Sars,

Here’s the deal — I am most definitely in need of some
of your wise advice. Let’s get right to it: I am 21
and adopted — I’ve always known that I was adopted, and
I’d always wanted to find my birth mother. A couple of
months ago, I got a phone call from her, and it was
good. I was emotionally overwhelmed, but I got a lot
of questions answered.

She asked me to come visit her
and her family in Nebraska over spring break (I live
in Montana), and I was going to, until I realized that
I could never handle that emotionally. So I asked her
to come here and visit my husband and I. She did, and
it did not go well. Interestingly, she thinks
everything went fine, and that the visit was great.
She’s the most selfish, pushy, inconsiderate person
I’ve ever encountered.

Here’s my problem: I haven’t
talked to her since she left, about three weeks ago. I
would be fine with never speaking to her again. She,
however, is determined to make me the long-lost
daughter she never really had, or something. She’s
asked me to call her “Mom,” and she wrote a letter to
me last week in which she said, “It was so good to see
you again” (“again”? The last time she saw me I was five
days old) and “I don’t want to lose you again
(“again”? she voluntarily gave me up).

I already have
a wonderful family, and the best mom in the history of
ever. I don’t need another one, especially one who is
ridiculously rude and inconsiderate. How can I tell
her I don’t need another mom, and I don’t want to be
extremely close, without hurting her feelings? She’s
incredibly sensitive, and insensitive at the same
time. How should I handle this? Everyone I talk to
about it is baffled.

Thanks,
Sabrina

Dear Sabrina,

I think your best bet is to write her a letter and tell her that you enjoyed getting the chance to meet her…but you have a lot of conflicting emotions going on as a result, and you’ll need some time to sort them out, so if she could just give you a little room, you’d appreciate it, because you feel really pressured by her right now.

It’s the truth.You do have conflicting emotions; she is pressuring you.Say so, and ask her to back off a bit.

Of course, if she doesn’t back off, it brings you back to square one, where you have two choices.You can just not to respond to her; you said you needed time, and if she doesn’t want to give it to you, too bad…but her not giving it to you goes back to the central problem, which is that you feel like you’d do better without her in your life, and you might have to say exactly that if she won’t let up.”You don’t listen, and you don’t respect my wishes.I want you to stop contacting me; it isn’t working out.”

But try the gentler way first.I imagine she’s just wildly excited about getting a second chance to do right by you, and she’s overcompensating as a result — it’s not that she’s not annoying anyway, but I think you both need to let the dust settle before making major decisions about one another and the roles you’ll play in each other’s life.

Hi Sars:

At my tiny college where everyone knows everyone, I made friends with “Rose.”She was totally obnoxious, but could also be fun to hang out with.She once confessed that she had a crush on me and I shut her down, but we stayed friends via mail for the next few years.

When I followed my boyfriend to California, Rose flew out for a visit.It went great — for three days.Then she decided to move out near us, and I learned that a little Rose went a long way.She was annoying as hell, clingy, wanted to know what Boyfriend and I were up to every weekend, and she had some sort of hygiene or endocrine problem (covered with cheap perfume) that made her apartment and personal space unbearably stinky.She also loved to shower us with gifts, although I repeatedly told her she didn’t need to.

Boyfriend and I got married, I got pregnant, and the combination of hormones and lack of antidepressants caused me to lose every bit of patience with Rose.Honestly, I was a nasty passive-aggressive bitch to her.We moved, she moved, and we haven’t spoken for the last ten years.

I think about it a lot and feel terrible about how I treated her.However, should I even try to apologize for my behavior? Would it be too self-serving?Any overtures of friendship on my part might cause her to zing back into my life again.Eww.

Thanks,
Every Rose Has Her Scorn

Dear Scorn,

Would you apologize because you miss hanging out with Rose, or because you don’t want her to think ill of you?You don’t want to hang out with her, so it’s better that she think ill of you…isn’t it?

