I have been a vegetarian for about five years and I am
considering becoming a vegan. The only problem is
that I really love cheese. Can you recommend some
alternatives for me? Even if I don’t become a full
vegan, I would like to have some more healthy recipes.

Thanks,
Lacto Ovo

So, there’s this girl. Let’s call her “Laura.” She’s attracted to me, we’ve become close friends over the course of a month, we connect on many levels, she’s even said that she considers me “the girl of [her] dreams.” Sounds great, huh? Yeah, except for a small problem. The guy.
We’ll call him “Leo.” The three of us all met on the same day about a month ago. By the end of that first day, he was discussing marriage. Within four days he was referring to her as “his Laura.” Within a week, he wanted her to meet his parents. Within three weeks he was telling me that he couldn’t picture a future without her. He’s in his early-to-mid-twenties, but I’m honestly not certain of his exact age. She’ll be 26 in a few days. Laura considers herself a lesbian and was surprised to find herself falling in love with him. And me. At the same time. She chose him, ultimately.

My problem with this (beyond the obvious) is that Leo gives me really, really bad vibes. I honestly don’t think it’s all jealousy-based, since I’ve felt them since I met him. They’ve gotten steadily stronger. For example, the speed he’s advancing their relationship at in his mind seems a little strange. For another, when he discovered that Laura and I had feelings for each other, he immediately began discussing some other chick he had made out with the day he met Laura.

I’ll pause here to say that Laura is wonderful, but one of her bigger weak points is that she is an extremely jealous person. He knows this. And it just seemed too perfect to me, timing-wise, to be coincidence. Despite still claiming to be in love with Laura, he attempted a relationship with the other girl that only lasted a few days before they realized it wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, Laura panicked and pretty much begged his forgiveness. Which was pretty much was the reaction we both expected from her. Laura came to visit me this past weekend. Leo was not pleased and demanded that she not go unless she would say beforehand that she was “his.” Of course, when he realized she was going regardless and if he said it was me or him, it’d be me because of the ridiculousness of the ultimatum, he let it drop. She had firmly told Leo not to call her, but upon checking her voicemail, she found that he had. His message was something like, “I keep picturing you with her and it’s killing me.”

Not long after, we got pretty physical, “going farther” with each other than either of us had ever gone with anyone (this was after she’d officially informed me that she was going to go with Leo…it was an emotional thing, and nothing that either of us regrets) and she felt the need to call him to ‘fess up. He was surprisingly cool with it. But he kept insisting for her to say that she was “his.” Which drives me nuts, simply because I keep waiting for someone to finish the sentence. She’s his what? His WHAT?! But I’m digressing here.

Laura loathes possessiveness in relationships (or so she’s told me). She’s said many times that “guys are just like that,” regarding his desperation for verbal expression of commitment (which she isn’t making anytime soon, for her own reasons), his runaway fantasy life involving their marriage and babies, and his manipulative mentions of getting involved with other women when she mentioned wanting to explore a relationship with me (she swears he wasn’t doing it on purpose). This has never been the case in my experiences with men, personal or vicarious. And frankly I find it all a little creepy. There are other things, too, but hard to express in writing. I hate to say it (especially more than once), but I really do just get bad vibes from this guy.

The day after Laura left, we got into a fight. I was pretty mean, but given certain details of the situation, I didn’t really say anything uncalled for. Nonetheless, I felt horrible and emailed her an apology. Leo, meanwhile, took it upon himself to IM me and berate me because she “doesn’t deserve” to be treated badly. The fight had nothing to do with him. I really resented his taking it upon himself to butt in. We’re basically not speaking now. Laura, meanwhile, holds no hard feelings.

Am I hurt? Sure. Do I wish the outcome of the entire situation had been different? You bet. Is this driving my negative feelings towards him? No. At least, I don’t think so. Am I making too much of this? I love Laura fiercely (despite having known her only a month) — we both screwed up some things in handling the situation, but regardless, I still consider her a soul mate and one of my closest friends — and I know that she has never been “okay” with her sexuality. I fear that she will take treatment she normally wouldn’t put up with to be with a guy. She’s got issues from her past that also make me worry that she’d be drawn to a controlling and ultimately abusive man.

