I shall try to keep this as brief as possible but it’s a relationship problem so please bear with me. Four years ago, I began talking to a guy online. He shared similar interests, made me laugh, made me smile, et cetera. Despite my doubts, I began a long-distance relationship with him and the first few months were the grandest ever. After a few months of IMs and emails, we had our first meeting and spent three weeks together at both my home and his (we live hundreds of miles apart so we saved up for the plane tickets). I was in love and he seemed to be everything I had ever wanted; granted, I’d never had a boyfriend before but this guy seemed perfect for me.

So of course, things had to take a bad turn, right? Basically, I realized within a year that my college education and his lack of ambition could cause a problem. See, I want to go all the way through school, to get my PhD and become a teacher. Boyfriend had dropped out of college and hated to work and has been on unemployment for over a year now for no real reason. Early on, he had brought up marriage and said that he wanted us to tie the knot. He wanted to support me in my goals. Fabulous. But then I approached the end of my undergrad work and I began to wonder what our next step would be. He had no idea but he made it clear that he wasn’t ready to marry or move out of state to go with me to grad school. Since I was taking a year off between schools, I decided that we had might as well try living together to see how well we fit in such a day-to-day situation. We agreed to a trial run and if things didn’t work, I was free to head home without recriminations.

Sars, I left everything behind to be with him. And where did I end up? Sleeping in his room on a twin mattress on a basement floor in his parents’ home where ten other people live. I tried to adjust but it was difficult living with so many people and never having privacy except for bathroom visits. The job hunt sucked and Boyfriend didn’t bother turning in a single application, much less filling one out entirely. Because food was barely there, I ended up paying for much of our food out of my savings. I got the chance to leave the house maybe once every two weeks and that was usually to go to the grocery store. Boyfriend would leave for entire Saturday nights to be with friends. I became deeply depressed and disappointed, but Boyfriend? He didn’t see what was going wrong, he thought things were good. I couldn’t even get him to find a job or check out an apartment with me — an apartment that was only three miles from the house since he made it clear that he didn’t want to move more than 20 miles away from his family. I couldn’t handle it and I went back home, broken-hearted and upset that Boyfriend hadn’t really tried to make a go of things.

Things have been naturally hard since then. It’s been a few months and Boyfriend still hasn’t really forgiven me for leaving. He swears things would be different if I came back but he still hasn’t gotten a job. I decided to go ahead with the grad school plan and have gotten into a fabulous school. After a year of stress and disappointment, things are looking up school-wise and career-wise. But I miss him. I do love him and I want him to be a part of my life. So I asked him to go to school with me. To try living elsewhere and give things a go in another direction. After a lot of discussion, he agreed to go but reminded me that he didn’t want to leave his home state and that I would be tossing him into a new place without family or friends to help him (notice that I’m not much of a supportive girlfriend or that I didn’t try to do the same thing for him).

Boyfriend told his parents about his decision and he called me to tell me how it went. Ten minutes later? He’s staying there and going back to college in the fall. He admitted later that it was partly to escape me but he honestly wants to get a degree now. Never mind me trying to get him to go back to school four years ago, he’s ready now. Here’s the best part, though! He wants to go to grad school too! And he wants me to apply for PhD work to the grad school of his choosing so we can live together. Isn’t that romantic? I’m being supportive about this school thing but yeah…what the hell?

Here is where I need your advice, Sars. I can’t see waiting five to seven years for him to finally get the courage to make a deeper commitment to me when he still wants me there as his girlfriend without strings attached. I’m in the prime of my life and I’ve become much more outgoing and vivacious and I want to make the best out of grad school. Yet, by his rules, I’m not allowed to become best friends with a guy, I’m not to hug guys, I’m not to allow guys to visit me. I’m to wait for him, graduate, find a job, and then move with him when he’s ready for another school. I don’t want this. So how do I tell him that I need to be apart from him without making it sound like I just need to have permission to do some guy I meet in school? He’s already said that if I leave him, he knows it’s going to be because of another person and that I probably won’t be able to help myself from having sex (and I was a virgin when I met him and have never been with anyone else since). Can I say that I just want to be friends? How do I let him know that I need to really live my life without being smothered by his long-distance, possessive self? Would it be better to tell him this before I go to school so he won’t think I’ve already met someone new?

Thanks for reading and having a “listening ear.”

Somehow I’m Married but I Don’t See My Husband or a Ring Anywhere

My boyfriend J moved in November back to his homestate in the Midwest
due to some personal issues (his mom passed away in July, he was the
sole executor blah blah legalcakes) and we’ve continued to see each
other — making due with email, IM, daily phone calls, and monthly
visits. In March, he told me he wanted me to move there — which is a
big decision for me, as I currently have an insanely good career, at a
great company, and have a job I love. However, after lots of talking,
dreaming, thinking, and discussing with close friends, I’ve decided
that in the long run, I can pretty much make it anywhere, job-wise
(and the possibility of me consulting to my company from the Midwest
has been floated at me). We’re coming to the point where we’re
discussing the final steps we need to take to get me there, and I
couldn’t be happier — he’s even decorating the house to my style as
well as his.

