self-absorbed, and my brother’s wife has done all she can do to minimize my family’s relationship with their kids. (I haven’t even met their youngest.) It’s a small wedding, and I feel like I can’t pick one of my nieces without upsetting and dealing with drama from one of their mothers. Apart from biting the bullet and having all three girls in the wedding (which will cause an entirely different set of mama drama), and not having a flower girl at all (which I really don’t want to do). What are my options?
A: I understand you would like to have a flower girl, but I ask you: at what cost? Your wedding will still have flowers and girls in it; consider resigning yourself to this particular loss, rather than engage in brutal family politics all for the sake of having a child bung handfuls of petals down a formal hallway.
Q. Should I reach out to a homophobic parent?: I’m a 24-year-old lesbian with a full-time job in academia. When I was in college, I realized I was gay. My mother (who only found out because she asked me and I answered truthfully) blew up over it—I won’t go into too much detail, but she told me I was dead to her, said I brought a “presence of evil” when I visited her home, said we were “in a battle for [my] soul,” and hired a P.I. to follow the girl I had been dating, among other things. She and my father stopped helping me pay for college, and my mother gave me a strange letter on how I’d been “recruited” by the gays, just identified as gay because I “wanted to be seen as special,” etc. We had previously been very close.
Now, a few years later, my younger (also gay, they also know) brother who lives with them has told me that my mother says that I seem to have “a lot of anger” toward her “for some reason.” It sounds like she has no idea how hurtful she’s been, or is in denial. Should I write her and tell her? Or let it be? (If it matters, we text very occasionally now, but that’s about it.)
A: Your mother knows exactly why you have a lot of anger toward her. She does not need to be told that calling someone evil and withdrawing support for her college education is an unkind thing to do. What she would like is to recast the narrative and minimize the horrific things she said and did to you when you came out, so she seems reasonable and you seem irrationally angry. Your options here are a) Continue to keep her at arm’s length or b) Have a fight. There are good cases for either option, depending on how capable you feel of having this out with your mother at present. What you shouldn’t do, I think, is write a letter reminding your mother of what she did to you; I suspect she remembers perfectly well what she did and is trying to rewrite history in order to make you feel like you don’t have a right to your own anger.
If you decide to continue your policy of nonengagement (maybe maintaining a sense of goodwill between yourself and your parents is the only way you can stay in touch with your more vulnerable younger brother at home, maybe you don’t have the emotional energy at present to cut off your parents entirely; there are a variety of sufficient reasons), I urge you to pursue therapy. What your mother did to you was by any definition abusive. She did not “blow up,” she orchestrated a campaign of cruelty, intimidation, financial manipulation, and emotional abuse in order to torment you back into the closet.
Q. Bad-at-math friend: My friend “Nikki” has been a stay-at-home parent for years, though her one kid is in grade school. She gripes often about how they’re just scraping by (despite eating out a few times a week, the kid being in private, pricey lessons, and that kind of thing). I don’t care what folks do with their time or money—truly!—but she seems genuinely befuddled as to why they are struggling. And if our friends are discussing something like summer plans and someone says she’s going to Disney World (or the local theme park or almost anything), Nikki will say something biting and bitter, like, “Well, my kid’s going to have to enjoy vacationing in our backyard. Not everyone can afford air travel.” Is there a gentle way, when she says something like this, to point out that she’s being a jerk, or that we all make certain trade-offs and financial choices and hers are keeping her cash-strapped and angry?
A: “What a remarkably ungenerous thing to say,” followed by a willingness to endure strained silence.
Q. Interracial wedding: I recently got engaged, and I couldn’t be happier. I come from a different ethnic group, and a more troubled family background, than my fiancé. My father was an abusive alcoholic who tormented my family, and I no longer have communication with him. Ten years ago, my brother physically and emotionally threatened me for dating interracially and, as a result, I have also removed him from my life. I have two older sisters I occasionally email or text with, and the communication usually ends badly.
I recently told my mother about my engagement, and she reacted very negatively and eventually sent me a text that she wanted nothing to do with me. Frankly, at this stage of my life, with the support I receive from my friends and significant other, I can actually live with this. My question is: Though I plan to email my sisters the news (although I am worried about their reaction), should I extend them an invite to the wedding? I am concerned about inviting all or none of my family, and I certainly do not want to invite some members, so do I invite only a few and risk angering the other members? On the other hand, I have no other family members, and am a bit saddened at the prospect of having no family representation at the wedding to support me. If I do invite them, I am worried that they will relay the details to noninvited members, and I’m worried they will try to stop it. I am also concerned that, if I invite them and they do not RSVP, I will sit at my wedding wondering if they will show up and will be devastated if they don’t. Thoughts?
A: While I’m certainly not happy about the number of letter writers with abominable family members today, it does make for an awfully easy column. Do not invite your sisters, especially if you’re worried about their reaction to the mere fact that you plan on getting married. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how much it does not bother you on your wedding day that no one from your family is in attendance—no one threatening you, no one getting drunk and abusive, no one insulting you and your husband for being different races, no one secretly inviting your father behind your back. Invite only the people who are capable of celebrating you, and don’t look back.
Q. Re: Should I reach out to homophobic parent: You should also discuss the whole history forthrightly with your brother. I’m guessing he’s been given a rather distorted history of the subject.
A: Yes—it’s very possible he’s been given an entirely different version of how his older sister’s coming-out went.
Q. Should I recommend a family member?: I have a family member who works as a real estate agent. She’s been able to make a living but not an incredibly stable one—she’s approaching retirement age and is currently renting, although she once owned a house. The other day, my significant other’s parents discussed selling their house, which is directly in the area where my relative does business. No one asked me directly, but they were asking an out-of-state friend generally about finding a real estate agent. I could have mentioned my relative but didn’t. If I just happened to know a real estate agent who had the same level of success as my relative, I wouldn’t say anything because it wouldn’t be in my significant other’s parents’ best interest. But I also feel obligated to help a relative who has sometimes struggled. Should I feel guilty for not throwing her name out?
A: I’m not sure what good “feeling guilty” would do either you or your relative. If you think she would do a good job helping your partner’s parents sell their house, go ahead and recommend her to them. If you don’t, don’t. If it’s too late and they’ve already chosen someone else, there’s no point in wallowing in guilt. She’s not struggling because you have personally failed to sufficiently talk her up around town.
Danny M. Lavery: Until next week, chums and chumlets! Be excellent to one another.
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