Dear Sars,

My boyfriend and I have been dating for well over a year. We are both in
love and happy with the relationship. We are also both 20 years old and
juniors in college. The problem is his parents don’t actually know I exist.

He has what he refers to as “conservative Indian parents.” During high
school his parents told him to stop dating a girl (they thought that he
was having sex) but he continued to see her behind their back. When we
first started dating, he decided not to tell his parents right away
because he wasn’t sure if they would be happy with it. He believed they
might think having a girlfriend would distract him from his studies. He
said if his parents ever asked about it he would tell them (he figured
his mother would wonder who he kept calling on his cell phone bill).

Months pass. During breaks when he was staying at home he would have to
tell them he was seeing other friends. Still, they didn’t know. It just
seems weird too me. I’m pretty independent and have lived on my own
since I started college. When he’s at home he can’t go out unless one of
his parents is at home so he can tell them where he is going. He’s been
invited on vacations with my family but he refuses because he thinks his
parents won’t let him. Seriously, aren’t we adults?

My parents have met him many times. We’ve had dinner with my parents.
Hell, my parents even know that he sleeps in my apartment with me
sometimes. He came to my grandmother’s Christmas party with all my
relatives. My parents and my grandparents even gave him Christmas
presents! He has been fully accepted on my side.

I have brought this issue up a few times. He mostly brushes it aside. A
few times he’s said things that have made me nervous about the idea of
meeting them at all. “They kind of don’t like white people…but not
really, it’s okay,” or “When you meet them you should talk more, they’ll
like you if you talk more.” The longer this goes on the more I think it
freaks me out. If he has to keep me so well hidden there must not be
much of a chance of them accepting me, right?

And now both of us are
going to study abroad in Japan. My mother bought airline tickets for us
with the ton of frequent flyer miles we have and said BF’s parents could
pay her a discounted price for the ticket. Exactly how is he going to
explain that one away? “Oh yeah, by the way, I’ve been dating that girl
for over a year. Must have forgotten to mention it…”

Am I making too big a deal out of this? Should I let him figure it out
on his own? Am I actually dating a crazy person?

Thanks,
The Secret Girlfriend

Dear Secret,

In order: No; no; and not exactly.

If he’s freaked out by his parents’ potential reaction to the cultural differences between the two of you, well, okay, he’s freaked out — but it’s been over a year.You’ve tried to “let him figure it out on his own,” and this is what he’s come up with.

Tell him exactly what you just told me, and don’t let him brush it aside this time.Tell him you think it’s weird; tell him you feel like he’s ashamed of you, or like maybe he’s not committed to the relationship long-term, because it doesn’t seem like he has any intention of introducing you to them, ever; tell him it makes you wonder about his gumption, like whether he has any.

Don’t give him an ultimatum.Just inform him that it’s weirding you out, and that you don’t get it, and that you wonder what kind of a future the two of you have if he’s still lying to his parents about seeing you.You might get an answer you don’t want, i.e. that he doesn’t think you have much of a future, but better you get it now and make the necessary adjustments to your own plan.I know you love the guy, but — what, you’re going to be 40 years old and hiding under the porch when his parents visit?Enough already.

Hi Sars,

How do you let go of drama?

For the last few months, my boyfriend and I have been dealing with some drama from our mutual friends, a married couple.Then at the beginning of the new year, they discovered and read my online journal.Where they found out that I had, over the course of two years, discussed my problems with them, and said some not overwhelmingly nice things about them.They, then, told my boyfriend they didn’t want to have anything more to do with me, but he was still welcome.So I called them, had a long talk with the wife and explained why I posted those comments and apologized for hurting her feelings.I really didn’t feel like I should apologize since they went looking for the information, but I felt that it was the easiest way to resolve the drama and make things be okay.She and I reached an agreement and things were supposed to be all okay.

Two weeks later, out of the blue, the husband calls my boyfriend and tells him that we are unwelcome at their home, unwelcome at a group party they are hosting and generally personae non grata from here on out.The rationale being that I’m mean and hateful, and my boyfriend is disrespectful for standing up for me.