The end didn’t justify the means, it’s true, but it is in fact the desired end.Leave it alone.

Hey Sars,

You’ve helped me before…so I thought I would get
your opinion on this one.Now, women have always been
a great mystery to me, and I’m used to that.But this
situation has me a little uneasy, specifically because
it’s at work.

Okay, where to begin?I’ve been at my current job for
about six months.In training, I started talking to
two people, but separately.One, we’ll call “Hot
Latina Chick,” the other we’ll call “Psycho Boy.”
Anyways, skip ahead two months, and I notice Psycho Boy
seems to be in a mood.So I say, “What’s up, PB?”To which he responds with great anger, “Why
don’t you ask Hot Latina Chick?”Apparently they
had been emailing for a couple of months at work, went
out to lunch once, and he finally asked her out, and
she said no because he waited too long.Psycho Boy
didn’t react well to this — generally went nuts. (Thus
the nickname.)He sent her flowers, emailed her at
work relentlessly, to the point she finally said,
“Don’t ever email me again.”To which he responds
with an email every day for four weeks.

Now I have inside info from her, and from him, and I’m
throughly on her side for two reasons: 1. The amount
of anger and resentment from him didn’t match with the
kind of relationship they had.Sure, they flirted, but
judging from his reaction, they were engaged.2. She
said stop, he didn’t.No excuse for that.

Anyways, enter the problem.Slight change of venue at
my job brings “Quasi-Single Blonde Girl” into the
picture.She’s cute and fun, but sorta has boyfriend.
They were living together, then they needed “alone
time,” now they’re “seeing other people.”Now, being
a guy, I recognize this as the classic asshole “we broke
up but I get to have semi-regular sex” play.Anyways,
due to this, I’m really not looking for anything from
Quasi except friendship.So we’re hanging out at her
place one night, and she mentions she also talks to
Psycho Boy.I send a general warning her way, but
realize she’s a big girl and can take care of herself.

So then things get weird.She starts avoiding me,
being short, and just generally acting like a 16-year-old.So I ask her what’s up.Apparently she got the
idea that I was looking for more because I’m not an ass and
actually open doors for women.We talk it out, settle
on the just-friends route, which is what I have
planned all along, and everything should be fine,
right?Wrong.She gets weirder, culminating in an
series of emails where she basically dares me to ask
what she was doing the night before.I don’t, because
I’m not nosy, but she still tells me she was up all
night talking to…wait for it…Psycho Boy. I
give her a general “that was sweet of you to help” and
change the subject.But it still doesn’t seem right
to me.Was she trying to make me jealous?Why? Just
to see if she can? Was she rubbing my face in it?And
why does she think I care?

So basically, I really don’t want to talk to her
anymore.My question is this: How do I let her know
this in a work environment? I don’t want things to be
awkward because we do share some friends, and I don’t
want to put them in the middle.And I like my job, so
I really don’t want it spilling over there.How would
you handle it?

Thanks,
My life became a sitcom

Dear Sitcom,

You don’t.It’s your workplace, and cutting people off completely isn’t really an option.Stay civil and friendly, but if she wants to socialize with you, find an excuse not to do it; answer her emails nicely, but vaguely.Get too busy to deal with her, and reduce your exposure to her.

If she wants to have a hissy about it, fine, but at work, you need to concentrate on work and not get bogged down in Quasi and Psycho Boy’s high-school dramas.

