dinoceros
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People have value even without fancy educations and fancy jobs.
Also, 19 is young. There is plenty of time in case he gets sick of the restaurant industry and wants to do something else.
I say this as someone who has watched many college students waste piles of money trying to pursue a degree they don’t want and cannot make themselves get.
As someone who’s driven in snowy states for 10 years with FWD, I think it comes down to how much you’re required to drive in the snow. I drive to work if it’s 6 inches or less, but if it’s much more than that, my job is flexible enough to let me work from home. But I can see where if you were forced to go to work (or had another obligation you couldn’t back out of) in any amount of snow or ice, you would have to have something with AWD. I for sure would have swapped my car for something else if my job wasn’t so flexible! Of course, there are a lot of pickup drivers here who don’t realize that ice is slippery no matter what kind of car you have and spin out because they think they can go faster than the rest of us because of the size of their truck.
*Ugh, edited because I read so many acronyms that I typed the wrong one.
I think that what a lot of people ignore/don’t understand when they are justifying “helpful advice on how not to get raped” is that people who are assaulted feel a lot of guilt and shame to begin with. Before they even tell anyone. Before anyone blames them or not. So, while saying, “It’s not your fault, but you shouldn’t do this” seems pretty neutral, it’s being heard by someone who is already probably blaming themselves. Because that’s the only consistent message that people hear from society about it.
I also think it’s not as useful as people seem to think it is to say it to someone who has already been assaulted. If you want to teach young women that you can’t trust men and that you’re not allowed to drink much in public because you’re a women, then go for it. But I don’t think that this is going to be ground-breaking advice to an assault survivor to where it’s worth the shame you potentially cause by telling them AFTER the fact what they should have done differently.
Also, just because a kid’s parents tell them they both have to be clean doesn’t mean they get that messaging from society. If boys are framed as playing with cars and sports and stuff, those are not really “clean” activities. You get dirty if you work on actual cars. You sweat with sports. When girls are implied to do things like dress up or use makeup, that implies keeping yourself looking nice.
Certainly, at school, girls would be more likely to get teased (at least in my experience) for not looking nice than boys are. My best friend wore the same type of sneakers that her brother did in middle school (decorated like a baseball). She got teased by girls who wore “prettier” shoes. He didn’t get teased for them.
Unless a child never sees other children, TV, ads, or people aside from their parents, then they can get messages about gender even if those are not being reinforced by or explicitly stated by their parents. My mom wore oversized sweatshirts and jeans all the time. I certainly didn’t grow up thinking that was what I was supposed to look like when I started middle school.
I think that Nicole is also being simplistic. People CAN feel how they want, but there’s a difference between accepting you feel a certain way and, like JD says, acting on it OR justifying a feeling that’s misplaced.
If someone gives me a gift that’s worth $50 and I feel upset that it’s not worth $100, then yeah, sure, I guess I can feel how I want. But insisting the person spend more money on me is not appropriate. It’s also not doing anyone, including me, any favors if I decide to tell myself that it’s totally fine to be angry about the $50 gift.
So, don’t beat yourself up over your feelings, but it’s good that you go to other sources, like here, to find out if the feelings you are having are healthy or if they signify unreasonable expectations. People who are being blunt with you are doing so because they do see them as unreasonable expectations and are telling you, and unfortunately, telling someone that doesn’t always sound super nice and friendly.
This is kind of an odd question. Why is it surprising that 16- and 17-year-olds would view a situation differently than 8-year-olds? Why don’t you just listen to what they told you instead of asking us why they gave the feedback that they did?
I actually did defend classmates who were getting picked on when I was in fifth grade. No one cheered for me. The bullies generally just walked away. One threatened to punch me and held his fist over my head. Everyone else just stared at me. This is part of why I think your story is fake. The dialogue is very strange too. What 8-year-olds talk like that?
I think you’re trying to get people to state some opinions that you’re going to say are “too PC” and are trying to rile people up. I’d say that generally, it’s best to not spend this much time dwelling on something you did in third grade. Just let it go.
I am a person who likes to travel alone, a lot. I think the people who are/were implying that the LW is being silly and simply doesn’t understand the desire to travel alone are/were making this too black-and-white (I use both tenses, because the tide seems to have changed with the new info about the online woman).
