Dear Sars, dispenser of wisdom,

I have a mini problem concerning two of my close friends, “Alexandra” and “Nicole.” We like to say that we share a brain, and that we’re really too much alike for our own good. Perfectly wonderful people, love them to death et cetera but there’s trauma.

Alex and Nicole are older than me, and this was never that big a deal (except when they wanted to go to 21+ clubs and I couldn’t get in) but the age gap is starting to become obvious. Nicole is recently married, Alex is in a long-term relationship (the boy is about to propose to her, he’s been calling me for advice and it’s pretty damn cute) and I? I’ve been single for nearly three years now and have no real intention of “settling down” any time soon.

So, I’ve been having to come to terms with the fact that we’re now in different parts of our lives. I still hang out with them (now more than ever, actually) and I adore their respective partners (I consider them friends more than tag-along boys) but it seems that every time we all get together I end up sitting alone on the porch smoking while Alex and Nicole congratulate themselves on how well the boys are getting along or complain about the hardships of committed relationships — conversations I obviously can’t join into. I find myself enjoying their company more on a one-on-one basis and I’m growing resentful of spending time with the two couples. Not good, and pretty damn stupid.

My question, then, would be, should I start to distance myself from them? Since we have dinner together or go to the jazz club on a fairly regular basis and I spend the majority of the evening alone and feeling sort of inadequate is it time for me to look for more friends in a similar position as myself? Or is there some way I can bring my trauma up with them: “Listen, guys, I love hanging out with you and the novios, but would it kill you to occasionally take a smoke break with me and talk about Britney Spears instead of ‘Oh my god, the boys are such good friends now!’?”

That about sums it up, thanks in advance.

The perpetually single girl

Dear Perp,

It’s not a terrible idea to consider expanding your social circle a bit — as I’ve said a hundred times, friendships have a lifespan, and when you don’t have as much in common with your friends anymore, it’s probably time to make some new ones. It’s not just about the SOs, either. It’s like when BSD and I have a Diner quote-fight. We think it’s fun; anyone else is going to be bored shitless, so we try to confine ourselves to, like, three rounds, because to keep doing it is sort of impolite.

But if your friends don’t get that, you might have to take some more direct action instead of waiting for them to get it, because…not happening. Change the subject yourself, nicely; change it again; if you’re on the third subject change, point out pleasantly that, you know, you’re glad their BFs get along, but you feel kind of left out and bored when that’s all they talk about.

If these people really have nothing else to say, well, see above. People change; if hanging with them is frustrating for you, you should do it less, or find a way to structure it so it’s either a girls’ night or you just spend time with each of them individually.

Dear Sars,

I don’t think I’ve seen a situation
like this, and I hope you can help me. I don’t even know where to
begin, really, so I’ll start at the beginning.

I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the beginning
of last year by a psychiatrist on my university campus. I started
going to therapy, everything was getting better, and then I went home
for the summer. Home is just…gah. That’s a story for another time. I
told my parents about my BPD, and their attitude was, “Well, as long
as you’re the one taking care of it, whatever. It can’t be that bad.”
Do I need to mention that my father is a pharmacist and my mother is a
psychology major turned middle-school teacher? Over the summer, I
couldn’t handle things anymore, and my general disposition took a
horrible downturn. So I trotted back to school in September and saw
the psychiatrist again, who prescribed Depakote and Zyprexa for me.

I hated it. It turned me into a complete zombie. Of course, all my
friends who have had to put up with my shit for the past couple of
years thought it helped. Yeah, well, when you literally can’t feel
anything except your stomach saying, “FEED ME!”, and your metabolism
saying, “Sleeeeeeeeep. Skip class and sleeeeeeeep,” it’s a lot harder
to have any sort of mood swings or be depressed. And the pharmacy here
wouldn’t take my insurance from back home, and the medication got to
be too expensive that way, so I stopped taking it. I was fine without
it…for a while.

See (and this is where it gets complicated), my best friend — we’ll
call her “Susan” — came to visit me in late October. We’d been talking
about sleeping together for a while, as we’re so close and comfortable
with one another, and besides, I’d never slept with anyone before. So
we did. And it was great. No fireworks or bells chiming; I didn’t
expect that. But it was fun and I was glad I did it with someone with
whom I was comfortable. It was just kind of a nice experience with no
strings attached on either of our ends.

