It Came From The Search Terms: Fall Into November

173 thoughts on “It Came From The Search Terms: Fall Into November”

1. As always – spot on answers!!! 🙂 The Thanksgiving one really resonates for me. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving because for the last 10 years my husband has had to work on the day and my kids and I have had no interest in spending the day with relatives we really don’t care all that much for without him. We’re a house full of lazy chefs and picky eaters and the thought of preparing a meal that big for ourselves seems like overkill so we just don’t do the big Thanksgiving celebration. People act as if I’ve somehow ruined *their* holiday celebrations but not having my own. What the hell is that about? Make the turkey, have the stuffing, relish the time spent with loved ones if it makes you happy …we just don’t do it that way. We know our way is non-traditional, but after so many years of it, we like waking up late and then heading to a local restaurant for a meal before husband has to head to his shift and the kids and I head home to watch movies and have snack food. In fact, this year is the first year in a decade where my husband doesn’t have to work. We’re still not making a meal, but we are mixing it up by going to the movies to see the new Fantastic Beasts movie.

   1. That sounds like a great way to celebrate! The first year Mr. Awkward and I lived together we celebrated Twin Peaksmas: Watching Twin Peaks from the beginning & eating food that is mentioned/shown in Twin Peaks. It is a cherished memory.

   2. I’m not a holiday person in general, and I get the same weird push-back from people if I tell them I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas. I’ve done literally nothing to affect your holiday plans! I’m sorry you have weird feels that other people don’t have the same feelings around this time that you do, but please stop making your feels my problem!

      Christmas is exceptionally fraught, apparently. I’m surrounded by people that would love to start celebrating in September, and honestly, I hate the pervasiveness of it all. The day has no meaning for me, and I would honestly like to forget the whole thing, but I’m still required to participate by family. We have our get-together in January because they want to be sure I can attend (I live far away), but still insist it’s Christmas. I go along because it’s less stressful than pushing back, even if I want no part of the holiday.

      I just enjoy having the time off work.

   3. I hate the way so many people get bent out of shape when they hear someone doesn’t celebrate holidays the way the culture says we are supposed to. That is the source of most of my holiday stress each year. I don’t have a partner or much family, and most of my experiences with accepting invites to other people’s celebrations were awkward and uncomfortable. I either go to a restaurant or buy some fancy food to eat at home and then go to the movies. It works for me. The expressions of awkward pity do not.

      1. It is very odd. I think it’s sort of like, misplaced empathy? Like someone thinks, “Oh, if I couldn’t celebrate with my family, I’d be so sad! Anon Goodnight can’t celebrate with their family, so they must also be sad. If I were sad I’d want sympathy or an invitation, so I’ll give them that.”

         I mean, the golden rule is great, but it’s gotta be trumped by listening to a person and believing them when they say what they feel and what they want.

         This is my first year skipping family Thanksgiving, not because I dislike my family at all, but because I volunteered to cover a shift at the crisis hotline that day. Nobody else wanted to cover, and I don’t mind missing the celebration because the family members I like I see all the time anyway. I’m already getting vibes like, “That’s such a noble sacrifice!” and I’m like, uh, actually I don’t like huge parties and I enjoy the company of my crisis line friends, so, y’know. It’s actually a bit of a relief to dodge the event, but I won’t tell them that.

         1. That’s very charitable.

            I think a lot of people just really instinctively hate to see anyone deviate from social scripts, whether it’s how to celebrate holidays or major life path things (like, get heteromarried and have babies), because THEY followed the script even though it sucks at least some of the time and how DARE you be happy outside the script!!!

            1. True, that definitely also happens.

         2. I do not get along with most of my family of origin so when I was younger and working in restaurants I’d always volunteer to cover Thanksgiving and Christmas. The tips were GREAT and my coworkers were so grateful. Win-win-win!

         3. You’re describing the Platinum Rule: Do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them. The Golden Rule (as institutionalized by our culture) is egocentric; the Platinum Rule is other-centric.

            1. Interesting, because the way *I* learned the Golden Rule as a kid essentially was exactly how you describe the Platinum Rule.
               What I would like others to “do unto me” is to treat me with kindness, respect my wishes, and listen to what I am saying, so that is how I “do unto others” as well. That is exactly how it was taught to me as a child, by my non-religious, Depression era parents (and extended family as well.)

               To read it as “treating others in the exact, specific manner as you would like to be treated in the exact, specific circumstances” seems to me not just to be an incredibly bizarre reading of what the saying is supposed to mean, but a rather immature or juvenile interpretation as well. Is this *really* how it’s come to be seen in the wider US cultural milieu? If so, is this a newer interpretation than when I would have learned it (I’m 51, was a kid in the 70s), or something that arose from a religious point of view? Because I just don’t get it at all, and only quite recently have ever heard of it being interpreted as *anything* BUT other-centric.

         4. I used to love when I had a job that *required* me to work on major holidays- built in excuse to get out of things that I don’t actually celebrate!

   4. When I was in elementary school we’d always call my father’s parents on Thanksgiving and Christmas, as they lived several (western) states away. One year my grandmother accused my mother of “ruining Christmas” when she confessed that we were having Breakfast for Dinner (pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc.) rather than a traditional big meal.

      Both of my parents are great cooks, but I think my mom had been sick that year and neither of them felt like dealing with the hassle. Also Breakfast for Dinner was an amazing treat and us kids were thrilled!

      I remember my grandmother being similarly indignant the year she called on Thanksgiving and we were having steak.

      My grandmother was a very traditional, middle class forties/fifties housewife, my hippie mother never did manage to meet her expectations of what a daughter-in-law should be.

      1. Breakfast for Dinner is AWESOME and wonderful and perfect for Christmas! When somebody’s rigid on HOW THINGS MUST BE they miss out on all the fun swerves and delightful meals in life.

         1. Breakfast for Dinner happens at least weekly in my house. Bacon, eggs, fruit, maybe pancakes if we’re feeling fancy. What could be better?
            Also, Leftovers for Breakfast is very typical of my morning. I’d rather have reheated lasagna than a bowl of cereal any day!

         2. My sister and I did this one year – neither of us could be with the extended family but were able to eat together, so we did French toast casserole and everything was great. I am SO HERE for deciding what works for you, and also SO HERE to tell people where to shove it with their ideas of what works for me. (*mentally prepares self to have this kind of conversation with my grandma when she comes up with yet another Life Plan for me at Thanksgiving*)

      2. Okay, you can ruin Christmas with too much consumerism, or with too little gratitude, or with not giving me that Barbie Dreamhouse I counted on, but you cannot ruin Christmas with pancakes.

   5. I still remember the Thanksgiving when were at the beach and ordered in a ham pizza for dinner. The sea was too cold to swim, and the meal was decidedly nontraditional – and it was fun! We were together, we could walk along the seashore (which we like more than swimming anyway), there were other fun things to do, and we had each other. I usually enjoy a more traditional Thanksgiving, but nontraditional can be great too!

   6. When I was in elementary school we’d always call my father’s parents on Thanksgiving and Christmas as they lived several (western) states away. One year my grandmother accused my mother of “ruining Christmas” when she confessed that we were having Breakfast for Dinner (pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc.) rather than a traditional big meal.

      Both of my parents are great cooks, but I think my mom had been sick that year and neither of them felt like dealing with the hassle. Also Breakfast for Dinner was an amazing treat and us kids were thrilled!

      I remember my grandmother being similarly indignant the year she called on Thanksgiving and we were having steak.

      My grandmother was a very traditional, middle class forties/fifties housewife, my hippie mother never did manage to meet her expectations of what a daughter-in-law should be.

   7. I still remember my grad school Thanksgiving. I was also working retail. I finally had a day off. I sat on the floor eating Chinese take out, playomg compiter games, and wearing pajamas. I didn’t see another person all day. It was wonderful.

      1. My sister and I will go to our favorite Chinese restaurant on Thanksgiving.

      2. Right after grad school, half of my coworkers and I had to work the day after Christmas so we had to stay in town. Thanksgiving doesn’t matter to me but Christmas is a “Nobody should have to be alone if they don’t want to be alone” holiday for me because I hate being alone for it. So I had an open house party, let everybody know it would be happening, and left it at that. People who wanted to came, people who didn’t want to didn’t, and everybody got to do what worked for them. It’s honestly one of my most treasured Christmas memories.

   8. I mean, heck, I did a traditional T-Day meal once just for me and my boyfriend and my brother, and people were STILL weird about it. “Oh, that sounds so lonely!”

      …No? Are you kidding me? I only had to cook for three people! Large gatherings are noisy and stressful!

