Are you allergic to Twitter? Do you befriend people outside your target demographic? Then you may be suffering from an undiagnosed personal branding disorder.

As our country continues its nosedive from prominence, we can all rest assured that, even as our tiny fortunes disappear and our little ships sink, our ability to create the illusion of inherent personal value will save us. Remember, in the golden age of social networking, our personalities are irrelevant; our personal brands are what really matter.

Accordingly, psychologists will soon shift gears from diagnosing personality disorders to diagnosing personal branding disorders. After all, you might be obsessive-compulsively checking Twitter all day for mentions of your name, but that doesn't mean you're sick, it just means that you're committed to maintaining a robust social networking presence in order to adjust to the demands of an increasingly volatile global marketplace. What was once considered pathological, personality-wise, must be viewed as wildly adaptive in today's ever-shifting digital landscape.

Conversely, personal branding disorders have the power to rip the American Dream right out of your clutches. If you're not ready to take your appeal as a human being and boil it down to a few key words, if you can't reduce your complicated philosophical perspectives down to a sexy catchphrase? You're in trouble. Now is the time to ask yourself: Do you want to be a part of the next wave of rich personal self-promotion, or do you want your child to grow up not knowing what really good sushi tastes like?

In order to protect yourself and your offspring, be sure to familiarize yourself with a few of the most prominent personal branding disorders currently threatening our socioeconomic infrastructure:

• Avoidant Branding Disorder: You're hypersensitive to comments posted on your Facebook page, and highly self-conscious about your tweets, wasting hours editing them and finally deleting them because they're not quite right. The fact that you only have 13 followers on Twitter has led to severe low self-esteem, but you occasionally pronounce the whole thing "a useless waste of time." The thought of attending a social networking conference makes you break out in hives.

• Brand Identity Disorder: You often find yourself longing to be accepted by people outside of your target demographic. You're haunted by the illusion that there's a difference between your brand and your "real personality." You experience anxiety when you're confronted with distribution models or marketing strategies that go against your basic "values" or "principles," most of which are unnervingly unrelated to the laws of supply and demand.

• Histrionic Branding Disorder: Your statements are often highly emotional and don't support or endorse your brand in any way. You sometimes go off on tangents, both in real time and via social networking tools, that aren't related to the product or services you currently offer. You waste excessive time each day focusing on feeling "appreciated" or "loved" instead of monitoring your profit margins. You frequently attest to the importance of "finding true love," often at a significant cost to any ongoing efforts to increase your sphere of influence and expand your potential customer base.

• Schizoid Branding Disorder: You have been overheard proclaiming that Twitter is for blowhards with ADHD. You profess a love of "nature" and "reading books" instead. You refuse to chat with people online, and your cell phone service charges extra for texting. You call Blackberries "Crackberries" and claim that you're not even a little bit curious about the iPad. When someone asks you a polite question, such as "What's your current distribution capacity?" you merely roll your eyes and shrug, then wander off without answering.

Unfortunately, because these Personal Branding Disorders have only recently been identified as serious maladies by helping professionals across the country, further study is necessary in order to understand their causes and consequences. Above all, the population must be alerted to the threat. Ultimately, personal branding disorders are capable of eroding international trade, thereby curtailing our access to basic goods and services—like dog grooming, and chili cheese fries!

The next time you find yourself disparaging iPhone apps or raving about the restorative effects of growing organic milkweed in handmade windowboxes, it's imperative that you seek professional help immediately. Remember, there's no shame in admitting that you're indifferent to your own multi-platform marketing initiatives, as long as you can see clearly that it's not normal. The sooner you can admit that you're sick, the sooner you can address your ineffectual sales tactics and build a more resilient, dynamic personal brand that will resonate with a wide range of potential customers, now through the end of the fiscal year.

Heather Havrilesky is staff critic at The Daily and author of Disaster Preparedness, a memoir published by Riverhead Books in January 2011. She was Salon.com's TV critic for 7 years and cocreated Suck.com's Filler before that. She has dispensed ill-tempered advice at the rabbit blog since 2001.

Photo by Bryan Rosengrant, from Flickr.

Reassuring news from Japan! Our panel of experts has assured us that the current levels of radiation are not a huge threat to those outside a 50k radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, at least not right at this moment based on the admittedly limited information we're being given, and based on the assumption that no further radioactive material will be released into the atmosphere—which is, in fact, happening at this very minute.

Fortunately, most of our experts agree that a full meltdown of the nuclear fuel at any of the reactors is "wildly unlikely"—although they're not sure what can be done, if anything, to prevent the aforementioned wildly unlikely full meltdown.

Update, 9:30 A.M. EDT: After listening to the latest statements by Japanese officials, some of our experts are changing their assessments of the potential of a full meltdown from "wildly unlikely" to "pretty unlikely" or "sort of unlikely," while others are now using terms like "somewhat likely" and "kind of likely, actually" and "awfully bloody likely."

In the case of a full meltdown, some experts say that it would be "rather improbable" for molten fuel to burn through the walls of the reactor vessel, which are made of thick, thick steel. Others say the steel "really isn't that thick at all" and that burning through the walls seemed "entirely possible" if not "quite probable." (At Three Mile Island, in 1979, molten fuel made its way through some of the thick steel, but not all of it, but experts point out that this Japanese crisis is "nothing whatsoever" like Three Mile Island, one characterizing it as "way, way worse than that, in every dimension.")

Update, 10:30 A.M. EDT: After a new wave of dire news from Japan, many of our experts have begun to pace and cough nervously, and some are volubly mulling various worst-case scenarios. Many of these experts tell us that the molten fuel will now "most definitely" burn through the steel, and fall to the floor of the containment structure. But these experts feel "pretty certain" that the fuel will not progress "all that far" before it starts to cool. Others predict, however, that it will "almost certainly" reach the walls of the containment structure, which are made of thick concrete, and will "absolutely" damage it, perhaps through cracking or crumbling. Some are growing concerned that steam explosions will totally annihilate the containment structure, allowing uncontrolled release of radioactivity. Others are starting to characterize themselves not as "concerned" but "extremely worried" and "deathly afraid" of this possibility, while still others have requested a nice, cool glass of water and a place to sit down for a minute before offering any further opinions.

Update, 10:49 A.M. EDT: Upon hearing that a new plume of radioactive material is heading out over the Pacific, one expert covered his ears and said, "Nah nah nah nah nah, I can't hear you!" But many of our experts said that this should be no cause for concern to residents of the West Coast of the United States as the traces of radiation from the plume would be "miniscule." But then other experts interrupted these experts, and said that the radiation would not be "miniscule," but would "hopefully not be significant" or anyway, would at least only be "pretty likely" to cause major, life-threatening health problems in the populace.

When asked about the size of the radiation cloud that could, theoretically, drift across the Pacific and elsewhere if, hypothetically, one or more of the Fukushima reactors encountered a full core meltdown, four of our experts took deep, cleansing breaths, then reassured us that even with such a cloud, residents of the West Coast could simply "stay inside" and "take lots of showers." Two experts stepped outside for a quick cigarette, then returned and told us that under such conditions, residents could just "remain indoors for a few months" and "refrain from drinking any milk for the next decade or so." And one expert developed a rapid pulse and shallow breathing and had to be wheeled out of our conference room by EMS personnel.

Upon inquiring about a core meltdown of Reactor 3, which uses uranium and plutonium and therefore produces more toxic radioactivity, two of our five remaining experts asked if maybe they could leave and go to the bar down the block for an hour or two before resuming. One expert asked to be reminded exactly how much he would be compensated for his time, and another expert retreated to the corner of the room and began rocking back and forth, quietly mumbling, "It's all over. We're toast."

The last remaining expert, though, assured us that everything would be absolutely fine, at least in the existentialist cycle-of-life sense, and that the Japanese government and the global community would do everything in their power to continue monitoring the situation—which, admittedly, equates more or less to standing by, helplessly wringing their hands—until either the situation resolves itself or several catastrophic meltdowns occur and a giant cloud of radiation descends on the earth, blocking out the sun and snuffing out life as we know it. A faint smile drifted onto our last remaining expert's face as he described this, and that's when we searched his briefcase and found a large quantity of potassium iodide, along with several grams of heroin and a few sterile syringes.

Heather Havrilesky is the author of Disaster Preparedness, a memoir published by Riverhead Books in January 2011. She was Salon.com's TV critic for 7 years and cocreated Suck.com's Filler before that. She has dispensed misguided advice at the rabbit blog since 2001.

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Tucker M. Yates, via Wikimedia Commons.

Defense Secretary: Mr. President, we have a situation developing in the Middle East.
President Trump: Do you like what I've done with the Oval Office? Incredible, right? Have you ever seen anything like this?
Defense Secretary: Mr. President, there's a matter that…
President Trump: I show this place to very few people. Presidents, Kings… and they walk in, they look around, and they really can't believe what they're seeing.
Defense Secretary: It's very nice, Mr. President, sir, but there's a situation in Libya needs your attention. It seems that…
President Trump: Get to the point, get to the point.
Defense Secretary: We have fears that Muammar Gaddafi will begin exterminating those involved in…
President Trump: You don't like him very much, though, do you? Be honest.
Defense Secretary: Excuse me?
President Trump: Gaddafi. You've never been a big fan.
Defense Secretary: Mr. President, I don't think my personal feelings about….
President Trump: Tell the truth!
Defense Secretary: Well, I don't know that his particular approach to the current crisis is one that…
President Trump: Wow. You are a talker, do you know that? Could you please get to the point?
Defense Secretary: I'm just saying that I wouldn't necessarily endorse his particular…
President Trump: That's it! Look, I love you, but you never shut up. You really don't.
Defense Secretary: Mr. President, sir, you asked me if…
President Trump: I'm sorry, I hate to do this, but… You're fired.
Defense Secretary: Sir, I was only answering…
President Trump: Enough! Now get out of my office.
Defense Secretary: Mr. President, sir! You asked me…
President Trump: Get out of here! Out!
Defense Secretary: Mr. President! I only…
President Trump: Out! Goodbye!
The Defense Secretary exits.
President Trump: Wow. I love him, but what a chatterbox.
Chief of Staff Ivanka Trump: He really took that badly.
President Trump: Well, I had to do it. I had to.
Chief of Staff Ivanka Trump: You did.
President Trump: He left me no choice.
Chief of Staff Ivanka Trump: That's true.
President Trump: I am running a great, great country. Who's next?

Heather Havrilesky is the author of Disaster Preparedness, a memoir published by Riverhead Books in January 2011. She was Salon.com's TV critic for seven years and cocreated Suck.com's Filler before that. She has dispensed misguided advice at the rabbit blog since 2001.

Photo by Michele Sandberg via Wikimedia Commons.

This #NoBollocks content was produced in partnership with Newcastle Brown Ale. If you enjoy this article, won't you be a love and watch a TV commercial on the Internet? Go on, it's right there on the right.

After two or three decades of exposure, watching TV can feel a little bit like going home to visit your family. At first it's comforting to see so many old familiar faces. But… why don't these people ever change? Why are they so rigid and repetitive and tedious? And what makes them think they're remotely interesting, or even marginally entertaining?

On the internets, we refer to these humans as either "stereotypes" or "the detritus of the past," depending on the situation. Having witnessed these stock characters over and over again as children, TV showrunners grow up and populate their own TV shows with them. This way, they hardly even have to wake up to write that scene where the Sensible Mom With The Hot Body confronts the Rebellious Teenager about her skimpy outfit. Although writers like to call this "being in the zone," it's actually more like simple regurgitation. You know how mother birds eat worms, then vomit them into their babies' mouths? It's like that, only it pays a lot more.

That said, in the past decade, lots of smart, talented writers who might've become novelists during another era have decided that getting paid obscene amounts of money is much nicer than typing away in insolvent obscurity while slowly drinking themselves to death. As a result, some of these recurrent familiar faces on our TV screens are getting a much-needed makeover. Let's meet a few of them, shall we?

THE HAPLESS DAD

On the vast majority of family shows, "Dad" isn't a person so much as a shapeless halfwit, fumbling confusedly with modern appliances, sputtering hopelessly in the face of tiny marital challenges, and just generally underwhelming friends, family and foes at home and at work. Strangely, though, this subhuman of limited charms, very little wisdom, and almost no capacity for grasping complex emotions is, nine times out of ten, remarkably smug about himself and his abilities. Name almost any TV dad on any TV show in TV history, and they're all pretty much the same with minor variations. They're simple, self-satisfied beasts who'll go to great lengths to avoid hassles. As accurate a snapshot of the domesticated male as this might be, there are only so many jokes you can squeeze out of a human being with the charisma of an overstuffed armchair.

Yes, it's true that, as Hanna Rosin recently pointed out at Slate, the Hapless Dad has evolved to a state where he occasionally enjoys parenting (No way!) and isn't always terrible at it (Amazing!). Even so, many of the standard complacent-jerk dimensions are still in place, even on great sitcoms like "Modern Family" and "Up All Night." Even The Evolved Hapless Dad makes clueless remarks, screws up with clock-like precision, and feels proud of himself in spite of it all.

But, given how inept he is, why doesn't Hapless Dad hate himself more? Why isn't he anxious or depressed or paralyzed by low self-esteem, doomed to spend the balance of his days making time with those buxom Nord beauties from Skyrim? And how long would the Sensible Mom With The Hot Body reasonably stick around before her friends urged her to dump that self-satisfied schmuck on the couch?

Thankfully, Louis CK came along and endowed the Hapless Dad with the self-loathing that he rightfully deserves. On FX's "Louie," our hero embodies all of the fumbling and emotionally stunted behaviors of the standard idiot dad, but with generous servings of spite, dread and learned helplessness ladled on top. Instead of chuckling and shrugging and waving off his wife's nagging, Louie long ago alienated his wife, who pops up as his ex now and then, mostly to marvel at how lazy and disgusting and useless he continues to be. Louie doesn't blame her, because he himself is in a perpetual state of despair and horror at his own vileness and ineptitude.

Now, some of you might say that "Dexter" and "Breaking Bad" and "Californication" reinvent the Hapless Dad by making him a serial murderer/drug kingpin/womanizer. After all, aren't those guys just Hapless Dads who've channeled their pent-up rage and neuroticism into cooking up drugs and screwing teenagers and slicing people up with expensive knives?

You make a good point. But personally, instead of watching unhinged dads blow people's faces off, I'd prefer to watch Louie panic as the ice cream on his pie starts to melt because his girlfriend told him not to eat it until she's done talking about whether or not they should break up. It's much more suspenseful.

THE FRIEND

The only way to describe The Friend is by saying that she isn't The Hot One, she's The Other One. This makes her incredibly insecure. Most of the time, she's actually pretty hot. Who cares, really? All that matters is that someone else has been named The Hot One, so she can't be it. This is the moral of her story: You Are Not It.

Think Natalie, laughing her terrible snorty laugh, while Blair flips her hair at some date rapist in a letterman's jacket on "The Facts of Life." Think Miranda, ordering Chinese take-out for the millionth time, while Samantha sleeps with an entire Italian soccer team on "Sex and the City." The Friend second-guesses herself, sabotages her only hopes of love, and pours herself into her (pathetic, dead-end, soul-sucking) career, all because she's all tangled up inside over with the fact that she hasn't been deemed the most supernaturally attractive woman in the world. When the kid with the giant forehead tries to kiss Jennie Garth on "90210," what do you think she's thinking? She's thinking about Shannen Dougherty. Shannen Dougherty, who everyone agrees is way hotter than Jennie Garth. Why? Because she has crooked eyes and she's dangerous, that's why. Everyone agrees.

The Friend is never dangerous, and couldn't for a second get away with having crooked eyes. They wouldn't even let her onto the set with crooked eyes. They'd say, "You take your mismatched crooked-ass eye sockets and you get off the set immediately."

Until now, that is. HBO's "Girls" has been proclaimed many things—the most groundbreaking show in modern televisual history, the most racist, elitist, lily-white show among an endless sea of racist, elitist, lily-white shows, the best thing you or your roommate have ever seen, the most repetitive gaggle of Brooklyn stereotypes ever to air on premium cable (and that's saying a lot). But while we're making grand proclamations, the one thing that Lena Dunham has most definitely done for all of womankind is to emancipate them, forever and ever, from being The Friend.

Because on "Girls," not only is The Friend (Hannah, played by Dunham) not all that insecure (relatively speaking), but she also has more swagger and courage and heart than The Hot One (Marnie) and The Other Hot One (Jessa) and The Sort of Hot One (Shoshanna) put together. Instead of whining and weeping snottily into her hands the way The Friend would do on any other television show, Hannah gets naked and refuses to exercise but realizes that she is exactly 13 pounds overweight (this isn't some fantasyland, after all, except for the trust funds and bad Fu Manchus). Hannah has lots of not-very-great sex. She's sometimes timid and confused, sure, but she's brave enough to state her feelings to people directly. She's self-possessed. But most importantly, she is not preoccupied with not being The Hot One. She wears clothing that doesn't compliment her body. She doesn't appear to brush her hair regularly. She doesn't have to, because she doesn't believe that there is some center of the universe located somewhere other than where she is, and she'll only get there if her hair is brushed. No. She can simply exist and do what regular people do: Eat, worry, sleep late, roll her eyes, fall on her face.

No, it shouldn't be cutting-edge for The Friend to be treated like a normal human being. But it is anyway.

THE WISE OLD PROFESSIONAL

White-haired dudes in suits with the answers to the mysteries of the universe are as old as the universe itself. Just think of John Houseman in "The Paper Chase," intimidating an auditorium full of young lawyers in training with his immense knowledge of everything under the sun. On TV, when some slick professional with white hair walks into a room, you expect him to start talking like Lorne Greene, telling you who's doing things right and who's doing things wrong and where you fall into the mix. You expect him to be a real leader of men.

Then there's Roger Sterling of "Mad Men." With his senior partner status and his silvery hair and his soothing luxury-car-commercial voice, Roger Sterling should by all rights be the kind of Wise Old Professional who could take Don Draper under his wing (tips) and show him the ropes. But "Mad Men" isn't a story about a man who seeks and wins his fortune in advertising and lives happily ever after. Instead, "Mad Men" is a story about how the blind pursuit of the American dream (and its shallowest, most fleeting spoils) will erode your soul, year after year, until you're a sad little shadow of your former self.

By transforming The Wise Old Professional into The Ambivalent Aging Slacker Starving For Wisdom, Roger Sterling not only foreshadows what lies in store for Draper (divorcing his wife to marry a much-younger secretary, for one), but also offers an eerie reminder of what a life of pampering and indulgences will eventually do to your psyche. Like a gorgeous false advertisement, Sterling is the smoothest character in the entire office, but nothing is good enough for him. He drifts from one distraction to the next, bored out of his skull, unable to derive any lasting meaning out of any of his experiences, or to locate any real purpose in any of his relationships.

By twisting The Wise Old Professional into a sort of wizened, embittered jester, showrunner Matthew Weiner is telegraphing exactly where the capitalist game leads: to a perpetual state of narcissistic befuddlement. And Sterling makes that state look bewildering, chilling, and vaguely sexy. Bravo!

Even though the television is still as filthy with tired characters as your mother's livingroom is filthy with insufferable blood relatives, a few brave souls are venturing forth unfettered by the one-dimensional dysfunctions of yesteryear. Now if you could only convince your sister to stop kicking you in the shins under the dinner table.

A contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Heather Havrilesky was Salon.com's TV critic for seven years and cocreated Suck.com's Filler before that. She's the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. She has dispensed misguided advice at the rabbit blog since 2001.

Imagine that an intern on HBO's hit show "The Newsroom" discovers a cache of unpublished pages while sifting through Aaron Sorkin's desk drawers in search of a cease-and-desist form letter. Who knew that the man behind "The West Wing" and "The Social Network" had such wells of passion for classic Russian novels—and prescription drug literature?