But then I worry that my concerns for her — and my own envy towards him — are amplifying my original issue of “bad vibes” and blowing them out of proportion. She doesn’t like these behaviors of his, either, but she just says “that’s just how guys are,” “he’s had his heart broken in the past,” or “I love him,” and leaves it at that.

I know I can’t break them up or force her to see things from my perspective. I guess I just want to know if you think I’m overreacting. What I’ve discussed above makes me feel majorly uncomfortable, but for all I know, this really isn’t abnormal behavior.

Thanks,
Thoroughly Confused By Her Own Thoughts

I have had a pretty crappy year. There have been work issues, my mother has been ill, and I had to break up with my boyfriend of eight years, because of his cheating. It was pretty grim, and to be honest I am still very sad about it, but I’ve got past the teary stage and we are even actually managing a friendship of sorts.

Around the same time I also “broke up with” my oldest friend Jo. Well, the person among my group of friends that I have known the longest, but we haven’t really been close for a long time. Over the dozen years I have known her it’s gone up and down — at one time she literally stopped speaking to me for a couple years, with no explanation, only for me to find out later that she had slept with an ex of mine (after we broke up, so I wasn’t bothered about it) and felt so uncomfortable she wanted to avoid me. However, she apologised and as we had mutual friends — including my fantastic best friend, who I actually know through Jo –- it was fine, we became quite chummy again.

Jo had a rotten upbringing, including abuse and alcoholic parents, and I do admire her for overcoming them as much as she has. Over the last few years, she has had major crises: her parents ended up in hospital because of their drinking, one died some time later (the other is now much better) and the guy she was living with dumped her out of the blue, leaving her broken-hearted. I tried really hard to be a good friend to her during this; I was the first person she told about the dumping, offered to let her stay with me, had her over for Christmas day with my family as she had nowhere else to go, lent her money (temporarily), listened for what seems like months and months as she agonised over the guy, to the point of often having to leave places when he’d show up there et cetera.

However, she eventually recovered and moved on. She ended up moving in with my best friend’s sister and getting more into the trendy crowd that she moves with. Over the first half of last year, I began to feel that Jo was kind of ignoring me whenever we were around these mutual friends. It seemed like we didn’t have much to say to each other now that her problems were more under control and I have to admit that I was fine with that, really, as I was realising that we don’t have that much in common. Too often any conversations we did have were pretty shallow — like, I once said that I liked John Cusack, so she’d go on and on about him all the time.

But like I say, that was fine, except that I quite often felt excluded from things by her. The worst time was when she, Best Friend, BF’s sister, and I were hanging out at a music festival. BF had to keep running off because she had work to do, I don’t know her sister all that well, and Jo made no effort to involve me in their conversation. I felt like she didn’t say a word directly to me all day and by the end of it, I was pretty annoyed.

I also began feeling very resentful that Jo was not being a great friend to me as I went through the split with my boyfriend. I admit that I’m not very good at asking friends for help or spilling my guts about my feelings, and in fact I didn’t actually need anything from them except that they would call me and go out with me and generally help cheer me up -– I didn’t want to talk it over at length or anything. I felt like Jo made no effort to do that and in fact was avoiding me. All my other friends were great, though, and I basically came to the conclusion that Jo and I had dwindled into being polite acquaintances, which was fine.

Or it would have been, except I kind of stuffed it up. I had to meet BF to discuss a work-related matter one evening that she was meeting Jo (along with some random friend of Jo’s that she didn’t introduce me to). I was tired and just wanted to get the work thing done, then leave them all to it, and I must admit I made no particular effort to be friendly, just directing my attention to BF in a bid to get our stuff out of the way. Well, Jo actually left just before I was about to and it seemed okay at the time. But the next day she sent me an upsetting email of staggering vitriol, basically saying that I had acted extremely childishly, and while “it is not a problem you joining us on a social occasion,” I had been very rude.

At this, I just thought: fuck it. I don’t want to know this person. I daresay I was a bit rude, but given the support and friendship in the past, I felt her reply was really uncalled for. I fought back my impulse to send an equally nasty reply and have never spoken to her since. And really, there was no real friendship there to miss.