   9. I’ve been doing a spa day for Christmas Day and whatever time off comes with it for a number of years. I live alone, so if I want to eat scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for dinner, I can. That, with a whole wheat roll, some fruit, and a dessert makes a delightful end to a day where I did things like play with makeup/facials/bellydance/walk/mani-pedi/do dress-up. And I don’t care if it’s not traditional- for one thing, I’m Jewish pagan. For another, my mom was Christian and loved Christmas, so without her, doing something traditional just makes me miss her and feel sad. Spa days don’t trigger that.

      1. I have to admit that once my grandmother got to an age where she decided she was done with Christmas dinners, the holiday lost most of its magic for me right then and there (and not long afterwards, for reasons, I decided for Reasons that I was done seriously celebrating big holidays altogether.) My aunt, who had always done Thanksgiving and Easter, took over Christmas for awhile, and though my whole family was awesome, and my aunt as great a cook as my grandma, it just wasn’t the same and I confess I was relieved when my aunt decided she was done with big holiday dinners too.

   10. Here’s to making your own decisions about how you want to spend holidays! Last year was the first year that all of my mother’s extended family members happened to celebrate with different branches of their families, so my mother and I politely declined all invitations and had a two-person Thanksgiving by ourselves. It was THE BEST. We got to sleep in. We didn’t have to time the cooking to fit any particular schedule. We didn’t have to see a single second of football on TV—if we wanted to watch the National Dog Show, we could damn well watch the National Dog Show and have fierce arguments about whether corgis are cuter than papillions! We only cooked the dishes that WE like best! We got to do all of this in comfy PJ pants and ratty sweatshirts!! And, and, AND we didn’t have to expend a ton of emotional energy trying to have pleasant interactions with people who think it’s fine to cast votes for racist, misogynist, trans-phobic, bi-phobic, homophobic shitlords who are actively trying to destroy lives they don’t view as valuable. It was the comfiest, least-stressful Thanksgiving either of us had ever experienced. We’re doing the same thing this year.

       When people found out about our plans, we both got a lot of “Oh, you two shouldn’t have to be alone on Thanksgiving!” For the most part, we were able to successfully deflect by being very cheerful and treating our plans as a done deal, not something that could be negotiated. “Thanks so much for thinking of us! We are actually looking forward to some mother-daughter time that day, and to getting a jump on our holiday decorating/crafting after the meal.” It’s a version of the approach that’s often recommended on this site, and it worked really well with our relatives, especially the ones who try to problem-solve you out of your polite excuses. By expressing excitement about our plans, we were able to make it hard for the genuinely well-meaning folks to try to argue us out of them. When you cheerfully announce “Oh, we’re really looking forward to it!”, the pushy-but-polite people tend to back off, because it looks rude to try to argue someone out of the very thing they’ve just said they’re excited about. For less-polite people, I found that a cheerfully-delivered broken record (“This is what works for us this year, and we’re really looking forward to it!”) followed by a neutral subject change was pretty effective.

2. I really needed that link in #3, I had a similar Facebook stalker who liked everything (and often shared and commented as well) and occasionally sent me messages about random stuff even though I never responded. Don’t get me started on his use of the “waving” feature in Facebook messenger (did anyone need random people waving at them online? NO!). In fact, I’ve had a few like this, but one man was particularly bad and it was especially weird since we’d hardly even spoken in person and he was so much older than I was – the fact that he was gay, or at least told me he was gay, didn’t do much to set me at ease. I just imagined him one day showing up at my home, or at an event where I’d be, just to see me.

   The other dudes who liked everything I posted were just added to the “restricted” list and that seemed to fix the problem. The thing with this one bad stalker was that even after being put on the restricted list, he kept liking all the public activity – fun fact, sometimes when you RSVP to an event, it’s public, and your profile and cover photo changes are always public, and it got to a point where I didn’t want to change my profile picture because I knew he’d “like” it and I didn’t want him to.

   I thought maybe I could tell him to please back off a little, but I was pretty sure he’d just defend his behavior as being harmless, since he wasn’t into women, he just liked to send positive vibes and lift everyone up, he was a disabled shut-in and Facebook was his window to the world. But one day I decided it was too much and unfriended and blocked him. And then denied his requests to follow me on Instagram, and blocked him there, then he messaged me on LinkedIn apologizing for “whatever [he] did to hurt [me].” I really, REALLY hope he’s done.

   1. OMG this! Only with my former boss (don’t fb friend your boss even when she thinks you should). I think she was keeping tabs to ensure I didn’t make the company look bad by complaining unprofessionally about it but that resulted in her being the first, first! person to like and comment on ev-er-y-thing I ever posted. No.

      1. And I second guess myself, or imagine people arguing with me, when I don’t like this and wish people didn’t do it, because it’s *social media* and the whole point of posting something is for people to see, like, comment on, and share, and what are you doing on those sites if you don’t want that kind of attention . . . right? I don’t know, maybe it’s a silly millennial thing to want boundaries even when you’re online, or in public, but people keep saying that if you put yourself out in the open like that you gotta be cool with just about anything that people wanna say or do to you.

         1. gotta be cool with just about anything that people wanna say or do to you. —- Yes, the others can be cool with you blocking them. No one tells you what you need to accept.

            You don’t need to even be consistent about it. One day it’s fine, the next day it isn’t. Block, don’t block. Everyone else will be fine.

            There is definitely a difference between here’s a picture of my dog & here’s the entirety of my being, please tell me your opinions on how I do my own life. People will always try to tell you things, but you can just leave it there on the table. No one wants their Notes From A Boner.

            Waving? Ew. lol

         2. Well, that would suggest that by going outside you consent to pretty much anything a stranger could do to you and I think we agree that’s not the case.

            In other words: These people are victim blaming, the Internet is a part of the Real World so rules like “Don’t make other people uncomfortable with your laser-focus attention” are still valid online. You are not weird that way.

         3. Not just a millennial thing. I’m 60 and feel the same way.

            1. ↑ ↑ ↑

         4. The kind of attention that users would like is not necessarily the kind of attention that Zuckerburg & Co want to monetize. Using social media wisely means hacking the system as best you can so you maximize the things you want and minimize the highly profitable privacy invasion the companies want.

            Never forget, “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” Have no guilt about trying to be less product-like online!

      2. I never even friended co-workers. Your boss asking you to friend her – NO. Professional boundaries, people!

         If a future boss is really pesky and insists, make a fake Facebook account wherein you praise all things Company and let your boss think it’s the real you.

   2. My “stalker” was my family. My mother would like everything I said. She has a history of objectifying me, so even her innocuous comments bothered me: “Oh, you went to Main Street Restaurant? I see.” Another relative questioned everything I said for more information. “How did you like Main Street Restaurant?” A 3rd relative jumped to wild incorrect conclusions. “You ordered chicken soup at Main Street Restaurant. You must have been sick.” A 4th got a kick out of letting me/making me google for him. He genuinely needed to know where Main Street Restaurant was. With him, I told him to google, but he insisted that he knew about Main Street restaurant- I must be talking about something else. He was so sure that I wondered if google was doing something where he was getting different results based on his search history. Turns out that wasn’t the case and he hadn’t ever really googled.

      I also was having trouble controlling who saw what, and it drove me nuts that people liked absolutely everything without ever volunteering anything of their own. I finally broke all facebook rules and opened a 2nd facebook page. I put all my relatives on that page. I friended all my work associates on that page. I use a variant of my pretty common name. (Clarissa, Clara, Clarry + relatively common last name) I put a picture of a puppy up for a profile pic. I friended all the offenders to that page. And I NEVER post anything to that page. Well, the exception is that every holiday I wish everyone a happy. Happy New Year’s Everyone. Hope you have a great Valentine’s Day. Remember to wear green for St. Paddy’s. And that’s it. They get no other information than that. On my other page, the one they have no reason to know about, if I want to eat at Main Street Restaurant and tell 100 of my closest friends, I do just that.

      1. I had to open a 2nd one because of two IRL stalkers (including an abusive ex I haven’t spoken to since 1992 who made THREE profiles to try and friend me because I kept blocking them) but it had the added bonus that people look for me under Real Name, and I can can choose if I want those people know about the one that I actually use (or I can block or ignore or whatever) I only check it once or twice a year, and rarely does anyone come up that I actually want to speak to.

3. Reading all these answers was so helpful today, because the underlying message always boils down to Communicate Clearly. It feels particularly soothing at the moment, where I’m in a weird pickle of post-breakup feelings with a very close friend who would like to replace Ex Love in my affections. But I know that I’ve been explicitly clear about what I can/want to and cannot/do not want to offer at the moment. And this is a good reminder that I can only control communication on my side, and trust that I have given Friend the information needed to make their own decisions.