Big Mouse and Small Mouse!
A Children's Story by Aaron Sorkin

There was a little house on a little hill that belonged to Little Mouse. One day Big Mouse rode right up that hill on a big bulldozer and knocked down Little Mouse's house.

"Why are you knocking down my house?" asked Little Mouse.
"Your house?" said Big Mouse.
"My house," said Little Mouse. "Why are you knocking it down?"
"So this is your house?" said Big Mouse.
"You're driving a bulldozer and half of my house is knocked down," said Little Mouse.
"Half knocked down or half built? It's all about perception," replied Big Mouse.
"I'm calling the cops," said Little Mouse.
"Do people really do that?" asked Big Mouse.
"Do what?" asked Little Mouse.
"Call the cops. I thought they only did that on TV," said Big Mouse.

Little Mouse ignored this and went into his house and looked around for his Blackberry. He looked and looked and looked, but half of his house was knocked down! He couldn't find it!

"Do the cops even come to this neighborhood? I mean, when you call?" asked Big Mouse, following Little Mouse around his half-collapsed (or half-built) house.
"I wouldn't— I mean, I haven't—" said Little Mouse.
"Seems more effective just to keep a gun in your sock drawer," said Big Mouse.
"I don't believe in—" replied Little Mouse.
"You don't believe that guns exist?" said Big Mouse.
"Don't do that," said Little Mouse. "Don't purposefully—"
"Which is it?" asked Big Mouse.

"I don't believe that it's right to pack heat, or to drive a giant bulldozer around, knocking people's houses down, for that matter," said Little Mouse, his voice growing louder. "Big Mice like you blame Little Mice like me for everything from high taxes to the moral degradation of our country to the sorry state of the economy, turning a blind eye to reckless Wall Street bigwigs who can't tell a credit default swap from a wart on their… How dare you?! You're the ones tearing everything down! How dare you?!"

At this, Big Mouse felt ashamed of himself, so ashamed that he pulled a semi-automatic from his bulldozer and pointed it at Little Mouse's head.

"Guns do exist, homes," said Big Mouse.

"I'm willing to retract at least part of what I just said," said Little Mouse.

Before Big Mouse could shoot his gun, which would probably be racist now that he's addressed someone as "homes," sirens were heard. Cops on the way, even in this neighborhood. (This is a fantasy, in other words.) Big Mouse ran, looking slightly deranged. Little Mouse cried a big, salty tear, and said, "America has changed. It has really, really changed."

Then he got into his little bed, to rest his weary head. "And not for the better, either," he said.

The End.

Crime and Punishment
Reimagined by Aaron Sorkin

Raskolnikov stirred his martini and sighed heavily, pinching the bridge of his nose between his strong fingers. He was so frazzled by the old woman—or maybe she was his age, she should wear her hair down and meditate more. His handsome face looked weary and moist, but refined. Why must St. Petersburg smell so bad? The room was packed with preening radicals, casting suspicious glances at each other. They're sick inside, he thought. Hypocrites. No better than the Tsar. They were probably thinking the same thing about him. Or thinking that he was thinking that they were thinking the same thing about him. Neurotic idiots!

At last he turned to Sonia, looking straight into her beautiful face, although her nose was a little too pointy. That had always bothered him. And she went to Vanderbilt. Is that really a good school? She didn't speak, but color rushed to her face. Her unabashed passion for him disgusted him, but then he thought of the really good medicinal pot she kept in her bedside table at home, next to her Bible. The madness of it, not having his own stash! Plus, all the suffering of humanity! His hands shook, his eyes glittered. All at once he grabbed her purse, fumbling for a cigarette. Damn big tobacco. Just one!

Zoloft Side Effects
Written by Aaron Sorkin

All medicines may cause side effects, but many people have minor side effects or they pretend they don't have side effects because they don't want their favorite prescription dope to be taken off the market (and by "the market" I mean the legalized corporate drug market, which is every bit as corrupt as illegal drug trafficking, in case you were wondering; Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline may as well be run by a Colombian guerilla group, for all of the unethical tactics they engage in). Anyway. Check with your doctor if any of these side effects persist or become bothersome when using Zoloft (although I wouldn't necessarily trust anyone who was indoctrinated—see, the word says it all—by the stodgy precepts of traditional, institutional medicine, which is essentially an old boy's club bankrolled by big pharma and therefore openly hostile to a more flexible, whole-body approach to wellness). So: Tightness In Chest (Beyond the usual level), Bizarre Behavior (When not drinking to excess or under tons of stress), Swirling-Room-Feeling (Like when Cheney said that stuff about bombing Iran), Trouble Sleeping (That just means you have a conscience), Confusion (Not while watching Fox News), Severe Ringing In Ears (And your cell phone is off, for sure this time), Unusual or Severe Mental or Mood Changes (Unless you just read something ill-conceived by that smug guy from that online magazine that only halfwits read), Worsening of Depression (Although, with the state of the world today, I'd be worried if you weren't more depressed).

"Bossman"
Performed by Katy Perry
Lyrics by Aaron Sorkin

Sometimes I think I'm the girl you always wanted
Champion of facts, mortal enemy of speculation
Other times I think that I work for you
And I have to do whatever you want me to.

What did you say?
I don't know, even though you repeated yourself.
What is this meeting about?
I can't tell. You knocked me off my feet, so why do I feel like hell?

Oh baby, this sexual tension, it never goes without mention, no no.
Oh baby, your condescension, it triggers my apprehension. Sometimes I don't know!
Take the high moral ground, and I'll go even higher.
Let's take on obese children and Holocaust deniers.
Oh baby, you know I can't hide
I've got to live my life as if I am alive!

Apple Blossom Heating Instructions
Written by Aaron Sorkin

CONVENTIONAL OVEN: HEAT FROM FROZEN Preheat oven to 400ish, whatever you feel. Why should I care? Remove apple blossoms from wrapping, while averting your gaze sheepishly. They look so frozen. Are they supposed to look this frozen? Place on a baking sheet in the moral center of the oven. Yes, the moral center. Define that? It's a hyperbole. Or a metaphor or an idiom or something. Did you really go to Harvard? Heat 15 to 20 minutes or until their soft, vulnerable interiors ooze all over the place and make a huge, embarrassing scene.

ALTERNATIVE/MICROWAVE OVEN: Give one of them an arrogant tic, like a nervous habit of looking at his watch. Make the cute one slightly stupid, or at least twitchy and hysterical. Place in a microwave safe fishbowl, like a crowded, hip bar or a big, open office or maybe the Oval office. Agitate their molecules for several minutes, until they shout, flail their arms around, pound their hands on the table, cite the Constitution, weep and tear their hair, rend their clothing, wail to the gods for mercy, and then go back to flashing each other furtive glances to the strains of Coldplay, just like none of that other stuff ever happened.

Oven temperatures may vary. Nothing is baked by committee. These are only guidelines, and I don't feel qualified to… I have no idea what day it is. Go away.




A contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Heather Havrilesky was Salon.com's TV critic for seven years and cocreated Suck.com's Filler before that. She's the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. She has dispensed misguided advice at the rabbit blog since 2001. Photo by s_bukley, via Shutterstock.com.

As Polly Esther, The Awl's existential advice columnist, Heather Havrilesky gives advice in this space every Wednesday. Here's an excerpt from her memoir Disaster Preparedness about a bit of advice she once received.

"Find someone early, don't wait!" My father's thirtysomething girlfriend leaned across the table to deliver this advice in a stage whisper. I was only nineteen years old, and my father was within earshot. But Alice had tossed back a few glasses of red wine and she was winding up for one of her soliloquies. She didn't have kids (not that she didn't want them!) and she needed to save me from the same uncertain fate.

"Really?" I stabbed my steak with my fork, hoping she'd see how little I felt like discussing this in front of my dad.

"Yes, really." she said, sitting back in her chair. "When I think about the great guys I dated in college, guys who would've married me in a heartbeat? Jesus…" She trailed off, looking over at my noncommittal, 50-year-old professor dad who was polishing off his halibut, hardly listening to her words.

I studied Alice across the table. What was wrong with her? She was reasonably attractive, smart, opinionated, and she seemed to like drinking. She was anything but boring. Maybe she was too demanding or too bossy and she went on and on about herself? Maybe she seemed confident on the outside, but once you got to know her she was insecure and needy and got teary at the drop of a hat? There had to be some reason she was dating a man 15 years her senior, a man who clearly wasn't about to marry her or give her the babies she wanted. Sure, my dad was good-looking and successful, but he also juggled much younger girlfriends far and wide, including one or two in Europe, to visit when he gave talks abroad. "One girlfriend, or three," he told me once. "But never two. If you have two, they'll find out about each other, and they'll be pissed."

This was the sort of pragmatic advice my father bestowed: advice that made no sense (three girlfriends wouldn't find out about one another somehow?), advice that had nothing to do with me.

My mother was even less helpful, limiting her counsel to some vague assertion of my appeal as a person, while inevitably managing to cast doubt on that appeal along the way. When I had a problem with a boyfriend and needed her input, her response was, "Who cares? If he's not interested, I'm sure someone better will come along as soon as he's gone."

"Who said he's not interested?"

"I'm not saying that, okay? I'm just saying it's irrelevant. You'll always have men eating out of your hands, no matter what you do. Why bother with someone who's lukewarm?"

"Who said he's lukewarm? Is that your impression?"

"Heather! Jesus! I'm just saying, there will always be lots of men who are interested in you, so why get hung up on someone who's on the fence?"

And so it went. Any practical discussion of whether this particular boyfriend was on the fence or not was out of the question. It didn't matter how much I said I liked him, or how much I wanted it to work. It was beneath my mother to mull whether this or that guy liked me or not, and it was beneath me, too. Why couldn't I see that? She preferred to look at the big picture—I was a catch, damn it!—and ignore the little day-to-day bumps in the road. She wished I would hurry up and do the same thing.

My dad preferred the big picture, too. "All men are assholes!" he'd announce, almost gleefully. "Never forget that."

"You're a man."

"Yep. That's how I know."

But instead of looking at the big picture, instead of casting a suspicious eye on the guys around me, instead of knowing that for every lukewarm asshole in my sights, there was another asshole waiting in the wings to take his place, I wondered suddenly if I shouldn't nail down one particular asshole as soon as humanly possible.

After all, to hear Alice tell it, while college was a fertile paradise, teeming with virile young men anxious to settle down and start earning money to support their beautiful wives and darling babies, post-college life was a barren wasteland, populated by lecherous middle-aged divorcés who wouldn't so much as lend you their bus pass after a night of hot sex.

So in keeping with Alice's very practical advice—the only practical advice I'd probably received about love in the first 19 years of my life—I spent the next 15 years hoping to marry every single guy I dated.

I wanted to marry the ambitious but slightly shallow yuppie who knew way too much about expensive wine for a 21 year old. I wanted to marry the stubbornly childlike aspiring filmmaker who thought marriage was a bourgeois trap designed to damn otherwise spontaneous people to lives of mediocrity and silent longing. I wanted to marry the older divorcé who lounged around the house in MC Hammer pants, quoting his favorite passages from Conversations with God. I wanted to marry the balding, perpetually unemployed stoner who had a life-size cutout of the Emperor from The Empire Strikes Back in his bedroom. Instead of assuming that there would always be attractive, interesting men around, I adopted Alice's scarcity mentality. I stretched out each relationship well past its natural shelf life. I remained committed despite big flaws and major incompatibilities.

Even so, like the school principal who's determined to stick with even the hardest cases, I had impossibly high standards of behavior. I tried each boyfriend's patience to no end. I was fault finding and relentless: This is not how the man I'm going to marry should act! I'd try to redirect his behavior, using polite but explicit terms. Hmm. How can I inform him, nicely, that my future husband should not talk about the wine at great length, or say things like "My mama didn't raise no dummies—except for me and my brother!" or wear MC Hammer pants? How can I make it clear that my future husband should mention how pretty I am much more often? How can I make it plain that my future husband should ask about my day, then listen like his life depends on it?

Every step of the way, no matter how frustrated I became, I never realistically evaluated our differences or made a rational assessment of our inability to move forward as a couple. I thought each guy constituted my one last chance to nab a husband before I lost my looks or resorted to dating middle-aged swingers. I just had to make this one work, there was no other option.

***

The irony was that, right before Alice delivered her little speech, I had just broken up with the perfect guy, the ultimate future husband. Henry and I fell in love the first day of college. We stayed up late every night, listening to music and making out and marveling over how perfect we were for each other. He was unbelievably cute and he was crazy about me. He hung on my every word. He couldn't wait for his parents to meet me. He raved about how incredible I was, how much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. On Valentine's Day, he got me a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates, a necklace, a teddy bear, a heart-shaped balloon, and a dozen roses with a card that said: "This is what it's all about." I wanted to be caught up in the moment, but I couldn't quite tamp down my skepticism. "Really?" I thought. "This is what it's all about? Valentine's Day? It's all about buying a bunch of red crap for your girlfriend on a manufactured consumer holiday?"

But Henry was a romantic. He could get whipped into a state of almost hysterical sentimentality over any little thing: a walk through campus, a trip to our favorite BBQ joint, you name it. There was music playing in his head. He was at the center of his own little romance novel, and I was the ravishing lead with the flowing hair and heaving bosoms spilling out of her bustier.

College life isn't kind to romantics. That spring, as I reveled in the joys of drinking cold beer with rooms full of cute, flirtatious upperclassmen with broad shoulders and deep voices, Henry confessed that he sometimes worried that I would get bored and break up with him, sooner or later. "No, no. That'll never happen!" I told him immediately.

Then I thought, "I'm going to get bored and break up with him, sooner or later."

That fall, just as Henry had predicted, I became fixated on a mercurial guy named Finn. Finn would ramble on about highly personal stuff whenever he got drunk (which was often)—his relationship with his father, his ongoing existential crisis. He was smart and very intense and could talk for several hours straight, always viewing the world in alienated, suspicious terms. He seemed a little depressed and whenever he sobered up, he couldn't remember any of our conversations.

I became obsessed with Finn. How could I resist? Henry was totally dedicated to me. Finn barely even noticed when I was in the room. Henry wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. Finn was liable to pass out or wander home with some other girl at any second. Henry listened to my every word with great concentration and focus. Finn could hardly focus on my face.

So I dumped Henry. He was depressed for months. He wandered the hallways of his dorm at night, weeping audibly, keeping all of his friends awake. The breakup was tougher for me than I expected. I missed Henry, and didn't realize how much I'd derived my happiness and confidence from his presence. There was only one thing to do: follow Finn around until he agreed to go out with me.

Eventually, Finn and I started hanging out regularly, but we were never officially dating. There were no flowers on Valentine's Day, no cards singed your best friend always and forever, no mix tapes with sentimental titles featuring sappy songs by Don Henley, no long phone calls. I just showed up where I knew Finn would be, and at the end of the night, he'd ramble on about himself as we walked to my dorm room together. Unlike Henry, who was always worried about the tone of my voice or what that look on my face meant, Finn hardly noticed anything about me. But he refused to discuss whether or not he was on the fence about me—this talk was beneath him. He had bigger, more existentially pressing fish to fry—just like my mother did! When he woke up hungover and saw his pale face in the mirror, he called himself an asshole—just what my dad would've called him! In other words, while Henry felt unnaturally positive and warm, Finn felt like home.

Also, he was really tall and he didn't listen to Don Henley.

This is how your mind works when you're 19. But once I had that awful conversation with Alice, I was tortured, because why was my future husband getting wasted and puking into that trash can, then flirting with a random woman he just met by the keg?

Even so, this pattern continued for years. I rejected relationships with stable, genuinely interested men to go out with lukewarm, inappropriate, unavailable, self-involved, off-kilter mutants. It would be unfair to call them assholes. Most of them were nice guys, guys who could easily make a less demanding woman very happy, guys who I made pay dearly for their future-husband status. And even as they pulled away, I became more determined to imitate what I thought a fulfilling relationship should look like: I prattled on endlessly about the farthest reaches of my emotional landscape, analyzing and unpacking past experiences, unleashing a torrent of what I thought were hopelessly charming anecdotes, escaping into rambling monologues on the unacceptability of patchy facial hair or pug dogs or insupportable fashion trends. I figured I deserved to loom large, to confess every detail of my history. I thought I should be accepted and embraced for everything I felt and thought, for everything I'd ever felt and thought before. I figured I should be celebrated and adored, like some kind of a demigod.

In other words, I was a lukewarm, inappropriate, unavailable, self-involved, off-kilter mutant. Maybe this was the glue, the common ground that kept me and my so-called future husbands together.

Yet, inevitably, each future husband would decide that he would prefer not to be my future husband. This took longer than you might imagine—somewhere between 18 months and two years in most cases. Often, I was forced to end the relationship myself, but not without provocation: Typically my future husband had proclaimed his total unwillingness to be my future husband several times before I finally relieved him of his duties.

This pattern finally shifted the night that my last so-called future husband, Dave, returned home from an East Coast trip. During an expensive welcome-back dinner (I was buying, of course), Dave described telling his friends (and their happy, baby-flanked wives) how I was ever so anxious to get married. He told them I had become despondent when I didn't get an engagement ring for my birthday. He related this story to me cheerfully and matter-of-factly, munching away the whole time.

Of course he was right. I'd wanted an engagement ring for as long as I could remember—from anyone, really—but that's not what had made me so upset on my birthday. I'd been annoyed because he ran out to the drugstore that morning and returned with a copy of Finding Nemo (because he loved that movie!) and then asked me for some wrapping paper to wrap it with. That was not how my future husband should act, was all.

I was horrified. My boyfriend not only got me a crappy animated movie for my birthday, but he turned around and told all of his friends that what I really wanted was a ring! Then he had the audacity to tell me about it.

"So . . ." I asked, willing myself not to lose my cool right there in the restaurant. "What did Ellen and Ava and Rebecca say?" I needed to know what the wives, with the babies on their hips and the adorable toddlers running around in their four-bedroom houses, had thought about this.

"They said you should dump me," he replied, stuffing his mouth full of fish. I looked down at the untouched salmon on my plate, and suddenly it dawned on me: This was not how my future husband would act because this was not my future husband! This was just some balding, unemployed comedy writer, eating a good dinner on my dime. Hot damn, why was I even having dinner with this guy?

But I didn't say another word. I got up and walked out of the restaurant, and sat down by a fountain outside. It was time to take the very practical advice offered by these wives, albeit secondhand. It was time to look at the big picture. I was 34 years old. I would always have men eating out of my hands, I told myself. I tried to picture myself at 65, old and gray, surrounded by fawning men, all of them chowing down on grilled fish.

Dave came outside, sat down next to me, and smoked a cigarette. I told him that he should move out. He finished his cigarette, and we went back inside and finished dinner.

I wish the story ended there, with me the picture of grace and self-restraint, silently moving forward alone, but that's not my style. Instead we returned to the house we shared and I cried for at least an hour, and then, surrounded by a pile of snotty tissues, I proceeded to deliver a series of lengthy treatises on my utter desirability as a future wife, including some extended musing on the totally unthinkable, insane notion that anyone, let alone someone with a full-size cut-out of the Emperor in his bedroom, would willfully turn his back on the prospect of marrying me, glorious me, wonderful me, hot mustard and me, me!

Let's face it, if you have to expound upon your countless qualities as a future wife, you might as well just staple bologna to your face and screech like a wild bird. Making a strong case to a man about your viability as a prospective wife is about as wise as informing your current girlfriend that you know that she's going to dump you, sooner or later. I think that's what my mom was trying to tell me, years before, but somehow it took me 20 years to figure it out.

***

When Dave moved out, I was Alice's age. Was there something wrong with me? Yes. I was attracted to indifference. I settled, and then tortured my boyfriends for it.