This action has hit us both pretty hard, and although I haven’t considered these folks close friends for a while now, my boyfriend was very close with them.To top it all off we share a hobby and they have made it known that if we participate in the hobby around them, they will make our lives difficult.Add in that many of our other friends are feeling forced to choose between us and them, and life has gotten excessively dramatic.

My boyfriend has decided to give up on the hobby and the people who seem to be choosing the other side without even asking us what happened.And I respect that decision, but this isn’t the first time this couple has chased people out of the hobby and I feel that it’s time to stand up to them.Granted, standing up to them so far has only gotten me ostracized and turned my boyfriend and myself into pariahs.

So my question is this, how do I let go of this?How do I just let it slide and give up a hobby and friends that I’ve enjoyed for ten years?I have a ton of unresolved issues, I want to yell at the married couple, and I want to make them hurt for all this, but I know that’s not healthy.I know that having a discussion will only make things worse. Our mutual friends seem to have taken the path of least resistance, deciding to not mention the break-up or even question it and ignoring us, so turning to them is not really an option.I just want to let go of it, but it seems that it’s always just around the corner of my mind.How do I stop obsessing about it and give up?Or do you think I should fight?

No Longer one of the Cool Kids

Dear No Longer,

“If you participate in the hobby around them, they will make your lives difficult”?They’ve already done that.Whatever you decide to do about the hobby, I wouldn’t base it on their threats — but if you really do want to minimize the drama, you should recuse yourself from the hobby, find new friends, and move on.

Because, based on what you’ve told me, the reaction of both the couple in question and the rest of their cohort is way out of proportion to what happened.I would tell you that you shouldn’t have said anything crabby about them in your online journal if you weren’t willing to deal with the consequences, but you did deal with the consequences, as best you could — you apologized, and you resisted the urge to plead your case to the mutual friends.And yet it’s still a big dust-up, with alleged adults choosing up sides and not talking to you, which means either that this entire group of people is actually not worth fighting for/over, or that there are things I haven’t been told about what went down so as to make your side look more sympathetic.

I suspect it’s a bit of both, but even if I don’t know everything I should about your role in all this, anything you do to try to repair the situation is only going to exacerbate it, so leave them in possession of the field, decline to explain yourself, and let that be the end of it for the two of you.

Dear Sars,

There’s this guy that’s driving me crazy (in a bad way).He’s my ex-boyfriend and I’m stuck working with him, and have been for the past six months or so.I’m sort of reaching the boiling point, and I’d rather not blow up and handle the situation gracefully, if possible.

Here’s the deal: The Ex broke up with me over a year ago.It wasn’t a happy break-up, but we were on friendly terms. He went out of town and we exchanged the occasional email.We got along well enough that he subletted my apartment from me last summer.

Well, now I have to work with him.And if you want to be technical about it, now he has to work for me.I am a student and I lead a commmittee that puts on an event for a university.A department gave us use of a student assistant to help with the administrative overload and that student assistant, assigned to me, was my Ex.

Any good feelings between my Ex and me (is that gramatically correct?), dissipated — quickly.He wasn’t my ideal hire — partly because he was my ex, and partly because he’s just not qualified to do administrative work (he types slow, he doesn’t know how to use Excel or Powerpoint, et cetera, and he doesn’t exactly get rave reviews from his former employers — information that I know only because I’m his ex-girlfriend).

It works out about as well as I predicted it would.He doesn’t do his work, and if he does it’s late or it comes with all sorts of errors, and he’s hostile.He’s only hostile towards me, but he’s distant to the rest of the committee.He won’t answer my questions, he won’t give me updates, and he won’t tell me if I give him too much work.