   Thank you for being awesome, Captain ❤

4. I know Q 20 isn’t literal, but I’m on the downswing of menopause right now, and this is the first fall in more than five years when my feet are actually getting cold. It’s delightful!

   1. I’m super sensitive to cold (dyspraxia/sensory disorder) but peri menopause has left me so sensitive to heat & humidity as well, that I can be freezing AND sweating like crazy at the same time. I’m SO over it, and can’t WAIT til my meno finally does just frikking PAUSE. Enough already!

5. #10: Vangie Foushee has done some wonderful research around helping families where a parent has experienced relationship violence discuss and address it through the Families for Safe Dates curriculum. It’s a series of workbooks and activities: they do cost money, but it should be possible to get them through a local domestic violence center (which often have lending libraries). You can also view the program outline here: http://www.violencepreventionworks.org/public/safe_dates.page which gives you some ideas of the topics that are important to discuss. If this is the issue, it might be a good idea to get in touch with thehotline.org and ask for referrals – this is a perfectly reasonable use of that resource.

   If the issue is more that the person googling flees relationships/fears commitment/feels that they drive partners away: well, that’s probably attachment, yeah? And the first person that a kid attaches to is their parent, so loving your kid a lot, being trustworthy and dependable for them, caring about their world, etc. is one of the best things that you can do to help your kid know that in the future, partners and other significant people in their lives should be loving and trustworthy and dependable. There are a lot of little details that are significant in the parent-child relationship, but loving your kid and being dependable and caring about their personhood is a strong foundation.

   That said, my parents (a generational trauma-fest) gave us the gift of _being in therapy themselves_ when resources allowed it, and wow did that make a huge change from my early childhood until now. (I wish the one parent who cycled out fast and never went back had continued – the parent that prioritized it even though they sometimes felt selfish for taking time and money for their own thing instead of spending it “on the family” had huge changes in their ability to cope and be warm and be emotionally available to us over the 16-odd years they went in and out of counseling.)

6. Is there a *chance* that the BDSM questioner meant to say “I have a co-worker who I see with visible injuries which I thiiiink might be from BDSM but also might be more sinister, how do I make sure they’re ok?”.

   Please say yes, because your interpretation makes me shudder.

   1. My first thought was the AAM question a few years back from someone who wanted to wear a collar at work (and before that, someone else who wanted their colleagues to refer to their partner as their master). Like, “how do I talk to my colleague about the fact they’re bringing this side of their life into work is wildly inappropriate”.

   2. I mean anything’s possible, but I doubt it? It’s not ‘how to approach a co-worker about suspicious injuries’–it specifically assumes BDSM. Being a kinky person myself, I can attest that you usually can’t tell at a glance whether a given mark is from a kink thing, from a non-kink abusive thing, from MMO sparring, etc. at a glance. It would be a really weird assumption to see some bruises and immediately jump to “This person must be kinky, how do I bring it up with them?”

      1. Yeahhh my interpretation is this person has read way too much erotica and/or fantasized about fantasy-scenarios-that-can’t-work-in-real-life but not acted on them…and decided to try and bring a fantasy to real life….lw abort abort abort

         1. That’s how I interpreted it too, approaching somebody at work sounds like the setup for a porno, not the respectful beginning of a meaningful relationship.

            And to be clear, I’m kinky myself. I’m leaving this comment just in case anybody tries to write off the Captain’s advice as “oh well she’s not kinky, she doesn’t really get it.” I am kinky, I do get it, and I’m still saying no! Do not under any circumstances “approach your coworker about BDSM.” It’s just fucking weird, don’t do it.

            If somebody from my work approached me about kink, it would creep me the fuck out even though I’m kinky myself. What doing that would tell me is that that person has no concept of professional boundaries and can’t be bothered to spend even five minutes thinking about what it would be like for me to be approached about kink at work. I do not go to work to be your fantasy, kinky or otherwise! I go to work to work, and I want to be left the hell alone so I can do my work without worrying that some creeper is going to keep hassling me in the misguided belief they can “win me over.”

            And even if said coworker isn’t directly hitting on me, I still don’t ever want to know anything at all about my coworker’s sex lives, kinky or not. Yeah, yeah, kink isn’t sexual for everybody, it’s still much too intimate to tell your coworkers about. I don’t want to know intimate details about how my coworker’s marriages are going or how their bowel movements are going either. Some things are just never appropriate at work, and your kinks are one of them.

   3. Other possible charitable interpretation: coworker wears a collar/some other low-key kinky thing to work; asker wants to, well, ask about it, but is unsure of the etiquette involved, with regards to it being explicitly kinky and not just jewelry. I do agree that it is far more likely asker is just being a creep.

      (Semi-related anecdote: I was out with my parents for lunch and when we went into the restaurant the hostess saw my collar and said, “I like your necklace,” with slight emphasis and I said, “Thanks, my girlfriend gave it to me,” with the same slight emphasis and it was like we had a whole secret conversation in code. It was fun!)

      1. I love this story.

      2. Is it normal to wear visible kink gear in places where kink would be innopropriate to bring up to most people? Is there a line you musn’t cross with what you wear and where you wear it? I ask because I would feel mortified if I asked someone about something they were wearing in public and it turned out to be sex related. I have many kinks of my own but I also have VERY strong keeping it private obsession for Reasons. (I know with your situation the hostess clearly knew what was up, so this is a new scenario I’m asing about.)

         1. It’s pretty common for a kinky person to have an “everyday” or “public” collar that just looks like a choker necklace to people who aren’t in the know, I believe that’s what Armada was referring to. I’m not a huge fan of people wearing visible kink gear in public either, but I think stealth symbols of your relationship are cute as long as they’re subtle.

         2. This actually came up in the “can I wear a collar to work” question, with some kinksters saying it’s okay as long as you have plausible deniability (eg, if your collar could be mistaken for just a regular necklace then it’s okay, even if some people twig that it could be a kink signifier), and others saying no, absolutely not, anything that even hints at BDSM is out. Personally I’m more with the first group than the second; you see vanilla people wearing heart locks and stuff out and about without it meaning anything, so I figure anything that could be worn as an innocent mistake counts.

            1. I mean, I have a necklace that’s a silver chain with essentially an o-ring hanging from it, and I bought it at JoAnn Fabrics! At that point I think that only people who are already clued-in are going to notice anything.

         3. There are lots of collars that are designed to look like a necklace, which you really wouldn’t suspect unless you’re thinking about it (which vanilla people usually aren’t). Think like those Tiffany’s necklaces and bracelets with the heart-shaped lock–they’re mainstream enough that no one would assume they’re kink gear, but just close enough that people who already have their eyes open for that kind of imagery might wonder. If Armada’s collar is this kind, the hostess probably didn’t know for sure that it was a collar until the slight emphasis got reciprocated in conversation…and she probably wouldn’t have thought to put it out there in the first place if she weren’t in the community herself.

            I’ve also known people who designated a nondescript necklace as their symbolic collar, which is even more subtle and will probably never be spotted by people who haven’t been told, even other kinksters.

            1. Agreed! Also plenty of vanilla folks do similar symbolic jewelry giving acts. I was given a heart-shaped necklace back in my young teen days and wore it every day I was overseas to help me feel connected to my loved-one. The heart made it kinda obviously romantic. I feel like we can all wear things that carry personal, deep significance and continue about our lovely lives none the wiser about what our coworker’s special necklace means if it’s none of our business.

            2. @Thanksfoarallthefish, out of nesting
               Heck, my ‘symbolic’ necklace is one I bought for myself- a large sterling silver charm of a pair of lungs on a sterling chain. I figure as an asthmatic who is subject to terrible respiratory infections that it never hurts to have an extra pair around! 😆
               I never take it off (well, it’s off right now because the clasp broke) because I have such bad ADHD that if I did I’d forget to put it back on most of the time. I do the same with rings, just leave them on all the time because otherwise I forget to put them on daily (I’ll forget to turn my phone back on if I turn it off at night, too, and I have always been absentminded in this way.)

            3. And it’s funny, because I checked that AAM letter about collars. I AM familiar not only with kink (it’s not my thing, though I used to sew for a well-known fetish wear company back in the mid 80s when I was 18-19), but I am extremely fashion and clothing oriented and familiar with goth/punk/industrial/avant-garde/haute couture/cutting edge/fetish/kinky/underground fashions of all kinds, and it would still never occur to me that someone wearing one of those plain metal eternity collars was doing so because they were in a kinky relationship, or to advertise such. If I thought about it at all, I would just think their tastes in jewelry ran to very modern, streamlined, minimalist looks rather than traditional, and nothing more. And if I did find out somehow that it symbolized a kink relationship, I wouldn’t find it any more shocking or inappropriate than people who advertise their relationship status with a wedding or engagement ring, because it is essentially no different.