At age 34, it was way too late to find someone early, as Alice had strongly recommended. I figured it was probably too late to find someone at all. I decided I would just have to adopt a baby on my own eventually. In the meantime, I'd get a few more dogs. I would work on my songwriting. I would write a novel or two. I would paint the rooms of my house weird colors. I would be messy and odd and interesting, the sort of woman who didn't worry about what men thought, at long last. I'd be the sort of woman who knew that men would always be interested in her, but didn't particularly care either way.

This dog-lady vision was comforting to me, somehow. And soon, instead of telling men I met that I was the perfect catch, I started to tell them the truth, based on what my ex-boyfriends had told me over the years: Like Alice, I was reasonably attractive, smart, opinionated, and anything but boring, but I was also very demanding and way too bossy and I went on and on about myself sometimes. Furthermore, despite appearances, I was insecure and needy and got teary at the drop of a hat.

That fall, I met someone new. He was smart and handsome and thoughtful and funny. Even though I was tempted to gloss over my flaws a little, I told him the truth. I warned him that I was impatient and demanding and emotionally overwrought and sentimental and earnest and exasperating, and I could be a serious pain in the ass.

"So, in other words, you're a woman," he said.

And I thought, That's exactly what my future husband would say!


Previously in series: Say I'm Alright


Also by this author: 3 Tired TV Tropes & 3 Shows That Toppled Them


Heather Havrilesky is The Awl's existential advice columnist. This excerpt is reprinted from DISASTER PREPAREDNESS by Heather Havrilesky by arrangement with Riverhead, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2010 by Heather Havrilesky. Photo by Taryn.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because the heart is a lonely hoarder."

Polly,

There seems to be an abundance of advice-seekers who are 25 and terrified of being alone or 31 and think they're elderly. What I don't see is anyone over 40 who doesn't have their shit together. Is it that they are too busy being surrounded by loved ones to read blogs? Or are they too downtrodden to bother?

There is a perception that young people are bundles of misguided anxiety and that time will sort everything out. And yet everything in my experience contradicts that. (It probably doesn't help that I just finished reading The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Why did no one stop me?!)

After a 13-year relationship, I find myself single—and 40. It's not a divorce because I was never married. And marriage is not really the issue. Ninety percent of my friends are unmarried with no kids, and I've attended exactly two wedding in 20 years, both of them my sister's (neither involved bridesmaids or a white dress). The issue is that I'm going on month four of what's meant to be a year-long separation (no illusions there) and instead of having fun with my new freedom like I had envisioned (the separation was not my idea, but I wasn't 100% opposed to it as a rut-breaking tactic), I'm miserable and panicky.

The problem is that what worked at 27 doesn't at 40. Yet a good number of the women I know are still living as they always have. I don't have good relationship role models. We like to stay out late, go drinking, be marginally irresponsible (which is all fine since we are wage-earning grown-ups) behavior that is all in line with the hipster punch line of a Brooklyn neighborhood that we live in. But a middle-aged version of "Girls" is not only horrifying, it's not sustainable. I'm hyper-aware of the growing disconnect between my insides and my outsides and I feel queasy about turning into the oblivious old lady at the bar.

This seems to bother only me, though.

(The ex, who was age appropriate, also thought I was irrationally hung up on being older than everyone around me, but I don't think men feel this as acutely. Case in point: I often see aging silver-haired dudes at shows, but never their female equivalents.) Nearly every female I know dates younger and for the time being it's feasible since we could get away with shaving five years off our ages and no one would question it. But I don't want to lie, plus I have a hard time with men who used Facebook as teenagers or were in grade school on 9/11. And the point is moot, because I've hit the invisible to the opposite sex point. At first I thought I was simply annoyed by youngsters dancing to Bell Biv Devoe because mindless nostalgia rubs me the wrong way (I learned to never trust a big butt and smile long ago). But then I wondered if I was more upset that youngsters who dance to Bell Biv Devoe have no interest in me.

I feel like all the grown-ups got married, never go outdoors after 9 p.m. and socialize by throwing dinner parties in their brownstones with reclaimed wood tables, small batch bourbon in Mason jars and kids playing in front of the chalkboard-painted fridge. Must I await the Dadurday of reckoning to score a viable divorcee?

The obvious solution is to try and meet people outside of bars—volunteering, church groups, poetry readings, whatever—or at the very least expand neighborhood boundaries. But even though I'm chatty (and long-winded, obviously), I'm extremely introverted and never start conversations with strangers first. Alcohol helps, hence the bars.

I'm starting to believe that at some point "there's someone for everyone" is as untrue a platitude as "do what you love and the money will follow" or as annoying as people who claim to have lost 30 pounds once they stopped stressing over what they ate. I know I'm still new at this but I'm already feeling that I could just as well become a hermit in my new paycheck-eating apartment, ordering Thai food off Seamless and mourning the loss of Enlightened until I eventually keel over.

Are some people just meant to be alone? All my friends are, and now I am too.

Older, Not Wiser

Dear Older Not Wiser,

Back in the mid 90s in San Francisco, you'd see advertisements all over the place for Linda McCartney's Meatless Frozen Entrees. The ads seemed to loosely refer to a food product of some kind, but all you knew for sure was that the "food" in question 1) lacked meat, 2) was frozen, and 3) was for some reason associated with the wife of the man who wrote "Hey Jude." Say whatever you want about that lunatic Judith Hearne, but the woman did have passion. And if she put out a food product, you can be goddamn sure she'd tell you all about what was in it.

While I very much enjoyed your letter, it's the 700-word equivalent of something meatless and frozen. Instead of telling me what you have and what you want, you describe what you don't have and don't want, while outlining what everyone else has and wants. The fact that you're on a year-long hiatus from a 13-year relationship fits right in with the wishy-washy Nowhere Man feeling of your letter. You portray yourself as passively standing still against a background of action: Your partner suggests a break and you agree to it, vaguely hoping to break out of a rut. Your friends go out drinking and dating younger guys and you agree to it, vaguely hoping that it will stop feeling quite so wrong to you. You imagine married people sipping bourbon out of Mason jars at their dinner parties, but insist that marriage is not the issue. As bad as Judith Hearne might make you feel, she at least took action, installing herself in that inherited house in the country, then leering at the handsome young lad tending to the grounds. (Correction: I've confused Judith Hearne, the old-maid antiheroine of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Rachel Waring, the old-maid antiheroine of Wish Her Safe At Home. I strongly recommend both books, though!)

Hearne only veers off the path to happiness when she starts to protect herself from other people's opinions and ideas by retreating into her own imagination. Eventually, she vastly prefers fantasy to reality. Every time she's faced with a choice that might bring her back into the real world with real people, she condescends and retreats to the safety of her delusions, Don Draper-style—except without the expensive suits and the sparkling cocktails.

This year-long trial separation is a terrible thing for you. It means that you're forced to experience all of the downsides of being alone—paying your own rent, worrying about what your ex is doing, haunting a half-single life while wondering if it's your permanent fate or not—without any of the advantages. Trying on singledom for size is like "experimenting" with cohabitation. So much of the experience is defined by testing, by being on the fence, by wondering how things will go without making any concrete commitment, that it's tough to get an accurate sense of what really being single or really making a commitment might look like. I'm not saying people should court briefly then marry. I'm just saying that it's often much healthier to take clear action: commit to a partnership (which can be done without marrying) or don't move in together yet. Break up or don't. "Trial periods" tends to mean that one person has their cake and eats the other person's cake, too.

Will you be happier alone? I don't think you're gathering new information on that front right now. Instead, you're living in this limbo state that's sucking all of the passion out of your life. As a result, you aren't passionate about anything—not your ex, not yourself, not your friends, not the idea of other possibilities, nothing. In order to change that, you have to form a vision of your life that makes sense to you. Going out to bars all the time and/or dating someone much younger doesn't make sense to you, so factor that out of the equation right now (instead of dragging your ass out night after night in order to avoid facing yourself).

Now tell me what does sound right. How do you want to be living a decade from now? What aspects of that picture are mandatory (must own your own place, must be creatively productive, must own a pet, etc.)? What aspects are optional? Do you want to get married? Do you want to have kids or adopt? Do you want to travel? Do you want to be involved in activities that don't include drinking?

You need to decide what you want and set out in pursuit of it. If it's really important for you to find someone and fall in love, that's all the more reason to call an end to this so-called hiatus right now. You gave it 13 years. If your ex wants to make a passionate show of staying together (or you do), fine. Short of that, you need to call it quits and move on. The right plane can't land if the wrong plane is blocking the runway.

Once you've broken up officially, then it's time to commit to some activities that don't feel lame to you. No one is going to make you start conversations. You just show up and take part, that's all. We garrulous drinker types always imagine that every interaction depends on our performing for a live audience. No. Regular people just do shit (volunteer, join jogging clubs, throw poker nights) and slowly become more familiar to each other until conversations naturally happen.

You're never too old to have the life you want. Truly. But you do need to know what you want first, and—maybe even more importantly?—you need to be able to say it out loud, without shame. I don't know that you're surrounding yourself with the kinds of people who find these sorts of direct statements socially acceptable. Is there a dearth of passionate talk among your peers? Do they mostly discuss what they don't like, what they'd never stand for, who they would never want to be?

Fuck the meatless frozen entrees of the world. It's time to be something, to own it, to announce it to the world without apology. Fuck the hipster hedging, the cleverness, the hiding. Stand up and tell the world what you're made of, tell them what you fucking want—dearly, desperately, from the depths of your soul—and don't accept anything less.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I will caveat the following by saying I'm not sure my question is exactly in the 'existential/life' category, but as a longtime reader (first-time writer!) I appreciate your generally incisive observations and hope you help me achieve some self-discovery through a different issue than those with which you usually deal.

So I've been dating this girl for 1.5 months. She is fun and cool and is super-cute and in great shape and is equally content dressing up for a night on the town as she is cooking at my apartment late into the night, laughing at my terrible jokes, and generally being excellent company. Extremely compatible in issues philosophical, religious, blah blah blah. There's just this one thing. She has upper lip hair.

I classify it as ULH because it's certainly not a full blown mustache—like maybe 10-15 hairs, short, barely visible by unaided sight, and then only if you seek for them desperately with a suspicious and jaundiced eye. I only really notice/am bothered by them when we're making out—maybe I have sensitive lips or something, but I can't escape the tingly tickle of these uninvited face-guests. It's gotten to where it's tough to focus on the pleasure quotient of kissing her because all my mind can do is scheme to avoid the bristly patch. As far as I can tell, she is either completely unaware of her ULH or is in denial.

I think it's too early in the relationship and, given her pluses, is far too minor an issue to bring up now. But how and when should I? It seems like it'd be SO EASY to fix, and it's such a minor roadblock it seems silly to not bring it up, BUT, if I were a girl, I feel (is this unjustified?) like I would be utterly mortified to be confronted about this, especially by a man I like and who I want to like me.

Am I a terrible boyfriend for even considering telling her about this? Am I being way too sensitive about her feelings? I wax my back and upper arms regularly (and did so before I met her) out of basic consideration for the fairer sex, and I am your average/not that sensitive/relatively brutish male. I've found women to be A LOT more touchy about stuff like this, so I'm kind of embarrassed for her to even have noticed it. Conversely, I, personally, would be deeply thankful and ecstatic for a girlfriend to say 'Hey, you need to manscape down there a bit' or 'lose the scraggly top-of-foot hair, it grosses me out', because its a super-easy way to make her happy. I feel like the rules are different, though, going the other way between sexes. Am I just nitpicking here? I need a wise woman's help!

Thanks in advance -

A Hair Too Far

Dear AHTF,

Sweet Jesus. Of course I think you're nitpicking. You youngsters won't be happy until you're as hairless as prepubescent aliens. Your shiny Caucasian bodies don't scream "sexy" to oldsters like me; they scream Lair of the White Worm.

Still, I did just instruct LW1 to stand up and tell the world what she wants, without apology. And obviously this lip hair thing is messing with your passion in a big way. Even so, I don't love how you wrote that you're "kind of embarrassed for her." She has no reason to be embarrassed, except for her embarrassment at dating a hairless white worm like yourself.

Anyway, if you really feel like you're in this for the long-ish haul and you want to cultivate a nice, honest dialogue about what works and what doesn't work for you, I would find some really humble way to tell her about YOUR problem. For example:

"This is really embarrassing for me to say, but lately when we kiss there's something tickly going on… and I keep shaving my lip smoother but it's still there. I feel like there might be some tiny invisible hairs on your lip that are maybe a little bristly? I mean honestly, I feel like an idiot saying this because I don't SEE anything, plus now you probably realize what a ridiculous, exacting metrosexual fuck-wiener I am, which means you're likely to dump me soon…."

Sorry for spelling it out, but I felt pretty sure you were going to fuck it up otherwise. (Yes, you can skip over that last part. That was just for you and me, baby.)

Anyway, if I'm being honest, my husband's really bad haircuts and terrible, terrible pants downright haunted me when I first met him. It was like covering a really excellent steak with ketchup. I hinted here and there, but eventually, I had to speak plainly. Talking about it made me incredibly ashamed, though, because I knew these things were bothering me more than any healthy, normal person would ever be bothered by them.

Come to think of it, it wasn't really about the haircut or the pants (although they were both truly terrible). It was about voicing something minor and stupid that mattered to me nonetheless. It was about admitting that he wasn't perfect, and that sometimes, the things he said or did (or wore!) were going to bug me, and, me being me, I wouldn't be able to keep my strong feelings to myself. So, when he reacted confidently, laughing off my pickiness without taking it personally, it was a good sign that the deeply irritating core of my bossy personality wasn't going to cause him to break up with me. A miracle, truly!

Brand new relationships include all kinds of seemingly shallow and foolish trials, I guess. Who should I be to judge? (In contrast to the shallow and foolish trials of 13-year-old relationships, which are easily eliminated by breaking the fuck up already.) You sound like a nice enough guy. That said, though, if you successfully encourage your lady to wax her upper lip (or even just bleach it, which will make the hairs invisible and far less bristly), and then you find something else that's unacceptable about her personal hygiene? Well, then you should probably give up on real woman and turn to the smooth, quiet, disinfected solace of blow-up sex dolls instead.

Polly

Are you longing for smooth, quiet, disinfected solace? Write to loud, filthy Polly for pointers on where to find it!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Disturbing top photo by Shane Hirschman. Caterpillar photo by Donald Hines.

Usually appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because time is running out!"

Dear Polly,

I am, by all accounts, a relatively happy, well-off, 21-year-old woman. I exercise regularly, eat well, have good friends, a great boyfriend, and I'm about to graduate from a shmancy private college in NYC debt-free (thanks, Mom and Dad!). Here's the thing: lately, while I'm lying alone in bed, trying to go to sleep, I can't stop thinking about death. I'm pretty sure it started when I took an astrophysics class last semester, and read an article about the "eventual heat death of the universe" where everything just sort of peters out and then there's no energy in the universe and everything is cold and lifeless forever. FOR. EVER. For the past few weeks, just as I snuggle into bed alone and try to drift off to sleep, I have been having a mini-panic attack about the fact that I (and everyone I love) will be gone someday. They'll just be… gone. Not to a better place, not to a worse one. I started thinking I should be more spiritual, and maybe that would help, but I'm not really one for religion.

Maybe these thoughts are suddenly coming up because I'm about to transition into a totally new, unknown phase of my life—and yes, in a very pathetic way, the idea of graduating and giving up Tuesday naps and libraries and spontaneous day drinking feels like some sort of death for me (especially because many of my friends and my boyfriend are younger, and will still be in school while I'm trying to become An Adult). I'm sure these nightly worry-fests about mortality aren't helped by the fact that I have no idea what I want to "do" when I graduate, either (except I want it to involve writing! Got any jobs for me? Ha, ha. Ugh.).

Since I'm pretty sure you—despite your immense advice-giving talent—cannot tell me exactly what happens when we die, can you please help me stop having these thoughts? Ending the day in a ball of existential anxiety is not exactly working wonders for me.

Sincerely,

That College Kid

Dear TCK,

Sweet Lord on high, do I hear you! I was rather innocently reading about stellar collisions the other day when I stumbled on some passage about how the sun will eventually burn out, thereby ending our happy fun time on planet earth. Even though this information is not new to me, I was suddenly unnerved by my utter insignificance in the big scheme of things, as one of a slightly advanced breed of monkey on a minor planet of a very average star (as Stephen Hawking once put it).

And while I love to contemplate black holes, dark matter, The Big Freeze, The Big Rip, The Big Crunch, The Big Rip & Freeze & Crunch (which is a good name for a 32-ounce off-brand McFlurry), sometimes I can't quite stomach too much of these things. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to mull over astrophysics, or think about rape culture on college campuses, or consider how undeniably screwed the vast number of kids and families living far, far below the poverty line are. When I learn that the 6 heirs to the Walmart fortune had a net worth equal to the bottom 41.5 percent of Americans combined in 2010, I don't want to think about it. I'd rather crack jokes and pour margaritas into my face.

Graduating from college is one of the scariest things you can do. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: College prepares you for the real world about as well as the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland prepares you for international travel. You will feel like a loser, you will dislike many of your jobs and many of your coworkers. You will be deeply confused about how to spend your time, or what you want to do with your life. Post-college life is truly bewildering.

I was really discouraged and fearful in my early 20s. I wish I could travel back in time and tell myself to calm down, to stop worrying about making the right choices. A big part of the struggle then—and now—lies in maintaining a sensation of forward motion, however slow. If you want to be a writer, then write every day. Get into the habit of writing, and see where it takes you. Consider getting an internship—start looking now. Research places you might want to live. Resolve not to spend all of your time with your college friends or boyfriend. Try to map out a life instead of just falling into one.

But you also need a nightly routine that turns the worrying parts of your brain off. Either you should go to bed early and read yourself to sleep, or you should meditate and then write down three things you're grateful for in a journal, then focus on those things as you fall asleep. Every time you think a bad thought in bed, you have to stop yourself. "I'm not allowed to think about this shit right now." Repeat that to yourself. Clear your mind and think about something you're grateful for again.

You have to train yourself to keep your neurotic mind from spinning in circles. Every smart person struggles with this stuff at one point or another. But you can't let your fears swallow you whole. You can't allow your brain to eat itself alive. You've got to nip that shit in the bud. Experiment with a few different methods for beating back your anxiety, and then call on them when you need them.

You will be frustrated and lonely for a while. That's normal. Obstacles will appear in your path. Imagine how you might overcome those obstacles. Imagine your ideal career, and then think about a few small steps you might take to approach that career, very very slowly. It will take time, but every step counts, and every written word counts.

It's true that eventually, you will grow old and die. In the meantime, though, you're going to have an incredible adventure.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I have spent most of my adult life in serious relationships. Last summer I had a really nasty break-up, and decided to keep things casual for a time. It took a minute, but I now have a small group of lady-friends who are down for the sex semi-regularly. I got into a bit of an argument with one of my sex-friends, and am hoping to get some advice on whether I am being reasonable or not.

One of my favorite sex-friends called me last night, wasted at a bar, to complain about a "rapey" Canadian who was forcing himself on her and was bad at making out. She claimed he would not leave her alone, no matter how much she rejected him. She asked me to come and scare him off with my presence (I'm a boxer and am no small guy) or take her home with me. Of course I realize that my sex-friends will sometimes pick up other guys, and I accept that these girls will only keep calling me to the extent that I am more skilled in the amorous arts than your average bar bro. It did not bother me at all that she had been out picking up dudes. Honestly, I was a little smug about the fact that she had to hit me up to get the good lovin'. I was in the mood so I decided to swing through and pick her up. I called her as I entered the bar—expecting to quickly leave and smash. That's when the situation turned a bit strange.

She came over to give me a big hug and thank me for rescuing her from the "rapey asshole." I suggested we leave immediately, since swooping in to scoop a girl out from under a drunk guy is a recipe for drama. For professional reasons, I would rather not get into stupid bar fights. She agreed that we should leave, and told her lady friend that she was leaving. Her friend insisted that she say goodbye to the rapey Canadian, and I was surprised to hear her respond "of course I'll say goodbye—I really like him!" After repeatedly emphasizing to her friend how much she liked the guy, she walked over to say goodbye, which consisted of a lot of making out and heavy-petting. The contact was obviously completely consensual—and initiated by her. She kept at it for some time, in which time I turned around and left the bar without her.