Dear Sars,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for some time, and in fact I have
actually sat down and typed out a message twice before.But I have
hesitated to send anything to you because 1) I think I have a pretty
good idea of what your answer will be, since everyone else tells me the
same thing, i.e. “Face the truth and get over it” and 2) writing it all
down forces me to confront how truly pathetic and terrible I have been.
This whole thing is about arrogance and denial, by the way.Without
further ado, here it is:

I was studying abroad two years ago, in my third year of college.I
was in a happy, fulfilling, mostly long-distance relationship with my
girlfriend of the past two and half years, A.We were best friends,
talked every other night or so, and over time had found the difficult
balance between our relationship and those with others.We were, in my
most honest estimation, a fairly mature and loving couple.She did not
attend my university and did not accompany me abroad, and we had spent
a total of about nine months actually in the same city over the course
of our two and a half years.Abroad, I was lonely among friends.
Travelling was fine, my classes were interesting, and my few friends
functioned as a good support system.When I met R, however, my
feelings of loneliness deepened, and I told myself that I was
unnecessarily cutting myself off from natural relationships by
remaining in my long-distance relationship.I was tough until I was
tested by those few months of removal from A.

Well, I fell for R, and I fell hard.My romance awakened, and it was
so nice to get to know someone again.Just so you know, while in the
process of this fall, I handed her the V-card.My relationship with R
was way too fast way too soon, and I handled what I thought as the
necessary breakup with A very poorly.I gave her an incomplete
rendition of what had happened, and then hooked up with her when she
came to visit the next month.Mistakes numbers 1, 2, and 3, the first
in a long, long list.Once the betrayals started, I was on a slippery
slope to becoming an uncaring, ill-intentioned user with a compromised
ability to form real emotional bonds.

I continued to talk with A during the next six months abroad, all the
while assuring R that I no longer a) had significant feelings for A and
b) that I no longer spoke with A.I had, and still have to an extent,
tremendous amounts of guilt for betraying A in the first place, then
sleeping with R, and then lying about it continously.I hate myself
for the way I treated both, but have never decisively broken the
negative behavior patterns that have caused my fuck-ups.

Anyway,
things went fairly well with R while I remained abroad, but I harbored
a displaced resentment towards her that I did not shake.During the
week before we returned to the States, I broke up with R, scared, and
then got back with her a few days later.Once home, I returned to my
midwestern home and she remained in Chicago.By this point, R had an
ingrained mistrust toward me that made the distance very difficult.A
was in the city where I spent the summer, and I foolishly went back to
her.I spent the summer ignoring R and trying to relive a life past,
rowing against the current, a caricature of Gatsby.

When I returned to Chicago — and I know it’s becoming tedious and
predictable by now — I saw R, felt guilt anew, and switched the tables
again.This is the problem: I failed to learn from my mistakes.Again
and again I told one woman that I should simply be alone for a while,
which was probably the right answer, and then I went back to the other.

Since returning to Chicago a year ago, however, I have been in a
scarred but remarkably continuous relationship with R.I have remained
in diminishing contact with A, and we continue to speak on a monthly
basis.Last winter, I was finally truthful with A about sleeping with
R — I told her everything.This was a good first step, but I didn’t
follow through.I was scared into the admission by R’s brief tryst
with another person, and once the shock faded, so did my conviction to
remain straight with A, R, or myself.

R and I have been getting better lately, at least in our day-to-day
relations with one another.We’ve never quite fit each other, but have
always been very comfortable around one another.I have stopped
talking with A for the most part, never going cold turkey but letting
it slowly fade.My feelings for her have likewise faded, and within
the last months I’ve finally come to a place where I’m okay with the idea
that we’ll never be together again.

But lately R has found out about
two secrets, the truth behind two big bad lies.Upon returning to my
home city five months ago, I met with and hooked up with A.”Hooked
up” signifies everything minus sex, which she and I have never had.
She also came to Chicago two months ago while R was in Hawaii with her
parents, and we also hooked up then.It doesn’t make a whole lot of
sense that we feel the need to get together when we see each other, as
both of us are finally resigned to being apart.The friendship works
over the phone but breaks down in person, and again I haven’t been to
quick to learn from the past.