         4. Honestly I think this is more down to what people are comfortable with – there’s no real line for what even counts as kink gear when you’re talking about clothes that cover the socially-expected parts of the body. Lots of fetish-wear overlaps with alternative fashion and even just ordinary fashion, like there’s no real definitive line between fetish heels and fashion heels. Obviously ballet boots are fetish gear, but black patent peep-toe pumps? On the off-chance that an item is kinky for them, you really have to rely on them to be socially aware enough to not overshare the details behind their choices in personal attire. I’m into corsetry as historical fashion, as a contemporary look, and as a kink; what kind of detail you get about the black satin waspy I wore to the party is going to depend on what kind of questions you ask and how well I know you.

         5. Thanks all for answering my question and for being kind with me! My baggage on collars in particular is pretty obvious, to the point where I probably could not read the AAM on this topic without it being triggering, so thanks also to those who summarised the discussion there.

      3. This works with Phedre’s Marque pendants too, I can attest 😀

   4. Or, I remember there was an AAM column a while back along the lines of “my coworker is into BDSM and wants everyone in the office to call her boyfriend Master at social events, how do we say no please stop telling us about this forever”.

      1. In that case the asker probably wouldn’t need to bring it up–the coworker has already brought it up for them!

      2. There was also a more recent AAM where a coworker noticed bruises the LW had gotten from BDSM … it’s possible the querent here was searching for one of those two articles and mis-remembering the deets. (“it came from the search terms” makes me paranoid about my searches! I’m usually looking for a letter I thought was somewhere in Captain Awkward but often was actually answered by someone else or just was not written the way I remembered).

      3. Yeah, I was thinking, “How do I approach my co-worker about shutting the hell up about BDSM and answering my question about the new TPS topsheet?” Because that’s usually my problem. I mean, I feel complimented that you want to share all your golden, glowy New Lifestyle Energy with me, but you proooooooooooooooooooobably didn’t ask about my gray-asexuality because it isn’t for you, and even if you did, I feel that’s my too-personal thing and I don’t like people I don’t know getting their eyeprints on my personal thing… anyway. Harrumph.

         1. Yeah I’m like 90% sure this question is “how do I get my coworker to not talk about BDSM around me” or something like that, not “how do I hit on my coworker but like for kink stuff.”

   5. One time I had bruises on my face due to dental surgery and an acquaintance asked in concern if everything was all right in my life. She didn’t assume she knew the reason, she just asked neutrally. I appreciated her asking and was happy to tell her the real reason even though I don’t usually talk about medical stuff. If someone’s mind goes to BDSM as an explanation they’d be way out of line asking about it specifically!

      1. Heh! A co-worker once asked me the same thing, referencing the bruises on my legs where I obviously had been hit many times with a long thick hard object.
         I explained that tail-as-weapon is a fact of life when you have a happy 160 lb dog.

         1. Right after I started dating my now-fiancé, I had this accident where I (legit) tripped and got all bruised up. I had one of my work friends who was deeply suspicious and made sure to check up on me. Thankfully my young man is not violent or abusive at all, but I appreciated knowing that my people had my back, just in case.

         2. Or a happy 60 lb dog, that uses the entire back half of his body to wag his tail.

         3. Thank goodness! If I saw someone with lots of bruises on their legs, I would assume a blood disorder like ITP or leukemia or domestic violence.

   6. It’s also *possible* that it’s “ran into my co-worker at a munch/party/discussion group/other undeniably kinky venue, now what?”
      In which case I recommend asking them out for coffee, assuring them that you would NEVER out them and know they would NEVER out you, and then working out whether or not you need to split up the party/discussion group scene somehow for mutual comfort.

7. As somebody who grew up with a mother who mandated handmade cards from children to parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles for birthdays, Mother’s/Father’s Day, and Christmas (store-bought cards were explicitly banned until after you had a job, if then), and gifts were to be handmade or bought with one’s own saved-up money, #8 is so utterly foreign to me. The idea of a parent giving me money specifically so that I can buy them a “gift” even as a CHILD is weird; the idea of them doing it when I’m unarguably an adult is even weirder.

   Is this a common practice (giving your kid a holiday gift budget to be spent on yourself/your spouse), and is it then common to extend that practice well past the point when most adult children would be expected to be financially independent enough to at least save $20 over the course of a year (or would be able to brainstorm a cheaper DIY gift)? Or is this family as atypical as I think they are?

   1. I’ve known people who give their kids money to buy gifts, I don’t think it’s that weird really. My family didn’t do it though.

      BUT: If the parents weren’t together, it was always framed as a “general gift budget”.
      AND: We are talking about minor children here.

      Look, I know what it’s like to be 20 and broke. Most normal parents would prefer a nice heartfelt letter, or a cheap but meaningful gift (some cozy socks cus your mum’s always complaining about the cold, for example), or handmade treats, or even an IOU for various chores (above and beyond what the kid would usually do), than some material gift that you can’t afford (or that you’ve bought just for the sake of it). Trust me.

      If you want or expect that your ex should give your adult kid money to buy you a gift, you’ll more than likely be disappointed.

      1. Yeah I think at age 20 it’s not really necessary, but I still won’t side-eye anyone who decides to do it. If you have the money and that’s what you wanna do with it, who am I to criticize?

      2. In general, if you value a certain kind of holiday gift giving practice, teach it to your kids (and make sure they have the resources to do it).

         For the person searching, I’d reiterate – don’t assume your ex will or even should handle this, be honest with your kid about budget and expectations.

   2. I remember being a broke college student. Having neither the money to buy a decent gift nor the time to knit a blanket or something. Literally running through the shopping mall to minimize the time it took away from studying for finals. Ughhhhhh. “The joy of giving”? Ha ha ha. I never want my kids to feel like that.I can’t give them more hours in their day, but I can give them money to buy gifts with.

      1. Or, I can give my kids gift ideas that cost very little (time or money). Like, a six-pack of root beer? Absolutely my speed.

         My college-kid son gave me a bottle of a fancy root beer he can get at the delis on his campus. I think that was my favorite Christmas present.

   3. My family doesn’t do this (and never did, even when we were children–the closest we got was parents buying craft supplies for us so we could make something, which feels different, and even that trailed off once we were old enough to be making a little bit via babysitting and such).

      But we also tend heavily towards the thought being the main point (much more than the actual object given). We don’t really make ‘christmas lists’ of desired gifts or anything, so there’s a lot of room for flexibility budget-wise; we can go fancy if we want, but we can also buy them a book, make their favorite cookies, do some artwork, give them an IOU for an outing together, whatever we think they’d personally enjoy. In a family where people do ask for specific things, especially if those things might be less budget-friendly, I can see how giving young adults some financial help could make the holiday less stressful and more fun for everyone.

   4. I have no idea how typical that family is, but mine is like that too. Growing up my parents would purchase gifts for grandparents, godparents, and gifts to each other from us kids. We’d still make homemade cards and would give other homemade gifts if we wanted, too. We did homemade stuff or small things we could afford for our siblings (we didn’t have allowances though, so the money either came out of birthday money or pet-sitting and babysitting money once we were in middle school).

      I’m 26 now and just get my parents what I can afford. My siblings and I will also often go in on a gift together. (I’m the oldest and my younger siblings are all 20 or older but some are still living at home/in school.) If we wanted to get our mom something we couldn’t afford ourselves my dad would absolutely chip in and we’d still say it was just from the kids. At this point it’s a combination of no gifts expected/but Christmas feels more obligatory than other holidays/kids will pay what they can/parents often pay for gifts too.

      We also would only ever ask Dad for gifts for Mom and vice versa, so I completely see where the question asker is coming from as a divorced parent.

      Also, if I “only” spent $20 on a gift for each of my siblings, parents, and partner that would still be $120 in Christmas gifts. I am able to save up that much but it’s still a lot.

      1. I set it at $25/present rather than $20, but my annual gift budget is $275 (Christmas, birthday, and parents’ days). It definitely adds up! And I’m the oldest, too, and tend to front any joint presents, which means I’m out an extra $20 at least temporarily.

   5. It seems equally weird to me too. A hand drawn card is a present. Something bought with money that was even your money? I don’t get it.

      I have heard of people doing it with kids, though, even though that wouldn be my way… Doing it with an adult though does seem to be over the top to me.

