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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. My wife and I have been happily married for 10 years with two lovely daughters, 7 and 5 years old. They mean the world to us and we mean the world to each other. We both are extremely successful professionally, working full-time jobs with work travel for me and occasional…

A couple weeks ago my husband, “Gary,” and I attended an out-of-town wedding for my best friend. We spent a couple thousand dollars between travel, accommodations, and gifts (which is not an issue for me but is a sticky point for my husband). Gary does not know my friends and has deemed me clueless with etiquette, saying horrible things about my friends since their wedding day. Now he is even threatening divorce unless I make things right. Let me explain… The night before the wedding there was a rehearsal but no dinner. My husband went out with some old friends of his that night (we both used to live in the town…

My boyfriend has friends who live out of town. They visit our apartment about two weekends every month, and since they live three hours away, they always stay the night. I have had conversations with my boyfriend in the past about how they can make things quite uncomfortable for me when they visit, as they always want to drink and get rowdy, they leave the house a mess, and they always “roast” my boyfriend for his committment to me and our dog. I recently learned that one of these friends had said he didn’t want to come in this weekend unless our dog and I got a hotel room—and my boyfriend had…

I have known my boyfriend for 10 years and last week he met my family for the first time for Thanksgiving. He seemed to get along with everyone, but two days into our trip he started acting distant. When I finally got him to tell me what was wrong, he said that he thinks my relationship with my 17-year-old nephew was inappropriate. He said several things concerned him: 1) When my nephew got into town, I jumped all over him hugging and kissing him; 2) Later that evening my nephew was lying on his bed and I jumped on him; 3) He overheard us play fighting in the hall where my nephew…

I’ve been with my partner for four years, we have one child, and we live together. I trust him now, but sometimes I feel he isn’t being completely honest with me. I’ve had this experience in the past with him: Back when he was in a very bad place, I discovered a few lies. But now he is always by my side. Still, I keep getting this bad gut feeling about something that popped up on his phone. We both share our passwords, and when I was on his phone recently, I saw a sex site that he apparently set up where you can arrange to meet up with women for everything…

I have three beautiful kids with a man I married almost five years ago. I’ve been in a relationship with him on and off for the past 10 years. We have had an extensive history of physical abuse, emotional abuse, and verbal abuse. The state has been involved many times, and it’s safe to say that our whole relationship has had way more unhappy times than happy. My husband has called me a lot of names, and he has never helped me take care of the kids (he doesn’t even know who their doctor is). I have essentially been a single mom in a marriage with this man. Going out as a…

I grew up as an only child of a single mother in a tight-knit and somewhat conservative community in Michigan. My mother was a gold-digger, irresponsible, and kinda slutty. Don’t get me wrong; I loved her. She took care of me the best she could and I appreciate everything she did for me, but that’s who she was: a gold-digger. She chased men with money all her life, even if they had families of their own. She wrecked many homes because she fucked the husbands. It’s actually how I came into the world; at age 25 she fucked her 57-year-old boss who was married with three teenage kids of his own. He…