And then I made the mistake of falling in love with Susan. I realized
it in December, and after wrestling with it for a few weeks, I finally
told her how I felt. Stupid me, huh? Then she drops the bombshell.
She’d been talking to some guy in Canada for a month, and was
head-over-ass in love with him. Mind you, she’s never even met him,
and I don’t even think at that point she’d talked on the phone with
him.

Naturally, I was hurt. Really, really hurt. I mean, she wouldn’t even
give it a chance. Susan told me that she “doesn’t like girls, and you
knew that.” Well, then, why the hell did she sleep with me in the
first place? You don’t sleep with someone you’re not attracted to at
least in a sexual way. It really complicated things between us, even
though I still loved her as a friend. Things have been just getting worse
and worse on the mental health front, and this did not help at ALL.
Sunday I was going to commit suicide. I had been talking to Susan and
basically crying my eyes out all night; everything was just completely
out of control with how I felt about her and how I felt about life in
general. So she threatened to call campus security on me if I didn’t
promise to go to the therapist the next day.

I did that. The therapist gave me these ridiculous affirmations — “I
am beautiful, I am loved.” Now, Sars, my self-esteem is pretty damned
low, and has been ever since I hit puberty and my body exploded.
Comments from my family about how fat I’m getting (thanks to the
Depakote, and I haven’t been able to lose the weight no matter what I
do), and being broken out from stress means that I’m not exactly
feeling beautiful. And if you know anything about BPD, then you know
that people who have this disorder also have a very hard time
connecting memories with good feelings, and just constantly feel
disconnected from the world in general. So I’ve felt pretty alone. At
the suggestion of a friend, I’ve started saying, “I am brilliant,” as I
am just egotistical enough to believe that. (Heh.)

So the affirmations
are sort of helping, and I’ve got another appointment with the
therapist for next week, as well as with the psychiatrist. I feel like
I need to go into a mental hospital, but my parents would really,
really not go for that. For one thing, they treat my problem like a
joke, as though I can’t possibly be in so much torment (I used to be
able to hide it really well). And another thing, they’d kill me for
taking a semester off.

Well…Susan stayed up until 3 AM talking to me on Sunday night, even
though I told her to go to bed, as she had to be up for work at 8 the
next morning. Susan emailed me the next day and said she’d be going
to bed as soon as she got home, so she wouldn’t be able to talk to me.
Okay, that was fine. Tuesday night she IMs me and says, “We have to
talk.” The gist of the conversation was that she wants to take a month
off from our friendship, and that when I “prove” myself to her, we can
start talking again. She wants me to get help, which I am doing, and
which I had wanted to tell her, but she jumped right into it and I
never got to tell her.

I didn’t take that very well. As in, I broke down and sobbed for an
hour, and then I went outside to the parking lot behind the dorm,
smoked about half a pack of cigarettes, and screamed bloody murder to
absolutely no one but myself. It helped, sort of.

Like a dumbass, I tried calling Susan last night. Um, three times. She
wouldn’t pick up the phone, and I know she knew it was me; she has
Caller ID. But, you know, I thought maybe it would help if we could
talk on the phone, because online conversation has a way of causing
people to misconstrue things easily. So this morning I get an email
from her telling me not to IM her, email her, or call her until the
month is up, at the risk of her extending the “break” or losing her
friendship entirely.

It really, really hurts that she refuses to be here when I need her
the most. I’m at the lowest I’ve ever been since I tried to kill
myself at the age of sixteen. I’m not going to hurt myself or
anything; I can’t even get up the energy to go open that bottle of
pills. It takes energy to care about yourself, and I just don’t care
about myself that much anymore. I just really need her now. She’s my
best friend and the only person I really care about having around at
the moment. I feel so abandoned by her. I don’t know if I can make it
through the month without her.

I need some objective advice, Sars. I mean, I don’t know what to do.

Signed,
Borderline in New York

Dear Border,

You need to go to the emergency room and tell them exactly what you just told me, and ask them for an in-patient referral. You have a disease, you are not managing it well, and you need to get some help, because things have gotten out of hand. It’s not your fault, and it’s going to be a pain in the ass, but neither of those facts mean that you shouldn’t deal with what’s going on. Forget your parents, forget Susan — get to a doctor, right now, and start getting this sorted out.

