Advertisements

#970: “Dance class and stranger-sweat” or “How to tell someone they are stinky: A review.”

By
May 26, 2017
COMMUNICATION, communications, Manners, Overthinking It, Reader Questions, touching, Work
163 Comments

Hi Captain,

So, I’ve been attending a salsa dance class the last few months. The class is structured so that you are welcome to come as a single person, and the participants shuffle through partners throughout the class. It’s a lot of fun and the men are generally pretty respectful and appropriate.

My problem is that a young man has been attending the last two weeks, and while he is very polite, his body odor is HORRENDOUS. I really cannot overstate how bad it is. By the middle of class he is sweating profusely, such that there is perspiration dripping off of his nose, and yes, onto his dancing partners (or at least *this* dancing partner, which is my main concern).

I really don’t want dance with him, but I don’t know how to refuse or what to do about it without being rude. I can totally see his attendance in this class as a suggested “assignment” from a therapist or other advice giver (such as yourself!) to get out there and be around people, even if it’s something he’s not comfortable doing.

Do you have any scripts that I can use? I do want to be kind.

~Dreading Dance Class

(She/her pronouns)

Read More

Advertisements

#969: “When spouses don’t agree about birth control.”

By
May 24, 2017
big discussions, control, ethics, family, Feminism, health, Reader Questions, Relationships, self-care, Sex

Dear Captain Awkward,

I’ve been reading your blog for awhile and just love it! Your answers and the community here are both awesome. So thanks. My question is really tough and I’m afraid your answer is going to be “there is no actual compromise possible here.” But I’m going to try.

My husband and I were both raised as extremely religious Catholics. When we were dating (courting??) we both agreed that we wanted to have lots of kids, like a dozen, and homeschool them all. Over eight years of marriage, we’ve both changed a lot. We’re both a lot more liberal and our kids are going to public school. After the third kid, we both agreed that we no longer wanted to have any more kids. But, being Catholic, there are only two allowed solutions: NFP (natural family planning, also known as Vatican Roulette), and total abstinence. We did that for a miserable year and a half and then, predictably, got pregnant with our fourth.

I cannot describe how horrible this has all been to me. Four kids is A LOT OF KIDS, especially given that the oldest is only seven. I loathe being pregnant with the fiery heat of a thousand suns. All of them have been high needs. I haven’t slept well since 2009. My husband is exhausted too; he cried like a baby when he found out we were having the fourth and I believe he is still depressed about it four months after she was born.

And I no longer see any point to this punishingly difficult lifestyle since I am no longer Catholic. Between kid 3 and kid 4, I did a lot of studying and am now entirely agnostic. My husband was really upset by my deconversion and mostly prefers not to talk about it at all. He’s become a lot more skeptical about his faith, but he does think it’s true and it worries him to think I might be going to hell. Meanwhile I now think that birth control is definitely the greatest thing since indoor plumbing.

Our birth control method now, given that NFP so obviously does not work, is abstinence. Every couple of weeks my husband can’t stand it anymore so we have non-PIV sex. Only there is zero communication about this. I think his perspective is that, if he’s got to “sin,” at least he’s not going to make it worse by premeditating it. The problem is that it’s obvious both of us want to take it further and I know from experience how hard it is to think clearly when you’re horny. I am terrified that sooner or later we’re going to get pregnant again. I cannot, CANNOT go through pregnancy again; I get the shakes just thinking about it. Meanwhile our sex life is completely screwed up from the NFP and then the whatever-this-is we’re doing now, so that neither of us is really enjoying it that much and we both kinda feel like roommates. It sucks and the thought of doing this till menopause is awful.

I want to go on birth control. He doesn’t even want to discuss it. He told me some time ago that if I did go on birth control, he’d continue to feel obligated to never have sex again because contracepted sex is a sin. I don’t want to do something unilaterally if it truly would upset him, but on the other hand I feel like his religion will make it impossible for him ever to agree to it, even if he WERE okay with it, because that would implicate him in the “sin.” So I can’t find out how he really feels about it. And then there’s the money issue … we don’t have insurance and all the really effective birth control methods are pretty expensive. With his cooperation we could easily save up the money for it in a couple of months, but since I’m a full-time carer for the kids, I don’t have much in the way of my own separate money. And it’s not like a couple thousand dollars are sitting around in the bank right now for me to just take and use … even if I would feel okay unilaterally spending that amount of money, given that normally all major purchases have to be okayed by both of us. And I have almost no one in my life who isn’t fanatically Catholic, certainly no one I could call on to drive me home from getting my tubes tied.