So now we’re getting to my actual problem, which is our mutual friends. I was extremely concerned not to involve BF in it and didn’t want to make things more uncomfortable, so I have avoided discussing Jo with her or other friends. Jo, as I would have guessed, has been bitching about me, but that’s not so bad because I trust the others not to listen to anything unfair. They seem to see the whole thing as a misunderstanding, which I’m not sure if it was really. BF still sees Jo regularly and has to schedule things so that she sees us at different times. I feel bad and embarrassed that she has to do this.

In the past, I’ve been the one to sort these things out and keep the doors open. This time I didn’t feel like doing it, partly because I had so much awful stuff of my own to deal with. But now I feel maybe I should just suck it up and make some sort of peace with her. We’re never going to be friends again, but should I force myself to approach her and restore civil relations for the sake of my other friends? But part of me thinks: why the hell should I? Why can’t Jo do it for a change? Waaah. This is really bugging me, so I’d be glad of your advice — thanks.

Getting Fed Up Being The Mature One

So, here we go with another icky sticky romance situation. About two years ago, my boyfriend and I moved in together in a new city, I transferred job locations…et cetera…my new boss and I clicked very well, everyone in the office got along, things were great. Boss got married to his long-time girlfriend, and about two or three months later, you guessed it, we hooked up (more than a few times). Long story short, we agreed that it was wrong, didn’t want to affect our working relationship, friendship, blah blah blah.

We remained friends, even when we weren’t working together anymore, we continued to meet for drinks after work, lunches, completely innocent. However, he still continued to make sexual comments, want to spend out of town weekends together, clearly stating that he doesn’t want it to be “just friends.” Meanwhile, I find out that another coworker (also my friend) and Boss hooked up shortly after Boss and I had our “agreement” to not see each other. Okay, obviously he’s not happy in his current relationship, that’s his way of dealing. It kind of hurt, but I have no reason to be upset.

Now I find out that he tried to hook up with yet another coworker (and another, much closer, friend of mine); thank God she is smarter than us other fools and she told him no. So now he still calls, still wants to go out of town together, still makes comments that I’m uncomfortable with. At this point, I (and my friend) am disgusted with him. Normally I’m the type of person to just lay it all out on the line and tell him to bug off. No games. But my friend told me about her and Boss in confidence so that I would not in turn say anything to Boss that I know (I know, how middle school).

I really don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore, but I don’t know how to say what I feel without letting him know that I know about him and my friend. Really he has no idea why I’m brushing him off, so I’ve been giving him the old cold shoulder, and “I’m so busy” excuses. I hate those games, but I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and don’t know of another way to handle it.

Thanks for your help,
Frustrated

Okay, I have thought about writing to the Vine about a lot of things…and although this is by no means a life or death situation, it is a problem where I can’t think of any solutions, so I would greatly appreciate your opinion.

I am currently in Grade 11, attending high school, so this may sound petty, but I swear I’m not a bitch…

So, there’s this girl, “Tessa,” and she is what I can only describe as incredibly annoying. One of my closest friends starting talking to her last year because they had a class together, and they have a class together this year as well, but they were never really friends.

Starting about a month ago, Tessa “ditched” her other friends and started eating lunch with us, and she is pretty much following us around. The first couple times she hung out with us it was okay…but after a while I suppose her true colours shone through and she is becoming increasingly irritating. She’s loud, and rude, and she insults people (that we like) that she doesn’t even know. She constantly complains about nothing, and about stuff that we don’t care about. She always talks about herself nonstop and is always attaching herself to our conversations, et cetera.

Now, the thing is, she is not my friend. I don’t hate her, she seems nice enough when she isn’t around me, we just don’t want to be her friend. I hope this isn’t sounding totally bitchy, it’s just I don’t find her interesting or funny or smart enough to be friends with. She is just abrasive to the nth degree.

Our problem is how to get rid of her without hurting her feelings. I know that we should just say something, but that’s basically impossible. We have avoided her on a couple occasions, but we can’t do that forever because it means that we cannot hang out with our other friends (she knows where our lockers are and where we eat lunch). So I was wondering if you had any suggestions on how to get her to leave us alone…

Thanks so much,
Feels like a bitch