Am I crazy? Paranoid? I really don’t know. I need some objective input.

My husband of five years is a wonderful guy, and we have a great relationship. I know he would not cheat on me; it is simply something he would not do. Plus, I would know if he was cheating. We both work with younger people in a very artistic environment, and a couple of times he has developed personal relationships with young women who seem very dependent on him. And, I hate to say it, I think he really gets off on being this important, wise, sexy authority figure with these girls. I know that the girls end up having a crush on him; I think that in itself is a good reason to maintain a distance from them. It’s certainly what I do with the young men who develop little crushes on me.

However, my husband claims that since he doesn’t reciprocate these feelings it’s perfectly fine to have friendships with the girls. There was one girl in particular with whom he spent a tremendous amount of time at one point; he would spend hours with her and come home late. And she clearly had feelings for him. They clearly were having constant communication, but it must have always been by his cell phone or email. It was never in front of me. My instincts say that, while he did not have a sexual relationship with her, he did invest emotionally in her for a period of time. I would even venture to say that for a short while, she was more important to him than I was.

We have had exhaustive conversations on the subject; he admits to no wrongdoing. I truly don’t believe he physically cheated on me. I do, however, think that I am justified in feeling threatened by this kind of situation. I have known him for more than ten years; I cannot treat him with hero worship. I can’t be constantly filled with awe by his brilliance. I can do better than that — I can see him with all his faults and love him anyway. But I don’t know if I can handle it if he needs validation from some young pretty thing every few years. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here, but am I? Is this an unreasonable level of jealousy?

Not Used To Being Green-Eyed

My friends are so tired of me constantly talking about this, and none
of them has been able to offer any really helpful advice, and so I
turn to you.

Basically, about six months ago myself, several co-workers I have good
relationships with, and a co-worker I didn’t know very well, “James,”
went to Glamorous Romantic European City (not Paris, but not far from
it) for work. We spent two months in GREC, and we all spent a lot of
time working and socializing together. Somehow James and I began to
spend a lot of time together talking, taking in the sights and
bonding. Even when we were out with the others we were mostly focused
on each other. It became clear we had a thing going on — I got a lot of
questions and eyebrow wiggles — but we didn’t sleep together. We didn’t
kiss, even. Our contact was limited to a lot of platonic romantic
nonsense, no doubt influenced by the city: One night we slow-danced in
the street, the next he held me and we watched the sun rise. At
certain points he became distant and seemed to pull away the moment
before anything sexual might have happened. Near the end of our time
in GREC I confronted him about it, asking if he wanted to be just
friends or what, and he told me he had a “sort of” girlfriend back
home.

I was floored, though in retrospect it was pretty obvious. A few days
later I asked why he hadn’t told me, and he said it wasn’t a very
healthy or happy relationship. According to him, his girlfriend
suffers from severe depression and she’s repeatedly threatened to
commit suicide if he leaves her. He said he really liked me, but he
wasn’t going to go back home and tell her he’d met someone else
because he didn’t know what she would do.

So at this point I figured I’m not a glutton for punishment and I
thought, What Would Sars Do?, and I told him I wasn’t going to wait
for him to get his girlfriend situation straight. It sucked, but it
was what I had to do. We went home. We returned to our positions in
separate areas of the company and we didn’t see each other that often.
Every time we did we played the “you are invisible and I can’t see
you” game. Whenever I saw him I realized I wasn’t over it and I had
all these fantasies of him coming to tell me he’d broken up with his
girlfriend and happily ever after yadda yadda. Didn’t happen.

A couple weeks ago there was a company party. He was staring at me so
much that the person I was talking to (who didn’t know the situation)
pointed him out and told me to “go get him.” We did wind up talking
and I apologized for being so weird — he said he hadn’t noticed. Our
conversation was really awkward and punctuated with a lot of lingering
looks. At a certain point he left, saying he had some work to do, only
to return a half hour or so later and sit next to me. Then I turned to
say something to someone else and when I looked back, he had left.
Again. This time without saying goodbye.

Sars, I ask you: What the fuck? My gut tells me I should just gather
what’s left of my pride and get over it already — he’s either really
thoughtless or deliberately fucking with me, and either way I’m going
to get hurt. But my stupid romantic side says he really likes me,
which is why he acts so weird, and that I shouldn’t give up until we
have a chance to turn this disastrous flirtation into a disastrous
relationship. I’ve never been in a situation like this, and I’m kind
of losing it…any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Europe Does Funny Things to the Brain

About six months ago I started working at a new place and soon after met a
fellow employee, “Joey,” who had been at the office for more than a year,
working on my floor. I thought he was a nice guy, who seemed interested in
what I was saying, and had witty things to say throughout our conversations.