I declined her confused phone calls, and sent a quick text explaining that I was a grown-ass man who was not amused by her little-girl games. Her attempt to set me up for public drama was far too transparent and obnoxious for me to play along. She proceeded to send me a million angry texts, accusing ME of being the dramatic game player. I turned off my phone, and went to sleep. This morning I texted her, offering to meet up sober and explain my need for a few ground rules for moving forward with our FWB arrangement. She said she had no interest in following any "rules set by a fuck-buddy," and said I am being a drama-queen (king?).

In my opinion, it is reasonable to set a few boundaries with sex-friends, like: (1) no sexual contact with other people while I am present; (2) no talking about sex with other people, even though we both know it happens; (3) no coming over to screw me right after you just screwed other people since that's dirty… etc. What do you think? Is it unfair to impose rules on people who are sex friends with no potential for becoming a girlfriend? I don't want to be controlling: just keep my natural instincts in check through the creation of social norms that avoid triggering the possessive caveman inside me. Assuming you side with me and think that rules are acceptable at all, do you have any other suggested regulations to keep things casual and classy? Your advice would be much appreciated.

Best,

Lorenzo P. Scrodge

Dear Lorenzo,

First of all, I want to thank you for offering what is now my all-time favorite sentence from any "Turning the Screw" letter:

"It took a minute, but I now have a small group of lady-friends who are down for the sex semi-regularly."

It. Took. A. Minute.

Anyway, let's skip over ultra-classy sex-friend regulations for the moment and state the obvious: This lady is a Dementor who will suck your soul straight out of your face if you let her. Normally, I'd admire her swagger—clearly she'd like an upgrade from sex-friend status to elite frequent flyer status, but she doesn't want to communicate this using words. Somehow, grinding up on this rapey Canadian is supposed to do the trick. But: Enlisting your help and protection, using the R word, and then throwing down with the guy? That is major league crazy cakes action right there. She gives the self-respecting sluts of the world a bad name, not to mention the fact that her actions are an insult to the many, many people who've suffered sexual abuse and then been labeled "confused" or "reckless" as a result.

Frankly, the fact that you're still willing to fuck her doesn't reflect well on you. If I were you, I would run away as fast as my pumped-up boxer's gams could carry me. If she wants to understand just how offensive it is to characterize someone as a sexual predator, ask for protection from that person, and then make out with him, she should be directed to the many, many articles about the rise of rape culture and the myriad of ways young women find their souls sucked out of their bodies by men who don't give a flying fuck about them.

Speaking of not giving a fuck: Setting boundaries with sex friends is, of course, perfectly reasonable, but only if you're totally honest about your own behavior from the start. If you're really rotating through 3-4 fuck buddies a week, you should probably make that clear to women you're sleeping with straight out of the gate. As in "I have a few different romantic entanglements right now." Or at least: "This is not going to be a monogamous thing; I'm not into monogamy at the moment." (Which implies not just "We're not going out and really never will" but also "I am actively fucking other women.") It's one thing to say "Let's explore a no-obligation entanglement" and quite another to say "I can work you into my rotation soon, because I have an opening on Wednesday nights." You say it's gross for a girl to come over right after fucking someone else? I think it's sort of nasty to sleep with a guy who's slept with three or four other women that very week. I don't really care whether he did it an hour or two days ago. I can't help feeling that you want to keep your own habits hidden, while demanding a combination of full-disclosure and don’t ask/don't tell from your partners.

Moreover, discussing your boundaries needs to include asking about your partner's boundaries as well. Frankly, it sounds to me like you're a little emotionally detached, a little cocky, and also a little prone to laying down ground rules, Daddy-style, rather than beginning a sensitive conversation with an open mind and an open heart, and actually listening to what the other person has to say.

It seems like you might have some control issues. Have you been extremely possessive of past girlfriends? Is one of the reasons you're actively pursuing this very ambitious rotating fuck-buddy lifestyle that you want to avoid focusing all of your anxious, controlling energy on one person? I have a friend who battled being a jealous guy by instead being a guy who slept around constantly, and who professed often that he "didn't believe in monogamy." He looks back on this and feels that he was hiding from his vulnerability and fears of intimacy. I don't know much about you, but I'm going to guess that it would help you a lot to talk to a therapist regularly to explore you ideas about sex and love and everything in between.

Because, I'll be honest, your situation feels a little bit fraught. You've got to steer clear of troublemakers and state your boundaries clearly at the start if you don't want to stir up a lot of unnecessary drama. If you keep this sloppiness up, it's only going to take a minute for your small group of lady friends to get a hell of a lot smaller.

That said? Enjoy it while it lasts, because nothing lasts for very long in this crazy, mixed-up energy-shedding universe.

Polly

Have you come to terms with the Big Rip & Freeze & Crunch yet? Write to Polly and tell her about it!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Sad robot photo by Santos Gonzalez. Bottom photo by 8one6.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because every time a door closes, a few more close."

Dear Polly,

I have a big problem. Actually a multitude of big problems that have coalesced into a giant problem. I am 31, and I cannot figure out what to do with respect to my romantic life. All my friends from college/grad school are married or partnered and I feel really unwanted. I'm attractive and outgoing, which has given me the opportunity to make many, many, MANY mistakes with respect to men. In my early 20s, I dumped every single guy who seemed truly interested in me in favor of college athletes, bros of various shapes and sizes, and I dated my philandering high school crush for a year when I should have known better.

I also did well at some great schools, moved around the country, made some great friends, stopped having an eating disorder, and figured out that I don't want to be a lawyer for the rest of my life. I figured out that I'm actually really a writer and went about finishing one (really funny) screenplay and starting another. I have my shit fairly together. I do a lot of hot yoga. I throw a kick ass dinner party. People seem to enjoy my company.

The only thing I can't figure out is how to get myself into a good relationship. I've been seeing a therapist for a year, and I think I've figured out what my issues are. 1) I'm biracial and I don't date black men, who seem to be the only men who hit on me—my dad was black and absent/alternatively horrible and a black guy raped me in college. I just can't do it, which probably makes me a racist. Don't worry. I beat myself up about it regularly. 2) I don't do vulnerability well because I was severely bullied in middle school. While I've been able to overcome my issues with respect to female friends, I have a hard time opening up to men because I assume that they are going to hurt me terribly and/or try to humiliate me. (It's so bad that I can't have an orgasm with anyone else in the room.) 3) My dad abandoned me, then emotionally abused me (via phone and later e-mail) for pretty much my whole life. And then, before he died of a sudden stroke this year, he made it my fault that we didn't have a relationship because I was so "angry" at him. So, I have a hair trigger when it comes to a guy patronizing me—which men seem to really love doing. 4) I'm incredibly judgmental. If someone doesn't wow me on the first date, he's not getting a second. And I have the unique talent for cross-examining a guy until he incriminates himself as an asshole. Or, if a guy is not at least a little attractive, I don't give him the time of day. Basically, no one really has a shot with me. (Also, my grandmother gave me tons of Harlequin romance novels when I was a young teen, so the whole "someone can grow on you" thing is absolutely ridiculous to me.)

So, I know what my issues are. I've talked the shit out of them. I think I've become a nicer person to be around. I can even observe my issues without castigating myself… sometimes. I've even stopped dating unavailable assholes and can generally stop myself from even mentally fixating on them when I run across them. But I'm still not interested in the guys who are interested. I haven't been attracted to anyone in two years. This wouldn't be a problem if I didn't really want a relationship. I have a full life. But I've tried everything, and nothing has worked. Online dating has worked for a couple of my friends, so I tried that several times. Now that I'm over 30, I only get messages from 60-year-olds, functionally illiterate guys, or black men who berate me when I say I'm not interested. At my therapist's urging, I've tried different activities: Argentine Tango classes (I left 5 minutes in when no one wanted to dance with me); running club (I could only get myself to go twice and later I got myself a case of runner's knee); sitting at bars and coffee shops by myself (because of my aforementioned judgmental nature, I probably don't seem that approachable).

No one's interested in me, and I'm not interested in anyone. I haven't been on a date in over a year and haven't had sex in a year and a half. I feel like that's really not normal. I miss human contact, even if I have to lock myself in the bathroom with erotica and Mr. Hitachi afterwards. And it's not like I became measurably less physically attractive between 29 and 31. If anything, the yoga and not going out as much has made my skin look better. And I know it's not that, it's the fact that I'm broken. But I can't seem to fix myself in this area of my life. I feel like I'm doing the right things, and nothing is working. It's making me really sad and lonely.

Even though I have all these issues, I think I would be great at a relationship once I got myself into one. I'm warm, caring, and open with my friends and family. I'm super health conscious, so I probably won't ever get too fat and my plan is to drink so much kale juice that people start questioning whether I'm actually a vampire at 40. I'm honest, funny, responsible, and engaging. There's no reason I wouldn't make a great girlfriend/wife/mother/what have you.

So what should I do? Force myself to date the guys who are interested even if I find them repulsive, marry the least awful one so that I can have a baby, and divorce him at 40 when I no longer need logistical assistance with an infant? Resign myself to being alone because I'm irreparably broken and get a sperm donor at 35? Have sex with an asshole I'm at least attracted to just to have someone touch me? Or how do I open myself up so I meet someone who suits me? I'm kind of at a loss here.

Thanks,

Sad, Lonely, and Stuck




Dear SLAS,

When you're walking down the street, you can sort of tell that some people are happy and engaged and open, and others are in a state of retrenchment, contraction, withdrawal. Some have tea on the stove and cookies in the oven, others have barbed wire and sand bags, followed by a lone spire of cigarette smoke drifting above a muddy trench.

I know you've been through a war, and you should feel great that you survived and now you're building yourself a great life. But… you're still wearing your army fatigues and firing random shots into the air. You're still having trouble distinguishing between harmless strangers and child-murdering Nazis. And it's almost like this angry soldier thing is part of your identity. You're damaged, and you have scars, and you're a little bit proud of the tenacity and the boldness that saw you through that dark time.

I don't blame you for that. No one would. You should be grateful that you're tough, you're confrontational when you need to be, you're a survivor. If you weren't, you might be sitting around in a dark apartment, feeling sorry for yourself, instead of throwing dinner parties with your friends and writing screenplays and doing all the stuff you do.

You can't scrape off all of your defenses overnight. You can't just open up and accept people when your safety seems to depend on not accepting, not trusting, not letting them in. Your first priority is to keep creepy, overly critical men away from you. But instead of giving men the space to be themselves, you're lobbing grenades at them from behind a bunker. You're assuming the worst—which is a pretty good way to get the worst, to turn perfectly reasonable men into defensive, dismissive jerks. That doesn't prove that they're bad to the core, it just proves that they aren't going to roll over and play dead just because it suits your personal preferences. (And I'd be more afraid of the men who do roll over, honestly.)

Everyone has their physical preferences, stated or unstated, and I don't really want to give you a hard time about that. But I can't help feeling like you won't understand the difference between your emotionally abusive father, your rapist, and other, lovable, thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive black men in the world if you don't get to know a few of them better. I'm not asking you to do anything you don't feel, but I am asking you to make an effort to deconstruct your prejudices and loosen their hold on you as much as you can, in part because they relate directly to your identity as a biracial woman. Rejecting black men may feel to you like saying no to your father and your rapist. Another part of it, though, is about rejecting yourself, labeling yourself bad and unacceptable. How do you think it feels to a black man, to have this beautiful biracial woman tell him she doesn't date black men? Even if you don't openly say this to other people, I can't help feeling that your narrative is all messed up. You're handing out your hatred—your rage at your dad and your self-hatred—to other human beings. I understand and sympathize with the pain and agony that's in the mix. But you've got to change how you think about this.

That doesn't mean you have to date anyone you're not attracted to. It just means that this story you're telling yourself about black men isn't good—and more specifically, it isn't good for you. Your newish therapist is not going to tell you that, because he or she needs to win your trust (particularly because you present as a strong, opinionated person who will drop a therapist who challenges you too directly). He or she wants you to gain trust, feel safe, open up to him/her as a way to model a trusting, honest relationship with other people. But listen to me: Stop using that story to keep you safe. You are safe. You can date and marry anyone you damn please. That's a bad, oversimplified story, and it's making you sick.

Likewise with the cross-examining, the snap judgments, the perversely stubborn belief that people can't grow on you over time. Marriage would not be possible, not sustainable, if people didn't grow on you over time. Even the way you describe these afflictions—and they are afflictions, make no mistake—indicates that you take a kind of pride in them, like they make you a bad ass at some level. You can say you hate yourself for your racism, but I think you also cling to it, like it's part of your identity. As long as you're not open to dating black men, that means that your dad doesn't have any power in your life. By blocking so many good, innocent, loving men from your life, though, you're just empowering your father's ghost.

It is your choice who you want to love. But you can be open to dating anyone in the world, you can be vulnerable, you can make a few mistakes, and it's still your choice who to love after all of that. It doesn't make you weak to keep an open mind until you know more. It makes you strong.

Do you want to fall in love with someone amazing, or do you want to be a bad ass? Do you want to be vulnerable and open to whatever the world might offer you, or do you want to be shaking your head, disappointed again, having another lonely cigarette behind battle lines? Would you prefer that the men you meet fit the script that you've already written for them, or would you like for someone to unexpectedly swerve off script? Would you even notice if he did?

Right now, you're angrily searching for love. No way that's ever going to work. It's like going to the prom with a bomb strapped to your chest.

You need to make some new male friends, that's all. You should change your online profile to reflect this intention. Don't go on dates with guys you find "repulsive." See if you can befriend some reasonably sane-seeming men, black, white, Latino, whatever they happen to be. If the online thing doesn't seem possible, join some new activity groups. Throw a dinner party, and make each guest bring someone you don't know, man or woman. Listen to these strangers with an open heart. Give them space.

Don't go out to bars and speak only to men who hit on you. That's not really the ideal demographic under any circumstances. Get out into the world and look for nice men who seem respectful but not necessarily over-the-top sexy to you. Have coffee. Make small talk. No heavy shit, no cross examinations, no anger, no flinty remarks. Don't roll out your grievances with people who have nothing to do with them. Just be there: relaxed, observant, calm. You won't like it. Do it until you get used to it.

If you want to find love—and honestly, maybe you're not really ready for that at this moment. Maybe you need another year or two of just staying out of the mix and taking care of yourself and writing great screenplays and seeing close friends only. But if you do want to find love, then you've really got to alter your whole way of moving through the world. Because all of this anger isn't making you safer. In fact, it's almost like you're attracting and engaging with the enemy more than you would otherwise, because you're in a confused, unsettled state. You've got to calm down and find your sweet, vulnerable heart, and you've got to take care of that part of who you are, so you can show it to the world a little more. You know what you're made of. No one else does, though. Stop retreating.

Vulnerability is the key. Don't pretend you can just opt out of that. Real, lasting love isn't possible without it. Befriend some men, and tell them the truth about who you are and what upsets and scares and hurts you. Hell, start by telling your girlfriends these things, without always retreating to "I won't stand for this" and "I could never do that." You've got to stop drawing lines in the sand and make a goddamn sand castle once in a while. You've got to stop lobbing grenades before you even see who's coming over the crest of the next hill. Just shut the fuck up and listen for a change. You're charismatic and engaging and smart and pretty. Try to stop being the best, the most confident, the toughest, the most incredible, and try being just another human being in the room for a change. You'll be amazed at how the blurry background becomes the gorgeous, colorful foreground when you watch, quietly, for long enough.

Polly

Hi Polly,

OK, so, two things. If you could help me with even one of them, that would be amazing. Basic facts: I'm in my early thirties, I live in a house with my boyfriend and our pets, and I LOVE my job (I'm a teacher).

I'm sad a lot because of the state of the world. Particularly, lately, about animal rights. Factory farming: could it be any worse for these animals? I feel so sad and overwhelmed when I think about factory farming that I just want to lay down under my desk. And I somehow end up thinking about it a lot. I'm already a vegetarian, leaning towards being a vegan, so besides going completely vegan there isn't any adjustment I can do to my own diet to make me feel better. We have two shelter dogs, so taking in pets to care for isn't an option besides perhaps one more dog.

There's so much other sad stuff. I just read something on The Awl that talked about manatees dying, for example. Seeing a dead deer on the road, also overwhelming. I just feel helpless against all the terrible stuff in the world. I should mention I have had problems with depression and anxiety for years. Perhaps that's relevant.

I love my job, I find it incredibly fulfilling, but sometimes I feel like, "here I am, in my nice house, living my nice life, teaching stuff, watching Netflix with my boyfriend at night, and right now there is soooo much suffering in the world, and I'm just driving along, la di da, listening to dance music in my car and bopping around without a care." I feel like if I were a truly good person I would give all this up, give up all my worldly possessions and whatnot, and dedicate myself full-time 100% to changing things and alleviating suffering as much as absolutely possible.

I've gone on long enough, but I'll also mention my other issue: I'm in my early thirties, as mentioned, and I feel incredibly old and unattractive. Increasingly less culturally relevant, increasingly unappealing, etc. I think about this A LOT. A LOT. I'm also about 10 pounds overweight, so obviously I feel not just old and unattractive but totally fat.

I know how dumb that all sounds, particularly when contrasted with all my concerns about real suffering. But I do think about it a lot and it makes me unhappy.

Also, I'm in therapy, though I keep forgetting to keep up on scheduling appointments so I end up going months without seeing my therapist.

Sad About Stuff

Dear SAS

When you're 65, you're going to look back on yourself right now and you're going to say, "God, I wish I would've just relaxed and enjoyed myself when I was young and beautiful and in love. I mean, sure, it might've soothed me to know that I'd eventually start to integrate volunteering for animal rights groups into my schedule, and I'd write a bestselling book about how to shift our culture's approach to animals as disposable beings, and maybe if I weren't so stressed out back then, I never would've accomplished those things. But I definitely wasn't fat. I was fucking sexy. I wish I would've known that then."

Everyone I know is exactly ten pounds overweight, and exactly five years past their prime. WHAT A COINCIDENCE, HUH? I still remember hearing "Sexy and seventeen!" sung on the radio the day I turned eighteen. I thought, "Oh well, I'm not quite as sexy now. How sad!" I WAS A FUCKING TODDLER, BASICALLY, and I was mourning my lost sexiness.

You know what you do when you're in your forties, though? You say, "OK, I really am aging now. It wasn't just an illusion. I am, in fact, verifiably past my prime. It's not all in my head anymore. And so the fuck what?" You recognize that you will be perceived as unattractive sometimes, and you will be seen as culturally irrelevant a lot. Who's doing the judging, exactly? Instead of worrying about an invisible evil audience, why not just decide that you're fucking beautiful and you will always be culturally relevant, forever, no matter what some toddler in skinny jeans thinks. You have to commit to it. It becomes less of an "Oh god, what's happening?" and more of an active choice. Maybe it's a choice you should start making now.

You need to tune out the bad a little more, and celebrate what you have. Have you seen Sex, Lies and Videotape? Rent it. Trust me. And schedule a regular, weekly time slot for seeing your therapist; don't leave it up to whenever you happen to remember. Come on, you don't need me to tell you that! Take a little more responsibility for your own happiness, will you? Stop playing the victim just because that gives you somewhere to put your anger and your guilt and your sadness. You worry because yes, things are shitty out there, and also, because you have a good life that affords you the time and space and support to worry around the clock. If you were less anxious, you might do more to effect change in the world: volunteer, join, help, invent, enlighten. Small things make a difference. Make a vow to yourself that you won't use these important issues as a tool to torture yourself. Instead, you'll put in hard work to support your causes, and then shift into relaxy mode at other times.