      1. ‘wasn’t even’

      2. With my parent she would never buy herself things. And like. I’m under-employed. If she wants presents, I need help to get them. And she does actually like opening presents on holidays, and also appreciates what I do for her to support her.

         1. Sounds like it works for you and makes you both happy 🙂

   6. In most families I’ve known, the other parent takes the child shopping for a gift for them to give Mum/Dad, rather than handing them money and telling them to go buy something. My own 20-year-old daughter’s father died when she was young and wasn’t around to do this, so she grew up not giving me Christmas or birthday gifts, and she still doesn’t. I expect if he were still alive, we’d have phased that practice out by now anyway, though.

      The drawback to being a single parent with a non-gift-giving child is that you almost never receive gifts at all, which is kind of a bummer even as an adult. If I happen to get a Christmas gift from a colleague ahead of the holiday, I always save it so I’ll have something to unwrap on Christmas morning–it’s not as if I can’t buy a book or an assortment of gourmet jam for myself, but as they say, it’s the thought that counts.

      1. consider signing up for something like reddit’s gift exchange?

         1. LibraryThing has a great book based Secret Santa every year, which I love doing (plus there’s the review program, which means free books all year round!)

      2. I’m sorry. Not sure if you want advice, but I’ll throw out there that, as a twenty-something person who can be clueless but definitely loves my mom, if my mom suggested a simple, straightforward way I could make her feel loved I’d do it, even if it wasn’t a tradition.

         Like it sounds like even asking for a small, $1 gift from her could be fine, since the unwrapping and thought is meaningful to you?

   7. I dunno, my parents were kinda like, ‘Here’s allowance money,’ and then, around December, ‘here’s allowance money plus Christmas money.’ Had to buy one thing for each parent, one thing for each sibling. Usually each parent told us what they wanted, and conveniently always had three ideas (and three kids, hey!) and tried to make sure we coordinated.

      It was a bit silly. My brother and I did always make gifts for each other, because we were both creative and had a bit of a competition going– usually it was, like, a story or comic with an inside joke, or sometimes a mix cd with a “secret song” where we drew all the pages for the little booklet. It was fun. The winner, just between us, was whoever made the funnier / stranger / cooler thing, and it was usually pretty clear who the winner was.

      I sometimes felt bad leaving our sister out. She was older than us and “not creative,” and we’d end up adding the money meant for each other to the money for her gift, which was usually a really nice book or tea-related thing.

      That being said, I have no idea what’s typical, and by age 20 I was definitely expected to get everyone a present. Some of my income came from my parents, and some came from my part-time job, but there was no longer, like, a present-specific allowance bonus. Or even an allowance really; my finances in college were very strange. Sort of a transition in a lot of ways.

   8. Maybe my family is atypical but it doesn’t seem that weird to me. My parents are well off and, even though I’m an adult with a job, I just barely scrape by. If I see or think up something I know my parents or brother would like I buy it myself if it’s within my budget but if not I ask my mum if she would mind sending me the money for it. There’s a substantial gap between what I can afford and what she is happy to send me and no one in my family has ever felt like it was odd.

      I can and have made presents before but a lot of handmade presents aren’t that cheap once you account for supplies. My mum has a phoenix I cross stitched for her hanging up in her bedroom but that was probably one of the most expensive gifts I’ve ever given her.

      If you don’t start from assuming giving money for presents is weird I can see how the original question might come about. Right now my mum handles all their accounts. Dad will happily agree to give me money if I ask him but chances are it’s mum who actually makes the transaction. If they divorced we’d figure it out but I could see some initial confusion and stress about it.

   9. I don’t know how common it is, but it’s how my family did it during our childhoods. We didn’t receive allowances or anything, and when we were very young, we didn’t tend to get monetary gifts at birthdays and whatnot. So when Christmas came around, Dad would take us shopping to pick out something for Mom which he would pay for, and vice versa.

      However, this did not last into our late teens. We all started working summer jobs once we were old enough, so after that, we used our own money for gifts.

   10. I come from a family that didn’t believe in allowances and didn’t want my brother or I working while we were in school.
       Generally holiday gifts to family were one or two things picked out by my parents & given as from the entire family, but if we wanted to pick out something small & individual on our own our parents would just buy it…we shopped at thrift stores and many other low budget stores (my parents grew up during the Depression) so whatever we picked would have been a very inexpensive trinket anyway.

8. I am NOT correcting your spelling because everyone has their variants and they are all valid.

   But the mental image I got from my first reading of “booty-style slippers” is gonna stay with me for some time.

   1. Me too. I’m glad I’m not alone.

   2. I came here to say something similar! My brain saw “booty style” and automatically supplied “booty shorts,” and the idea of your mom asking for and you giving her booty shorts was…amusing.

      1. Oh man I JUST got what that was (“booties”), I was totally thinking they were somehow similar to booty shorts, like these were the slippers you would wear with those, perhaps to dance around your living room. I did enjoy my mental picture though.

         1. I was picturing what part of the booty-shape your feet go in and it was … very wrong. 🍑

         2. My kid and I photograph thrift-shop offerings that we promise each other we will never, ever buy, wear, buy for each other, or cause to come into existence, and one of the things was a pair of intarsia booty shorts. Of thick knit that was immediately itchy to the hand. I’m now kicking myself for not realizing these were, in fact, socks for the booty.

9. #6 is good; this could well be a generational norm, since I tend to see this more often with people who grew up before cell phone possession was common here. If the neighbor has trouble changing behavior around coming by unannounced, you could also ask how ze prefers you to let zir know that it isn’t a good time to chat when ze comes by unannounced, so that ze won’t think you’re intending to slight zir or be rude. (Of course, if the neighbor is coming by partly because ze feels entitled to other people’s time and attention at zir preference and is bad with boundaries, the answer might be, “There isn’t a way, becasue ‘not right now’ isn’t an answer I find acceptable,” in which case you can find advice on holding that boundary in previous question responses about such situations. But I like to start out assuming good faith, so hopefully it’s an easy behavioral redirection!)

10. One thing for #18 to work on in general and in the longer term is creating a situation where her daughter can get *any* sort of medical care without *any* parental involvement. (And, en route to achieving that, work on reducing the amount of parental involvement strictly necessary.)

    Examples:

    – Would she need a ride to the doctor’s office? Could you eliminate that by finding another doctor who is closer to home or school? Could you set her up with Uber or Lyft so she can call for a ride herself and have it billed to you? (That might be an idea for life in general, so your teen has a means to get home from any situation she might find herself.)
    – Would she need parental consent to get out of school? Could you eliminate that need with a doctor who’s closer to school, or has longer office hours?

    1. THIS! I LOVE THIS COMMENT. This is so helpful and useful and SO IMPORTANT once your kids get to mid-teens, let them have a bit of autonomy over their medical treatment (where appropriate). This should go for things like the dentist/hairdresser too. Important developmental babysteps, raising independent adults, yo!

       Also please, please questioner#18, PLEASE take this opportunity to make sure your daughter is absolutely 100% clear on the fact that she and ONLY SHE gets to make choices about her reproductive rights. No man’s opinion should ever override her choices about birth control, whether he’s her dad or her partner or the freaking president. If she wants to be on birth control, she gets to choose that, and it is your duty as her parent to make sure her (really sensible) choices are upheld.

    2. Yes, maybe if OP can’t stomach connecting the daughter to birth control herself (or deliberately subverting the father’s stated position) – which would be the case in my conservative family – they can just focus on empowering daughter in medical access generally and keep out of the specifics. Many generations of Fidgets have covered their ears about what their children discuss with their doctors.

       1. Ha, that brings back a memory. Me in high school and my mom making me a doctor’s appointment for me and then telling me I was old enough now to talk to the doctor alone without a parent there.

          The doctor of course, with a teenager, asked me questions about sex and asked if I had any questions… I was sooooo not at that stage in my life and it was an embarrassing appointment, but I appreciated my parents making that space for me.

          Neither of my parents said anything explicit about that doctor’s appointment or what they thought I should or shouldn’t discuss with the doctor. And I don’t know if they even explicitly meant it to be a sexually related appointment. They just said I wasn’t a little kid anymore so I should be able to talk to the doctor alone.

          1. When I was about 18 my dad asked me if I was taking BC. I told him it was none of his business. My mom walked a fine line between minding her own business and being all up in the middle of mine. It was a weird dynamic but she somehow managed it.

             About the time I figured my son was sexually active (I was correct BTW) I dropped a bag full of condoms on his dresser one day. Later he said “Mom did you put this bag of condoms on my dresser?” “Yep.” “Oh ok.” and that was the end of it. I kept him supplied with them for the rest of his life.