I introduced him to other people I knew at the office, and he soon became
integrated into my group of friends at the office, participating in happy
hours and sometimes lunches. He would often offer to drive me home (we live
near each other) and he would call me up during the weekends to invite me to
go out and hang out. I thought of him as nothing more than a friend, until
one day when I found out he was gossiping with others about a supposed crush
I had on another co-worker.

I was hurt by this and the matter was cleared
up, but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed by him. I lost my trust in him
from that moment on, and felt as if he had been using me to become friends
with “cooler” people in my group. Nevertheless, I sought his approval,
hoping that we could be good friends and that he would want to be hanging
out with me as much (or more so than) with the other people I introduced him
to, whom he seemed to prefer. I wanted to justify to myself that he still
found me as someone interesting/cool enough to be his friend. For a time,
we hung out alone with each other, going to a movie, and several times to
bars together. However, recently there’s been a period where he stopped
partaking in group activities, and it doesn’t seem he even cares whether I’m
his friend or not. Only recently have I developed a crush on him, and this
really upsets me. Any thoughts why I have a crush on him?

He doesn’t seem to care about me, and I feel that our friendship is very
one-sided. I don’t respect him as a person and there have been various
instances where he has shown himself to be a horrible, mean-spirited person.
Even so, I still want to seek out a friendship with him. I wish I could
stop caring for him and I would very much wish to end this crush I have on
him. Please tell me what I should do to deal with these feelings and with
Joey. Thank you.

Crushed on Co-worker

It has to do with my family and what being near them does to me. I’ve only
started seeing it in the past few months, but now that I am, it feels like
it’s getting worse.

I’m very overweight. I’m not unaware of it, but I put a lot of energy
into…I don’t know, deluding myself about it, I guess. It’s easier for me
to get up in the morning and leave the house if I don’t have to think about
how bad I look. It’s gotten to the point that I run away from cameras
because the sight of myself in pictures is so depressing I just want to jump
off a bridge. I know how unhealthy that is, and I am trying to work that
out. I started therapy this week, and while I don’t expect it to instantly
“fix” me, I am hoping that it will help me deal with some of the stuff
that’s gotten me here. I think there is a lot of “sheltering” involved in
my weight, stemming from a lot of trauma in the past decade or so.

Because of my low self-esteem and bad self-image, I’ve lost a lot of
entitlement. I’m always on guard for rejection or taunting, because I’ve
come to expect it. There are many things I want in my life that I don’t
feel I deserve, and so I have sort of given up hope. I’m in love with a man
but I don’t feel like I’m good enough for him so I have kept it to myself.
I want to travel, but I’m so awkward and self-conscious that I’m afraid to
hang out on the beach or go walking through the old cities. I’ve forfeited
all the things I might find joy in, basically, that I would have to put any
effort into achieving. All I have left is my job, which I really like, and
friends who don’t treat me like an aberration. And my family. My big,
loud, oblivious family.

I should say, to be clear, that I do love them very much. They are
ferociously loyal and protective and I am proud to be one of them. They
have always been there for me. They do not do anything overtly hurtful.
But lately, whenever I’m at a family gathering, I’m intensely uncomfortable.
I feel like the ugliest person in the room, like a big, lumbering tank. I
go home hating myself, and it sometimes takes me days to feel better. After
the latest one this past weekend, I cried myself to sleep the next two
nights.

One of my cousins was there, and I think my reaction to all of this was
worse because of seeing her. In the past year, she has lost a lot of
weight. She looks very good, better than she ever has, because she’s always
been big like me. While we were in line for dinner, she told me that she
was going on vacation in a couple of days, and she was really excited about
it. She’d also just bought a second house. She and her husband are
planning to have kids in the next couple of years. I don’t really have to
draw a map, right? We have always been close and I wanted to be happy for
her like I’ve always been, but this time, I just couldn’t. I felt myself
shrivelling up a little bit, and while I wasn’t necessarily jealous, it was
like her success just highlighted my failure. I wanted to just run the hell
away.