Then it exploded. He sent emails saying he felt pressured and burdened and that he wanted to concentrate on school and that he thought what much of what we were doing at the time was a waste of time.The committee was at a loss, and as the “leader” I tried to alleviate the problem by asking him to account for his work for the past week or two, any oustanding projects he was working on, and that we’d see if anyone else could take on what exceeded his commitment. If I didn’t mention it before, he gets paid to do ten hours of work and the rest of the committee volunteers (including myself).Many of us spend twenty hours a week working on this.

Well, that didn’t go over well with him and we ended up not cutting anything because he insisted that he would do it and would use his own time to make up for it.I pointed activities that he was doing or planning to do as unnecessary, such as printing out 200+ emails and organizing them into folders — no one needs the past emails in hard copy (they are saved on a server) and he spends four hours every two weeks printing and organizing emails.

Then he left me copies of chapters from a book of explanations of the different Meyer-Brigg personalities — he didn’t know what my personality was so he guessed at it.He highlighted portions of the chapter on his personality and the ones from what he thought was the category I fit in: “Females are inwardly conflicted about trying to balance the conventional female roles,” “[I] may give off an aura of being impatient and even disapproving when that isn’t necessarily the case,” “[my] inexpressiveness often results in others feeling frustrated, flustered, or on the defensive,” “frightening [to me] are interpersonal situations — an upset employee…or someone expressing frustrations with his or her job,” “[I] become edgey, if not angry, if deadlines are going ignored.”He highlighted this.

I made the decision to have someone else work closely with him and monitor and supervise his assignments.I made it their decision whether they wanted him to do something or nothing.But I can’t escape working with him — I am the leader and often questions are thrown my way.I admit, I do get annoyed when he asks questions repeatedly and forgets the answer because he doesn’t write it down.I’ve probably been abrasive lately towards him because of these latest actions, but I always, always do my best to be polite and encouraging — I say thank you, I write people encouraging messages (including the Ex), and I always take the time to ask people if they need help.And yet I get emails from him that tell me that I make him want to quit (and that there were times in the past that he was thinking about quitting) and that I make him mad and angry and that I’m mean and aggressive towards him.And I think to myself, why don’t you just quit?

I have no idea if I’m in the right, or if I’ve done wrong.I’ve asked other committee members if I need to change my style, or if I am being mean — it really isn’t my intention.I don’t know if they aren’t telling me something, but no one else talks like this to me.We all joke together and laugh.I can’t fire him — I can say that we don’t need him anymore, but I don’t want to do that because on the days that he does pull through it’s a great help to us and doing something like that can bring the morale of the committee down, as well as be insulting to the department who gave us use of one of their employees.

I’ve already apologized — numerous times.(He has not even once apologized to me, nor apologized for missing deadlines.)Some of my close friends say I should just remove him from the project altogether.And I know I am going to at some point tell the department how he worked out (they ask this question every year) — I don’t want to say something that’s biased or that comes out of our past, but I honestly think it’s just because he didn’t do his job and he a bad attitude.

It’s six weeks until his contract expires.Should I ask him to step aside?Should I just tough it out?Should I give a polite evaluation?Should I decline to do an evaluation?

Toeing the Line of Combustion

Dear Toe,

He pulls this shit because you let him.He thinks you won’t call him on it because it might look like it’s related to the break-up, so he keeps fucking up and speaking to you condescendingly, and you keep allowing it.

He’s more trouble than he’s worth.Tell him he’s no longer needed, tell his department why, and either ask them to send someone who’s not a little bitch or cover his action yourself, because believe me, you’re spending enough time worrying and waiting for him to screw up to more than get his work done.Get rid of him.

I tend to believe that most decisions are actually made quite quickly and
that people usually just spend a long time justifying them. However, every
now and then something will be totally and utterly confusing and you won’t
know what to do — that’s the situation I’ve found myself in now. I thought
I’d made a decision and that I was just putting off executing it but now I
don’t know where I’m at.