             Seriously though some parents think that not getting their kid (more with female children than male children…go figure) BC will keep them from having sex. Hahaha magical thinking from someone who will sooner rather than later stop being “Mom/Dad” and start being “Nana/Pop Pop.”

             1. Or end up *never* being the Gran and Gramps they want to be, because their children will, after having “if you get pregnant, I will toss you out in the cold and you can try walking to town before you die of exposure but don’t you come back here” drummed into their heads from the age of 11 until they leave home at 17, decide to opt out of the whole thing.

                😀

          2. The last doctor visit, I left my teenager with the doctor alone for the first time. It felt like such a milestone! My baby girl is so grown up. I won’t deny, some tears were shed in the waiting room–it was sort of like the first day of kindergarten all over again. {sniffles}

    3. I think my parents sent me to the GP on my own from the time I was 14 or 15 on. Living in a big city in Germany meant that I could walk or cycle there.

       Same went for all other doctors.

       The only thing they accompanied me to was picking out glasses, as they needed to pay for those…

    4. Fully agree, and I 100% agree with the Captain. Just wanted to add this to the #18 thread.

       It’s also important to remember that BC is NOT just taken to prevent pregnancy. I’ve been on BC to help control my migraines waaaay before I became sexually active (and hey, being on the pill by the time I decided I was ready for sex was one less thing I had to worry about – my side of pregnancy prevention was taken care of). BC can also be taken to help get cramps under control, help with mood variations, clear up hormone related acne… a bunch of medical reasons! So not only could Father be attempting to deny Daughter a way to be sexually active safely (which again, assuming she’s of consenting age, is nobody’s business but her’s), he could be attempting to deny something that could actively help her medical needs.

       Hormonal birth controls does not always mean sexually active.

       1. Great point that BC is not just taken to prevent pregnancy and dad might be jeopardizing more than just reproductive choice, but I’m also 100% not countenancing so-called moral objections to taking birth control for exactly what it says on the tin. People who can get pregnant have an absolute right to make decisions about that, and if Dad’s feelings are getting in the way of “want sex/do not want babies yet or at all” it’s still just as much of a problem.

    5. Somewhat OT comment – I drive for both uber and lyft and teenagers (minors under 18) are not supposed to ride alone. In most municipalities it is actually illegal (as well as a violation of TOS) and the driver could be cited. If uber/lyft find out that your account is being used to request rides for teenagers it can be suspended. Please, for the love of god, do not recommend that teenagers take uber/lyft alone. Refusing rides from teenagers is something I have to do on an almost weekly basis (and its cousin, moms without carseats) and it sucks.

11. Folk Implosion! Love it!

12. #7: For some reason (e.g. religion, more general cultural norms, unusual possessiveness or narcissism – this is a case where I think the why might matter in terms of whether seeking to change his mind is worthwhile, whether the searcher should be on guard for other possessive behaviors, etc.) he thinks your sexuality should be about him and him only. That’s a fairly common message for people to internalize thanks to our toxic possessive norms about dating/romance/sexual partners, and it’s also a red flag for controlling behaviors. If that’s the only controlling thing he does, you might be able to explain that your relationship with your body/yourself is nobody else’s business, including his (unless YOU wish to make it someone’s business); if it’s part of a pattern, you might want to look at other info on asserting and holding boundaries and/or break up with him.

13. watch TV together, talk about the healthy and unhealthy relationship dynamics that you see. — SO MANY terrible ones that could be solved by a nice #4 ….. Did you ask what the problem was?!?! Did you use words or secret eye blinks.

14. Thing that creeps me out about #18 is that it says MY daughter not OUR daughter. If I’ve read that right it is EVEN CREEPIER. I hope you are ok, unlikely as it is you’ll ever read this.

15. No. 18: IME men (and women) who do this think that somehowwwwww if they deny their children the safety gear for [activity], those children will decide not to [activity]. At precisely the age when your brain is telling you “Yes, risks exist, but immediate benefits are more important.” (Ofc. there are also the parents who think that if they pretend really hard that [activity] doesn’t exist, at least in the lives of their children, then the children won’t independently imagine [activity] and try it out, with complete ignorance as their guide.)

    So, LW, I suggest pointing out to your husband that if all the kids are poppin’ wheelies on the back of Neckbreaker Mountain, refusing to buy your kid well-fitted safety gear will not prevent them from borrowing somebody else’s bike and poppin’ wheelies too. But definitely don’t wait for his permission. Not his body. Not his choice.

    1. This.
       Authoritarian parents think they’re teaching their children to obedient. They’re teaching their children to lie.

       1. In my observation, authoritarians assume everyone is lying anyway, regardless.

       2. I can attest to that! My mother’s picture ought to show up under any reference to “authoritarian personality”. I was firmly under her thumb until I went off to college, but after that – that is, when I actually started to have a life – I found it necessary to either lie or just not tell her things. She was fanatically Catholic (should’ve been a nun rather than anyone’s mother) and threw a major fit snd threatened to pull my tuition when I told her I wasn’t going to church anymore. (I had to explain exactly how terrifying it was to have to step into the damned confessional every week.) And then she wondered why I stopped telling her things… gosh, can’t imagine why.

          1. My mom explicitly told me to lie to her.

             She’d always emphasized what she thought parents were supposed to say: just tell me the truth. But then in my junior year of college I went away with my bf for a weekend and she’d somehow convinced herself that his parents were there and that (I guess?) they’d enforce separate sleeping arrangements?

             When I came back, she was asking me about the trip and something I said clued her in to the reality. She asked outright “Were you there ALONE with him?”

             “Yes.”

             She stopped talking to me for two days and then finally came back to me and told me, in situations like that in the future, “just like to me.”

             Shockingly, we have a really awful relationship today.

       3. Yes. Reasons are for reasonable people, and honesty is for trustworthy people. The breach of trust here is in a parent trying to refuse common and, given what pregnancy and childbirth can be, potentially life-saving medication to an adolescent who needs it. Everything the daughter does after that is responding to a breach of trust, not creating one.

          The googler can give it one more try with her husband, but if he refuses then her choices really are to:

          1) Set up a situation where she doesn’t have to KNOW-know, like taking her daughter for a “well woman” checkup and giving her money for prescriptions but not asking.

          2) Lie to the daughter’s father, encourage her daughter to lie to her father. I think that this is frankly the best solution in 99% of situations.

          My opinion: it’s better that the daughter knows that she can confide in one parent if she has bad birth control side effects, or, heck, has anything go wrong in life that isn’t perfectly in line with her dad’s image of her. Like abuse, or sexual assault, or an unplanned pregnancy, or – idk, but stranding her to deal with whatever that is by herself is an abdication of responsibility.

          Last note: if there’s a chance that her father will react super badly to finding birth control pills or condoms then this poor kid needs a method that is less detectable. No one should be put in the position of having to hide your birth control from your parents like they’re a birth-control sabotaging boyfriend, but there we are.

          1. “honesty is for trustworthy people.”

             <blink> How…obvious. And yet, so counter-intuitive.

             …or worse, have the birth-control confiscated by a controlling parent.

             1. I googled to see if there was any guidance on this and the internet is full of Quoras etc. where people are relating that every time their daughter comes home from college their husband searches her things and throws away her birth control etc.

                There are many loving families that don’t have their act together on reproductive health but I think it’s worth remembering that the balance of power between parents is weird in a lot of families.

             2. Just today, at work, I nearly did not have one of my young adult volunteers (think between 18 and 25 in age, going to college full time/saving money by living at home) because of the following sequence of events:
                After they got home last night, their dad hid their bag. This morning, their mother would not let them leave the house until their bag was found because mother thought they had mothers debit card. Standoff ensused until dad woke up and said, “Oh, I have your bag under the bed. Mother, go through it and make sure they have no condoms in there.”

                Because my volunteer otherwise presents as a fairly responsible young person, I’m pretty sure they have condoms tucked away somewhere much more difficult for dad to discover. And also, no, they did not have mother’s debit card either.

                The denial parents put themselves through is utterly astonishing.

    2. While it’s obviously absolutely fine if the girl IS having sex, I’ve also heard a great many stories about teens who were denied birth control to treat awful periods and I kinda think it’s important not to forget that aspect, especially in a teen. No one should have to, say, miss school due to cramps. She should be allowed to make the medical decisions that are right for her, no matter what the reason.