What, dear Captain, would you do? Can you help me come up with a script for “seriously, we need to actually TALK about what we’re doing and your Catholic guilt and denial are not helping”? I have been quietly waiting for the past two years or so for him to come around, but he hasn’t, and I feel our disastrous fourth pregnancy is my fault for agreeing to rely on the broken fire escape that is NFP instead of going behind his back and somehow getting an IUD. Yet I still hesitate to make such a big decision unilaterally; I’m equally scared to tell him (and face his hurt feelings) or not tell him (and have a big whopping secret looming over my head). And of course there are the practical issues.

Thanks for reading my lengthy novel,

Offred (Just Kidding) (Mostly)

Read More

Weird Video Ad Behavior on WordPress.com

By
May 22, 2017
Uncategorized

Edited to Add: WE DID IT! YOU DID IT!

Ads will be turned off June 1 and stay off as long as Patreon funding stays at current levels. THANK YOU.

————————————————

Hello friends! Some kind folks have sent me messages like this this week:

Hi Captain,

This isn’t exactly a question, but more of a problem with your site. I know that you have ads to support things and whatever, but recently, video ads have been pulling me down the screen, and no matter how much I try to scroll back up, it keeps pulling me down to the ads, so it becomes difficult to near-impossible to actually read your posts. I don’t know if this is something you can fix, but I thought you should be aware that this happens, and I didn’t know how else to let you know. I didn’t want to derail the comments section with technical difficulties. Thanks, and have a great week!

Thank you for alerting me! I am also running into this – every time I post a new entry, it wants to show me a video ad before I can read my own stuff that I just wrote on my own website. RUDE.

This is unacceptable behavior, and I know it’s made me click the back button when I’m reading other sites.

Unfortunately, I alone cannot fix this – I am not the one controlling the ad placement or how they behave and I haven’t been able to successfully screencap anything. I will alert WordPress.com, but you can also help me.

What I suggest:
  • Screencap the issue if you can.
  • Describe and report the issue here  (ad support) or here (WordPress.com support).
  • Those links are also good if you ever see something offensive. Which ads display for you are targeted regionally and using cookies, so I won’t necessarily ever see what you see.
  • If you don’t get a satisfactory answer, please let me know immediately. We are one of the most-read blogs on the platform and that should count for something.

Personally I find that as the ads get more intrusive and take up more screen real estate, the financial reward for letting WordPress stick them all over the site has seriously diminished and the way that ad revenue is reported and delivered has gotten less transparent and less frequent. I do depend on revenue from the site, but that doesn’t have to be AD revenue. In other words, if my Patreon goes over $2000/month this summer, I’ll turn them off in a heartbeat and keep them off as long as we stay above that threshhold. We’re so close!

#968: “How can I stop fat-shaming myself and enjoy my life?”

By
May 22, 2017
Captain Awkward's Dating Guide for Geeks, Culture, Feminism, Mental Health, Reader Questions, self-care, terrifyingly amazing
381 Comments

Hi Captain!

My problem is one that I imagine is very, very common, but I’ll start with a little background on my specific situation.

I recently started going to therapy for some pretty serious self esteem issues that had led to me isolating myself for a long time. Up until this year I hadn’t been to a non-family social event – including just one-on-one hangs – in over five years (and even before that it was pretty rare).I’ve made a lot of progress over the last few months; I have a few good friends that I can go out with and all in all, I have learned how to get better about relentlessly judging myself during and after every social interaction.

But even after all this (successful!) work, there’s one aspect that I just can’t seem to crack, even with my wonderful therapist, which is the possibility of a romantic relationship. It has been ten years since my last relationship (I’m in my early30s) and I haven’t been on so much as a date since then. While I was in my hermit state I vacillated between “I don’t really want a partner anyway” (a big fat lie) and “You’re not worth a relationship.” Basically the idea of being involved with someone in a romantic way seemed to be something that just wasn’t in the cards for me, ever. I always pictured myself alone.