I really can’t even touch the Susan situation, advice-wise, because I think it’s all a function of the disorder at this point. You mention other friends, but then you act like you don’t know anyone else in the world except her; you talk about going off your meds, but then you act like the whole dust-up with Susan is coming out of left field. I don’t disagree that the proving-yourself thing is obnoxious on her part, but I also feel like your sense of your own agency in the situation is totally off.

And it’s not because you’re a bad person or that you deserve this or anything like that; you have a disorder, again, and you need to get that under control, both in the short term, so you don’t hurt yourself, and in the longer term so that you can lead a happy life and not find yourself thrown for such big loops. It’s going to suck at first, but it’s totally worth doing, and it’s not going to suck any less if you don’t deal with it.

Go to a hospital, call a hotline, do whatever you need to do to start getting better. Everything else will fall into place after that. You’re going to be okay; you deserve to be okay. Start making that happen as soon as you can.

I have a dilemma that I wonder if you could help with — tip the
scale, so to speak.

My 19-year-old younger brother is gay. Although he was always a bit of a
flamer, frankly it was news to most of my family. I say “most,” because
he’s taken the chickenshit route and only come out to two people — my
sister-in-law and my mother. Who told their respective husbands. And then
they told my sister, who in turn told me.

So word got out, and my younger brother sat back, let the grapevine spread
the news, and had the gall to thank my SIL and mother for telling everyone
for him. Since it was so hard to do. Since he didn’t know how everyone
would take it. And because he’s an immature chickenshit.

At any rate, we have an older brother. Who doesn’t know Younger Bro (YB) is
gay. Who has NEVER gotten along with YB; in fact, their relationship has
always been rife with, well, strife. YB never outed himself to Older
Brother (OB), and now that the rest of the family knows, YB is waiting for
OB to just…find out, apparently. Which ENRAGES me, frankly. I’m not
close with OB myself, but we are cordial, and I know it would hurt his
feelings to find out that the whole rest of the family knows YB is gay but
no one told him. I also know that he’d probably make YB’s life miserable
for just being gay in the first place. Which is purportedly why YB doesn’t
want to tell him and has said that he is perfectly fine if the rest of the
family wants to break the news to OB.

On the one hand, I want to tell OB what’s going on, because I don’t want to
hurt MY relationship with him by withholding something like that. OTOH,
Sars, I’ll go trout fishing in hell before I help that dick of a YB of mine
and do his dirty work for him. It’s not my news to tell. I have gone back
and forth on this one for weeks. It’s possible that OB has put two and two
together and knows already, but if he does, he’s not said anything. That’s
not like him.

So what should I do? My sister and I have already tried to encourage YB to
tell OB; he won’t. So either we perpetuate his secret and potentially hurt
our older brother, or we reveal all, and contribute both to helping YB be a
jerk AND more family drama when OB goes ape at finding out. Mom and Dad are
no help; they are pretending that this “gay phase” of YB isn’t even
happening.

Just thought I’d get an impartial opinion.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts…

Caught in the Middle

Dear Caught,

My “impartial opinion” is that you’re a pretty jerky bit of business your own self. Calling YB a “flamer” and an “immature chickenshit”? I mean, have you come out to a disapproving family lately? Because unless you have, you need to bring the judgmental anger down about seventeen notches.

Either you resent YB not telling you himself, which hurt your feelings, or there’s something else going on between the two of you that you haven’t told me. If it’s the first, it’s fine to feel hurt, but again, coming out of the closet is not easy, which I should think you’d be a bit more sympathetic to, given that you told me yourself your parents are not dealing with it — so stop making it about you and start getting your head around the fact that, hey, he’s 19. I wasn’t the Kissinger of interpersonal relations at that age and I’m betting you weren’t either.

If it’s something else, you should deal with that, too, but you’re right — it’s not your news to tell, and if OB chooses to hold your not telling against you, he’s an ass. The thing is, you’re coming off like an ass too. Again: Not about you. Calm down.