I met Mark two years ago and we started dating. At first it was a strictly
casual thing as we had both gone through serious break-ups with raving loons
so heading into another relationship seemed to make no sense. Initially we
were just company for each other — someone to go to bed with, someone to go
to the movies with, someone to have pizza with. But like all things this
couldn’t go on forever. After both of us went through a pretty rough time
(him at work, me with my family) we naturally became much closer. We were
really there for each other and he became someone I could confide in and at
times the only person I could trust. So as time went on things just
naturally evolved into a more serious and monogamous relationship and now
he’s probably the most important person in my life and I think I am in his.
So what’s the problem?

The problem is probably not very original but from the first day I met him
he has been anti-marriage and never wants children. These things were not an
issue for me at first but as time goes on I’m beginning to realise that
there are some things that you just can’t compromise on. I’ve always wanted
to have kids and I would like to do that someday — someday, not tomorrow.
And I’m in love with someone who never wants that.

His commitment phobia spreads a bit further than that — he doesn’t believe
in marriage, and he doesn’t want to live with anyone ever again. In two
years I haven’t been introduced to his family and he refuses to meet mine
(he can’t see why this is important).

I know he went through a really rough time in his previous relationship but
so did I, yet I’m willing to take a chance again. He’s not, and he can’t see
why these things are important to me. He thinks I’m rushing things and wants
things to stay exactly as they are — and I don’t think they can.

I’m not one to deliver ultimatums so there’s been no big flaming row about
this — I’ve just told him how I feel and that there are things that I want
in life that he doesn’t. What he hears is that I feel like I’m wasting my
time with him and I want to be off meeting the marriage-and-kids type of
guy. The truth is that I can’t even imagine in a million years being with
someone else — Mark is my best friend and I would miss him so much, but what
is the point in staying with someone in this situation.

So now that we’ve had these conversations about where this is going I think
it’s the beginning of the end of the relationship — and I’m getting cold
feet. I’m not afraid of being on my own, or the pain I’m going to feel when
it’s over (although I will miss him like hell), what I’m afraid of is that
I’m making a huge mistake. I’m having doubts over whether the marriage and
kids thing really is that important to me. I’m wondering if, like Mark says,
I should stay with him and just see what happens in the future. I’m afraid
I’m turning into this desperate 30-something (I’m 33 and Mark is 34) who is
throwing away an otherwise happy, wonderful relationship for something
abstract?

So what do you think I should do — break up with the (otherwise) perfect guy
or stick with it? I was so clear before that ending it was for the best
(although heartbroken about it) but now I’m not so sure.

Yours,
A Big Teary Mess

Dear Teary,

He doesn’t want marriage or a family; he doesn’t even want to live with you, or introduce you to his parents.He wants nothing to do with a greater commitment of any kind, ever, which he has made plain to you.It’s one thing to question whether the ability to have children with the man you love is a deal-breaker, but it’s another to live on emotional bread-and-water rations.

Your doubts are natural, and understandable, but they don’t change the basic facts, to wit that this man is damaged, and unwilling to repair himself.Don’t get bogged down in weeks and months of capital-D discussions and “seeing where it goes,” because it’s not going any farther than where it is right now.He’s been forthright about that, at least; take it as a favor and leave, because this problem is not going to go away.

Dear Sars,

When standing in line at the grocery store, I will always let a person go ahead of me if I have a cart full of stuff and they have, like, donuts and shampoo, but what if after I do so, someone else comes up behind me with three things and proceeds to shoot dirty looks into the back of my head and roll her eyes while I unload a grocery mountain onto the conveyor, fumble for coupons, and try to keep my two and a half year old daughter from running away?Do I ignore it?Should I say, “Hey, I’m sorry, but I already let someone go ahead of me and I want my turn now.”Should I say, “Lady, the express lanes are thataway.Don’t let a cart hit you in the ass on your way over there.”Or should I just let her go ahead of me? This actually happens to me a lot and I’d really like to know what you would do.

Thanks for your time,
Carly

Dear Carly,

Stop letting other people go ahead of you unless it’s just that one person behind you in line.That, or let the huffers huff and just ignore it.

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