Live Q&As

You can find today's column here and I've alerted the proper authorities about trying to get it onto Carolyn's page and the Advice page.

A nice note, unless there's a small gift you know she'd appreciate.

As a follow-up to my previous answer, I just heard that this is a site-wide issue that the IT team here is looking into, so hopefully it's fixed soon.

No, thank you for reading and participating!

Yep. It's okay to do that. While you won't block out all of it--you'll still see headlines in newspaper boxes, public TVs,  magazines at checkout stands, etc.--I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much media exposure you can avoid if you try. TV news, for example, is both one of the leading culprits in stirring the anxiety pot and one of the easiest to avoid. Just stay off news channels, and bypass commercials for local news by getting your shows online.

Obviously a total news blackout makes for underinformed citizens just as we urgently need as many informed people as possible, but checking out for a few days isn't going to make much of a dent in that regard.

Two weeks ago ... that's pretty far down in my memory pile. You're the one I advised to keep a joint calendar, preferably one where you can trace who recorded what, so you can have him note the things you agreed to? Particularly the type of things he forgets agreeing to?

To answer your larger question, yes, sure, it's possible for a person to have just one trait that shows up on abuse lists, and the otherwise-goodness of the person can downgrade that abusive trait into a merely obnoxious one.

Whether this describes your fiance, I don't know. One strong point in your/his favor is that when you make the connection to his dad, he looks inward vs. lashing out. That's very uncomfortable news you're delivering to him---that he resembles someone he shaped his life around not resembling--and the way a person receives uncomfortable news is one of the key red-flag areas. The classic abuser will lash out at the messenger and refuse to question his own behavior.

As for the smaller question of how to deal with the you-say/he-says obstacles, I'm sticking with the calendar advice. 

And keep watching your own feelings for signs that you're walking on eggshells. That's also a classic place to look for trouble.

And finally, I hope I'm answering the right question. I normally do a quick browser search but the questions are unusually long today and I'm off to a slower than usual start.

The link to today's column? Here's a shorter one that hopefully works: http://wapo.st/otObR5

That depends solely on what you think you can live with. While it is sad and unecessary that your mom's close friend had her life shortened by cigarette smoke, and while smoking obviously comes with all kinds of added health burdens, it's not quite so black-and-white that you'll bury a smoking spouse young and rock gently on the porch with your octogenarian nonsmoking spouse. Plenty of people marry someone who has a higher than average risk of dying young, be it through illness or habits or choice of profession, and they make that choice with their eyes open. They just calculate emotionally that they'd rather have this person for a short time (with hope of a long time) than not at all.

It gets a lot trickier when kids are involved, and you apparently plan to have them. In that case, you're making a choice not just for you but also for people who have no say in the matter.

(more)

I'm more than happy to be your bacon-pants pusher :)

Welcome to apartment life. How do you fare with noise mitigation strategies like music, white noise, earplugs ...?

I'm just not sure what you can say to these people. It's their patio, and her strained relationship with punctuation is really none of your business. I can see a kind mention that you can hear everything, and that you wanted them to know their conversations weren't as private as they probably thought, but making it an issue of your comfort is probably a dead-end. Best case, they keep it in mind and pipe down for a night or two, but then drift back into old habits, because that's what people tend to do. 

As for the anonymous note: yes, cowardly, -and- awful to receive. In this case, too, one would probably be too easy to track down to serve your already dubious purpose. 

Glad my headache is gone, because now I get to smash myself a new one.

Suggestions for you from readers, coming up ...

Definitely worth a look, thanks. And:

Because then he'd need to admit someone else could figure out something he couldn't!?

I don't know, that just sounded like where things were going. And, yes, for some reason it's okay for a brain surgeon to have knowledge one doesn't have, but the idea of consulting a therapist/psychoanalyst/other mental health expert is often treated as one step up from a tarot reader. Sigh. 

But that's a moral argument, and I wasn't making a moral argument. I'm talking about a pure emotional calculation: "Am I ready to hitch my life to this person's, as-is, knowing his/her choices could make "till death do us part" a nearer-term reality than the typical spouse?