Not easy to pull off, but you have to try. Part of making the world a better place is daring to be imperfect, daring to grow older without feeling apologetic or embarrassed about it, and daring to be happy without feeling guilty and sick about it. Share that happiness with as many people (and animals!) as possible. Bringing love into the world is not a small fucking thing. You're on the right track, and you look fucking spectacular. Keep fighting the good fight. But when you're not fighting? Sit back and relax and enjoy this life. You are just an ordinary, fallible woman, doing your best to make things better. That's reason enough to feel proud.

Polly

Are you tired of trying? Write to Polly and she might make you try even harder.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Black Ken dolls photographed by Ivan McClellan; Sad cat photo by Dino Quinzani.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Don’t make me come over there!"

Dear Polly,

Recently one of my best friends since childhood started dating my sister (whom I am also super close with). They seem pretty serious about each other and I want to be okay with it, but I'm having a really hard time with it. The main issue is I just have this primal response of UGHGHG NOOOOOOO which doesn't feel totally logical when it happens, but here's what I think it's about:

1. I talk to both of them constantly, all the time, about everything. Particularly dating, as we are all ladies in our 20s and that is pretty much our main interest. You know how when your friend starts dating someone and then they don't want to text with you, wine-drunk at 2 a.m., about "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" anymore? That's totally normal and healthy and you're happy for them, but it's kind of sad for you, and it's really sad to think of two of the people I'm closest with in the world becoming a little less close to me because their primary person is /will now be each other. Kind of related, but in the worst part of myself, I'm sure I'm jealous they've found love.

2. I think it feels almost incesty to me. It doesn't to them because when my friend and I were living at our parents' houses and hanging out with each others' families, I always went to her house. She really doesn't know my family super-well. But she is someone who I would describe as being "like a sister to me" so it is so gross that she is dating my actual sister.

3. Normally we would talk constantly about sex and love and dating, and now… we just can't.

Firstly, I have this super negative primal response, so I told them from the beginning I did not want to be involved, but phrased it more diplomatically as like, "It puts me in a weird position," which is also very true. You know how annoying people are when they first start dating someone they really like and want to gush about them and how amazing they are and they don't actually really know each other that well yet, so they fill in any blanks with more amazingness? Normally, I would call them out on their bullshit, both of them, because that's our relationship, and now I KNOW when it's bullshit because I know the person they're talking about. But saying, "Actually my sister isn't as dreamy as you think and here's why!" is obviously not cool. So I've told them to leave me out of it. They've been okay but not great about respecting my wishes on that. At the same time it sucks that there's this very important part of their lives that I'm left out of.

4. Finally, the way it went down was pretty shady. They live in different regions of the country and also a different region than I do, but had expressed interest in each other, both being cute single ladies interested in ladies. I said I didn't like it, but my sister struck up a texting relationship with my friend regardless. My friend told me she'd stop if it bothered me. I said it bothered me, she said she stopped. A few weeks later I was about to leave the country for six months so I was having a going away party. My friend happened to be in town that weekend and was coming. My sister decided to fly into town under the pretense of attending my party for me, but it was very clear this was just a ruse to run into my friend in person, as I'd just seen my sister two weeks before. They hooked up that night, I obviously knew, and then they lied about it the next day, which surprised me, because I didn't even call them out on it. I decided to ignore the whole thing and hope it would go away, I mean they live thousands of miles apart. But after I had been away for like a month, I got an email from my friend saying she hopes I have the heart to forgive her, she flew my sister out on a secret trip to visit her, and they really like each other. They didn't want to tell me until they knew they were serious because they didn't want to upset me if nothing was going to come of it anyway. Last year I had a super devastating situation where I was betrayed by a friend and as a result I know I'm hyper sensitive to that kind of thing, but I was really upset by how this all transpired. Particularly because I never forbid them from dating each other or anything, never flipped out, and when I was directly asked I said it bothered me and that's it. There was no need for them to handle this like they did.

But what's done is done and now they are together. There are a lot of potentially good things about this: I think they could make each other happy—at least I know I'll like my sister-in-law! But it just bothers me so so so so so much. How do I just be okay with this?

In The Middle, But Left Behind

Dear ITMBLB,

Most people who read your letter are likely to think: "They found love. Get over it. You should feel happy for them."

But I get it. When I was in my twenties, my two closest friends in the world —my best friend and my exboyfriend—started sleeping together. I was fine with it at first, excited for them and surprised that my best friend (who took me out to lunch to tell me) thought it was going to be an issue for me. Then I found out that they'd kept it a secret from me for over a month, and everyone else I knew already knew about it. In fact, when we'd gone out together a few weeks before, they'd been making out whenever I left the room. So not only did I feel like a big asshole who was being openly fucked with by the two people she loved the most, but I also felt that they were each totally willing to sacrifice their friendship with me just to pump up the titillation of their affair. I was already in a pretty fragile place: My dad had died of a heart attack, out of the blue, a few months earlier. Now I felt like I had no one to turn to. No one could be trusted. The two friends I leaned on the most were careless with me.

When I tried to talk about it, my best friend wouldn't hear it. I hadn't been a good friend to her lately, so she wasn't about to take shit from me about how she let me down. When the three of us spent time together, I felt self-conscious and neither of them acted like themselves, either. Soon after that, I moved away. When I went to visit, my exboyfriend would tell me that my ex-best friend was angry at him for having lunch with me, or he'd bail on me at the last minute "to avoid trouble." If I talked to either of them on the phone, I was always worried that I'd say the wrong thing and it would set off a chain reaction. I was angry and upset, though, so I wasn't very good at biting my tongue, and everything I said to one seemed to get back to the other.

At the time, I felt like I'd been standing still on the sidewalk when an eighteen-wheeler swerved and flattened me in an instant. Later, I wrote this cartoon about the unethical, self-serving behavior of urban hipsters. I retreated into my new boyfriend, but I struggled to make new friends because I didn't trust anyone, I didn't feel open or interested in anyone new, and no one I met seemed as smart or as interesting as my exboyfriend and my ex-best friend.

Now, I look back and think: Two people were in love, that's all. They didn't necessarily handle it perfectly, but neither did I. I had no claim on either of them and couldn't really expect them to address the unexpected ways that their relationship made me feel betrayed and lonely and shut out. The three of us were extremely emotional, sensitive, confused people. At that age, none of us understood restraint or discretion. And I was full of unfocused anger and blame back then. I drank too much. I stepped on people's toes and felt hurt when they got angry about it. I was a confessional, confrontational mess, and when you're like that, people don't exactly bend over backwards to address your complaints, no matter how terrible you might feel. All three of us just wanted to be heard and loved and supported, but not one of us was that good at hearing, loving and supporting someone else. Even if you take away the relationship between my ex and my ex-best-friend, I don't know that the three of us could've stayed close to each other. We were too immature to tolerate how similar we were to each other.

Your situation is absolutely simple, on one level: Your sister and your best friend are now dating, and in love, and maybe they'll spend the rest of their lives together. What can you do but grin and bear it? It's great that they found love, that's all.

But on a deeper level, you're mourning the loss of these two intimate friendships, the likes of which may not be matched for years to come. Even if you stay very close with each of them (and you'll hopefully be close to your sister no matter what), you may never feel quite as comfortable pouring out your heart to either one of them. You can't recreate where you were before this happened, when you didn't have to wonder what your friend would tell your sister about you, or guess what they might say to each other about this new guy you met, or this friend who's getting on your nerves. When you're young, so much of a female friendship forms around feeling totally comfortable admitting your biggest mistakes and deepest fears. How can you go there with two people who once felt like yours and now belong to each other? Even if you take pains not to frame this in the traditional, limiting perspective that sexual relationships trump all others, it's still a big challenge. You trusted them completely. You told them everything. Now that's going to change.

I hate to tell a really negative story about your experience. I just want you to know that I know exactly how terrible this feels for you. You call this thing between them "gross" and "incesty," but what you're mostly feeling is loss. You have lost something. When things settle down between them, or if/when they break up, your relationship with each of them may get better. But that's not how it feels right now. Right now it feels like you've lost them both.

Maybe we all have to mourn the loss of this kind of unconditional connection at some point. My best friend and I used to talk for hours on end, without a pause. We used to write songs and perform together. We intuitively understood each other's experience—not just our intellectual experience, but our emotional experience, our romantic experience of the people, places and things around us. Breaking up was like realizing that we'd never been that special, like it was all an illusion.

But fuck that. We were so full of ideas and so open-hearted and so young, and we really loved each other. How could you look back and sum that up as naïve?

So all I can say to you is this: Forget the "whys" of it. Forget how they told you about it, how you said you were bothered and they did it anyway. File all of that under: Two People In Love. You probably laid the groundwork for them to fall in love, too, because they had that shared love of you, that shared knowledge of you, right out of the gate. Maybe you learned, with each of them, how to be a good friend, how to listen, how to entertain, how to open up and tell the truth, and you taught them these things, too. But now they're just two people in love, two people who want to be together. Just let them be together, and don't slice and dice how it happened or what your role in it was or how you were betrayed or bullshitted or discounted or sidestepped along the way.

They didn't fuck you over that badly, trust me. They told a few little lies to protect their chances at love, to prevent you from coming between them. That's not ideal for you, but it's totally understandable for them, and most people in their shoes would've done the same thing. Don't make their "bad" decisions a sticking point for you, because all you're doing is taking your pain (which is very tough to describe to an outsider), and trying to attribute a cause to it. They have not trespassed against you, OK? You're going to have to drop it. You can feel angry, but you can't blame them for that anger, because it's really not their fault.

Furthermore, in reaction to this major loss, some part of you is going to want to draw up some rules, set limits, explain what you won't stand for. I would be very careful about that. You can flag some obvious potential pitfalls of three-way communication, but I would not try to control what they talk about. They're going to tell each other everything. That's what people in love do. If they're serious about each other, which it sounds like they are, they have to be honest. If you get pissed about information getting passed between them, you could hurt them and hurt yourself and make a big mess. Sadly, you're the one who, by definition, needs to be careful and maintain control and not cause trouble. You're the outsider, like it or not. Don't lash out because you're hurting. Don't talk shit. Keep your nose clean. I mean it. This is your sister we're talking about—she will be in your life forever, and you MUST be generous. If you have to detach a tiny bit, then do it. But don't get sloppy. Don't make a mess. Take the long view and be gracious, at all costs.

Most of all, though, I want to tell you to keep your heart open to them, as open as you can possibly stand. I know it hurts, but don't close yourself up and walk away. After seventeen years of mostly being out of touch, I went to my ex-best-friend's wedding last fall, and it was like dropping back into a life I lost a long time ago. Platonic friendships between women are defined in such casual terms. But they're often much richer and more meaningful than romantic relationships. You don't really see it that way when you're young. I look back on exboyfriends and I still care about some of them, but it's all relatively blasé. Close friendships with women age differently. The feelings don't just dry up and blow away, because they're not dependent on attraction or timing, they're dependent on mutual honesty and vulnerability.

Even so, at that wedding, I looked at my ex-best-friend and thought: We may not spend much time together, before we die. Isn't that stark? We're in our forties and we live 2000 miles apart. We are a matching set, but we won't ever go back to completing each other's thoughts. How many people do you meet, who make you feel completely understood – sometimes to a fault? Not that many. There was a magic to our friendship, to our collaborations, to our most mundane conversations. It feels important to honor that magic, even though it also makes me feel a little heartbroken, to think of how I protected myself from the pain of it, and lost her in the process.

So keep your heart open. Admit that you feel terrible, and try to explain this loss without blaming them for having caused it. Let them off the hook, but don't let them go. It's not that easy to lean on someone. It's a rare thing, to be able to do it without feeling self-conscious about it. You can and you should make new friends. But don't give up on your best friend and your sister, and try not to see their love for each other as a betrayal of you. Don’t cut yourself off from two people you love. If you step back because it hurts too much, if you leave them behind, if a big wall comes between you and your sister, you'll really regret it. For decades, you'll regret it. Forgive them and keep them close. You will get caught in the middle sometimes. Life is messy. It's no one's fault. Forgive them, and don't let them go.

Polly

Do you have a problem that could send Polly spiraling into an existential crisis of her own? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Amazing photograph by Rachael Voorhees.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because laughter is only the best medicine if you can't afford the other ones."

Dear Polly,

I am recently hot for a man who is also hot for me. But my very closest friend has been hot for him for a year. He told her after one make out session that he just wants to be friends with her, but she has been hoping for more anyway. She has worried about me meeting him because of potential hot times between me and him. I am not some raging slut. I assume she sensed that he and I might fancy each other/be a good match. I told her back then that I would never move in on her game. When I did meet him, I was almost cold and certainly strongly-boundaried for many months to demonstrate and enact my loyalty! But as time goes by, I have decided to relax and be myself because they are coming to terms with a friendship despite her longing for more from him. Last night we all hung out and he and I hit it off in a big way. I am into him, but I feel like a jerk. I told him "no" and said "because of my friend" and now I am simultaneously frustrated, guilty, and resentful. She is much more important to me than he is. So is that the end of it? I honestly don't know that my love and loyalty for her mean I cannot get to know him more and/or bang him.

How do I get the sex and love I want when girls be calling dibs on all the dudes?

Signed,

Frustrated Fran

Dear FF,

Interesting that your nickname is FF (Friends Forever!), because if you go after this guy, you're not going to have your best friend for very much longer.

If you'd both met the guy at the same time, and you'd always embraced an equal opportunity spirit around the guys you meet, then this wouldn't be an issue. She likes the guy, you like the guy, the guy likes you: What can you do?

But that's not what happened. She met this guy, fell for him, and then mooned over him for a long time. Her imagination has been in overdrive. From his perspective, it was hardly ever a thing. They made out once. But from your friend's perspective, this guy is looming large. She still has feelings for him, and still hopes that he'll wake up and see that the two of them are meant to be together. He is important to her. Even if she's deluded, even if it'll never work out, even if he likes you and not her, he's important to her.

You met the guy through her. She told you from the start that she was worried about introducing you. Maybe that's calling dibs, or maybe that's just telling your best friend how you feel because you're trying to protect your friendship with her. She could've said, "Look, I'm going to hang out with this guy without you around, because I don't want to feel competitive with you and he's really important to me." She could've cut you out. But she didn't. Why? Because you assured her that you would never move in on her game.

This is your best friend we're talking about, not some acquaintance or sort-of friend. She was worried, and you reassured her, "I would never do that to you."

Now, if you really feel strongly that what you're missing out on is True Love—and not just an urge to "bang him" as you put it—then you could sit down with her and tell her that you feel like there's potential there but you won't do anything without her blessing. She'll probably say, "That upsets me, you know I like him, I can't deal with that." And then you know: this could end your friendship. Does she have a right to tell you how she feels about it? Sure, she does. Whether or not it's totally rational, she's still into him. Telling yourself that she's silly and you should be able to do whatever you want is natural, since she's standing in the way of the candy jar. But that doesn't mean you should disregard her feelings and grab the candy. You said yourself that the friendship was much more important to you than he was.

If you two were older, the conversation might go differently. Your friend might say, "Aw, whatever. He's not into me. Who am I to stand in the way of love? You two have a real shot at something great." But that's not even what this situation sounds like. You just want to get down with the guy. And how is your friend "calling dibs on all the dudes" anyway? She's liked one guy for a whole year, and now you want him.

If you really want to trade your best friend in for a guy, that's obviously your choice. But how are you going to feel about yourself if you do that, after you promised you wouldn't? This is as much about respecting yourself and honoring your own values as it is about honoring someone else's. Isn't the magic between you two partially fueled by the notion that you're forbidden from hooking up? How are you going to feel after you two make out, and it's just ok, and then he never calls you again—and neither does your best friend? Whether or not she has any real claim on him is sort of beside the point. This is about her feelings about you, your feelings about yourself, and your closest friendship.

Sometimes I think that women don't really learn how to keep their love relationships from falling apart until they learn how to commit to their female friends, hear them out, and honor their feelings even when things get a little rough. Personally, until I learned to be completely honest with my female friends, to trust them, and to stick with them through thick and thin, I don't think I was remotely ready to settle down with a guy. When you turn your back on your (good, trust-worthy) female friends, you're really making it clear that you're incapable of honor and intimacy of any kind, whether it's with friends, family, or significant others.

You didn't say a thing about what makes this guy special. I'm guessing that he's not so special at all. There are lots of other guys out there. Stop fixating on him and move on. If he is still very interested six months or a year from now, and you're still very interested in him, then maybe you can talk your friend about your feelings. But for now, don't mess with your friendship just because you want to get laid. It's easy to get dismissive and grabby when you want someone, but rest assured, karma will bite you in the ass every time. That kind of selfishness is bad for your soul.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I'm not sure where to start with this, so I'll just jump in.

My husband and I have been married for 9 years now. For the most part, our marriage is pretty great. We love each other. We try to be supportive. We fight, but usually manage to work things out. Our communication styles are pretty different. I'm confrontational, whereas he shuts down. We've worked on closing this gap together and it's not perfect, but it works.

My husband comes from a family with some serious dysfunction (their mother wasn't a very good one, and his brother and sister are messes), and he always likes to say that he doesn't know how he turned out so normal. My background is the opposite—big family, parents married for 50 years. We did have our dysfunction (what family doesn't?), but we all turned out ok.

When my husband and I married, we talked about having 2 kids. I never imagined having only 1 child. 3 feels like the magic number, but I was willing to settle for 2. After the birth of our son, however, he changed his mind. I heard "we can't afford it," and "he's so perfect, why do we need to do it again?" and even "maybe later we'll be able to afford it." (When he told me that our baby-making days were done, I decided to go back to school part time. He wasn't happy about it, but has been supportive, mostly. I'm not sure why I mention that, but it feels important.)

Polly, I spent my 20s and most of my 30s dicking around, dating jerks, trying to get my career-slash-life off the ground. When I met and fell in love with my husband, I was 36. We married 2 years later. He was the only man I ever seriously wanted to marry. We had our son 2 years after that. I was 40. I'm 46 now. Another fun note: hubby has a busybody family member who would always comment on my age, how OF COURSE we would only have one child, she had a friend who was my age when she married, blah blah blah… I avoid her now.

It's led to fights. During a particularly bad one, I accused him of pulling a "bait & switch" on me. I don't want my son to be an only child.

I've been advised by some friends that I could have an "accident" and get pregnant that way. Trickery is not an option in marriage. This decision is one that needs to come from both of us. Part of the problem for me is that HE decided this. I've told him this, but he just says "But we've talked about this!" NO. He's talked about this. I had no say.

I feel betrayed and hurt, and it's affecting my feelings for my husband. I'm so filled with resentment I've been starting fights with him. He, on the other hand, is oblivious. He just doesn't get why it bothers me so. I told him I wanted us to seek counseling. He says that I'm the one who needs it, not him. Maybe he's right? I'm angry. At him for not wanting another child, and at myself for not accepting this and being content with what I have.

My friends are all having their 2nd and 3rd children. I'm happy for them, but… I'm jealous. Recently I broached the subject again to hubby. His response was: "You're older now, do you REALLY want to be changing diapers at 50?" (Of course if we'd had another child when I'd wanted, he or she would be OUT of diapers by now.)

I love him, and I don't question his love for me. I KNOW that I am a fortunate person. I feel like a big navel-gazing ASS for letting this bother me so much. I have a husband who would walk through fire for me. We have a beautiful son, a great kid. But every time my boy asks why he doesn't have a brother or sister (he's at that age) it hurts.

I have much to be thankful for. How can I get through this and be happy with what I have?