Now, though, that I’ve started being around people socially, it’s starting to seem…not so insane. Like maybe it’s not out of the realm of possibility anymore, at least not when I think about it in an abstract way. But when it comes to a practical way – joining a dating site, talking to guys at social events, whatever – I can’t seem to break that bubble of “Why even bother? Who would want to be with you?” Even just writing this part of the letter made me feel embarrassed and silly.

There’s one important thing at play here that I haven’t mentioned yet: I’m fat. [details of weight redacted by Captain Awkward, per the site policies] I just can’t stop thinking of my weight (and looks in general, to a lesser extent) as my #1 defining characteristic.

It’s pretty easy to draw a straight line directly from media portrayals to my issues in this area. A fat girl talking about sex is almost always a punch line, a character for everyone else to make “ew, gross” faces about. Despite intellectually knowing better, I’ve internalized this message. For instance, occasionally I’ll use Tinder when I’m bored or feeling optimistic about the future (but mostly bored), and one time I ran across a co-worker. What should have been a “haha isn’t this awkward” moment sent me into a complete meltdown. I was *mortified* that this co-worker might think that…I don’t know, that I thought someone would be attracted to me? It was ages (like, literally a year and a half) before I could be around this extremely nice co-worker without wanting to crawl under the table and die. I couldn’t even talk to him.

So that’s basically where I am. This feeling that, no matter how funny or kind or interesting I am inside, it doesn’t even matter because my outside is so unappealing. I get so sad thinking about how no one will ever look at me and think, “Oh, she’s pretty, I’d like to get to know her”.

How can I start to escape the “overweight=unfuckable, unfuckable=unlovable” cycle?

-Want To Make The Rockin’ World Go ‘Round (She)

Read More

#967: “Am I signing up to be a business partner or reluctant caretaker?”

By
May 20, 2017
Accessibility, Disability, Mental Health, Reader Questions, self-care, Work
37 Comments

Dear Captain Awkward,

Almost a year and a half ago, while I was in tenuous material circumstances myself, my partner of less than a year got sick. One minute they were having a biopsy and the next minute they were fresh out of what turned out to be cancer surgery. Shocked, I didn’t have the presence of mind to prevent post-surgery on my couch from turning into living on my couch. 

Frustrated with my overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of epic shitty circumstances (which also later turned out to include partner’s mental health crash-and-burn), and failing to get caretaking support from their family, my community, and whatever social safety net ostensibly exists for someone like my now-ex,I started aggressively pursuing work. 

I struck a deal with my friend to  help with their small online business. Working for them for the past almost year has allowed me not only to  address my recent and childhood traumas in therapy, but also to enroll in a course to learn their trade.

They offered me partnership, I took it. We’ve been splitting the revenues, but have yet to finalize our partnership agreement.

So here is the deal: my prospective business partner also struggles with chronic and mental illness. Sometimes getting them to do any work even on a flexible timeframe is like pulling teeth. Right now, the money coming in is by-and-large from a combo of their old work and my current work.

I am torn.

They extended a hand to me when I desperately needed it, and they really did help give me space to heal. Having experienced mental illness and loved someone who has mental illness, I have a hard time writing them off just because they’re difficult to work with. They were so patient with me when there were some days, and some weeks, when I just couldn’t work.

On the other hand, I *did* do a lot of work. I went to therapy, I got my ex off my couch, I revived their business, and I invested in professional development education which will empower me, if I choose, to work on my own. After everything I just went through, and from where I stand now, I am seriously balking at formalizing my commitment to this person who is reliably unreliable about doing anything besides paying me.

What should I do? 

So Burnt Out (She)

Read More

#966: “Boundaries, Love, Death, Denial, Manners, & Kink” or “1 Husband, 1 Lover, 1 Burned-Out Caregiver & The Next Five Years”

By
May 18, 2017
boundaries, death, Disability, family, Manners, marriage, Reader Questions, Relationships, saying no, self-care
275 Comments

Hi Captain! All names have been changed to protect the guilty. Sorry this is long, but the backstory is rather necessary.

