Guy Friday

You know what’s going to really be the sad part about this? The LW is building herself completely up, but I can see the outcome coming a million miles away:
-The child’s mother doesn’t want the LW’s son to be a part of the child’s life, to the point where she’s deluded herself into not believing a scientifically proven/supported test.
-The son doesn’t want to be a part of the child’s life (which we can paint as a negative character trait, but, honestly, kudos to him for recognizing he can’t be the kind of father this kid deserves and not trying to force the issue).
-The son and mother are talking about how to handle this new information

Result? The son is going to voluntarily terminate his parental rights, which in most states can be done within a certain period of time after an adjudication of paternity with little to no penalty. And, as she is not a party to the case in a legal sense, the LW has no standing in the juvenile court to intervene and object. So she will lose any legal visitation rights (or any legal relationship, period, really), and then it’ll feel like a gut punch, and it will lead to resentment and more grief and pain.

First of all, Sue, if you “don’t have time to sugar coat things”, then why are you demanding that WE sugar coat our responses to YOU? Being rude in reply isn’t going to get anyone here to go “Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry for offending you!” It’s just going to invite more scorn.

Second — and I know people have made this point, but I just want to emphasize it because I’m hoping the 12 hours or so since you posted this have helped you refocus and recognize the issue — we certainly have sympathy for you feeling lost and worried about your son’s well-being. It sucks to be in a situation where you realize your son has been lying to you about his circumstances and then to sit back and replay months and months of time in your head wondering if you missed the signs and signals. But where you lose us is when your letter (and replies) turn from “I’m worried about how his choices now are going to close doors for him in the future that he didn’t mean to close” to “How dare he make these choices after all I’ve done! How dare he embarrass me!” Just to turn it around for a moment: how do you that the choices you made were the best ones for him? How do you know that they didn’t harm him? And if they did harm him, would you still have made them? I mean, it’s possible someone could argue “How dare YOU pressure him so much to focus on textbooks at the expense of everything else in his life,” and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

Here’s my biggest sticking point: education is great. Education is wonderful. Education can be the silver bullet, the great equalizer. But the key word is “can.” We have been socialized to believe that degrees are the measure of intelligence, but study after study has shown that there are multiple axes in which “intelligence” can be quantified. My brother-in-law is one of the smartest guys I know, and he absolutely loves my sister and nephew to the heavens and back. He also happens to be a brilliant mechanic who can instinctively fix anything and everything that has parts. But when he graduated high school, he did a semester of college and realized that it wasn’t working for him. He was doing OK, and he could have finished, but he didn’t want to waste his time and money on a degree he wasn’t going to use. So he dropped out, and went to work as a mechanic to support my sister through college, and he basically put his shop on the map. And when my sister graduated college and went to work for a defense contractor, she referred people with car issues over to him. And like a fairy tale, one day her boss was bitching about how no one could fix his expensive foreign car’s unusual problems, and my sister told him to bring it to her husband after work as a favor, and my BIL took one look at it and fixed it in 15 minutes. And her boss was impressed enough with him that he made some calls to friends he knew, and one of them was a CEO of an engineering firm who met my BIL, loved him, and offered him three times his salary to come work for him, with a promise to upgrade his job title and salary and pay for the whole thing if he agreed to pursue an Electrical Engineering degree. And he just graduated last December at 30 years old, and he’s got a job most people would kill to have at that age. And all of his success came WITHOUT the degree, not BECAUSE of it.

Oh, and one other thing that I know people have already mentioned but bears repeating: people only show you what they want you to see. I’m a lawyer from a Top 100 school with a decade under my belt. I had friends with better GPAs and fancier jobs who appeared to have it all. The key word is “had,” because they’re dead. 8 of them, to be exact, in the last 3 years. That doesn’t count the hundreds of lawyers I personally know in a variety of specialties with substance abuse issues, or mental health issues, or divorces, or affairs, or whatever. Doctors are the same way, sadly. I love my job, like REALLY love it, but sometimes it even gets too much for me. So what I’ve learned is that if you love what you do and you are happy with your life THAT is what matters. Your son is still incredibly young, and nothing has been foreclosed to him yet, so don’t give up hope that his life will end up being positive and worthwhile for him. Just have faith.