       1. High school friend of mine had awful periods — painful, long, super frequent! — and her parents denied her birth control because sex. Astoundingly cruel, honestly. I have very strong opinions in favor of teenagers owning their bodies and having resources to take care of their sexual health but I can at least UNDERSTAND that parents have feelings about their kids’ sex lives and don’t always handle those feelings well. Handling those feelings so poorly you force your kid to endure severe physical pain is another level. If the daughter asked for birth control because she wants to have sex, the husband is still wrong. But if she asked for birth control because of debilitating cramps it might be time to throw the whole husband away.

          1. I had a dermatologist recommend BC because of acne, which my mom refuse to allow me to take because of ” MY DAUGHTER IS NOT A SLUT” (<– actual words yelled at Dermatologist by mom. I was 13). BC was, in the end, the ONLY medication that controlled my horribly painful cystic acne (and I couldn't access BC until I was OUT of college because of stupid momly reasons). She also refused to allow me to take pain pills for my period cramps. She was catholic, of course.

    3. Yup. Like I said in another comment, those parents will soon start being called Grandma/Grandpa.

16. I have another possible angle on #14 because I’m fresh from reading “Why Does He Do That?”… is your bf badmouthing his ex and accusing them of mistreating him? Do you know this is absolutely true, or could your bf be misrepresenting the ex? Ask some questions, tread carefully, maybe don’t take your bf’s account as 100% truth until you’re able to get some outside verification.

17. #20: When my fiancé (50 days! oh god! what is time!) and I moved in together, we did so with a lot of initial deliberation and discussion, and one of the things I said was “If living together doesn’t work out, does that, to you, mean that we have to break up? Because ‘together but living in separate dwellings’ is TOTALLY a valid choice as far as I’m concerned, but if to you moving out means breaking up, I feel like I need to know that up front.”

18. #20 – cohabiting is high on the list of life decisions where the rule is “If in doubt, don’t.”

    It’s up there with getting married, giving copious amounts of money to person of unconfirmed reliability, parachutes, and shark diving cages.

19. Extrapolating from (but not not specifically useful to) #8: one thing I think all parents should coordinate on is how much help (financial, logistical, brainstorming) they give their kids with gifts for the other parents.

    My mother was always very proactive in helping with gifts for my father, and my father never did anything to help with gifts for my mother. (In retrospect, I suspect he might have helped if I’d asked, but as a kid I took the lack of proactive offer to mean that I wasn’t allowed to ask.)

    And for my entire childhood, I felt horrifically humiliated and guilty that my gifts for my mother weren’t anywhere near good enough. Every single gift-giving occasion I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die, which I suspect isn’t the effect my parents were going for.

    1. But in terms of practical advice for #8, one thing I’ve found useful in gift-giving relationships of financial imbalance is to make the work of shopping the gift.

       Example: “I’m looking for mindblowingly soft towels. I went to the store where I usually buy towels and they were okay, but they weren’t mindblowingly soft like my previous towels.”

       The work of finding mindblowingly soft towels is that you have to go to a bunch of stores in person and feel all the towels, which takes time and energy and I hate doing. So the other person does this as their gift to me, and the effort they’ve saved me is worth far more than the price of the towels.

       If you already have a give-your-kid-money dynamic going on, you could give them the money in advance and ask for something specific, with the understanding that their gift to you is finding the softest towels in town.

       1. That’s…really brilliant.

       2. I think *for me* as a gift giver that approach wouldn’t work well, because I’d spend a lot of time second-guessing which towels were really the softest and whether they were soft enough. But then I have a lot of anxiety around gift-giving in general, and I can see this approach working for other people. And I do agree in general that picking out a gift and/or putting in the actual effort of shopping is itself a gift.

          1. Well, you could get really silly and specific about it, and write up an Official Report: Store A: towel softness grade: deep plush A+, fabric type B, color you’ve got to be kidding. Store B:… Maybe have a notes field where you decant all your internal commentary and second-guess in silly, over-wrought language.

             At the very least, it gives the recipient of the report a good giggle, and appreciation of your effort. It might actually even help them to clarify just what they mean by The Softest Towels Evar.

20. #13, I ask myself this far more often than I’d like to. Being openly, unrepentantly queer + poly hurts my parents, and sometimes it hurts my partners, and sometimes…sometimes it hurts my children, and that’s hardest of all. (How many playdates do they not receive from parents who disapprove of my “lifestyle”? I pray I never actually find out.)

    In moments like this when I am feeling brave and certain: it does not mean I love them any less for being true to myself.

    In every other moment though… oh gods, what have I done, who do I possibly think I am for having the temerity and the selfishness to do these things to people I say I care about.

    And so maybe I’m projecting far too much. Maybe you’re asking about something with a far less complicated answer: contempt, control, and nonconsensual contact are all anathema to healthy relationships, and if you are engaging in behaviors like those, get some distance and then get professional help.

    But in case I’m not… Jedi hugs, if you want them, and a warm cup of comforting beverage of your choice.

    1. Sometimes there’s sort of a middle area too, where someone is hurting someone with something that’s genuinely harmful, like, their addiction, or their eating disorder. Unlike being queer or poly, where the hurt wouldn’t exist at all if a person /culture weren’t bigoted in the first place, and being open is the only way to evoke change.

       But with eating disorders or addiction, someone you love hurts because they empathize with you when you hurt yourself. Or because your addiction pushes you to cover it up with lying, or feed it by stealing from them.

       Sometimes the answer is, yes, it is possible to love your partner, and still hurt them. And that’s tough because it’s one of those things where love in and of itself just isn’t enough to cure a disorder or treat an addiction. Love might not last long enough to get the treatment you need even if you want it.

       And someone might distance themselves from you to protect themselves from that pain, and that could hurt you, and in this way it is possible for two people to both love each other and both hurt each other. I’ve seen this happen too often. I’m not sure what the answer is.

    2. I can’t tell you how to balance being openly yourself with what’s best for your children (and probably couldn’t even if I knew you), but modeling honesty is also something that your children will benefit from. I can tell you that I want–and am fortunate to have–partners who are positive about me being openly queer and poly. That doesn’t mean their families, or anyone’s coworkers, have had all the details–I’m okay being “this is my friend Vicki” instead of “girlfriend/partner Vicki” to someone’s colleagues I may never see again–but it would hurt me to make an effort to hide.

       Who you are is the person who has the temerity to tell the world “I love them” about your partners, and to push back against the selfishness of relatives who can’t or won’t see you even when you hand them a captioned photograph.

       (I don’t think you, or anyone, owes the world more openness than you’re comfortable with–but I do think we don’t owe it to closed-minded relatives to closet ourselves for their comfort.)

    3. To be honest, I think loving and hurting someone are entirely unrelated. You can feel neutral about someone but still treat them well, you can love someone and treat them badly, and you can love someone and treat them as best as you can, but still hurt them one way or another. I think you just have to decide whether or not you are behaving reasonable, ethically and considerately towards someone, whether or not you love them.

    4. Marginally related, this is partly why I think the “born this way” type arguments for why it’s OK to be queer aren’t enough. Who you’re attracted to isn’t a choice, but who you date is. So if the moral justification for why it’s OK to be queer/why straight people should not be assholes to queer people is “oh, they can’t help it”, then what does that say about the things you *can* help? Does that mean you should be as minimally queer as you can possibly make yourself? No. (Sending lots of love and support your way.)

21. Q6. I stopped answering the door to my old woman neighbour over a year ago after reading a few of the captain’s posts on such a topic. I don’t like her and I don’t think she is a good person (racist etc), and every time I felt I had to talk to her it ruined my whole day. I know she has plenty of people coming to her house (like care in the community type people) because I see their cars in her driveway, so apart from that, I couldn’t give a crap if she is lonely and wants to chat, because I don’t want to chat to her. Pretty much everyone on my block doesn’t answer their door to her I have found out which eliviates some of my guilt. If you live alone, you also have tons of excuses such as on the toilet, in the shower, napping, listening to music and didn’t hear the door, in another part of the unit and didn’t hear the door, meditating, cooking with stuff boiling away on the stove etc etc. my neighbour turned a bit mean afterwards and started doing things like reporting me to the council for my dogs (barking etc which were dropped), but I just rode it out and now happily ignore her.

22. 18: Your husband/her father does not own her body. He does not own her sexuality. Get her BC…even if you have to do it behind his back. Show your daughter that women need to stick together and support each other, especially in the wake of entitled, authoritarian males.

    I know he’s her father so yeah I understand the paternalism in that particular context, but she needs to understand right now, and as an on going lesson that males are not in charge of women’s’ choices. If she’s old enough to need BC, then she is old enough to not need to inform Daddy. Her body, her business, full fucking stop!

