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Mental Health

#1147: “My lover wants me to keep our relationship secret from his ex and kids.”

By
September 26, 2018
boundaries, BREAKING UP, cheating, Darth Vader Boyfriend, Disability, Families, how to say no, manipulation, marriage, Mental Health, Reader Questions, saying no
467 Comments

Hello!

I’m sorry, this is complicated. I am in my late thirties and have fallen in love for the first time in my life. We have been in love for a year. I believe he is the love of my life, which I have never believed about anybody, and he believes that I am his. He still lives with his ex-wife and their three children. This made me hesitant at first, but we have been so open, honest and intimate that I trust him.

His ex-wife suffers from depression which renders her unable to work, unable to care for the children, and unable to take care of household tasks. They have been living together, divorced, with him taking care of her and the children for several years. He does not like this, but believes it is best for the children. I am happy to live separately and I don’t want kids of my own, and I trust him, so I am fine with that situation.

However, his ex-wife is hoping that he will eventually come back to her. When we fell in love, he asked me to keep our relationship secret for a while, wanting to wait for when she was on an uptick so that he could break the news to her that he is seeing someone. He is also wary because one of the kids has explicitly said that he does not want his parents to date anyone else (although he hasn’t said that in the past year). So I agreed to keep us secret until the right time.

The other day, he came to me absolutely shaking, like he had just walked away from a plane crash or something. He told me that he tried to take up with his ex that he would like to start dating other people. His ex had a complete breakdown and told him that if he dates anyone else, she will move out and have the kids every other week. He couldn’t let that happen, partly because he can’t bear to be without his kids so often and partly because she won’t care for them when it is her turn. He was also panicking too much from her breakdown. So he promised her that he would not date anybody else.

Now he is asking me to keep our relationship secret for 10ish years, until the kids are grown. He feels extremely guilty for asking me this, and says he understands perfectly if I don’t agree to it, but he seems to think it’s the best option for the situation. I don’t think it’s good for the kids for a parent to keep such a huge secret from them, but that’s not my call to make. I also think this is preventing his ex from moving on with her life and her love life, but that’s also not my call to make. Having a secret relationship for 10ish years sounds horrible for both of us, and of course there is the risk we will be caught. I think his solution is terrible, but I don’t have a better suggestion. Does anyone have a better idea?

Sincerely,
A person with a she pronoun

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#1146: “I panicked about the hurricane and my friend, the bride who was getting married, is done with me.”

By
September 20, 2018
bygones, Friendship, Mental Health, Reader Questions, self-care
231 Comments

Dear Captain Awkward:

My friend’s wedding was the weekend of Hurricane Florence. I considered her one of my closest friends until she got engaged and like a bad cliche stopped communicating with her only single friend.

I didn’t take the hurricane seriously at first but everyone I spoke to freaked out when I said I was still attending the wedding. I agonized over it and talked it out over and over with my family this week. I had been on the road for work for 3 weeks and was not at 100%. I learned that the friend I was meant to travel with to the destination was canceling due to the weather. I panicked and canceled my flights and hotel that night too. I couldn’t sleep as I was distraught at having to call her to cancel in the morning only to find in the news that the situation was nowhere near as bad in her area as I had thought. When I rushed to try to get another ticket, the fares were astronomical and I couldn’t afford it. I waited until a decent hour and then called the bride to tell her I couldn’t come and apologize. She hung up on me. Within seconds I was getting angry texts. She told me not to bother her again unless it was to say I was coming. She said a lot more but essentially she was done and finished with me.

I’ve been crying randomly all day. Those texts are like a sore tooth I can’t stop messing with. I keep going over in my head, wanting to not mess it up this time or imagining how I could apologize if she’d just give me a chance or rip into her so she’d be hurt too. I have problems with anxiety, self-harm and was already in a bit of depressive funk from being so isolated with work. I just don’t know what to do and am worried that if I tell anyone what happened that they’ll think badly of me too. Before those texts, I thought I would send flowers or a letter to her but I’m guessing those would go in the trash now. What do I do to fix this?

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Short Answer Friday – 8/31

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August 31, 2018
boundaries, Families, family, Friendship, invitations, Live Chat, marriage, Mental Health, Overthinking It, Patreon, Pep talks for the creatively blocked, racism, Reader Questions, rejection, saying no, Short Answer Friday, Social Interactions, The Book of the Face, Work, writing
221 Comments

Good morning! We’re doing the thing today!

To ask a question, patrons can post to this thread and anyone can reach me on Twitter (@CAwkward, #AwkwardFriday). Submissions close at noon Chicago time, at which point I’ll answer as many as I can between then and 1pm.

Comments are open! So many great questions! Thanks everyone.

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Short Answer Friday/Chat – August 3 – Pledge Drive Concludes

By
August 3, 2018
boundaries, COMMUNICATION, creeps, crushes, Families, family, Feminism, Friendship, how to say no, Live Chat, love, Manners, Mental Health, neighbors, Overthinking It, Parents, pledge drive, saying no, Short Answer Friday, Social Media
256 Comments

Hello, it’s on!

