The Vine: March 10, 2005
Dear Sars,
I’m 21, a junior in college, and hopelessly paralyzed w/r/t post-college existence. Briefly: I’m in a deeply committed relationship with an artist who graduated (BA) in 2001. She’s ready to return to school for an MFA upon my graduation. My options are as follows:
(1) Philosophy graduate school (I’m a major). If I take this course, I must enter graduate school immediately (fall 2005). Immediacy of this option is non-negotiable; competitive programs won’t wait for me to get my shit together.
(2) Law school. I presently favor this option because great law schools abound throughout North America, and I can take my sweet-ass time to apply.
(3) Career track in non-profit. I’m one of those rabid social/political activists, placard in hand and neck chained to a tree. I’ve been pretty successful in my activist endeavors throughout college, so I could probably parlay a one of them into a paying (albeit badly) job.
(4) Novelist. Uh, yeah.
Options 1 is enticing because it delays the inevitable graduation (and ensuing decision-making). Plus, I have some genuine interests in philosophy, and I think it would be fun to spend a few more years pursuing them. This is the most untenable option if Sweetheart attends grad school in 2005.
Options 2, 3, and 4 share the advantage of being able to be put off until Sweetheart is out of graduate school. Of course, this is assuming she is accepted (which is a reasonably safe assumption). Sweetheart has as pretty specific area of concentration in art, and therefore is only applying to a handful of graduate programs which cater to her area. Sweetheart and I are fully financially integrated (joint checking, assuming each other’s debt, et cetera) and I will likely have to support Sweetheart through grad school (as she has graciously semi-supported me, earning roughly two thirds of our income). Furthermore, job stability, domestic partner benefits, and long-term financial security are all serious considerations as Sweetheart was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last year — she’s presently doing well, but the primary feature of MS is unpredictability.
Option 2 is strongly favored by my parents. Option 3 seems like a real crapshoot. Option 4 is a lifetime wet dream, but I’m sure you can provide some discouragement. Additionally, it is Sweetheart’s pick, but it’s difficult to trust those dreamy-artist-in-love types.
I guess this wasn’t too brief, after all, but it’s the shortest summary I can give of a complicated situation.
What should I do?
Putting all her eggs in Sars’s sage basket
Dear Heh, You Said “Basket,”
I wouldn’t discourage you from Option 4, necessarily. From relying on it exclusively as a source of income, absolutely don’t do it, but writing a novel is something you can fit in around other things in your life if you’re organized about it.
I would go with Option 3, based on what you’ve told me, because Option 2 is lucrative — but not until you’ve busted ass and spent hella money for three years, and if it’s something you really want to do, it’s worth it. If it’s not, well, the first year of law school is not for the undecided. Option 2, you can get a job — well, not “today,” but in shorter order, and nobody’s making great coin in non-profit straight out of undergrad, but if you stick with it, you can do okay. Plus you’ll have benefits, you won’t be racking up any student loans, and by the time Sweetheart finishes her MFA, you’ll probably have moved up the ladder a bit and be in a position to survey your future with more perspective.
Grad school isn’t going anywhere, really; you can go back to that if it’s something you really want to do later. But I think getting a job in non-profit is the best blend of doing something you actually like and adding some stability to your household financially.
Dear Sars,
This is a situation that’s more or less over, but I want to know your advice about how to handle it well, in case it comes up again, and I think it probably will.
Okay, first things first. I have a friend who is about the closest to me of anybody I know, family included. I’ve known him ever since we moved to our current area, which was literally weeks after I was born. We spend nearly as much time at each other’s houses as we do at our own, and we do everything together, movies, going to the beach, sleeping over, but it’s always been as close friends and nothing else (as far as I know).
Four or five years ago a girl moved to town, and we became closely acquainted but she was fairly quiet so we never really got too close. Two years ago, at the start of school, I started seeing her a lot more often because she was friends with some of my friends. She and I became much closer since she was much more outgoing, and she was also dating my above-mentioned friend. We started hanging out as a threesome, but not too much and I never really thought of it as a problem because I was friends with both of them; also I knew they went out together fairly often. My mother would comment on a possible “love triangle” once in a while but I never took her seriously because, like I said, I never thought of it that way.
