Dear Prudence is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here’s an edited transcript of this week’s chat. (R. Eric Thomas is filling in as Prudie for Jenée Desmond-Harris while she’s on parental leave.)
R. Eric Thomas: Hi everyone! I hope that this week you’re able to connect with systems, organizations, and leaders who support you, affirm you, and are active participants in fighting for the world we want to live in. What’s on your minds today?
Q. Secret Keeper: My late thirty-something sister is engaged to a guy who had his kids very young (changing diapers before he could legally drink young) and got the “snip.” He has made it crystal clear that he is done with diapers and would rather spoil his dogs. He is well-off, handsome, funny, and has a good relationship with his adult children. They like my sister. My sister thinks she can change his mind. She has been on the fence most of her adult life about kids, but keeps insisting that she would be “okay” without one (while constantly sending me inspirational emails about older women having kids and nursery decor). Now she has been confiding in me that if her fiancé “really” loves her, she should get a baby. IVF or adoption or whatever. She and her fiancé are in pre-marriage counseling, and she is lying through her teeth. They are planning the wedding for this winter. I feel I am stuck with a ticking time bomb here. If my sister wants to be a mother, and I support her a hundred percent, but I think she is deluding herself, deceiving her fiancé, and that a called-off wedding is better than an expensive divorce. Which in all candor, I have done—no one had the guts to tell me about the cheating going on in my relationship. My sister ignores me when I tell her she needs to be honest now and not “change” her mind once the ring is on her finger. Our parents are dead and extended family is far away and limited. Help.
A. It feels like the only thing left to do is to tell the fiancé, but I don’t think you ought to go that far. It may save him some strife, but it also would draw you further into a situation that just going to keep creating stress. Your sister may have a covert plan, but I don’t feel like you’re betraying her fiancé by not spilling the beans. Trust that he’s going into this with his eyes open and if she does make a switcheroo after the wedding date, he has the skills to advocate for himself. Your sister is setting herself up for failure here and, at this point, she’s got to make this mistake on her own. And, who knows, this may not be a miscalculation. Maybe the line that her fiancé has drawn in the sand isn’t as strong as it seems. I doubt it. But if she won’t listen to reason and is going into a marriage actively planning on disrupting it, this is probably not a problem you can solve.
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Q. Unsure: Nearly two decades ago, my parents got quietly divorced as an act of love. My dad had a rapidly progressing illness that was leading to snowballing medical debt on top of some other personal debt. He suggested divorcing to protect the assets for her, and with the help of a savvy lawyer and financial planner, it worked. They wrung as much as they could out of the time they had left, she cared for him until the end, and the eye-watering debt died with him.
Now, my mom is elderly and finding comfort in things from her childhood, including returning to religion. Her retirement home offers transit to her church once a week. I thought this was great, until I found out that her priest harps on “the evils of divorce” a lot, and she’s become kind of fixated on it as a sinful choice. I know even with early-stage dementia (which she has) that many people will fixate on a topic that agitates them, but I’d like her to have the solace of faith without becoming hyper-worried about confession.
I grew up non-religious, mostly because of my father, and I don’t know how to navigate the church. There are no other churches of her faith near the home, and I don’t want her to be cut off from community, but is it appropriate for me to say anything to the priest so he could talk to her privately? Would that make it worse? How can I help her through this? I occasionally attend services with her and the priest is very literal about the Bible, but I think there must be a way to navigate this.
A. It’s worth talking to the priest, sure, but if “the evils of divorce” are already frequent sermon topics, I worry he won’t be a receptive or compassionate audience despite the reasonableness of your parents’ divorce (and the non-evilness of divorce in general). It might be easier to try to shield her from his message. You write that you sometimes attend services with her, and I wonder if this is an opportunity to find a church of her faith somewhere else that you can drive her to on those Sundays. This won’t stop her from riding the bus from the retirement home but at least might provide a respite from the barrage of anti-divorce rhetoric.
Q. Darkroom Negative Wife: I am seldom photographed by my husband, but when he does take a rather awful face or ugly pose, he shares these terrible pictures of me to his grown daughter. She is not my friend, but I’ve been in her entire life as positively as I’m allowed. I try my best to be sweet and loving always. I would think he’d prefer to make positive feelings between us and not promote the negative, as his former spouse has always done. I feel betrayed and unwanted when he does this silly deed. Am I just being too sensitive? Or is he sending me a message?
A. If you don’t want your husband to share a photo—good, bad, or other—then you have the right to ask him not to. I think you should point out this habit to him and ask him to stop. He may have an excuse, but the fact that it makes you uncomfortable is enough. I can’t tell from your letter whether he knows these photos are not good and is sending them to mock you or if he’s unaware. If it’s the former, this is a bigger issue. Your husband shouldn’t be belittling you to anyone, including his daughter. If he is doing this on purpose, I encourage the two of you get some outside counseling because that’s emotionally manipulative, even abusive. In fact, you may want to talk to someone regardless. Your fear that he’s sending you a message is enough to warrant a conversation with someone who can give you both an outside perspective and help you get the answers you’re looking for.
Q. Confuse and Making It Worse: I have been with my partner for five years, married for two. In all the ways that matter we have a great relationship. My partner is loving and supportive, passionate about their work and values, and takes such good care of me. We have so much fun together and they make me laugh all the time.
However, I’ve noticed a pattern that when other parts of my life are not going as well, I seem to have thoughts about ending the relationship because of some random part. This has changed over the years—from a thought about how they dress to how they make friends to recently their gender (I’m bisexual). I’ve always known these thoughts are intrusive, and I literally can’t imagine my life without my partner.
Lately work has been pretty bad and a few other things are tripping me up, and I can’t stop thinking about the latest idea (that I would be happier if my partner was a different gender—to be clear I want to exact same person just a different gender). How do I stop these thoughts?
A. It’s possible that frustrations in other parts of your life are amplifying frustrations in your relationship that you normally ignore. And the opposite is also possible: that you’re focusing on frustrations in your relationship in an attempt to ignore other frustrations. The best way to sort it out is to talk about it, if possible with a therapist or other trained professional who can help you look at each area of your life objectively and create action plans to change the things you can. Figuring out what’s going on in your work life may relieve some stress that you’re offloading on to your relationship and help clarify what, if anything, you really want to address with your partner.
Q. Re: Secret Keeper: I think it’s time for an intervention. Your sister is not going to convince him and will wind up divorced and scrambling to conceive with no backup plan. So talk to her. Tell her what you said to us that you wish someone had done this for you. If after that you still want to inform the fiancé, let her know that you plan to do so and give her a deadline. You’re helping her to get out of a marriage she doesn’t really want to be in.
A. An intervention sounds like an escalation that’s just going to create more stress for LW, and for little possible return. The sister has been very clear about what she’s doing and why. I struggle to imagine what an intervention is going to do to shift that. Sometimes we have to let people make their own mistakes, especially if they are purposefully trying to make a mistake.
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