If I felt the need to travel alone, I wouldn’t choose the exact location my partner has been wanting to go. I’d compromise and travel to that place WITH them and then choose another place for a solo trip. I also wouldn’t wait until the entire trip was planned and booked to tell them. If I thought they’d throw a fit over the planning and thought that telling them after it was booked was a way to avoid that, then I’d take that as an incompatibility, rather than just choosing to sneak around. I also wouldn’t try to come up with intangible arguments as to why it was a good idea (“revisit my past self” “make you proud”). Again, if being honest about wanting to travel solo didn’t work, then that’s an incompatibility.
That said, obviously this situation is more than that anyway. At the least, this guy doesn’t care much about you or your relationship. At the worst, he’s planning to hook up with this woman. The part that I’d be most insulted by, if I were you, is that he seems to think you’re incredibly stupid and spineless because he’s very blatantly making up dumb excuses and even telling you that he plans to meet a woman from online. He knows that you’ll believe him/be in denial to just let it happen and then stay around waiting for him to come back. Don’t make him right.
If your son has a medical condition that is exacerbated by sugar to the point where he isn’t allowed to eat it, then you shouldn’t keep it in the house. If he were an adult, maybe. But teenagers eat junk food. They don’t have the best self-control. If you KNOW he has issues with controlling himself around it, and keep it in the fridge, knowing he’s going to “steal” it, then you’re setting him up for failure. He probably eats it and feels guilty for eating it because he knows it’s wrong. I am in my 30s and if I had cookie dough or ice cream in my fridge, I’d probably not be able to stop myself from eating it at some point too.
The issue here is that you’re describing some normal teen behavior and some behavior resulting from your son’s mental health, and essentially saying he’s a bad kid for how he behaves. You scream at him multiple times a day, apparently. You can hire all the professionals in the world to work with your son, but if your relationship to him as a parent is that you scream at him and make him feel bad about himself, none of that is going to matter. If you’re a nuclear scientist, then you should be able to pick up a parenting book or two and learn more about how parent a teen, particularly one with mental health issues.
Your original post makes it sound like your top priority is this man who doesn’t want to be with you and you’re blaming your son for it. As a parent, you should be RUNNING away from anybody who says it won’t work out with them and your son. You two are a package deal, no matter how bad you seem to think he is.
Take some time to learn more about parenting your son and once things are under better control, then that would be a good time to date. But I think also some counseling would be in order to help you learn how to look for men who are right for you and not chase after ones who aren’t.
Aside from the cheating aspect of this, I work with college students and one of the big causes of students failing classes is that they memorize stuff rather than understanding the concepts they are being tested on. A lot of students use seemingly helpful resources and think they are studying well (memorizing types of problems, practicing them over and over, etc.), but they are essentially just memorizing what they need to pass that test. In later classes, or if they have a teacher who writes a test in a way that requires them to APPLY what they’ve learned, they can’t do it. You don’t want to set up a situation where you can’t do well unless you’re cheating or where you’re expected to know information that you don’t know.
I think this is a good learning experience for your daughter, that you need to facilitate. A child that age does not need to be judging the gifts they receive based on how cheap they are or not (and I mean cheap in the quality sense). I would have probably responded to her that her aunt cares about her a lot and wanted to get her a special gift, and that sometimes we buy things without knowing they are broken (or whatever). This is not a time to reinforce the idea that she should be expecting gifts of a certain quality or expense.
Yes, you’re too controlling. Even you admit that he’s only talking about the kid and that whenever you look at his phone, everything is fine. That should have been what you needed to learn to back off. The fact that you’re continuing to expect him to tell you every text and show him all the messages is really inappropriate.
If he had written in, I’d be telling him that he needs to run in the other direction. You need to get your jealousy in check or find someone who doesn’t have kids. (And the jealously is not his problem to fix, so your solution needs to involve you and only you.)
You shouldn’t make that kind of commitment to someone if you have this many doubts. I think you’re trying to rationalize your doubt by saying that you’re the kind of person who can’t make decisions, so therefore your doubt isn’t about him. Even indecisive people would feel mostly good about their decision, but maybe have a couple doubts that creep in.
Considering how much risk is involved, I also think you need to listen to yourself here. I would never give up all of that for someone that I had no idea if I really wanted to be with. I think that a year with someone who lives two hours away is not necessarily enough time to make that decision anyway. A year with someone you see every day? Maybe. But how often do you really see him?