23. Because one was right after the other, I imagined 16/17 being related. “Why does my coworker keep asking if I’m OK?” “Because their kink is comforting their coworkers about their bad days!”

24. I immediately assumed #17 is neuroatypical in some way; I think every single autistic, OCD, and ADHD person has at some point been asked “Hey, are you okay?” because we forgot to perform body language, facial expression, or tone of voice. When neurotypical people have flat, affectless expressions, they’re usually pretending not to be angry/hurt/sad, so well-meaning people ask if we’re okay. If it’s being asked repeatedly, this might be why.

    My response as a kid was to rigorously train myself to emote. If I were getting those questions now, I’d say, “Yeah, my face/voice/body language just does that thing sometimes. Usually it happens when I’m distracted or intensely focused. I promise I’m fine and you don’t need to ask me that.” And if they kept asking, I’d ask whether they were concerned that I was angry at them or upset about something they did, and assure them that if I had any kind of problem with them I would bring it up directly.

    1. I, meanwhile, wondered if the co-worker was from the UK, where saying “are you all right?” is a common way of saying “how are you today?” and has no subtext of “is something wrong?” at all. It’s aThis confused me for many months when I first lived there. And then I started doing it and confused many people when I returned to Australia.

25. On #17 – is it possible that the coworker is from another country/culture? I ask because I had such a time with that with our british office at the last job. Some of them use “you alright/you ok?” the way we use “how are you?” – i.e. in a way that’s not really a question at all, just an expected pleasantry. But I went through a lot of racking my brain until someone clued me in!

    1. Yes! I came here to say the same thing. My sister (Aussie) moved to the UK and found it hard to get used to. In our culture that question implies “you do NOT look ok!” but in theirs it’s just a friendly “how’s it going?”

       1. And I should have read further down, because that was my thought too!

26. I feel like maybe #13 missed the mark. You can love someone and still have to hurt them sometimes. I mean, honestly, sometimes it hurts me when my best friend wants to hang out with other people when I want to hang out with her. But I suck it up because that’s a totally reasonable thing for her to do! I don’t think it would be right to tell her, “If you love [me], stop hurting me.” Sometimes having personal boundaries hurts other people and that’s okay.

    (Of course, if you hurt the person by, e.g., hurling slurs at them, that’s very different. But I think it’s case-specific…)

    1. Good point!

27. Q16: TW for stalking:

    ::shudder:: Reminds me of the time a (female) coworker received a gift of soft restraints. Anonymously. Through inter-office mail. With the note: “I’d love to be bound to you.”

    During the all-staff meeting, the division director’s hands were visibly shaking.

    And then there was the following week, passing male coworkers in the hallways, wondering, “Who?”

    1. Holy cow. Did they ever figure out who’d done it? What happened?

       1. Nope. All-staff meeting was the last I heard about it. Apparently the perp had the sense to go well-and-truly underground.

    2. NO. WHAT. EWWW.

    3. That makes me extremely angry. I bet the person who did this did it in such a public way to enjoy the non-consensual humiliation aspect, which adds an extra layer of ick.

    4. EEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!! I hope the creep who sent that got a short trip out the door permanently!

       1. Also, a woman could have been the sicko as well.

          1. It’s…possible? I mean, I thought about that when I replayed the incident in my head. But I just can’t even make that picture. (Which may say more about me than the, er, perp.) (Ran through the female members of the division; came up dry on likely candidates. But then—suspect pool not restricted to the division, so, shrug?)

       2. Wouldn’t even have bounced on the curb, I’m sure, had they ever figured out who it was. ::shudder::

    5. AHHHH. Wait, does the “director’s hands were visibly shaking” mean you thought it was the division director who sent them? Or the director was super angry on behalf of the coworker? Or the coworker was the division director?
       No matter what, that story is awful and gross and creepy.

       1. It only belatedly occurred to me that it was possible that the director was the sender which, omfg. But my interp at the time (and mostly still) was that he was just extremely upset (angry, wigged out, scared, freaked, not only that this had happened, but that he, in his capacity as director, had to deal with it. I mean, king nerd—HR harrassment nightmare not Zathras skill. And this was back in the very beginning of the whole cultural conversation around sexual harrassment. Maybe even before Anita Hill.).

28. #9 I’m interpreting from your query that he still has an account, but is it possible he’s no longer checking it, so sees that as “no longer on the dating app”?

29. Re 17: in many parts of the world (such as parts of the UK) “are you all right?” is equivalent to “how are you?” and the expected answer is “you all right?” back again. I know many Americans I’ve spoken to have been initially confused about this, so maybe check that this isn’t happening here. (And if it is, it’s not really okay to ask them to stop using it!)

30. “Do I really love my partner if am hurting her/him?”

    I just want to bring this up for anyone who needs to hear it: a known abusive dynamic is for the partner to be “hurt” by healthy things you’re doing for yourself, thus gradually discouraging you from any kind of self-care or independence. This can be pretty mind-twisting, so I encourage you to get some kind of outside opionion about what’s going on.

    1. This is an excellent point, Amtep

31. Nothing to say about the letters this time; I just want to say that I really enjoy the monthly music picks. I’ve listened to this one a few times over, and September Girls by the Bangles has been in my ears for the past two months as well 🙂

    1. And by letters, I mean “letters.” 😛

32. Regarding the moving in situation in #20, I see a lot of “doubt means don’t” or “if it’s not a hell yes it’s a no”, and I just wanted to point out that for some people any big change or raising of stakes will come with more panic than excitement, especially if you have anxiety. I love my partner to the ends of the earth, but we’re talking about moving in together and I’m far more scared than I am excited, purely because I can’t not think about how things could go wrong and how painful that would be. Negative forecasting is unfortunately just what my brain likes to do, and I always have to push past that and accept that I’m scared and doubtful and do the thing anyway. when I see the idea that any misgivings means I’m making the wrong choice it pisses me off because I generally feel like if you make a big step with absolutely zero fear or doubt, you haven’t thought it through properly. Living with my partner might be amazing, but it might bring out bad things in us, or change the dynamic in a way that doesn’t work, and I don’t need to obliterate any doubt from my mind before I accept those possibilities and make the leap.

    I know cap’s advice is way more nuanced than the usual stuff but I always think it bears emphasising that if I held to the idea that I had to be raring to go with zero doubts and no fear before I did anything, I’d literally never do anything. I definitely agree with the idea that having solid contingency plans in place is important, but not that all cold feet are feet that should be driving the decision.

    1. Thanks for this perspective! I’m an anxious person to (both diagnosed big A and little a) think even in this case, halting the moving process long enough to ask the kind of questions and have the kind of talks that lead to “Look, it’s just my anxiety, my decision is still a go” is valuable. Like, if someone is expressing anxiety or doubts, I want to find out what’s really going on with that, not try to sell the person who is having doubts on the plan or keep the plan intact at all costs.

       1. Totally agree 🙂 I think my little vent was aimed more at the Oprah doubt-means-don’t brigade that i sometimes see in the comments as opposed to your advice for a healthy level of caution x

    2. Thank you for writing this! I too am having a lot of anxiety about moving in with my partner and I literally can’t even come up with a convincing living together related issue – we are similar levels of cleanliness, we communicate really openly, we both like some alone time and we both have hobbies outside the house a couple of evenings a week so we should easily achieve that alone time, etc. I just have a terror of breaking up with someone I live with and the potential housing instability that would bring with it, especially given that neither of us have relatives living nearby. For now we are putting the apartment hunting on hold for a few months and I’m using the time to gather the necessary savings for deposit+furniture+’emergency move out fund’. I think the most important thing is to be able to communicate with your partner about what the cold feet are about. I mean, I also just got a new job and I went from overjoyed to worrying about whether they would honour my prebooked holiday or be upset about it within about half an hour, I’m just a worrier.

       1. I’m exactly the same. Relationships end sometimes, and plenty of people have been really certain about a thing that came crashing down soon after, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be aware of that when making BIG FUTURE PLANS. But I think the most important thing is to trust yourself to handle it if things go wrong. You can handle it, and I can handle it, and our respective partners can also handle it. Then you can make a choice based in what you want, not what you fear 🙂

33. I’d like to say thank you for #18 without going into why. Just thanks.

34. Re #2, it’s never weird to feel what you feel, including loneliness in a relationship of whatever length. In 22 years of marriage, I’ve felt intensely lonely at times. Having a partner, even for the committed long-term, doesn’t cure loneliness. It’s just something we all have to cope with at times. Which sucks, but, you know, Jedi hugs. You will find out a way out of loneliness.

35. @Fall Into November

    Wow. Instant earworm.

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