Now, the typical spouse also accepts that a cement truck could do the parting for them one fine morning, despite all the yoga and bran cereal in the world. So that has to factor in, too, to the it's-not-so-black-and-white argument.

But just to re-illustrate my point, let's take courage and selflessness out of it and compare the smoker not to a firefighter, but to a motorcycle enthusiast, or a gourmand with a deep family history of heart disease and diabetes, or the inventor in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang played by Dick van Dyke, who strapped a rocket to his back to see if he could fly? Not heroism, just humanism that happens to come with risking one's life more than others do. 

Yes, I can be cautious and advise people to shun them all as marriage prospects, and I can climb onto a soapbox and declare they're all immoral for having kids, but that runs counter to everything I believe. I believe we're all better off--happier-- making our own choices based on what's right for us, as long as we do it with eyes open vs. in the grip of wishful thining, even when that means suffering a premature loss that was foreseeable all the way.

Once she stops talking she doesn't stop, right? So, no commas, dashes, or periods. 

The "full" archive of columns can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/2010/07/06/ABRBs7D_linkset.html (full in quotes because it's not updated with today's thanks to an issue being investigated). And again, just to be safe, here is a link to today's column: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-relatives-playing-favorites/2011/08/23/gIQA6aU2CK_story.html

It may be wishful thinking, but I expect this 10th anniversary to be the last hurdle to the very thing you say (until the 20th). Round numbers are milestones and milestones are the times people tend to reflect. 

I can tell you why I feel the way I do: because I've gotten one, and it was horrible. You feel helpless, blindsided, judged. You can't ask follow-up questions, which are often important. And you never forget that someone felt you had a right to know something, but not the right to know the source of the information. It's a loser and I won't advise it.

I don't know, I see reflecting as good, in most cases. Especially when there's a buffet and an open bar.

It's a good idea to live together when you think it's a good idea to live together, and no sooner. When people are open to it at any point, I advise them to wait till they've made a mutual life commitment; in your case, engagement would qualify. Because of that, I do wonder why you think it's a good idea to "keep status quo." Not that there's anything wrong with that on its face, it's just that some reasons for wanting the status quo are great ones and some are warning signs.

Maybe he's got guacamole in his fridge and he's out of tortilla chips. 

If you're always the one making the effort, and this is what it took for you to see that, then this hint to call it quits is actually one of those very well disguised blessings. CGI-quality disguised. But still a blessing. Make an effort for people who make an effort for you.

Eureka.

May want to, yes, if the situation mirrors yours. There are also situations where the favoritism is capricious and cruel, sometimes even driven by the gift-giver's psychological need to secure an ally and create a rift between the haves and have-nots. Just ask people who grew up in homes where the favorite could do no wrong and everyone else existed only to be reminded of that. In those cases, seeing the aunt as "generous" is a slap in the face to her designated have-nots.

That would be Slate advice columnist Dear Prudence, a.k.a. Emily Yoffe, who has an advice chat here every Monday.

It's not important that they love you. It's actually not important that your boyfriend loves you or that you love him, because if one of those things fails to happen then you break up.

If you and your boyfriend go on to marry, then it does become important that he loves you and that you love him, but more in a you-want-this-to-last sense than an I-need-this-to-last, because you always have you and you can get yourself through all kinds of disappointments, sometimes even better for having been through them.

As for his parents, it'll be nice if they take to you. It will be nice, also, if you respect them and enjoy their company. Not necessary, but nice.  

And when I say it's not necessary, I mean that even if your boyfriend's opinion of them is such that he needs them to like you before he'll commit to you, that still doesn't raise the stakes of your weekend beyond the point where it would be nice if you found mutual affection in them. It's still not necessary, because  it;s not necessary that you spend your life with this very man. It would just be nice.

The better you're able to keep this in mind this weekend, the less you'll need everthing to be just right, and the less pressure you'll put on yourself, and the more you'll be able to be your natural self. That's your best bet, always; just be you.