Yeah, I like how this writer conveniently ignores that there ARE men responding to this thread who are echoing what the women said. Then again, perhaps my handle was misread as “Unsure About His Gender Friday”?

Look, Hans, I’ll do like Leslie and assume for the moment that this is genuine. So here’s the deal, speaking as a guy: you DON’T have a right to request an explanation. You’re confusing “can” (as in physically capable of doing so) with “may” (as in having permission or blessing to do so). And when you say things like “I told her to tell the other guy she wasn’t interested” . . . I mean, screw you, man. You knew damn well what you were doing when you said that. You don’t get to play innocent and shrug. You were calling her out! You were telling her she’s full of crap. And regardless of your hurt feelings or disappointment, you don’t get to justify your shitty behavior because you’re young. I was young too and did those things, and you know what? I apologized for them when I realized I was wrong. And some of the women accepted my apology because they knew I was sincere, and some I had burned to the point where they just wanted me to go away, and I accepted that because my actions have consequences.

But you know what bugs me most about your attitude here? YOU reached out to a forum of strangers, and now YOU bristle at the fact that they weren’t all warm and cuddly? Come on, man. And I’ve read all of the responses here, and setting aside the ones in response to your insults, the vast majority of them were, at worst, blunt, and frankly necessary given the tone of your letter. I didn’t add much because I didn’t feel the need to; the points I would have made to you were already made. But obviously the fact that many people who responded presumably have vaginas — though, again, how you would know that for at least a third of the responses is absolutely beyond me because even *I* don’t know that — caused you to assume their thoughts on the issue were colored by past offenses toward them (which, I mean, whose advice ISN’T colored by that?). Well, I very much have a penis, and I’m telling you you’re being an asshole, and JUST. STOP. ALREADY. Walk away. Walk far away. Don’t interact with her until you can get your shit under control, and possibly longer than that if you want to take a “Is someone who would be less than totally honest with you someone you want to remain friends with?” approach; that last part I leave up to you.

Final piece of advice: go on YouTube and watch some clips of Terry Crews talking about both women and his own experience with sexual harassment. He’s a former NFL linebacker, a great comedic actor, and a guy who was where you were at one point until he realized what he was projecting out into the world. Seriously, watch him talk and let it sink in.

Cause seriously, no grown man over the age 30 should be playing Madden

Hey now. I’m over 30 and play Madden. It’s not like I play it all the time or for hours in a sitting, but Madden 17 lets me play a whole game in about 20 minutes, so what’s wrong with playing it now and again?

So here’s my problem with the whole “last name” debate: anytime a guy has any feeling about it besides “Oh, sweetie, whatever you want is fine with me,” we get labeled as chauvanist pigs who want to treat our wives like dining room sets or cars (i.e., things we own). And that’s completely unfair, especially since it just doesn’t mean the same thing as it once did. As a guy, I absolutely wanted my wife to take my last name, and I was insistent on it. Granted, part of it was because I was basically capitulating to every other damn thing in the marriage (raising the kids Catholic, seeing her parents for every Christian holiday, etc.), and I felt like I needed one thing that I got to have go my way. But a large part of it was for reasons I couldn’t completely explain. It was something that just . . . mattered to me. It wasn’t because I thought my wife was less than me; I just wanted us to have an identity as a couple in the fashion that I always dreamed of it being. Many women also get “given away” by their fathers at their weddings; should we assume they all see themselves as property because they did that? Also, men put up with far more ridiculous requests from the women they marry because “that’s how I always imagined it being.” I’m not saying getting married in a certain place or a certain time is necessarily equal to changing your last name for (you hope) the rest of your life, but I just fail to see why the former is considered completely reasonable and forgivable, and the latter is some great sin.

I don’t know. I’m just seriously sensitive about this. I got SO much crap from people for wanting my wife to take my last name, and it’s such bullshit. Men shouldn’t be bashed for wanting that, and I get really sick and tired of being tarred and feathered for it, even indirectly, for holding that belief. I would never do anything but support and celebrate my wife’s accomplishments, and I would never try to minimize her family history, so I don’t know why people always think that because I wanted her to take my name it means I don’t care about either of those things. 🙁