Now, R wants to end it.Of course she does.For probably the seventh
time over the course of her relationship, she issued an ultimatum for a
complete baring of the truth and I failed her.And this time she
appears serious, says that it will simply compromise her dignity too
much if she re-accepts me again.She can’t believe a word that comes
out of my mouth, and doesn’t believe that I respect her in the least.
I try to tell her, perhaps wrongly, that my last meetings with A are a
residual effect of the past relationship, that we do what we do out of
habit rather than genuine desire.I paint myself as a pathetic victim
of circumstance.I have come to feel very deeply for R, a tainted but
resilient love, and now am desperate that she wants never to speak with
me again.

Sometimes, even in the best moments, I have believed that we are not
right for each other.Thousands of times, I have fantasized about
breaking it off, planning it over and over until I trivialized it,
broke its sacredness.Now, though, I feel that we have actually come
to something real, that we have something that might last, that I have
finally come to love this person whom I have hurt time and time again.

Sleepless in Chicago

Dear Sleepless,

Aw, that’s sweet.You’ve stepped all over her, lied to her, and repeatedly acted like a gutless, self-absorbed piece of crap, but she’s finally sprouted a spine — and now you love her.I think I might start crying.

Give me a break, buddy.Seriously.You write about your utter lack of impulse control like it’s the tragic flaw of a literary hero, but it isn’t; it’s fundamental immaturity, and you haven’t had to take responsibility for it because the women in your life have, for reasons that are a total mystery to me, tolerated your endless bullshit up until now, thereby giving you the idea that you aren’t accountable.

I don’t even see a question here, so I’ll just ask it myself.Should you get over yourself already and start actually considering the feelings of others, instead of doing whatever you want and then pretending you feel terrible, when you really only feel terrible about getting caught?Yes.Grow up and do it.The “it’s so lonely fearing commitment, please fuck me to ease my pain” routine is played.

I’ve always enjoyed reading The Vine, and usually was pretty sure that
my problems would never warrant actually going and asking another
person for direction…but I’m confused. It’s another one of those
“about a boy” dealies. I think my heart may be broken, but I’m not
exactly sure, because I’m so mixed up. I know that it hurts very badly, though.

Starting from the beginning: My boyfriend, “J,” and I have gotten along famously for the greater part
of the last two years. We had a few ups and downs, but an
almost unbreakable bond, and the willingness to communicate very openly.
The downs were barely a blip.

He moved an hour away a year and a half ago, and we commenced weekly
visits to each other. Come hell or high water, the weekly meeting was
made. We looked forward to this last summer where we could spend
every day together.
That happened. We were very happy.

Now that school is in session, though, we had to revert back to the
weekly thing. It has put an enormous strain on things. Me, I’m ready
to wait as long as it takes for the next week. Apparently HIS eyes have
been wandering.

He came to me a month and a half ago, and told me his concerns: that he
would be very very tempted to cheat on me, not because he didn’t love me
but because I’m not an available option most of the time.
Seemed like a small problem to me. Cheating doesn’t just happen.
We talked it out, heart-to-heart, and resolved the issue for a while.

For the past two weeks, he’s been getting more distant. Yesterday, he
told me that for the last week he’s been on the point of tears many times
(this boy isn’t a cryer), wrestling with the decision to break up with
me rather than hurt me worse than if he hadn’t.

He now is incredibly attracted to another girl, who I’ll call “C,” and
wants to give her a try. I’m afraid of this, though, seeing as what he
used to describe her was, “She acts and sounds JUST LIKE YOU! Isn’t that
weird?!”He admitted that he still loved me very deeply.I suggested we try an “open” relationship, aware of the risks, but seeing
as he hadn’t been considering it an option (he was going from the
standpoint of all or nothing), I set it out on the table as my favorite
course. That way we wouldn’t have to be “broken up” when we both knew how
much we were attracted to each other. Plus, all sets of our parents
wouldn’t have to get pissed off about the entire situation.