And no, that's not another kind of pressure, "be yourself or you're doomed." It'll be okay either way, whether you're nervous or not, or hit it off with his parents or not. Just trust that the natural outcome will be the best outcome for you. 

I think open marriages are a  great idea when the two people in them both think it's a great idea.

I think the idea of them is offensive when one spouse is pregnant and under pressure to agree because the other spouse can't deny himself for a few months. I hope you have your finances in order, because I have no reason to believe you aren't married to a taker of epic proportions, and that rarely ends well. 

Agreed, thanks.

You did, in a potentially useful way: Turnaround, if your life depended on your answering this question correctly, could you say that he treats and views you as his equal?

This could be its own thread: "the less pleasant sister (who may actually need it more for the fact that she's able to ask for it less) ...."

Sometimes people really are ungrateful or me-centric, but I also think it's common for people to ascribe simple, negative motives where more complicated things might be happening. For example, the accessible charm of a sibling could lead to an entire childhood where the less-accessible sib gets overlooked, ignored, misread, incrementally black-sheeped. By the end of the process, that black sheep will be easy to write off--"S/he never reaches out to me ...," but what if there were points along the way when the adults didn't act like adults and make the extra effort, thus teaching these less-accessible kids that the older relatives were concerned only with shiny things (favored sib)?

Certainly enough there for debate. 

Look at the reasons it often isn't a good idea: People move in together to save on rent or shorten a commute, and only after their stuff is commingled do they realize their relationship wasn't solid enough to justify that degree of closeness/commitment. Or, in a similar vein, they have a casual attitude toward commitment and move in together, only to find out there are other, unanticipated down sides to a casual attitude toward commitment. Or, two people move in together, and one is excited to have a warm body available without having to go on a date first, and the other thinks they're headed toward marriage. Oops. Or, they're both in agreement that moving in is the "next logical step," and the experience tells one of them that the relationship is okay but kind of meh, but now they have a dog and a couch they both paid for and everyone sees them as a couple and they do get along without fighting and maybe s/he's overthinking and marriage is the next "next logical step"?

Moving in with someone does have mistakes and bad outcomes associated with it, yes, but so does marriage. So does breaking up. All you can do is be honest with yourself about -your- situation and make the decisions about it that make sense to the two of you.

Make it a crusade for man-kind, too, because by far most mans are kind and they suffer by steretypical association with the "cretin and manipulator."

It does have its own lexicon, but "glass bowl" is from Tony Kornheiser's. Google it. It was a clever write-around for a word the Post won't print but that found its way into national news.

You're already most of the way there; you recognize that there's something "incredibly dumb" in taking the kids' temperaments personally. (Though I think you're being a little hard on yourself.) 

Best thing you can do is have a little mantra to remind you that there are introverts and extroverts, and there are great, great people in both camps. The intros just need you to work a little harder to get to know them, because they don't have an inner force driving them to go sit in your lap and bat their eyes at you.

Nice perspective, thanks.

When it's funny and you're both in on the joke. That's not what you meant, I know, but some of the hardest laughs I've had in my life are when I've been called a thoroughly inappropriate name by someone with really good comic timing. 

Interesting, thanks.

Well said. When I "listen" to it in my mind, the tone is of an exaspirated friend, which most people accept, but it can be a slap in the face in this form.

Which I first typed as "a face in the slap." Maybe I need to make good on my musings about padding my keyboard.

Yes, some questions never get posted, usully because I don't see them during the chat. I receive hundreds, skim dozens, and answer 20 or so. I read over the outtakes when I can and pull some to use in columns, but I'm not sure I know of yours--not because I've never read it, but because it sounds like a few I've seen recently.

So, two things you can do: Post a new note to Levi with keywords to ID your question, which he can send to me now, or email it to tellme@washpost.com ID'ing it as the one you're talking about here. It may just be that it's too long/too much detail for a speed forum and also too much to pack into a column (that's the biggest category of Qs that never see the light of day; things not suited to my platforms), or it's a topic I don't feel confident tackling.

But if it's one I just keep missing, I'm happy to have a look.