Last fall, I started to catch wind of possible trouble because we rarely hung out together as a group, and he and I never did anything together anymore. It wasn’t till soon after Christmas, though, that I found out what was going on, when he called me one night and asked if I could come over right then (it was pretty late). When I got there, he was on the phone asking her to come over, and when he hung up he said that she was really mad because I was there and she couldn’t come because she’d sprained her ankle. I was pretty surprised because hanging out with just her, we had always had a good time, and as a group it wasn’t like she was completely obvious about not wanting me there, but when I realized that the problem between them was mainly me, it was easy to explain her strange behavior and incidents that I had noticed.
They broke up fairly soon after that. I tried not to play sides because they were both good friends of mine, but I ended up avoiding them for a few weeks after the split. Avoiding them wasn’t completely intentional, but I was nervous about any bad feelings or other things that might affect our relationships (mainly my friendship with her, I wasn’t worried about my friendship with him). In the end they remained friends, and neither of my friendships with them was affected, but I have a feeling this problem will happen again. I don’t want to avoid him when he has a girlfriend, but I’m afraid our closeness might affect his other relationships.
O Most Sagacious One, please bestow your wisdom upon me, or at least give me a sound opinion, I’ve learned not to trust my mother’s advice too much, she’s not incredibly mature when it comes to my social problems.
Thanks,
Waiting For Someone To Tell Me Something Useful
Dear Me Too — Heh,
Back in the day, a friend of mine had a string of girlfriends that would only talk to our friend and not to us, would leave when we came over sometimes (read: “usually”), would inevitably find some whispered drama to pull our friend’s attention during a card game if they’d stuck around — that kind of thing. Our friend continued to hang out with us, and we were always nice and friendly to these women, but they just really didn’t feature having us around and there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that.
But then our friend met his current girlfriend, a card-counting, belch-ripping sort who, more importantly, isn’t insecure about our friend’s close friendships with women.
My point here is that this is kind of your friend’s issue. If there’s nothing between you, there’s nothing between you, and any prospective girlfriends will have to choose to trust him or not, but when your friends’ S.O.s (Lord knows if I punctuated that properly) are jealous of your friends’ time generally and of their opposite-sex-friend time in particular, it’s really for your friend to deal with. And if he’s declining to deal with it by continuing to hang out with you, which, duh, because you’re friends and there’s nothing going on beyond that, well, again: it’s between him and his girlfriend.
I think you’re afraid that, the next time around, he’s going to knuckle under and cut down on his face time with you, and if that happens, you should speak to him about it — but it doesn’t sound like it happened the last time, and you shouldn’t worry about it yet. Maybe the next girl will not love that you guys are so tight; maybe she won’t care; there’s no way to know, but don’t get too het up about it before you know what you’re dealing with — and trust your friend to be your friend about it. If that makes any sense. It may not have, I have a cold.
Dear Sars,
I love your advice and now I’m hoping you can sling a bit of it my way.
There’s this guy — he and I are both 23 and recent college graduates. I’m at
law school and he’s trying to figure out his next step. Our sex life is great,
our friendship is great, but our relationship? Not so great.
We started out as
fuck buddies and then as time passed, our whole “purely sexual” relationship
got muddled up in our blossoming friendship and somehow the two merged. We
ended up in an exclusive relationship that’s been going on for over a year.
It’s fun, and it’s easy, but it isn’t particularly deep or meaningful. Neither
of us expects it to turn into anything serious, but neither of us sees it
ending either (what few fights we’ve had have ended almost before they
started). I’ve been happy coasting along because I sort of love the guy and
consider any time we spend together to be quality time, but he, for all that
he cares about me, doesn’t love me and has been feeling more and more
unfulfilled in our relationship.
The thing is, I know we’ll have to end it soon. It’s not fair to me to be in a
relationship where the guy doesn’t love me back, and it’s not fair to him to
be in an unfulfilling relationship. The real issue I have is how do we end the
relationship without ending the friendship. This guy is one of my best
friends, and he’s told me that I’m one of his closest friends as well. We get
along great, we find each other hilarious, we have a very open dialogue, and
we care deeply about each other. It doesn’t seem fair that I should have to
lose my boyfriend and my best friend at the same time. There should be some
way that we can just zap the little relationship elements out of our
friendship (there should also be some way we can keep having sex, but well,
that ain’t gonna happen).