Much relieved, he became his warm and loving self. For the next few hours,
he showered me with the love and affection that had been missing from our
last two visits and our phone conversations (he insisted on a
talk-every-night policy).I let him know that we’d have to back the truck WAY up, and that we’d have
to sort of restart a few levels of our relationship (so that it wouldn’t be
a “have your cake and eat it, too” situation). Also, he’d have to
let me know where he was at with C, not because I’m paranoid, but because
if he hits some of those levels that require protection of some sort, I’ll
have to be able to consider my options of how to make him feel loved when
he IS with me.

I worry, though. I can only see him one day a week. This girl can see him
all five. I asked him about next Friday (our next day to see each other),
and wanted to know if he’d go to a concert (that I have to go to for one of
my classes) with me and stay over (neither
of us can afford a car yet…the concert would cause him to miss the last
bus back to his home, so he’d have to stay).Before he let me know he was “breaking up,” he was all for going to this
concert. After he let me know, his answer was, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.
I’ll see.”If he changes to “no, sorry, can’t” in the next week, I’ll scream.
This is all just so sudden. And crappy. Yeah.

He also mentioned that he felt that he needed to be whapped down a few
more times by other girls before he was sure.This sounds like pure BS. I thought he WAS ALREADY sure. But…he’s not one
to be a jerk. He’s very sincere, so I don’t know if I can venture that
he’s lying, or feeding me a line. I can’t help hoping that that
common “line” is actually true, or at least he feels it to be.

So, to wrap this huge thing up, my question is this: What am I looking
at here? Is he wigging because he’s feeling this becoming very very
serious (HE introduced the idea of marriage), and I’ve been his only
serious girl? Or is he really just wanting to let this thing die, but
can’t figure out how to make a clean break without leaving me with a
lot of “Why hast thou forsaken me? I did nothing to you!” feelings?
Does it seem likely that if I play my cards right, he’ll return? Or will
this go the way of most relationships that consider this as an option?
What does one do from here in order to give this the best possible
outcome? Can the “open” situation work, in this case, because we
communicate with each other so well? Is keeping my hand in this the right thing to do, or should I drop out
of communication and let him decide from there? What sort of shit will
hit the fan when C catches wind of this setup?

Yeah, a lot of questions.
It’s just — the mixed signals and the insecurities add up, and I need a
good person, whose reasoning is solid, to give me straight-up what her
opinion on the situation is (and/or why I’m being an idiot).

Sign me,
Not sure if I should cry, not sure that I shouldn’t

Dear Not Sure,

Go ahead and cry.You’ve already lost him.

Sorry to put it so baldly, but it’s time to face a couple of brutal truths here.First among them: J is full of shit.”On the point of tears” — yeah, right.The guy wants guarantees, but won’t give any; he wants to take it to the hoop with C, but if that doesn’t turn into a regular thing, he wants you in reserve, and he’s afraid he won’t get it.

And I don’t see anything wrong with wanting that, I guess, but his actually expecting you to put up with it is not realistic, which leads me to my second point — agreeing to an open relationship because it’s “better” than giving him up completely?It isn’t, and it just doesn’t work, not if it’s not what you really want and not if you aren’t planning to date other guys yourself.The idea is that you keep him, sort of, by giving him what he wants, and while he does get what he wants — to sleep with another chick consequences-free and hold onto you as back-up — what exactly do you “keep”?You “keep” sitting at home, sobbing into a pillow and wondering why you aren’t enough for him on your own, is what.

Don’t bother pretending that an open relationship is okay with you when it isn’t.I know you don’t want to lay down the law because you think he won’t choose you, because you think it’s better than the alternative — but the thing is, even if you don’t lay down the law, he’s still not going to choose you, and you’ll wind up with the alternative anyway.He’s not going to date C for a while and then come to his senses and reaffirm his commitment to you.It just doesn’t work that way.So, stand firm.Tell him it’s only you or it’s over, and if it’s over, it’s his loss, but for the sake of your self-respect, force him to make a choice now and get it over with.

[11/12/03]

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