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I’ve got a family reunion coming up where I am the only member of my immediate family going. Both my mom and my sister are boycotting it after the treatment we got last year from my mother’s brothers and their wives (my brother has been boycotting the family for years). Last year there was a baby shower the following week of the reunion for my cousin – a first time dad. The shower host claimed she couldn’t find our addresses then proceeded to make a big deal out of the fact that we “must come”, etc, though she never told us exactly when or where it was. A little later in the…

New readers, welcome to Dear Wendy, a relationship advice blog. Read some of the most popular Dear Wendy posts here. If you don’t find the info you need in this column, please visit the Dear Wendy archives or the forums (you can even start your own thread), do a search in the search bar, or submit a question for advice at wendy(AT)dearwendy.com. 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: “John” and I met almost six months ago, but only decided to be in an exclusive relationship after four months of dating, right before…

I’m a 26-year-old man and I’ve never kissed a woman before. I’m not hideously ugly or anything like that; in fact, my best friend often tells me that when he introduces me to his female friends or girls in his family, they usually tell him afterward that I’m cute and ask if I have a girlfriend. My problem is that I just don’t know how to talk to women at all. I grew up with an alcoholic father and a mentally ill sister who was hospitalized, and it was too damn much for me to deal with as a kid, let alone all the other angst of being a teen. As a…

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: I’ve been dating my boyfriend for almost a year now, and I feel as though we are getting very close and he could be a person I could see myself spending the rest of my life with. On our first date we were talking about our families, siblings, etc. He told me at the time that he was an only child. Then a couple dates later we were sitting around and he apologized for lying on our first date and told me in fact that he…

I met my boyfriend online two and a half years ago, and while we didn’t mean to develop real feelings for each other, we eventually did. I lived in Canada and he lived in Australia, so for the next year and a half we both worked and saved enough money to visit each other for a few months each. We met around five months ago when he first came to visit me, and by the time I went back to Australia with him I was extremely in love. He was my first boyfriend and even my first kiss, so I’m pretty attached to him. Initially, before we met up, he had told…

When I was four my mom left my dad. My sister had just been born and my mom found out he was doing drugs and cheating on her the the woman who was babysitting us. She moved with all four of us kids back to Pennsylvania from Arizona. My dad was ordered to pay child support and they were supposed to work out a custody agreement, but instead he disappeared. The only time we heard from him afterwards was the announcement that he had a baby three months later with the woman he was cheating with. Because my mom never finished high school she always worked menial jobs for part-time wages. I…