I’m a 45 year old pansexual poly woman. I’ve been with Wolfie since I was 18, married him at 23, and had two sons with him, who are now both out of the house. We’re also kinky, both dominants. I met Jon through a kink website, and while our relationship started as purely D/s play partners with friendship, we’ve fallen in love over time. Jon wears my collar. Wolfie’s known about the relationship with Jon from the beginning. Wolfie and Jon get along really well. Over the last four years, Jon and I have gotten much closer. And he confessed last fall that he wants to marry me when Wolfie dies.

Wolfie’s ten years older than me, so he’s 55, and while I knew demographics suggested I’d outlive him, it’s another thing to have it brought home to you when you’re still feeling young. He smoked for most of our marriage and well before, has worked a lot of physical jobs, gotten in a lot of fights, and…. the outcome is congestive heart failure, COPD, arthritis in all his joints, and diabetes. He’s on disability. I could wake up to him dead in bed beside me tomorrow, to put it bluntly. As it is, I’m pretty sure he won’t make it to 60. He is not trying to manage his conditions. He is in total denial of all of this. As far as he’s concerned, he has about thirty years of happy retirement to look forward to.

I had been going down (it’s an hour drive, we live on opposite sides of a large metropolitan area) to see Jon for the weekend once a month for about eight months of 2016/17. Jon developed a drinking problem last fall, and in the course of his achieving sobriety, I spent a week with him on a couple of different occasions, and that blew away any reservations we had about our eventual future. We also grew close enough, and our relationship deepened enough, that I now view myself as having two primary partners. We three decided that Wolfie and I should come down to Jon’s place and spend the weekend, unless Wolfie was busy, in which case he’d drop me off or Jon would come get me and Jon and I would have the weekend alone.

Well, I’ve done two weekends with Jon alone, and one weekend with Jon and Wolfie, and Jon said to me that Saturday night, “Next weekend, I’d rather have neither of you come than both of you come.” And I understood why. Wolfie likes to be the center of attention. He has needs. Actually, he has NEEDS. It’s hard for him to get up and down, and the arthritis makes it hard for him to stand very long at all. And he has no wind, so he gets out of breath at the slightest exertion. So it’s, “Get me a glass of tea. Get me the ketchup. Pick up the fork I dropped. Help me on with my shoes. Take my socks off.” He also needs to be the most important man in my life, flattered and reassured constantly. It honestly feels like having a child hanging off me. When I’m at home, it even interferes with the housework and cooking; he wants me to be right there within view.

This is newish behavior. He’s never been the same after the hospitalization in 2015 when they found out he had congestive heart failure and drained 30 pounds of fluid. He’s King Baby all the time now. It’s interfering with his relationship with his sons, and it’s building up a lot of unhappiness in me. Needless to say, our sex life is non existent. I have my time with Jon as a safety valve…. 50 or so hours where I get to be a beloved and adored adult woman with her own needs and desires sweetly catered to, and then back to the rest of the week of caregiving for someone who never says “Thank you.” I can stand it, because I don’t have to stand it for another five years, even. He’s already showing signs of the heart failure getting worse.

I know that I should hold a firm boundary with him about my weekends with Jon. But if I am firm about this, he will get tremendously hurt, yell, and start talking about how maybe he should go talk to a lawyer about a divorce. I don’t want to divorce him. I love him, and have loved him, for more than half my life. It matters to me to be beside him when he goes. And while Wolfie knows (we did have this conversation last fall) that Jon wants to marry me someday, so “he doesn’t have to worry about me”, he’s not willing to do some other things that need to be done. I’d like him to write down the stories about his firearm collection so his sons can have them, for example. I’d like to clean out the basement. And I can’t talk about this stuff because he’s totally in denial.

So how do I hold my boundary without destroying my marriage or damaging my other relationship? And how do I cope with the denial without going insane?

Thanks in advance to all.
The Lady Perplexed

Read More

#965: “My mom wants me to be her #1 sounding board and support system about her troubled marriage.”