A Class A Mess

Dear ACAM,

I'm going to be blunt, if not for your benefit, than for someone else's. If you get married at 38 and you know you want two kids, you've got to make that aggressively clear to your spouse at the time. If you have a baby at 40 and suddenly your spouse tells you he/she doesn't want another one, you had better fucking press the issue relentlessly. Saying "If we're not going to have another kid, I guess I'll go back to school" is not pressing the issue. I hate to say this, but it's sounds like you may have used his guilt over the second kid issue to get something else you wanted (since you say he had mixed feelings about your going back to school). I'm not blaming you for adjusting to your husband's desires and trying to make your life better in the process, but I am telling you that becoming increasingly angry at him over the course of six years feels unfair, and points to a not very healthy tendency to sweep your feelings under the rug instead of addressing them directly.

You say you're confrontational. Being confrontational in a marriage can actually be healthy, IF you address issues as they come up. But being confrontational about your regrets, and blaming your husband for decisions that were made, together, six years ago? That's a way of refusing to take responsibility for your own decisions. Maybe you felt that you couldn't change his mind back then. But if you were going to throw down the gauntlet, that probably should've happened then, not now. You're 46 years old. If I were your husband, and you seemed to agree to a certain course of action, and then you reversed yourself once it was quite possibly too late to do anything about it? I would be annoyed, too. He still needs to deal with the fallout from all of this, but let's just admit right now that his reaction isn't all that far-fetched.

Yes, it can be tough to remember what you want from your life once you're married. It can be easy to lay the blame on someone else when things don't happen exactly the way you want them to. But nothing will destroy a marriage faster than allowing your true desires to get paved over, and then blaming your partner for ruining your life.

And for all the other married/committed partners who are going along with some loose plan to have kids "eventually"? You're the only person who knows what a big thing this is for you. You're not going to serve anyone by pretending to be fine with whatever happens, and then freaking out and feeling contemptuous when it turns out that your partner never really wanted kids to begin with, or that it's pretty goddamn hard to get pregnant after the age of 39. (And no, getting pregnant immediately the first time has nothing to do with the second time. Everyone I know over 39 has had to work for several months to get pregnant, and some never succeeded. No one likes to hear this, as if it's anti-woman to admit that we're animals and not superheroes with total control over our bodies. But don't mistake denial for empowerment. Talk to a doctor or do a little research about pregnancy, age and the cost of fertility treatments.)

In the interest of cleaning up this messy emotional state you're in, and extracting the contempt you have for your husband that he can't possible be responsible for, I'd suggest that you see your doctor, get a sonogram, and check your hormone levels. If getting pregnant is a real possibility for you, then you should insist that your husband to sit down with you and a therapist and talk about what you both want.

If pregnancy isn't possible without spending $30k on IVF or adopting, and that's not something either of you is prepared to do, then the conversation shifts dramatically. But you still have to see a therapist, alone AND with your husband, to work through your anger and resentment over this issue, and to put your hopes of having another kid to rest if you can. To be clear, your husband is absolutely wrong that he shouldn't have to hear you out on this subject. If he wants to have a decent marriage, he MUST hear you out—whether you're worked up about something he just did or said, or worked up over the imaginary aliens floating around in your head. Listening and talking to your spouse when you'd rather be doing something else? That's part of the fucking deal. Saying "This is your problem, not mine" is a really good way to turn one little problem into a bunch of great big problems overnight.

So I do understand why your anger is increasing, even though your window for having another kid may have shut. Even so, you have to separate your anger at yourself—for not standing up for what you wanted in the past, and not accepting what you have now—from your anger at him. And he needs to separate his frustration with what he sees as your irrational behavior from his ability to listen, and to make good decisions about your future together, moving forward. Refusing to listen doesn't solve the problem.

I would caution you against putting the kid thing to rest without tackling all of the denial, blame, guilt, self-hatred, contempt that's in the mix right now. These things aren't going to sort themselves out by pretending they're not there. You need to make it very clear to your husband that you two have a lot to discuss and work through. Try to enlist his help without blaming him or getting angry at him, but make sure that he understands that your marriage is at stake.

Yes, of course you should feel grateful for what you have. That's the goal. But right now, you're depressed and anxious and confused and hurt, and your husband is turning his back on all of that and telling you to get over it. Like I said, I understand why he's annoyed with you. I can also see why you're furious with him. This started out as a kid thing, but it's even bigger than that now, and both of you have to work through this mess in order to feel gratitude for your life together. You'll get there, but you have a lot of hard work to do first.

Polly

Is someone angry at you for being so angry? Write to Polly so she can get angry at both of you!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Top photo by "Sarah"; bottom photo by Joann Choo.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because you're still fucking up in the same ways you were before, only now you're too arrogant to notice."

Dear Polly,

How many times is too many to listen to a friend discuss their problems? I have several friends (mostly unemployed writers) who talk about the same thing over and over: namely, that they're not successful and don't know people who will help them, and yet don't do anything to change it. I literally have listened for over 30 minutes at least four times this week to the same friend who kept repeating him/herself about why they were frustrated and disappointed with their careers not moving forward. What is most frustrating is that I don't think they actually want or take my advice. I've offered to introduce them to people and tell them to keep plugging away but instead they go on and on about how rude it is for people not to respond to them or they are scared to send out their material too soon or since high school they've had insecurity complexes. I feel that soon I may just become exasperated and say, "I can't listen to this anymore, especially if you don't listen to advice!" Or, "Maybe see a therapist?" For every suggestion I have they have a suggestion about why it won't work or contradict themselves. Polly, am I bad friend? Do I attract these people for a reason? Or do I just severe boundary issues in that I let myself have the same conversation over and over again. Polly, if speaking up is the right thing to do, how do I say these things nicely? I find myself very depressed after these conversations. HELP!

Signed,

Wanting Writers' Block

Dear WWB,

Dude, I hear you. I listen to more people going on and on about the frustrations of being a writer than I listen to anything else. OK, sometimes my husband likes to complain about the frustrations of being a university professor, but I try to gently nudge him in another conversational direction by saying something mild and loving, like, "Please shut the fuck up right now."

What's interesting is how often writers wander about, whining softly about how they need help and they need guidance and they need someone to give them a chance or hold their hand or read their pitches or stop ignoring them or tell them why their pieces are wonderful. All they need is an agent who'll mold their genius into something saleable, who'll go out there, onto the mean streets, and champion their brilliance! Someone who'll smack those publishers in the face, and shove that manuscript under their moronic noses and say, "This genius is entitled to an enormous check that you'll probably never recoup by selling this genius's books!"

But let's be honest. Collaboration and support are not always all they're cracked up to be. If you're in this questioning, needy state—"Is this a good idea? What do you think? Can you help me? Do you want to publish this? What would you change?"—you're throwing the doors wide open and inviting every friend or editor or agent or publisher into your overheated kitchen, and you're asking them to stick their grubby, shit-stained fingers into your half-finished, tasteless pie. (These editors' fingers are shit-stained because they're also editing zany, unfunny "Oh silly, awkward me!" memoirs and magazine articles about people with really incredible DUMBO lofts.) How many people do you know who have better ideas—much, much better ideas—than you do? How many people are smart enough to take what you've written, and mold it into something that's a little more interesting and vivid and cooler than what you had before?

I love the smart, imaginative editors I'm writing for right now. They make me sound like I'm smarter than I am (and that's pretty goddamn smart, too, huh huh!). But let's be honest. The world is filled with smart people who will quite cheerfully turn your original weird ideas into horse shit. They won't do this because they're evil or because they're crass capitalist slobs or because they're fucking morons, either. They'll do it because you're standing there saying, "Well? What should this be? What should I be? Who the fuck am I anyway? Do you even love me anymore?" They will show you how to turn what you have, which is strange-ish and not fully formed and maybe a little sloppy, into the average of everything that came before you. They will inadvertently point you straight at the Least Common Denominator, either because you haven't indicated that you're capable of more than that, or because they haven't had a second cup of coffee yet, or because they just heard that someone got a big advance for something a little bit like what you're doing, only way stupider.

So this is something you'll want to tell these writer friends in order to shut down their sad donkey eyes and their quiet mewling. You'll want to tell them to take full responsibility for themselves and move the fuck forward. You'll want to say that no big break is going to make it easier to get up in the morning and write. What makes it easier is trusting your own instincts and noticing that you have giant ideas percolating in that herd-animal brain of yours, you just have to dig in and find them. After you find them, you have to write something terrible that eventually, through a lot of editing, over and over and over, becomes something great. If you go pawing and kicking at doors of editors and publishers and agents and all you have is the creative equivalent of a half-eaten burrito from yesterday's lunch, you shouldn't act surprised when they want to turn that pile of cold beans into, say, a book about candlemaking, even though you couldn't give a shit about candles. You aren't owning your stupid writing career. You're being a lazy sack of fuck that wants a Mommy to make a little color-coded schedule for you and to stop you at lunchtime to spoon-feed you your Spaghettios.

Lately, I've had a lot of editors approaching me, asking me to write stuff for them. That is pretty great, and I'm very lucky. But I have to be careful what I agree to write, even when I'm pretty broke. Saying yes to an advice column and yes to writing weekly "Mad Men" recaps might sound a little downmarket to some of my snobby bitch-ass writer friends, but I love an excuse to watch great TV and pontificate like a blowhard about it, and I love, love, love using this so-called advice column as an excuse to go on and on and on about myself, particularly when someone with severe boundary issues like yourself comes along, someone who clearly wants a person who's self-involved and awful like me to take advantage of their generosity and tread all over them with my petulant, self-involved drivel. But! My gung-ho "Sure, I'll do it!" spirit (which only lasts for tiny spurts within each caffeine and tequila ingestion zone) sometimes tricks me into thinking that I should be writing shit that I really, really should NOT be writing, shit that I would never in a million fucking years sit down and read myself.

This is where support and advice and help and patronage will sometimes lead you: Down the primrose fucking path to writing a piece or a screenplay or a book about something that, while you might be capable of writing it, will turn out just as bland, worthless and repetitive as every other bit of bland, worthless, repetitive horse shit that crowds the shelves of those dying chain bookstores and plays on repeat at those mammoth movie theaters or sits unhappily between the perfumey pages of some of the not-very-good lady magazines.

And let's be honest. As a woman, people are going to ask you to write the kind of insipid shit they would never in a million fucking years ask a man to write. They're going to tell you to make it lovable, to take harsh opinions out of your heroine's head, to cut your pissy first-person essay off at the kneecaps. They're going to run out and publish a million and one disconnected, crappy Deep Thoughts by some self-proclaimed boy wonder, but they're going to read your perfectly delightful work and tell you that it'll be just great, as long as you only include the stuff on the trials and tribulations of being a mom (Argh! Teehee!) or being a girl (Oh noes! Teehee!) or being a woman (Growl! Just kidding! Teehee!). They're going to ask you to write about your recent weight gain, or your recent divorce, or your recent (insert humiliating story here), and what lessons you've learned from it. They're going to want you to come up with a fucking moral to your story. Because you're a lady, you don't have the option of stomping around in a funk. Because you are a woman, and you feel feelings, you must draw some giant, oversimplified conclusion. You must have blandly down-to-earth protagonists, you must have lovable mommies hugging lost kittens, you must have rainbows and sunbeams spewing out of your ass. They're going to coach you into writing something you're not entirely sure about, something you would never in a million fucking years read yourself (if you had free will, which it sometimes seems like you don’t), and they're going to tell you it's pure genius. And even though you still might see your piece or essay or snippet of prose as "literary," they're going to stick an incendiary headline on it ("Help! I Ate My Own Vagina!") and it's going to be an internet sensation, and you're going to feel Bad with a capital B about it.

And one year later, there you are anyway, laboring away under a giant contract to write Help! I Ate My Own Vagina!: A True Story (which your agent described to publishers as "The 'Eat, Pray, Love' of vaginal self-consumption"). And you're so depressed and anxious and frustrated from working on this enormous, bland, repetitive turd of a book that you could, literally, eat your own vagina. Finally, you call your editor to tell her that, and she tells you to definitely, definitely put that in your final "What I Learned!" chapter.

I've had really smart agents and unnervingly good editors, but I don't need THEM to lead me astray; I will happily do that to myself. I write about culture, and sometimes I'm soaking in that shit so much that I don't notice how flaccid and limp my prose has become, how bland and dumb I'm getting, how little faith I suddenly have in my voice. I start thinking I should write shit that I hate, in a tone that I cannot fucking get behind, because maybe that will make my financial picture a little less stressful.

That's when I call my friends and talk their sad ears off, and mewl and moan and piss myself until they have to pretend their cell phone connections cut out just to get off the fucking phone with me.

You know what I need to do though? Put the phone down and ask myself who in the whole wide world is supposed to take responsibility for what I write if I won't do it myself. And sometimes, in order to take total, true creative responsibility, you have to shut people out for a while. You have to stop walking around like a giant fucking question mark. You have to stop looking for reassurance from half-interested friends, and you have to stop asking other people to help you shape your work from start to finish. Calm the fuck down and get back to work. Talking in circles is just a form of procrastination. Asking for guidance but not actually wanting guidance is a way of justifying inaction and self-pity. Letting it out is one thing; repeating yourself indefinitely is another.

But let me add a caveat: Some of my most repetitive, most needy writer friends are also brilliant, inspiring and very discerning about what's good and what sucks. Those who ask the most from me, in terms of engaging, thoughtful discussions, do actually give me back tons of insight and knowledge. Certainly don't turn your back on someone who's brilliant just because he or she is a little emotional and, well, fucking insane.

But look, honestly? This is how you get a writer to shut up: You say "Shut up." Anything less than that, and the writer will keep talking until the sun falls out of the sky. Say, "Shut up. Go finish your shit and then edit it again and again and again until it's great. When you're done, then we can talk some more."

Shutting up,

Polly

Dear Polly,

My friend and next-door-neighbor just lost his job this week, which is awful, but ultimately has nothing to do with me. That's his bad news. As always, I want to be a supportive friend and that would seem to include helping him through this trouble. I've been there myself, and I know sometimes you just have to talk to people about it to stay sane. And when you aren't leaving the house very often (no job, no money, etc.), your friend and next-door-neighbor ends up being someone you talk to a lot. My problem is this: I recently found out that my position at my job may be ending in the near future. I mentioned "I've been there myself," well in the past few years I've been laid off twice. Both bouts left me overwhelmed and stricken with depression and anxiety. I'm doing okay right now (after being on medication and working hard to put things back together), but with my own job concerns, I can feel myself teetering on the edge of a drop back into depression. I'm concerned that being my friend's go-to person to bitch about job loss and job hunting could be the thing that pushes me over the edge.

Is there a way for me to back away from my neighbor, who I see every day, without making him feel like I am abandoning him in a time of need? Alternatively, is there a way to make it clear to him that I am available for playing board games and watching movies, but that my house is an unemployment-discussion-free zone (again, without making it seem like I don't care about these problems)? I don't want to alienate him or damage our friendship, but I truly feel that right now I need to devote all of my energy and positive vibes to keep myself in order. If my job does end soon, I need to be prepared to prop myself up and do this again. I don't feel like I have the energy to give that to someone else too. How can I do this?

Many thanks,

Overwhelmed

Dear Overwhelmed,

Yes, there is an easy short-term solution to your problem. The next time your friend comes over, you stop and say, "I really like hanging out, playing board games or watching movies or whatever. But all of this talk about unemployment is starting to give me a panicked feeling, because my own job is not very stable right now. I WANT to be a good friend to you, but I can feel myself teetering on the edge of depression. So, do you think we can try to tackle the latest developments and then move on to something else? I know that's not completely fair because you're going through a lot. I just need a slight adjustment to how long we discuss this stuff while I'm feeling this way."

Don't wait until you get frustrated or mad to say this. Be nice about it. Notice that you're not banning the subject entirely, which isn't really fair or rational. You're just saying it can't go on and on.

As far as your own job insecurities, though: I'd suggest you spend a little time each day mapping out a plan for what you'll do if you lose your job. Think about what you want from your career over the long-term. Do some research into how you might put yourself in a more secure position, employment-wise, if that's remotely possible. When a fear has power in your life and makes you depressed and anxious, avoiding it isn't the answer. You have to keep moving forward, sure, but you also have to stare that fear straight in the face and come to terms with it. You will survive a lay-off. But HOW will you survive, exactly? Try to run through it in your mind when you're feeling calm and happy, and make a strategic plan for handling it. Then you won't be such a fragile flower with your friend, who clearly does need someone to talk to.

Having friends sometimes means listening to boring or repetitive or anxiety-inducing concerns that you don't want to hear. If you get depressed or anxious when someone is speaking to you about their feelings, that says a lot more about your fears and your inability to face them than it does about your friend. As you said yourself, his problems have nothing to do with you. Learn to draw boundaries, gently, and learn to face your own fears, and eventually you'll become a much better friend – to him, and to yourself, and to your other friends. Don't let your boredom and avoidance and inability to look hard at your own issues stand in the way of connecting with other people who are, in fact, a lot like you, albeit a little better at expressing their emotions and leaning on other people when they need help.

Polly

Do you stigmatize vulnerability in others because you're horribly afraid of vulnerability in yourself? Yes you do, and you know it! Write to Polly right now, you defenseless little lamb, you!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Top photo by April Sanders. Unemployment photo by Justin Cozart.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because it's all been a pack of lies." (Cue drum solo.)

Dear Polly,

This is probably far from an original advice-seeking topic, but I need an original answer. I am a 28-year-old woman who still feels the need to have everyone like me. I mean everyone. People I like, sure, and people whose respect I would like to have, but also people I actively dislike, people I will surely never see again, people I will never see even once in real life. Work people, Internet people, flying purple people, you get the idea. Errybody. I fully understand the insanity and inanity of this, but it seems to be a problem I can't figure my way out of, and the majority of advice I've read/heard amounts to, "Stop caring. Just don't care anymore!" But of course it's not that simple. Reminding myself that I don't even like him anyway or that I'll never have to see her face again does nothing to alleviate my striving for their approval, and it definitely doesn't dull the pain if I don't get that approval. Same goes for other strategies like reminding myself about all the wonderful people that have my back no matter what or adopting a fake-it-til-you-make-it, balls-out, "fuck tha haterz!" attitude.

(For background, I have an idea of where some of this comes from. I was friend-dumped a lot as a kid—particularly by a group of girls who would routinely and arbitrarily decide we weren't friends anymore and ignore me for a few weeks until they graciously forgave me for the nothing that I had done to them. Being a sensitive child, I turned this inward and decided it had definitely been something I did or said that made them temporarily terrorize me, and I felt so grateful and determined to not fuck it up again when they would allow me back into their mean girl clubhouse. But I feel that this only accounts for some of the problem.)

Of course, in the process of trying to be universally liked, I end up losing a lot of myself, agreeing with arguments I don't actually agree with just to be agreeable, putting forth opinions that I in no way hold but sense the other person might approve of, holding my tongue when I should speak up, etc. This feels predictably horrible and gross afterwards, but the sad truth is it doesn't feel as bad to me as being rejected or even just plain un-liked, which I experience as disproportionately unbearable.

I can spend days agonizing over whether or not I offended a stranger I spoke with at a party last weekend with my joke that they misconstrued, hours feeling wretched about a mild Twitter insult from an ideological adversary whose real name I don't even know. I can believe in my good intentions or the righteousness of my argument 100%, but my conviction doesn't seem to blunt the pain of any and all backlash that comes my way. Experimentally, I've tried small acts of attempted skin-thickening, entering into situations where I know I'm in for rejection/dislike (saying absolutely anything in a comments section, for example), and even in full emotional crouch, armor on in anticipation, negative responses still hit me with gut-punch force.

This is as untenable as it is ridiculous. I need to develop a skin that is thicker than crepe paper and be able to let go of the many, many people I will encounter in my life for whom I am just not a great flavor. I need to stop trying to control everyone's perception of me. I need to let them see the real me AND make peace with the fact that they might not like what they see. (I am assuming people can actually do this, in real life? It just seems so impossible from where I am now.) I dream of one day being able to laugh off and immediately forget the criticisms and insults of casual haters, to disagree with an acquaintance without fear of alienating them completely, to call out an asshole on their objectively asshole-y behavior without feeling nauseated and regretful afterwards. I can see this Cool Future Me, a confident and uninhibited woman who is occasionally controversial or too loud or kind of haughty or wrong-headed but is okay with that because that's who she is, dammit. She is calm and brave, and I want to be her so, so badly.