The problem? My parents. They really do love him (my mom calls him her
“son-un-law”) and they get along splendidly when we go on family
vacations and whatnot. However, recently I casually mentioned our
conversations about me moving, to which my mom told me flat out that
she did not want/approve of me moving there unless we were married,
nor did she want me living with him if I moved there when we WEREN’T
married (the implications being that “We won’t pay for the wedding”
and “We might not even COME to the wedding” — which have been her
style throughout my life). Don’t get me wrong — marriage is in our
future, and we’ve talked about is as happening after I move. I don’t
want to plan a wedding 4000 miles away from said fiance, and I know
that wedding in the Midwest = inherently cheaper than wedding in the
big eastern city where I live.

However, I’m 28, but very close to both
my parents, and am an only child. A lot of the decisions I’ve made in
life have been directly related to either being scared of
disappointing them, or feeling like I can’t disappoint them as I am
the only. This is one of those things that I’m NOT going to do this
time, and was wondering if you have any advice for how to handle what
I see as a happy, fun event, and keep it from turning into a parental
nightmare.

Thanks very much.

Carla

This is my first time writing to an advice column, but hey, I figured why not? (Love the advice, love the site, love the writing, just love you in general. But not in a crazy stalker way.) Here’s the story. I had a close-knit group of friends in high school. Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it?

Well, we graduated. There’s the problem. I went away to a university three hours away. Everyone else stayed home because there are four colleges/universities within twenty minutes from my house.

I make it through the first semester of freshman year, still holding on to these friendships which have dictated my life for the last four years. Then it starts. B can’t return calls because of long-distance phone bills. M can’t bother to respond to email because she’s pre-med. A can’t come to visit because her car died. All legitimate reasons, but they hurt nonetheless.

Throughout the rest of freshman and sophomore year, I deal with this and make a new group of friends, even tighter than high school because we all live together. No one at home is making an effort; I’m having a ball at school, so I say screw keeping in touch.

I’ve tried the group emails, I’ve tried individual phone calls, I’ve tried individual emails, I’ve tried actual letters, I’ve tried instant messages. I don’t get home often and when I do my family takes priority. So I slowly start to drop off with all my friends from high school, except for H because she’s the only one who shows up when I need her.

They only call or contact me when they have a problem and need someone to dump on or if they want to tell me that I’m ignoring them. I feel guilty, I suppose, but more because I miss what used to be, not because I miss them.

Everything gets worse when I come home. This house is full of memories of them and good times and without my college friends, I start to wonder how everyone is doing. And then I seek out my high school friends and ask and find out and get yelled at because I’ve “stopped caring” and “dropped off the face of the earth” and “gotten a big head because of that hoity-toity rich kids’ school.”

So I start writing and talking and taking whatever they say. Again.

I love them, I’ll always love them. But what if all we had was high school? I want them in my life, but they don’t seem to want me in the way I want to be wanted. And if I do drop off again, I feel like I should offer an explanation or a second chance or something, anything to ease my somewhat guilty conscience.

Thanks a bunch,
Got In On a Scholarship, I’ll Have You Know

I know you’re good with research; do you know how I could go about doing
a background check on a co-worker?

I’m not the employer; I haven’t seen his CV or anything, although I know
it is full of lies, as his story of what college he went to et cetera changes
constantly, and his competence level certainly doesn’t match up with the
number of places he has said he’s worked in.

This isn’t the kind of thing I would normally consider doing, but this
guy is seriously alarming. He has a near-pyschotic level of aggression
towards coworkers and management seem blithely unconcerned. Many, many
people have gone to the immediate manager and reported his aggressive
behaviour. I don’t work with him directly, but I work near to him in a
small office and have seen many screaming matches between him and
various staff members. The evidence is pretty conclusive that he comes
in at night when everyone has gone home, sneaks through people’s emails
and desks and gathers whatever information he can about everyone. Once
when a colleague came in extra early she was surprised to see this guy
still here, and made a joking comment about “Did you sleep here or
something?” To her surprise he went into a defensive mumble about “no,
sure I only came in five minutes before you…”

He seems convinced people are plotting against him, archiving all his
work to DVD before he gets up to go to the lavatory or leaves his desk
for any reason at all (for some reason I cannot put my finger on I
find that the most sinister of all, maybe just because it is a
relatively new development and shows that his behaviour is escalating).
And he has also recently put passwords on all the Macs in the company
and refuses to tell anyone what they are — anyone using the Macs now has
to get him to log in for them. This wasn’t authorised by management
although it seems they haven’t done anything about it either.