By
May 17, 2017
Disability, Families, family, marriage, Parents, Reader Questions, Relationships, saying no, self-care
197 Comments

Hi Captain,

I am an adult (early 30’s) child of two wonderful people who are going through some turbulence in their marriage–that thing of having an empty nest/rediscovering each other/discovering they have communication issues that have just been sitting there for 30+ years and are now blowing up. They’re going to get counseling, which hopefully is step one of getting this all resolved, but in the meantime, I need some advice about navigating things with my mom. We live in different parts of the country, but we are on very good terms with one another, and talk on the phone a couple of times a week.

The current problem I have is that my mom calls me to vent about how hurt and despairing she is about her marriage, how my dad unintentionally really got under her skin or triggered her PTSD (she grew up in an abusive home). I should clarify that neither she nor I think that my dad is abusive; he just sometimes doesn’t understand what’s wrong or how to fix it. He gets hurt that she’s mad at him for reasons he doesn’t understand, then she gets hurt that he doesn’t understand, which restarts the spiral, etc. etc. etc. And then I get to hear all about the fight and how upset she is. The fighting is not constant, but it cycles around from time to time, and when it happens, it’s pretty intense.

She has been talking to me about this stuff for years–starting from when I was honestly probably still too young to deal with it–and it is super, super hard for me. I love, like, and respect both of my parents, and it feels like a punch in the gut to hear about them hurting each other, especially because I know they both deeply love each other and are trying to do right by each other. I don’t want to deny my mom the basic emotional support that friends show each other when going through a rough time. But when she talks about her marriage, it’s so hard for me, because that’s my dad. I guess for this part I feel like I need to get better at either a) not getting so rocked when we talk about this, or b) asking my mom to leave me out of it in a way that won’t absolutely crush her–especially in light of the fact that it’s been going on so long.

So that’s the current problem; the potential future one is that my mom has floated the idea of leaving my dad if things don’t get better, and she would want to come move in with me. She is disabled–still pretty independent, but unable to work, and living on her own would be a real struggle. My other sibling is kinda flaking out on the world right now and is not an option; my mom’s side of the family is the reason she has PTSD and is therefore also not an option. And as much as I love (and like!) my mom, and as much as I’d love to live in the same state again, it hurts so much to think of her moving in with me because of leaving my dad. And it would substantially disrupt my life to accommodate her. It’s not completely unworkable–but man it would be hard. If my dad died–or abused her or cheated on her–I would take her in a heartbeat with no complaints and no hesitation. But knowing that she was staying with me because she and dad gave up on each other feels very different. I worry about what it would do to my relationship with my dad. I worry about what it would do for my financial and living situation. If she decides she would be happier living with me, well, maybe she’d be right–but I’m pretty sure I’d be less happy, and I’m not sure she’s done the math on that, and I’m not sure how to tell her without making her feel rejected.

They’re adults, and are not beholden to me, so I know that pulling a “think of your (grown) children” talk would be beyond inappropriate. But–it would directly affect me. And of course I want them to work it out. I can’t tell where healthy boundaries end and selfishness begins here for me.

I guess the biggest underlying struggle I have is that I am my mom’s closest friend, and the person she trusts most in the entire world. I know this because she has told me so, repeatedly–starting when I was probably a bit too young for that to be entirely cool. And as much as I am grateful that she believes I love her and like her, it kinda scares me to be the only one she really trusts. She’s recently been seeing a therapist (thank GOD–seriously, that took years to talk her into), so I am no longer the only person she talks to at all, but I’m still the one she trusts most.

Practically speaking, I am almost certainly her only option for somewhere else to live, and I’m not sure there’s much to be done about that. Emotionally speaking, I am the only one she’s fully willing to lean on–and I feel like that part is not quite so inevitable, and also not spectacularly healthy, but I don’t know how to fix it without being really devastating to her.

Again, I love and like my mom so, so much, and I’m willing to knuckle down and do the right thing even if it’s costly to me–but I also don’t want to be shouldering burdens that I shouldn’t be taking on.

Any advice/scripts are greatly appreciated.

Signed,
Boundary-Challenged Adult Daughter

Read More