What is this "for worse" pledge doing to/for your children? I appreciate and respect a dedication to your marriage, but you have other commitments, too, and you might well be to the point where serving one is a disservice to the other. 

Please enlist the help of a good family therapist. I get that you're teetering on the edge of serious money problems, so first try to get help through your employer, if you have access to an EAP. If not, then go to nami.org and look up Family-to-Family, a support class for the families of people with mental illness, as well as other support groups in your area. 

Finally: While I'm not saying, "Leave your husband," I do advise strongly against closing your mind to any one remedy to a serious problem. Whether it's, "I'll never see a shrink and tell a stranger  my problems," or, "I'll deal with my depression and not take pills as an easy way out," or, "What can I do short of X?," it's a regular thing to see people cut off an entire avenue for dealing with a problem, and it just doesn't make sense to me. Opening your mind to it doesn't mean you do it, it just means you're willing to explore -all- of your safe and legal options. People in crisis  need to explore -all- safe and legal options.  

If "everyone (including BF) says 'be yourself and they will love you,' " then that suggests people around you are all trying to put things in perspective for you, which suggests you have lost perspective. That's not a bad thing, it's totally normal, but it's a thing you might want to let yourself admit to and even embrace. In a, "Hey, this is who I am, and this is how it's going to be" kind of way. It's actually better to go into it all caught up in the long-term implications when you know that's the way you are, instead of being all caught up and thinking you've got it under control.

I actually can't think of any answer more tangible than the one I gave you, unless you wanted me to say, "Bring wine."  My advice is a set of step-by-step, mental instructions for putting your BF's parents in a less weekend-centric perspective, and giving you ways to forgive yourself quickly if things don't go exactly as you want them to. If that wasn't how it came across, then that's my failure to write it effectively.

Ah, I recognize this, thanks. (I've seen it once or twice, though, and didn't spot the high-volume submission).

I didn't answer you partly due to length, but also partly because I don't have much to add: It sounds as if you and your BF (and the kid's grandparents) are doing your best to show the boy that he's loved and that his mother's behavior is outside the norm; you've just collectively chosen to approach this quietly, vs by making a scene. 

When people are making the best choices they can under difficult circumstances, there isn't much for a columnist to add. If you'd like, there's nothing stopping you from enlisting the help of a family therapist, to see if there are any small details or  big ideas that you're missing. Should you find and develop a rapport with someone good, s/he could also become a safe place for the boy to talk about what's on his mind, since I'm sure there's a lot that he's wrestling with at his age. 

This isn't going to sound credible, but I'm going to say it anyway: Stop taking this guy's indifference personally. You're saying yourself, throughout this post, that you and he just don't ahve what you used to, don't get along they way you used to, aren't who you used to be. So, end it. Accept that people change, accept that it's over, and accept that not fitting any more is a perfectly adequate reason for ending a relationship; it doesn't have to involve any judgments about someone not being good enough or caring enough or whatever. It's not your fault, or his , and it's certainly not his ex's. You.two.don't.fit.

Now, once you've rolled that into a decision to stop calling this guy, the next step is optional but encouraged: You've agreed to be treated indifferently by someone for what sounds like a pretty long time. That's something worth running by a therapist, since the first thing you bring to a relationship and the last thing you have to count on when it goes wrong are: You. That's it. Make sure your view of you is as a person you can count on in the clutch. Otherwise, your struggle with your worth will follow you wherever you go,when there are 1. ways to resolve it in your favor and 2. people trained to teach you those ways.

She sounds like someone I wish I knew. Thanks.

And, buh bye--how I carried on today. Blah blah blah. Have a great weekend, and hope to see you here next week. Now I'm going to go stand outside and, like whoa, not get wet.

Worth a try, thanks.

Last word. Sounds good to me. Thanks for your thoughtful stamina.

yes, keep supporting him, it's the best thing, unless you get to the point where you feel he's mature enough to make the decision himself about your being there (he may be already; you just don't want to give him the impression that it's all on his shoulders or that you're trying to get out of having to go. Kids do read things into adult words, more than adults do.). You're making it less difficult for him by not making a scene with the mom + stepfather.