I went in to speak to management at the beginning of December, about two
months after he was hired, and told them, “There is something wrong with
how his mind works.” I was referring at the time mainly to his bizarre
memory lapses — an inability to remember his email password, for
example. But I was also talking about his habit of blaming other people
for his mistakes — with the email password problem he kept insisting
that there was a problem with the network: “the server is excluding my
machine,” even though that is patent nonsense, and getting aggressive
and shouting at the system administrator about it. One employee was
being especially victimised by him and it was mainly out of concern for
her that I spoke up about him — she has since left the company, but she
made plenty of efforts to get management to do something about him
before she did.

It won’t do any good to go in again — they have been threatened with
legal action twice already to my knowledge by people who are forced to
work with him. He has made many blunders of staggering incompetence
(putting company data at risk) that would earn anyone else in the
company a serious bollocking. He is contributing directly to a dramatic
downturn in the quality of the company’s products. For some mysterious
reason they are absolutely determined not to sack him — his probation
period is likely to be over by now and they had plenty of warning that
he was an unsuitable employee in every way. The people slightly above me
just say “they won’t sack him” but offer no explanations. Maybe the
manager is afraid of him. I don’t know. We can’t go over her head
because the managing director doesn’t actually have anything to do with
the company; no one even has a contact number for him (he comes in for
an hour a week and communicates only with the managers) and anyway, no
one knows whether the decison to ignore this guy’s behaviour comes from
our immediate manager or is handed down from the MD.

Anyway, it seems kind of likely that this man has been in prison or in a
mental institution or something — he is oddly lacking in “hinterland”
for a man who looks to be in his forties. His pretences at having a life
and knowing what he is talking about even in casual conversation, never
mind in work-related discussions, are completely transparent.

I am scared that he is violent, or might turn violent if things keep
going the way they are. I may be overdramatising the situation because
it is so mysterious. Maybe part of me just wants some kind of resolution
to all the oddness and has imagined a dramatic conclusion to bring
things to a head. I do obsess about things I can’t understand, it is a
big character flaw of mine. But I do know I am not the only employee of
the company who has had this thought.

I am concerned enough to want to do some research and maybe put my mind
at ease about him. Do you have any suggestions about how I can start?
I’m in Ireland and I can’t find anything useful on Google. I can’t
afford to hire a private investigator but there must be something I can
find out on my own; any pointers would be appreciated, although I
appreciate you can’t know how things work over here.

Alternatively, if it sounds like I’m just being a big nosy parker drama
queen and should stay out of it, please tell me that.

And apologies for the length of this email; I can’t figure out which
details are salient and which aren’t although I do find the increasing
paranoia more scary than the verbal aggression.

Thank you,
Worried Nosy Parker Drama Queen

I’m having some problems with my friends and I hope you can help me out.

Let’s call my friends “S” and “J.” Most of the time we get along fine. We’re a close-knit bunch because we go to a small private school so we share the same classes and all. Of the three of us, I’d be considered the outgoing one. This might be the problem.

We’ll start with S. I’m closer to him than J even though he’s the quietest of us. I’ve always known this but it’s not until recently that things he does have become very annoying and off-putting. I know this guy’s home life so I know he isn’t having serious domestic issues (outside of being spoiled). Sometimes he will talk to me at school and other times he won’t say two words to me without my starting up the conversation. If I call him, sometimes he’ll pick up the phone and other times he won’t. In fact, he’s gone so far as to get his younger brother to answer the phone for him to say he doesn’t want to talk. There have been times he’s asked to see my notes or homework and I’ve let him see it without hesitation. I’ve tried to do the same thing and he’ll be like, “No, I don’t want to let you.” I’ve asked him why he does this and he always gives this really selfish masquerading as brutal honesty answer like, “I just don’t feel like talking.” I can understand that but geez, let me know and I’ll understand.

Now on to J. He and I didn’t really start off liking each other but we have grown on each other. He, like S, doesn’t have a problem asking me for something and I give it to him. My only problem with him is that it’s terribly hard to have a conversation outside of the realm of school and TV without him acting like I’m in his business. I don’t want to be in his business, but I’ll say: “J? What are you doing this weekend?” He’ll answer, “Stuff.” I can understand that answer every now and again if it’s private, but he doesn’t have that much stuff going on where he has to be all cagey and weird about it all the time.

My main problem with both of them is that I treat them like friends all the time and they treat me like a friend SOME of the time. Whenever they have a problem or issue, I sit and listen and offer up advice and just try to make them feel better. Whenever I have a problem, J will sit there and make comments the whole time (which are supposed to be funny) and S will just sit and listen, then say something like “what homework did we have?” I just feel used, Sars. I really do.

What should I do? I’ve told them how I feel and they just don’t seem like they care. Maybe they don’t and I don’t want to believe it.

Scared of the 7th Heaven Twins