An answering machine message and a pass through a greeting card
section the other day brought this issue back to light for me, and
I’ve taken the advice of my best friend, who’s an even bigger asshole
than I am, and am asking a better person.

I’ll try to keep this short but will probably fail. Here’s the deal,
as tersely as I can manage. Me? Unhappy childhood. Strict, crazy
parents. Lots of time alone, few friends. Went to college, parents
split, dropped out, blah blah blah depression-cakes. Long story
short, I went back to school and started getting better.

Then I found
out halfway through my second year, first semester back that my mom
hadn’t taken out the parent loan and hadn’t bothered to tell me. When
I finally got her to talk about it, she said she was going bankrupt
and couldn’t afford to (the fact that she couldn’t go bankrupt without
losing her house is not the point). So I went home during winter break
not knowing if I’d go back to school, and when I mentioned this to
dearest Mother, her response was, “Well, I’m not any better off.”
Needless to say, I spent the last half of that break with my best
friend and his family. And thanks to his mother, who talked to some
people she knew, I got the help I needed and could go back to school.

So as you can guess, I’ve got quite a bit of resentment towards my
mother. And this past fall, after finally getting tired of her shit
(she’s been separated from my dad for five years and has yet, to the
best of my knowledge, to get a job), I wrote her a long email and told
her I wouldn’t be speaking with her for an indefinite period of time.

Fast forward to now. Mother’s Day is fast approaching, and I’m
wondering, do I acknowledge it at all? Send a card with no message?
Call? I’ve no intention of starting up communication with her again,
but part of me would feel guilty if I ignored this completely, and I
know she’d be hurt (thankfully Father’s Day isn’t an issue at all, as
my father’s a complete bastard). So what do I do?

Not Missing Mommy

Dear Not,

I’d do nothing. I assume you didn’t get in touch with her at Thanksgiving or Christmas either, and if that’s the case, getting in touch now sends the message that you want to resume contact, which, especially since it’s Mother’s Day and she’s your mother…yeah. If you really don’t want anything to do with her still, don’t have anything to do with her.

Mother’s Day is an invented holiday anyway, but those of us who do participate in it do it to acknowledge and thank our moms; the gratitude and appreciation is implied. If you’re neither grateful nor appreciative, and in fact don’t want her in your life right now, don’t mix the message.

Sars,

Just recently ran across your advice column and have decided that you could
probably kick Dear Abby’s butt and her advice sucks. So I’ll ask you. I
met a guy, a really nice guy. He’s funny, smart, has a good job. Lives in the
area of town I’m actually moving to next month. He’s even a TRUE gentleman!
He opens doors for me, calls me just to see how my day went. And things are
going pretty great.

Now here comes the hard part. He has really bad teeth. I spent the majority
of my teenage life in braces and have made it a point to take exceptional
care of my teeth. Teeh are a big thing to me, they’re the first thing you
see about a person. They are your first impression, no matter how nice you
are or good-looking, people see your teeth before you even speak.

So I guess my question is, how do do tell someone that you’ve just begun to
date that they need to seriously consider seeing a dentist? I know that he
has dental insurance, he works for a very large company that my mother also
works for. I can understand having some crooked teeth but this is bad,
Sars!

I hate to seem petty or that looks are all that is important to me, but this
has to be fixed!

Your advice is greatly appreciated. I’m sure Dear Abby would tell me to
give him a piece of gum or something and hopes that he catches on but I have
to do something now!

Teeth-Crazy in Texas

Dear Dr. Denton,

You…don’t. It’s mean. It’s fine to not be attracted to a guy with bad teeth; you like what you like, and you don’t have to apologize for it, because that’s just how it goes. But I can’t tell a guy who is otherwise perfect, but stands five foot three, to get taller, because 1) he can’t, and 2) it’s mean. So we don’t have a second date, and I don’t say why, because it’s not his fault, but a guy that short is not my thing.

A guy with bad teeth is not your thing. It ooks you out. But you can’t tell him that, not really, unless you want to hurt his feelings — and then what if you do tell him, and he takes it well, and he gets bunch of caps and whatnot, and then it doesn’t work out?

He has a thing that makes him less attractive to you. You don’t have to feel guilty about it, but you do have to understand that you can learn to live with it or not, and those are your choices.

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