It’s time again for Shortcuts. For every question, I’ll give my advice in just a few sentences, because sometimes the answer to a person’s question is so obvious and the need to hear it so great, being as clear and frank as possible is simply the best way to go.
My boyfriend and I have been dating for three years and live together, rent-free, in the house his parents bought for him to live in while he’s in college. His dad is in the Air Force and recently deployed, so his mom moved to the same city we live in. Now that his mom has moved here she drops by unannounced. I realize she owns the house but she does not live here, so I feel she is out of place coming over whenever she pleases. We were out of town and asked her to watch our animals, and, when we came home, we discovered that not only did she take care…
In a feature I call “Your Turn,” in which you, the readers, get to answer the question, I’m presenting the following letter without commentary from me: My boyfriend and I and I are both 22 and have been in a long-distance relationship for a little over a year now. He only went to college for his associate’s degree, so he has been working for the past year. And I am taking an extra year of college and graduating next May, so we have another year of distance ahead. Since he has several different career ideas, he doesn’t know where he will end up, and I want to go to law school so…
I am in my mid-twenties and have been in a relationship with my boyfriend since college. This was the first serious relationship for both of us and we have had a lot of growing up to do along the way. Through work and persistence, we now have a very fulfilling relationship. The boyfriend has a close friend, “Justin,” whom I cheated with a few times, from October of last year to this January. Justin is engaged, and we both decided to stop our affair out of guilt. Initially, I was going to break up with the boyfriend, but Justin talked me out of it. I took some time to evaluate my motivations…
In our social group we have a friend, Joe, who has a severe mobility impairment. He has no intellectual issues but needs help doing even the most basic tasks such as eating, drinking, toileting, showering, etc. Joe uses a very technologically-complex wheelchair to aid in his mobility. I’ve invited him over to my house often and he really appreciates it as most people don’t want to deal with the “trouble.” It’s not much trouble — I just make sure there’s a path cleared for the chair, straws for his drinks, and help him get out of his chair for a bit if he’s there for a long period of time. There is…
We sent out Save-the-Dates for our wedding a few weeks ago, and people have been posting pictures of the postcard to Facebook and Instagram, some of them tagging us in the pictures. This bothers me a bit because mutual friends who have not been invited to our relatively-small wedding will see it. ALSO, there is at least one person whom we actively do not want to show up to any wedding festivities (long story short: a member of our wedding party has a restraining order against her), and the STD has the URL for our wedding website, which has time, date and directions to the celebration. Up until now, my fiancé, “NonFic,”…
Seven months ago I thought I had found the love of my life. We met at a Halloween party and instantly connected. I’m finishing my last year of graduate school and he is a pilot in the Air Force. After a few dates he revealed that he would soon be moving back to his home base halfway across the country. We decided to keep seeing each other and really live it up in his last two months in my home state. However, in those two months both of us got more than we bargained for… We were on the same page on so many levels: readiness to settle down, desire for children,…
I’m a middle class, Catholic woman with a decent job. I always think of others first and try to do the right thing. My boyfriend of five years, however, is Jewish, a partner in a well-known law firm, living in a white collar neighborhood. Money is no issue. He is somewhat of a fitness freak. He never misses a workout even it if means going into work late or rearranging his schedule to get it in. His newest love is CrossFit. He is obsessed with it and the people he works out with. He is on a chat room constantly with these people, and on the weekends when we are together we…
I met my now boyfriend of four years about six years ago when we were both starting college. Now that we have been together, I would like to take the next step in our relationship and start making definitive plans, like say getting married and buying a house. He tells me that, yes, he wants to get married, but right now is too soon for him. And he is very, very, very, wary of buying a house due to student loan debt. We also can’t agree on how many kids we’d like to have. I say I want three or four kids. He gives me the pained look and asks, “Really?”. I…
It’s time again for Shortcuts. For every question, I’ll give my advice in just a few sentences, because sometimes the answer to a person’s question is so obvious and the need to hear it so great, being as clear and frank as possible is simply the best way to go.
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