There has never been a time where we’ve been “just friends.” I don’t even know
how to be his friend. Even if we could manage to cut the sex out of our
relationship, if he’s still over at my house every night it’s not going to
change anything. Also, for all that I know we have to end this, I can’t bring
myself to voluntarily cut him out of my life. I’m pretty sure he feels the
same way. We’ve talked about breaking up, but when it comes down to it,
neither of us wants to break up right now, we just don’t want to founder in
this stagnant relationship forever.
So…what should I do? I know there are people who remain friends after a
breakup, but how the hell do they do that? Should we become pen pals?
Thanks for your help,
At Least Then I Wouldn’t Have To See His Fashion Crimes Against Humanity
Dear Just Say No To Manpris,
I think the way people stay friends is by acknowledging that you can’t spell “breakup” without “break.” Even for people who were friends before they started dating, it’s not an easy transition — and trying to pretend it is, by downshifting straight into a non-intimate relationship, doesn’t really work, because…well, what seems like a best friendship is sometimes just the fact that you spend a lot of time together and some of that time you’re naked.
He’s not in love with you. You can’t move on unless you move all the way on; I know you want me to tell you there’s a way, but there ain’t. You need to break it off and not see him for a couple of months — not see him, not talk to him, not think of him as your best friend, because once you stop sleeping together, he’s not going to be anymore.
It sucks, I won’t lie to you; that’s why you haven’t ended things already, and that’s fine. None of us is like, “Yay, pain, let’s get a move on with that.” But it needs doing, which you know, so — get it over with. In a few months, maybe you’ll become friends, without benefits; maybe not, but for the first while, it’s a breakup, and you’ll have to act like it to get through it.
Dear Sars,
Every year, our school band (small Catholic school, everyone’s in band because you get to go to Six Flags) takes a trip to Chicago. We stay overnight in a hotel that has a window and a telephone for each room. Two girls in my class, Taywhore and Holicia, were staying in a room with Jenny, a former “mean girl” who is now a close friend of mine. Taywhore and Holicia called the boys across the hall and told them to open their blinds. They opened their blinds, and they flashed them.
Anyway, Taywhore and Holicia have been putting all the blame on Jenny, who is truly a nice, modest girl, for over a year. When asked about it recently, Taywhore said, “Well, Jenny flashed but the rest of us didn’t,” which most people know is an absolute lie. Jenny is really hurt by this, even though everyone who matters knows she didn’t do it. But Taywhore and Holicia’s parents, and a few teachers, still believe that Jenny did it. She already had the same punishment as the other girls, but Taywhore and Holicia still try to suck every little drop of lie that they can. As I said, Jenny is really upset about this, and I’m wondering if it would be appropriate to tell Taywhore to lay off the lying, for Jenny’s sake.
Sincerely,
Anti-Girls Gone Wild
Dear Anti-Drama,
Jenny already got punished for doing it, right? Which sucks, but it’s done with, so the issue is that Tay and Ho are still talking it up…but why? Why are they still talking it up? Because it’s still an issue. Why is it still an issue? Because Jenny lets it be. She still cares; she still gets upset; she still makes it into a big drama, which is what you do when you go to a small school, I remember well.
Tay and Ho are enjoying tweaking Jenny about this, which is sad for them, kind of, but the central point here is that they do it to get a rise out of Jenny, and it works. She needs to stop reacting and let people think what they want; you’ve said that nobody “important” thinks she really did it, so the best way to sap the drama out of it is to stop caring.
And it’s on her to do that, not you; it’s on her to handle it, not you. If you get involved, it just amps the drama up another notch. You know what happened, you’re still her friend — that’s your only job here. Stay out of it and don’t respond to attempts to ratchet up the opera volume.
Hi,
If you have time to help me out…
“I make more money than he?”
OR
“I make more money than him?”
I was trying to find the answer on the net and I came
across your site. It’s really great.
Thanks,
KL
Dear K,
“I make more money than he.” You have an implied verb there — “I make more money than he (does)” or “than he (makes)” — so you need a nominative pronoun.
Tags: boys (and girls) friendships grammar