I know this totally unflappable version of myself is an impossible fiction, but I need to at least move in that direction, away from the cowering people-pleaser I currently am. The question is, how on earth do I do that? I predict therapy will play a big role in this when I can one day (soon, hopefully) afford it, but for now, is there anything I can do on my own to address this issue?

Sincerely,

Approval-Seeking Missile

Dear Approval-Seeking Missile,

Everyone seeks approval in one way or another. But people like you who seek approval compulsively, from everyone, tend to have some emotional trigger around approval. Maybe a parent repeatedly disapproved of you, or led you to believe that their very vocal approval was conditional, based on their somewhat eclectic expectations of your behavior. So now you alternately avoid approval-related situations and seek them out, seemingly to excise these demons. But it never really works out that way, does it? You get confrontational, hoping to stare down the worst and maybe to explain yourself, but it just makes you feel physically sick, right?

Emotional triggers are bizarre things. They're these weird areas of wild weeds and unpaved roads in our psyches. Even if every other part of us is all sparkling skyscrapers and bullet trains and really good restaurants, if we stumble into this wilderness area by accident, we end up feeling totally confused and ashamed. There may be happiness and satisfaction—or at least control—everywhere else in your life, but those scrappy hinterlands always seem to have jihadis hiding out in caves, ready to take down the teeming metropolis at a moment's notice.

And maybe you suspect that other people are too different from you to ever approve of your real self. Maybe you don't like that many people, so you feel that you have to bullshit them just to keep the peace. People say random shit and you agree with it, whatever the fuck it is, because you don't even know how to begin to say, "Well, that makes no sense to me. In fact, nothing about you makes sense to me." or just "I've always thought exactly the opposite, honestly." Your deep disapproval of yourself leads you to disapprove of other people, so you have to live a lie and act like you approve of everyone just to prevent starting an all-out war every few seconds.

Now, as unappealing as it can be to plod along with the herd, nodding and agreeing and resisting the temptation to make waves, the fact remains that these behaviors are essential to adulthood. I resisted these things for so long, but a lot of my resistance was strictly immature and ego-driven. Calmly observing other people, seeking to understand them without asserting your ego constantly, listening before you speak: these are important habits to develop in yourself, habits that will make people like you for a good reason: You have self control, restraint, and a genuine interest in the world around you. You are demonstrating that you're not so self-involved that all you give a shit about is you, you, you.

But aping people, repeating their ideas back to them, agreeing enthusiastically with shit you don't agree with? This is not adaptive or healthy behavior. Approval that's gained by aggressively faking it isn't really approval. It's bullshit. The people who you're tricking into liking you don't mean anything; they might as well be cursing the day you were born, for all they know about your true self.

So let's try to imagine all of the people who were basically born to dislike you, no matter what you do. Among these haters, let's include the ultra-conventional thinkers and the frightened idiots and the raging douchebags and the slow-moving animals who are allergic to ideas, then throw in the women who hate women and the men who hate women. George W. Bush might also include "the enemies of freedom" on his hater list. Others might include the enemies of red hair, the enemies of assertive Greek men, the enemies of marriage equality, the enemies of good taste, etc.

And let's not forget the people who are envious of some aspect of who you are. Remember, people can be envious of flaws, too. You stick your foot in your mouth, they would never do that but sometimes wish they took more conversational risks, so you suck. Like that. You dare to express your feelings, they see that as the path to ruin, but they're sick from choking back their feelings all the fucking time. And so on.

Now we're looking at lots and lots of people who will never like you no matter what you do. Even if you agree with them vociferously, they won't like you, no fucking way. And look at who we're talking about: There are so many of them! Some of them are really wonderful people, I'm sure. They're aren't nearly the tools you assume them to be, trust me. They have great big hearts, they have feelings, they have joys and sorrows. But they have one thing in common: They find you deeply repellent. Are you seriously going to scamper around for the rest of your life, catering to THESE people?

But the individuals involved aren't the issue, are they? It's the feeling that disapproval kicks up in you, whether it's disapproval from your best friend or disapproval from the guy at the corner store who hates you for wearing boots and playing the lottery. And when people seem well-equipped to like you, but they don't anyway, that's the absolute worst. You figure they just don't understand you. You're thinking, "If they got to know me, they would see what a great person I am!"

This is where you fail. You truly believe that you have control over other people's narratives about you. You think that, if you had a little time with these people, you could explain yourself to them. "But I'm really a nice person!" "I have such good intentions!" "I didn't mean to sound surly like that, I was just in a bad mood!"

You need to let go of control. What you're suffering from, in part, is a compulsion to "fix" shit that cannot be fixed. You're reaching for something that is totally beyond your grasp. You might as well wish the moon out of the sky, for how much control you have over other people's ideas and impressions of you.

Lots of people dislike me. A lot of times, they dislike me for exactly who I am. I am friendly but moody. I clean up well, but not very often. I don't always bite my tongue, or behave in ways that other people find pleasant and enjoyable, but that I find tedious and soul-crushing. Even though I have learned to listen, to enjoy how different people are from each other, to keep an open mind, to stay calm and shut up, I'm still not everyone's favorite. Sometimes I just want to say something obnoxious, because no one else seems willing to do it, and there's a great big gaping hole where the obnoxiousness should go (even if I'm the only one who sees it).

So first of all, I want to say: Get used to it. That doesn't mean go out and make noise and see what happens. The less I act out of a compulsion to assert my ego in the world, the more I like other people and enjoy my life. Don't drop conversational bombs. Don't poke people. Don't stir up shit for no reason. Don't drink way too much and then do these things. That's not the path to good emotional health OR good personality health, which is sort of what we're talking about here. It's a way to injure yourself, pure and simple.

But you don't have to loudly agree either. You have other options. You can say nothing. You can stay quiet even when other people are saying, "WELL?!!" You can choose not to weigh in. You can ask questions instead.

Stay calm. Try to tune in a lot when someone is talking—go where they go, be with them. But try to ignore what they might think of you. Experiment with hinting, vaguely, that you don't agree, but don't argue your point after that. I know this sounds like me instructing you on how to be an inscrutable, annoying motherfucker, but what I'm really trying to show you is that just because you're a youngish woman doesn't mean that every fucking jackass in the world has a right to know exactly where you stand on everything. Do men explain exactly what they mean about everything? Almost never. They are often comfortable simply flashing a look that says "I prefer not to explain myself." Learn how to serve up that look. Learn how to be a person in the world who is not fully known and understood.

Because some part of the world isn't going to understand you no matter what you do. Sometimes I think that I became a writer out of this totally misguided compulsion to be understood by EVERYFUCKINGBODY. I just write and write and write, due to this core dysfunction. That's pretty shameful, right? But it makes me who I am. It fuels what I do, and I really love what I do. So I have to love my compulsive confessional explainy self, too.

Sometimes our worst emotional triggers fuel our greatest talents. Maybe there's some part of you that's absolutely beyond compare, thanks to this compulsion you have. Forget the calm, brave woman you imagine becoming for a second, and embrace the jittery approval-seeker. It's ok not to be a fucking superhero. Stay with who you are right now, and don't hate that person for her weaknesses. I know this is a big challenge for you, but try to breathe deeply and monitor those times when you start to feel physically ill over someone's disapproval. Try to stay still in the face of these moments, and accept that this is a part of you. Resist the urge to do something, to take action. Observe how dramatic your emotional reaction is, and accept it, but don't start nodding and agreeing to release the tension. Just exist. If you start to cry, or laugh, or shake, let that happen, and dare not to explain it. OR dare to explain it to someone you trust. At the very center of this "problem," there's you, judging yourself badly for having this trigger. But trust me, every single person you know has something that sets them off and makes them feel weak and freakish and bad. The only difference is the way you explain it to yourself, and the action you keep taking to paint over this very interesting and challenging part of who you are. It's time to accept this part of you, and stay with the fear of disapproval, and give it some air to breathe, so that it won't rule your life.

Everybody's messed up in one way or another. Some will love you, some will hate you, but most don't give a fuck either way. The only reason these "disapprovers" pay any attention to you at all is because you're waging a war, internally or externally, to win their approval. Learn to accept this approval-seeking impulse of yours, but try to stay quiet and observe it instead of acting, and most of your (imagined) detractors will lose interest quickly. Then they'll wander off in search of something else that might distract them from their own emotional jihadis.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I lie all the time. I always have. Even when I was a kid who never did his homework, I could never own up to the fact that I hadn't done it. I'd look at my shoes and mumble some chickenshit excuse for not having something that never existed. I have gotten through elementary, middle and high school and most of college this way. I have lied about being in intensive therapy in order to excuse weeks-long absences where I just didn't feel up to attending class or telling my professors what was going on. I spent several months lying to my parents about being enrolled at school while I was really just faffing about in an apartment while they paid my rent (this was following the semester where I had a fairly comprehensive breakdown where I stopped answering any phone calls and stopped going to class and started sleeping while the sun was out). I feel fine taking things from friends and family and supermarkets without any remorse. I am 23 and have never had a girlfriend, both not for lack of trying and for lack of trying. I feel like a sociopath sometimes, but I don't think that's true. I care about the people around me that I care about. Do I just care about myself more? Am I destined to be a drain on those around me? And, most importantly, what the fuck?

Best,

DPO

Dear DPO,

Call your parents and tell them you have a lying problem. Tell them you need to go to therapy. (Again? Come clean? I don't care which, just tell them you need it.) Tell your therapist that you have a lying problem, and you need help. Commit to never lying to your therapist about anything.

You have no destiny. You simply have a choice: Do you want to continue to live this way, or not? I don't think you care about yourself enough, honestly. You hate yourself for lying, but you continue to do it because you figure you're just that kind of a sucky, lying type of person. You feel you have to lie to cover up just how much you suck, in fact.

I can't tell you how to stop lying, beyond saying that you're fucking yourself over and you'll never have real relationships and real happiness until you stop. All I can tell you is that you have to take the first step: Go to therapy and commit to telling the truth there.

Good luck.

Polly

Is your personality a pack of well-crafted lies? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Shy cat photo by Tambako the Jaguar; lying hand photo by Marisa Watts.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because even Bumbles bounce!"

Dear Polly,

I met my husband when I was 26 in 2003 and got married in 2006. In short, we've been together for 11 years now. The first five years were great. Then bit by bit he started getting comfortable to the point where he wouldn't take care of himself like he used to. And due to work-related and financial stress, he prioritized that over our relationship. He hasn't worked from the time we met and takes antidepressants for his vertigo which kills the sex drive.

It is impossible to communicate with him about matters of the heart. If I bring up the fact that I'm not happy with how things are going and we need to find a way to meet halfway, he gets all defensive and tells me if I'm not happy I should find someone else. Or says he's not a girl, and if that's what I need, then I should go out with a girl. Oh yes, and as I'm pouring my heart out to him, he just keeps on playing games on his iPad.

He's always on the iPad, has tremendously bad breath, and doesn't keep in shape. One minute he is nice and then gets quite rude and it hurts. It's like walking on egg shells.

We have been living like roommates for the past five and a half years and we haven't slept in the same bed in five years. I remember in the past telling him I hope we can sleep in the same bed soon. He would say that he is a bit restless and edgy but soon when things get better, everything will go back to normal. Go back to normal? I agree that plans can be put on hold but not a relationship, not for so many years anyway. Guess when a couple doesn't focus and work on their relationship year after year, shit happens. I lived under his stress and tried to relate to it for so long I feel as if I lost my identity. I don't even want to mention what it's like when and if we go out. He drives like a maniac. Gets road rage, gets agitated around people, always complaining about something. It truly gets stressing and I feel so relaxed when I go out alone.

He is a good-hearted man and has so many good qualities but the other stuff just smothers his good qualities. We don't have kids, by the way.

When I told him I want a divorce, he did get very upset. But he told me he basically didn't make an effort because he never thought I would want to leave. He never discussed anything regarding the divorce and just skimmed over it. Asking for sex here and there, like nothing.

I am fully aware that it takes two to make things work, but I do literally everything around the house. Laundry, groceries, cleaning, cooking, taking care of the cats, their litter boxes, etc.

So Sad & Frustrated

Dear So Sad & Frustrated,

Let me see if I've got this straight. You're married to an out-of-shape guy who hasn't had a job for years, doesn't clean or cook or run errands, has bad breath, has terrible road rage, and spends most of his time fucking around on his iPad. When you try to talk to him, he insults you and tells you to find someone who gives a shit, because he doesn't.

Does he also snack on live frogs all day long? Does he force you to wear a metal bikini? Does he lick you with his stinky tongue, then fall asleep and snore loudly? Because it sounds like you're married to Jabba the Hutt.

I guess it's not all that surprising that you had to whip out a thermal detonator just to get his attention. Since then, though, he's just hanging out, hoping that this whole "divorce" charade will blow over. So the real question is: Why haven't you left yet?

You know that Jabba basically can't survive without someone to fill his tank with live frogs, right? He needs someone to hire his live band and someone to point spears at people's faces and someone to wrangle the Rancor, too. But for some strange reason, right now you're playing the roles of Bib Fortuna, Gamorrean guard, Rancor wrangler and Salacious B. Crumb combined. You're working and buying groceries and doing laundry and changing cat litter and stocking up on frogs and tolerating scary driving and laughing at bad jokes, and for what? For some immobile slug who's basically lost all confidence in himself and his ability to, I don't know, speak and walk and wipe his own ass. And when you try to discuss it with him, he says stuff like, "So I'm not a person who likes to earn money or move or brush my teeth! So what?! If you don't like it, then why don't you go out and find yourself someone with a toothbrush, and legs?"

But here's what happens to Jabba when everyone throws down their spears and their saxophones and their drink trays and says, "To hell with this boshuda. I'm outta here!": Jabba gets very hungry and very lonely, and eventually, maybe, he loses enough weight that he can find his feet and walk out the door in search of food. Maybe he puts away his iPad and empties the fucking cat litter. Maybe he learns to stop laughing in people's faces when they talk about how they feel, and maybe he wipes the frog intestines off his chin after he's done eating his afternoon snack.

By staying with Jabba, though, you're essentially keeping him helpless and angry and dependent on you. You're hurting him, and you're hurting yourself. Why are you doing that?

Take a minute and ask yourself why. Why do you want to be loved by someone pathetic who depends on you for everything? Are you pretty sure that's the best you can do? Are you so disgusted with yourself that you can only feel secure if you're with someone who's helpless and angry and lost?

You need to gently explain to your husband that a divorce is the only way that either one of you is going to change. He's not going to listen or get a job or do a thing to become a better person until he has to do so to survive. You're not going to understand your own worth until you remove yourself from the company of someone who doesn't like or respect you.

It's time for you to learn to like and respect yourself again. It's time to break free and start from scratch. What are you waiting for, exactly? Stop making excuses and start mapping out a life that doesn't include imperious layabouts with frog breath.

Polly

Polly,

What is this "it takes years to get over a divorce" thing people talk about? Am I going to have some terrible backlash? I divorced my wife about a month ago, and I don't recall being happier. I don't get guilt-tripped for going out dancing every other night, I am not criticized for changing my mind, there is no passive aggressive stonewalling every day, I can have company over any time I like, and my sex life is better than it has been for years. I feel bad for being over it so quickly, though. Some of our mutual friends who are in touch with both of us are basically pissed at me for being happy while she is going through hell sporadically. One of them is a psychologist, and is somewhere between pissed and confused when he asks me how I am doing and I respond by telling him about all of the fun I am having and the new productivity I have found. How the fuck do I convince people that this sweet, caring, diligent girl they all love is miserable for me to live with, and I am incomparably happier on my own?

Happily Divorced

Dear HD,

You're happy, right? So don't try to convince anyone of anything. The more you try to convince people, the more suspicious they'll become. Your ex is in pain, so don't add to her misery by walking around telling everyone how awful your life was with her. You'll only make a lot of enemies that way. Maybe you're on a high right now that will subside once the excitement of being free wears off. Maybe you'll have nothing but dancing and hot sex for the rest of your life—in which case, more power to you. But you really don't know how you'll feel in a few more months, so try to remain humble in the face of this major life change. Show some respect for this woman who cared about you and loved you, even though it didn't work out, and show some respect for the people who love her. If you're having a great time, why do you need for them to understand how unhappy you were before?

Their anger might upset you and make you feel misunderstood, but it's not surprising. Mutual friends are likely to find it awkward, if not downright jarring, to see you acting nonchalant about ending a marriage, because it makes them feel bad for your ex AND bad for themselves, imagining that their own spouses could dump them out of the blue and not regret it one bit. It's fine to revel in your newfound freedom privately, but try not to lay it on quite so thick with the people who care about both of you and actually feel sad about your breakup even if you don't.

If you're truly happier, they'll see that over time and adjust. But in the meantime, don't wage any kind of campaign or tell any sweeping story. The truth is, you don't know how you'll feel a week or a month or a year from now. You don't have to feel guilty, but if you're doing well, that's all the more reason to treat your ex with consideration and embrace a spirit of humility and gratitude.

Polly

Does your misery love company? Does your happiness demand an audience? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Jabba the Hutt photo by Jen Sadler; divorce celebration photo by Alvin Howard.

1) Don't think of this as "The End." Technically, it's the end of the world. But every end brings a new beginning! Instead of focusing on the bombs and the toxic clouds and the eventual death of every living thing on earth, consider, instead, what might spring to life next. A vibrant and adventurous new species that thrives on the ashes and nuclear toxins we left behind? A deeply intuitive breed of mutant slugs that can suck oxygen out of the tiny bubbles found between styrofoam Hardee's cups, seeping car batteries, and decomposing copies of Snooki's autobiography? When one door closes, another one always opens. In this case, there won't be any more doors anywhere, closing or opening. But what kinds of doors will those adventurous mutant slugs create? Perhaps they'll dare to live without doors, thereby keeping themselves utterly open and present to the world around them! Sometimes just considering how much more centered the next living creatures on earth might be can provide a gentle solace as everything you've ever known is destroyed before your eyes.

2) Try to put your life into perspective. Watching everything you care about go up in flames can be pretty stressful. Debra, 55, a bank executive with four children in Des Moines, Iowa, says that there are days where she can hardly stand to make dirt soup for her family. "Killing the dog and curing its meat was especially hard on the kids," she explains. "But then I think about the dinosaurs, who lived here for millions of years. Our lives are just a blip compared to that!" It's true that we'll go down in history as the one generation to destroy our entire planet and everything on it in a single lifetime. But thankfully, there won't be any history books to record our great big, super-embarrassing blunder! Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to see just how trivial and silly saying goodbye to your family and friends and the entire planet can look, in the big scheme of things.

3) Consider all the terrible stuff that will never happen now. It's never a good idea to fill your head with countless negative possibilities—unless you and everyone else in your life is about to get snuffed out like a light! Now is the time to unleash all of your worries about the future like never before. Since you have no future, that means that you won't get cancer to die in a plane crash or get maimed in a freak accident like you always suspected. You also won't get fired from your job, you won't lose your house to bankruptcy, and your dog won't die of some terrible dog disease (You just killed her to make dog jerky, remember? Phew!). And just think, now your husband will never leave you for his sexy younger coworker. And let's be honest, that was totally on, right before the bombs dropped. Think of how betrayed and humiliated you would've felt for the rest of your life if an affair had been revealed! Now, instead of dying a bitter old woman who complained relentlessly about her son-of-a-bitch husband and his filthy slut of a second wife for the balance of your days, alienating your children, your siblings and every last friend, you can die as a courageous mother with a devoted spouse, both of you looking out for each other until your dying breath!