Some other things happened that night that didn’t really help anything, but
that was the major sting. My initial thought is that maybe I just shouldn’t
go to these things anymore, because I’m such a mess afterward and any
progress I make is pretty much undone in those few hours. But that would be
punishing my family for my problems, and would I just be switching the
drama? I know it would hurt them if I suddenly stopped coming around and I
don’t want to alienate myself from people who care about me and haven’t done
anything wrong. But I do want to someday be happy, and if this keeps
happening and setting me back, it could take forever.

So, am I being too reactionary? Is this totally the wrong way to handle it,
or should I suck it up and try harder? Any thoughts would be much
appreciated.

Thanks,
Sour Candy

Okay, I’ll try to keep this short. The basic deal here
is that I didn’t tell my sister I got married and I
don’t know how to do it.

I’ll start by saying that I think my sister hates me.
When we were kids, she considered me a suck-up, and as
we were in a passive-aggressive alcoholic household, I
probably was. I got very good grades and she got okay
grades, and it is true that my father in particular
loved to make a big deal of my grades and had little
nice to say about her, though he wasn’t otherwise much
nicer to me most of the time. He was pretty much a
dick, albeit less of one to me. Still, I see why she
would have felt this way.

Though she’s better now than ten years ago, it’s
awkward to talk to her. She’s socially inept and
possibly mentally ill. I know she’s clinically
depressed (as am I). I know she used to talk to
herself, violent fantasies, a lot when a teenager.

How do I mean “awkward”? I mean she always “corrects” me
about everything, or lectures me on things she knows I
know quite well. I mean when she has to call me up,
she calls and then falls silent and I have to talk. I
mean she used to hit me on the arm if someone asked me
what I was up to and I didn’t lie and say, “Nothing at
all!” I mean she mocks nearly a third of my
statements. I mean she interprets everything I say as
a potential insult, including requests to tell me more
about what she’s up to. I mean she once sent me a note
strongly implying I was a bad daughter for not calling
our mother more often, even though I had actually
spoken to Mom twice since my sister herself had last
spoken to her.

Most of this stuff is petty, but it’s all there is to
our conversations. She is better now, but there’s
still a lot of sneering and awkward pauses while I try
desperately to think of something that won’t set her
off into more sneering or sudden fits of contained but
visible rage. My husband and friends and even my
mother take my side on these things and say I’m not
actually being a bitch to her when I try to talk to
her.

So why don’t I just avoid her? I do. However, in the
last year she’s started calling me occasionally to
announce she’ll be in the area. I live in a nice big
Canadian city near the border, and her husband’s
grandmother lives just on the other side of the
border, so when they visit her grandmother-in-law they
come over and see me. I don’t think she particularly
wants to see me, but either her husband thinks we
should or her therapist does — it has the air of a
magnanimous gesture that she’s enduring patiently.
They visit maybe two or three times a year.

So, the marriage. I moved here from the States and my
then-fiance moved from a third country. (Upon learning
that I had a boyfriend abroad, my sister had raucously
laughed and sneered, “How can you date someone in a
foreign country?!?”) We had to get married so that he
could stay here, and we’d been planning on getting
married anyway, having dated for four years.

I didn’t invite anyone to the wedding except the
witnesses, two new colleagues of mine. My mother and
some friends back home know about it, but it wasn’t
really a big deal to us. I didn’t care about the
provincial-courthouse ceremony, only about being
married, and I’m afraid I didn’t really think this
not-telling-my-crazy-sister thing through.

Well, it turns out my sister apparently thinks the
ceremony must matter and had thought she would be
invited. I went to her wedding, it’s true, because I
knew it did matter to her. But I think she’ll
interpret this as a kind of insult, and I guess it is:
I don’t want her in my business because she’s horrible
about everything. My own mother hasn’t told her I’m
married, because she doesn’t really blame me on this
one.

I’m really sure I can’t tell my sister she’s extremely
difficult to deal with, because I really don’t think
she’s rational and so don’t think it would improve
anything. I also, again, can understand why she thinks
I got special treatment as a kid, and I don’t think
saying “it wasn’t that special and it wasn’t my fault
that Dad was an asshole” will help.

Unfortunately, my sister seems determined to remain
peripherally in my business. She must know I’m
married, since my now-husband has been here way over
any possible visitor’s visa. She’s not asked.

Any ideas? Oh, she owns a lot of firearms.

Thanks,
Great Big Dumbass