Patrons can submit questions here (advantage: 1st dibs, more words). Anyone/Everyone can submit on Twitter (@CAwkward, #awkwardfriday), questions close at noon Chicago time, I answer as many as I can and update as I go between noon and 1pm. Whatever I don’t have time for gets held over for next week. Comments open once everything is posted.

This is also the last day (for a while, at least) that I remind folks about supporting the site. You can become a patron or send a donation anytime, of course, but these biannual reminder drives really help me be able to plan out nice things! One of these nice things: I’m officially hiring a graphic designer and a proofreader/formatter to put the finishing touches on an e-book of previously-published columns called #ThisF-ing Guy (And How To Avoid Him), so I can make it available before the end of the year. Thank you so much for all the support so far. This site is a labor of love, but it is labor, and it feels so great to be able to say “I run a fan-supported advice website.”

Cue the jazz flute which, I confess I started out including as a humorous homage to the NPR and WGBH-Boston pledge drives of my youth and my middle-school bad flute playing, but then I ended up listening to a crapload of jazz flute on YouTube this week, and now I’m like “JAZZ FLUTE IS AWESOME, MOAR JAZZ FLUTE PLEASE.” Proving that irony will lose out to sincerity every damn time.

Let’s begin: Talking to the neighbors about misbehaving kids, KITTENS, ADHD and learning to take compliments, bickering family/feeling bad about interacting with family, crushes (it’s okay to just ignore them!), when do you know if couples’ counseling is working, how to therapy, when to say ‘I love you’, drop-in houseguests, parents who want you to be their therapist, compliments that aren’t compliments.

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Rule Explainer: Why We Don’t Diagnose People Through The Internet

By
July 19, 2018
Abuse, big discussions, Culture, Disability, emotional abuse, Essays, ethics, Families, Mental Health, Overthinking It

There’s a really interesting conversation about narcissism that popped up in a comment thread yesterday that made me think harder about the “Don’t offer diagnoses for people based on letters or internet comments” rule we have here and I’d like to expand on it.

At length.

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#1124: “My girlfriend wants to move in and I am having major cold feet. How do I tell her?”

By
July 12, 2018
boundaries, Dating, ethics, Mental Health, Money, Reader Questions, Relationships, saying no
179 Comments

Is it me or is this cover of It Ain’t Me, Babe by Kesha the soundtrack for lots of the posts this week?

Now, a letter:

Dear Captain,

A friend that I’ve had for more than a decade recently said she wanted us to start dating. It’s not the first time we’ve done this – we dated at the beginning of knowing each other, and ended up splitting up because I wasn’t quite adventurous enough for her tastes, at the time. I didn’t hold a grudge, and we’ve stayed friends since.

I’ve known this person for a while, and I know that her life is not easy – she suffers from depression, and her life with her family has never been comfortable. She is convinced the family, and the fact that she’s had to move back in with them so often when things go wrong in her life, is the root cause of her depression – that her life would be better if she should just move out and away and stay in a constant environment. I have my doubts about this, but throughout our friendship, I’ve left open the option of her crashing wherever I was staying at the time, if she needed to get away from her family for a little while (because really, they ARE bunch of relentlessly negative humans, and while I don’t believe that they’re the cause of her depression, I definitely don’t think they help it.) She’s taken me up on the option a few times, for a weekend or a few days here or there… never longer than a week.

Since we started dating a few months ago, she’s become more and more strident about wanting to move in together (she’s been stuck living with her family for a year or so, since her last roommate/apartment situation didn’t work out), and start a family. As she puts it, if she doesn’t get out of there and get started on meeting her life goals, she’ll end up hospitalized. I’ve been… non-committal (not the best behavior, I know), saying I wouldn’t want to consider anything for at least a few months. That seems to have been taken as saying we would in a few months, and I now am getting forwarded house and apartment listings every few days.

To make all of this more complex, I have some personal history that makes me worried I’m reading more into the comments than is actually intended. My next relationship, after the first time we dated, was… not a particularly healthy one, and it ended horribly, with the other party in it sabotaging our (multiple) methods of birth control, in an attempt to get deliberately pregnant. Her theory was that when that happened, I would have had to marry her, and she could be assured of having a family at her funeral (she had a terminal illness). When I found out what had been happening and why (by having the first pregnancy test thrown to me with a ‘now you can’t leave me’ speech), that relationship did not end so amicably. It led to me having some huge trust issues around sex and dating – I’ve spent most of the last decade not being able to have romantic relationship with others, because of those issues.

The Once-And-Again Girlfriend doesn’t know about my issues. In the last decade, I’ve told a grand total of four people about what happened. Do I need to say something to her about how the comments are setting off my anxiety? How do I do that when I’ve known for a decade that I don’t want to go into the history of it, and her old opinions on the nightmare GF, and all of that with her?

Signed

-Uncomfortable With All The Buzzing

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