4) Focus on your apocalyptic blessings. You may be quite literally starving to death right now. Or, you may be fighting off hoards of hungry neighbors by brandishing sharpened gardening tools. But even if you're considering cutting off your own foot so you can roast it for dinner, remember: Only thoughts can stand in the way of your happiness. Telling yourself a really depressing story about the blood-thirsty desperation of the end times will only lead to more agony. Research shows that embracing a more uplifting story, filled with love and gratitude and acceptance of what is, will increase your happiness by a teensy, tiny little bit. Every little scrap of happiness helps, though! (Studies indicate that results may vary, depending on your access to lethal narcotics/huffable spray paint.)

5) Ask yourself, is this really how I want to suffer and die? This question might sound a little tortured at first, but if you ask this enough times in a row—say, when you're actually in the process of suffering and dying—you might just have a breakthrough. Every time you ask, you'll open up the possibility that you could discover some little choice, seemingly minor, that could make your untimely demise all the more delightful. Helen, 35, a schoolteacher in New Paltz, NY, reports that even after her boyfriend perished from malnourishment and she was too weak to saw his bones apart, she kept challenging herself to find some new choice that might shift her whole experience. Finally, a creative solution dawned on her: She could drag his rotting corpse outside to stave off the pack of prowling wolves gathered in the empty lot behind the crumbling remains of her apartment complex! As she sat and watched the wolves tear meat off her dead boyfriend's femur from her collapsed second story window, a funny thing happened: She was filled with an inner glow of satisfaction, knowing that she'd kept some other living beings alive for just a few days longer!

* * *

Here in the Living Lady! underground bomb shelter/alien-retardant bunker—built years ago under the guidance of Staff Clairvoyant Marsha Rittenhammer—we have enough green tea, flax seeds and smoked salmon to last us through the next decade or so. But we've still been marveling at the rawness and vulnerability of Helen's tale over mani-pedis and deep tissue massages in the Imagination Room each day. Remember, it's the little things that make a big difference when the world is ending. Once you recognize to how full of invigorating unknowns the apocalypse is, you can start to shift your whole way of experiencing Armageddon!

Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Top models shot by "Ryan." Bottom image by Lisa Omarali. Handsome lady by the trash by "thierry ehrmann."

Dear Polly,

My birthday is coming up in a couple of days and I'm turning 25. Ever since I was young, 25 was the big year. The year I thought you become an adult, have your life figured out and making your way through an impressive list of accomplishment. Life hasn't shaken out for me in that way.

I come from an abusive family. When I was younger, I chalked it up to cultural differences. My parents are conservative and traditional minded parents. They favor boys more. I am a girl. So when my brother was born, 9 years after me, I became no longer worthy of love. I stopped receiving any gifts, having my birthday acknowledged or being shown any form of affection. By the time my brother was born, they had stopped hitting me because they just couldn't care enough.

I left for college as soon as I could. But I suffered through some unpleasant medical conditions and untreated depression and anxiety. I had to come home before I could graduate. I then promptly left for a year of service in AmeriCorps, but having no money, I had to come home. I've been living here for two years. My anxiety has never been worse. There are days when I'm too scared to use the escalator. Depression shadows my life completely. It is a battle of wills to get up in the morning. I don't have insurance.

My parents have become increasingly irrational. I go to community college and work part time to save money to leave. My mom calls me lazy. My dad has now threatened to kick me out. My brother (whom I've always supported) calls me a bitch. When I talk to them, they won't even respond back to me. They have started demanding my entire savings. They are unable to save. They won't save and they want me to bail them out.

It's taken me two years to finally have the courage to leave. I have a plan. But I'm too scared to leave. Without a BA, I know my chances of getting a good paying job is limited. I have a good job here doing what I like (working with young adults with special needs). When I move, I won't have a car (meaning, I can't work in the same field). I worry about unemployment.

But the real fear is that I'm not good enough to deserve a good life, to be surrounded by people who like and care about me. I've grown up believing that I'm a monster who destroys everything good in life. I waiver moving the 'move-out' date sooner. Because I'm just so scared.

I know what to do. I know I need to move and I should move sooner. How do I get over this fear? How do I feel worthy of some goodness in life?

Thanks,

Scared to Leave

Dear Scared To Leave,

You will get over your fear and feel worthy of goodness in life when you get out of your parents' place for good. My guess is that you returned home not just for pragmatic reasons, but because you have some compulsion to right the wrongs of the past. Some part of you believes that your parents will come around and start treating you with affection and consideration, the way they treat your brother. Even if this isn't your conscious intention, it's acting on you. You are simply waiting around for their love. You may not think that's what you're doing, but there you are, in the belly of the beast, seemingly unable to move. You are waiting. You might as well be lying down in the middle of the railroad tracks.

You are not safe at home. The world outside is much safer than you think. Your parents are not going to love you the way you want them to. They don't even want you there.

That has nothing to do with you. I want you to start repeating these things to yourself: My parents don't want me here, because they are sick. It has nothing to do with me. I remind them of how sick they are. I am a good person. I am worthy of goodness and love.

You say you had untreated depression and anxiety. Did you ever treat it? Your fear of escalators leads me to believe that it remains untreated. Until you treat your anxiety, you're going to see the world through a very scary lens, and you're going to feel helpless to change anything. You need to fix that lens first, and then you'll find it easier to move forward with your plan.

Find a therapist immediately—I'm sure there are cheap services available through your former college—and commit to seeing that person regularly. You also need to get a referral to a psychiatrist who might prescribe something to help you get a handle on your anxiety, particularly during this transition between living with your family and living on your own. Don't skip this part, I don't care if you have to chip into your savings a little bit to do it. Once you move out, you can reassess your financial picture and make a long-term plan, but right now you need some emergency help to get you out of the state you're in.

Do you have to get a new job, or could you move to a place in town and keep your job and keep going to school, so you could get your BA? Are you sure you can't get a job doing what you love in a different town? Keep working on your plan until it feels less scary and more full of promise and happiness. Make sure you honor who you are and what you enjoy (i.e. working with young people). Because you feel unworthy, you'll be tempted to deny yourself the things you want the most, so watch out for that impulse.

Try to minimize your interaction with your parents. Tell them you're moving out soon. Be polite and don't tangle with them or get into arguments. Make the exit strategy the center of your sustenance. Stop returning to the source of your pain, hoping that it will magically transform into something better. It won't.

Go get some books at the library about surviving an abusive home. When I tell you you're a good person, you probably think, "But you don't understand how messed up I am." Being messed up isn't a crime, and it isn't that rare, either. You don't have to be abused to be messed up. Anyone who didn't get the love they needed when they were younger and couldn't stop compulsively trying to get it as they grew older fits into the same messed up category. We are still good people, not damaged and unworthy. And once we exit abusive or neglectful settings, our entire concept of ourselves can shift dramatically.

You're on a new path now, and your life is going to be amazing. Get up off the railroad tracks and you'll realize that you're not about to die. You're just beginning to live. In a few years you'll look back and say, "25. That was a big year. That was the year I changed everything."

Polly

Dearest Polly,

I will try (and probably fail) to keep this short. I have issues with my job (boo hoo, who doesn't?). I hate to be the person that complains about their awful boss, but my boss truly is awful. He's said many times he isn't good at being a manager, and boy is he right! It's gotten to the point now that I'm pretty sure he simply hates me and is purposefully trying to make me miserable so I'll quit. If I were under different circumstances, I would, but as it stands now, I'm working abroad and will be transferred back to my home country in a couple of months. Suck it up you say? I've been sucking it up for almost two years. I was 100% ready to leave but didn't because I met someone wonderful and amazing and worth putting up with a rotten boss for. I have no regret or resentment for staying as long as I have, but I'm sick of the emotional roller coaster I've been on.

Some weeks I feel great and confident about my job, then something will happen, my boss will undercut me, and I'll feel stupid and useless again. When I try my best, he will come in and change everything that I've done because his way is right, and only he knows what he's doing. Though he tries to tell other people in the company we work independently, it's flagrantly untrue since we need to review everything with him (a few people do see this, and aren't happy about it, since it makes him the bottleneck and he's already burdened with other work). Nothing I do is good enough. Recently, he's simply been ignoring my emails with questions and updates. I know he doesn't read anything I send him. But when a project that he cared deeply about was a bit delayed (not directly my fault, I was waiting on a reply from someone else that came late), he was furious. He made me feel so shitty and pretty much threatened to fire me for not updating him and making the project move along faster (I cannot *force* people to respond to my emails!).

He's said in the past that my colleagues and I are "stupid," will often belittle us by saying we are "nothings" and "losers," pretending these are cute terms of endearment. He's often racist but thinks he's funny (racist about other people in general, and directly at what he perceives my heritage to be). I'm supposed to just laugh this all off. On rare occasions, I'll receive a dollop of praise, or an acknowledgement that I have worked very hard. It feels nice, but usually it's tempered by "but you still have so many other things to improve." It's worth adding that out of the nine people hired for this position through the years (myself included), three have been fired for "not getting" what we do, one is about to be let go, and one just was hired, so she hasn't had the chance to prove herself yet.

So it's gone, up and down, ruining my self-confidence and making me feel like I will never understand what I'm supposed to be doing at my job. Which, I should mention, isn't anywhere near brain surgery. If you've ever watched Bill Hicks, he equates what I do to Satan's work.

Is it just me, you may ask. I have a coworker who is great, but has worked with my boss in the past, so they have a very different relationship. He doesn't understand my problems. I have another colleague who works with my boss less than I do, but is also plagued with self-doubt (and tends to be not very confident anyway). We commiserate sometimes, but I mostly feel alone and that I can't confide in anyone. There is one high-ranking person in the company I have considered approaching, but I am not sure what will happen by complaining. My boss isn't going to get fired, and I am afraid he'll know I'm the one who tattled. My boyfriend is tired of hearing me complain about it. I feel somewhat powerless to do anything because almost everyone else in the company thinks my boss is God and the work I do is trivial and mechanical (it's anything but). All they see is the final result, not the hours of late nights I've poured into it, nor the gallons of tears I've shed from feeling so stupid, and they don't feel the deep sick feeling in my stomach that I feel when I hear his voice.

So—what the fuck do I do here? I *know* the answer is to just deal with it for another few months, and quit once I am safely at home. I have a little bit of money saved up so I think I can afford to be jobless for a month or two. But these are going to be the longest two months of my life. I have battled severe chronic depression my whole life, and being at this job just makes me so fucking SAD. My work isn't helping anyone (except me, to live a comfortable lifestyle), so I wish I could just be more blase about this evil little man. But goodness, how he can make me feel like I'm worse than the shit on the bottom of his shoe!

Can I change myself? My behavior? What can I do to make it through these months (and do you think it's possible for me to actually stay at this job without jumping out of the window?)

Thanks Polly.

Too Sad for a Clever Name

Dear TSFACN,

Your boss is a serious dick. That's obvious. It doesn't really matter if other people can see it or not. The only relevant point is that he treats you like shit. For whatever reason, he's the flavor of fuckwad that really savors abusing and ignoring and dismissing and berating someone like you. Did you read the first letter? His dickishness has nothing to do with you. This guy basically wants you gone, even though you do a great job. You make him uncomfortable. He's not going to make you feel good about your work. He wants you to feel ashamed, because he's ashamed of himself. You are a reminder of just how twisted up he is inside, that's all. It's not your fault.

That said, he's also become a symbol for you, of rejection, of withdrawn love, of parental dismissiveness, of abuse, of evil in the world. I don't know how he figures into your emotional past and your psyche, but you keep going back to this sore place and wanting to change it, heal it, make yourself stronger, make him see what a dick he is. This problem has ballooned out of proportion for you, because it signifies work that you still have to do on yourself. That doesn't mean it's all your fault; it's not your fault. But right now, you're using this abuse as a way to work through something from your past. You're returning, somewhat compulsively, to the scene of the crime. Instead of keeping your head down and doing what you do and laughing off this bastard's weak tricks, you're in turmoil over him.

So, while he is a terrible fucking boss and probably a shitty person to boot, the compulsive side of this needs to be explored. You are pouring all of your energy into this problem. That means that your next boss might be pretty ok, but you might still get touchy and weird and needy about how he or she treats you. In order to avoid that, you should explore, in detail, what damage and issues are being kicked up by this guy. The more you can look at those things, and be honest with yourself about behavioral patterns that might not function that well in the workplace, the better off you'll be.

As an example: These emails he doesn't read. You should probably stop sending him detailed emails, huh? Instead of wasting your energy? I was in the habit of sending long emails to a boss of mine at a former job, because I didn't know how to say what I needed to say while taking into account how busy he was. But then I'd feel annoyed when he didn't read my emails closely. I was being naïve, and he was trying to point that out by ignoring me ("ignore" is the "fuck off" of the modern workplace). Let's face it: Offices are not normal. We are expected to speak in clichés and small talk and jargon, to be enthusiastic and never ambivalent, to go with the flow and question nothing. That said, though, let's be practical about this: Until you're making detached, cool judgments about the most appropriate and efficient ways to behave at work, you're going to feel angry and defensive and hurt by things that are as simple and superficial as communication style.

You can learn more about this at your next job, because you won't have a complete dick for a boss, so you'll be far less confused about what's happening around you. That's the problem with dicks: They're confusing. They make us question ourselves for things that aren't our faults, and they make us refuse to take responsibility for things that are our faults.

I would ride it out for two months and then quit. Power down emotionally at work, but look closely at what this guy symbolizes for you. Enlist a therapist or a very close friend to discuss it. Tell your boyfriend you want to talk about the problem constructively, not just complain, but you need him to be patient and help you with that. Look for work before you leave the job. Investigate getting transferred to a different boss or department, ideally without laying any blame. Yes, you could complain to a higher up, but that's risky and could backfire. You need an exit strategy, though, so you feel less panicked when two months is up.

These two months will pass by quickly, once you have a plan. And when you're finally free, promise yourself that you won't settle for a shitty situation again. Life is too short to spend any time around repugnant, disrespectful losers. Plenty of people simply refuse to work for assholes. Become one of them.

Polly

Is your boss ALSO an asshole? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.
Clown photo by Amy van der Hiel. Scary baby photo "dawnzy58."

Hi Polly,

I have been married to my husband for two and a half years. He is a good guy, always doing favors for his family, trusts people implicitly, works hard at his job, loves me and our young kids (2 years and 3 months). Most of the time I enjoy his company, mainly because he has a good sense of humor and is very laid-back. Also, he's one of the few people who can take my shit and not mind.

But (you knew this was coming), we are so different when it comes to a lot of important things. I have goals—I want to go to school to become an anthropologist. I want to start working out. I want to start saving money so we can move out of my parents' extra room and get our own place again.

However, he seems to share none of these goals. I mean, he says he does, but I have a strong feeling that he only says that because I nag him so much. This belief is supported by the fact that he only makes steps (and tiny ones, at that) after I've bugged him about it for days. And after making a tiny bit of progress, he slumps back onto the couch, and I have to bitch at him for days again until he does something else.

Oh, and did I mention he doesn't have his license or G.E.D., and he's 30? WTF, right? Yes, I knew this going into the marriage, but I honestly thought he'd make an effort to attain them. He hasn't. Not on his own, anyway. He works at a fast food restaurant and has the whole time I've known him. He seems so content with his level of mediocrity, and I'm so not. This is a huge factor in what I consider incompatibility.

In addition, we differ in many aspects of our personality. As I said before, I am trying to be healthier; he's completely okay with being overweight. I don't want to sound arrogant but I am much more intelligent than he is and it makes having a decent conversation difficult. I find his scatterbrained approach to everything very frustrating, causing me to lash out at him often, which in turn often leads to arguments.

He is also extremely irresponsible with money. I have created countless plans for our money, which always get tossed aside the second he has a craving for a cheeseburger. I try to remind him of the plan we made but if he doesn't get his way he gets all sulky, and I hate when he acts childish so to avoid that I usually just give in. As a result we are constantly broke.

And, as I mentioned before, he is an alcoholic.

Granted, he's been sober for about a month now, but he's gone longer than that before without a drink and then gone and fucked it all up. He's let me down and lied about drinking so many times that my trust (which I had issues with to begin with) is completely gone. He agrees that he's an alcoholic, but I can't be sure whether he means it or he just agrees with me to shut me up. He went to twelve-step meetings for a few weeks in the beginning of this year at my insistence, but after about five meetings he began coming up with excuses—he felt sick, he was worn out from work, etc., and eventually he stopped going. He said he felt he didn't need them anymore. But about two months ago he drank again. He hasn't since, but after so many relapses (and there have been many—forty, at least, since I've been with him) I find it impossible to believe him. Of course I hope he's done for good, but I can't bring myself to get invested in that hope.

So there's all of that, plus the fact that I very frequently find myself daydreaming about being on my own. Not with other guys, really, just on my own with my kids and my own life, free of this dumb, idle alcoholic I call my husband.

But as I said, we have two young kids. I'd hate to rip their lives apart. Our finances are entangled, so that would be a bitch to figure out. I don't want to disappoint my parents (who paid for our expensive wedding when I was 19) by getting a divorce this young. Also, at the moment I'm a stay-at-home mom, so if I left him I'd have no immediate source of income.

That's a lot on the line, so that's why I'm coming to you for advice. I am only 22 and I don't want to be stuck in this idle place for my whole life, and it really seems that he can't (or won't) change (not for lack of trying on my part!). But at the same time, he's a good guy at heart, who (when I'm not frustrated with his level of intelligence or bitching at him to get his damn license already) I enjoy spending my free time with and loves me and our kids.

What the fuck do I do?

Sincerely,

Stuck Between a Husband and a Life

Dear SBAHAAL,

First you need to tell your husband that you'll kick him out if he drinks again. You will not spend the rest of your life with an alcoholic, because that is the path to misery, and you won't do that to yourself. But you must be prepared to back up your words. Every time you give in, you seal your own fate.

Then you need to go to Al-Anon, look into affordable day care, find a job so you can help support your family and save some money, find a used double-jogging stroller online and push those kids around the neighborhood for an hour a day, insist on cooking healthy meals and lead by example on that front, look into a local marriage and family therapist or social worker that offers very cheap sessions for you and your husband, and write down your accomplishments in a journal every night.

In other words, first you need to make it very clear that you won't be with a drunk. Then you need to get off your ass and change your life, and you need to stop blaming him for everything that you yourself refuse to do. I'm sure there are lots of reasons why you landed here, as a nagging, helpless woman who doesn't take charge of her own life. Your parents paid for an expensive wedding when you were 19, so it's not hard to see how you landed here. I understand that it feels like it's been a long, lonely road. But you're the only person who's going to change this picture dramatically. It's up to you. Right now you're just sitting in one place—in your parents' house, no less!—and complaining about what your husband isn't doing right. You're making things worse for him, not better, by giving in about money, giving in about drinking and taking him back, giving in about everything, and then screaming at him about all of it. That's exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect from the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic. If you'd gotten off your ass and gone to a single Al-Anon meeting, you'd already know that.

I know you're in a tough spot. But you can't expect him to change a thing if you're sitting back and doing nothing yourself, whining about money but not making any, and waiting for him to get his act together yet never quite insisting on it. Yes, I know you have your hands full with the kids. It's impossibly difficult, having a toddler and a baby. Under your current situation, though, you have to suck it up, find some daycare, and get a job. It'll make you feel better, and the time that you spend with your kids and your husband will improve dramatically. Right now you're idle and depressed and powerless, and you have to change that in order to be happier.

Instead of yelling at your husband and blaming him for everything that's wrong with your life, write down the things you expect from yourself and from him over the next year. Tell him you both need to stop acting like pathetic babies. Tell him you can't see the relationship working if you both don't grow up. For you, that means taking on some of the financial burden of the family you created, pursuing your dreams either by going back to school part-time or by trying to find work in a field that excites you, living healthily, working out, and trying to be a better friend and partner to your husband, particularly when he's sober. For him, that means staying sober, learning to drive, and trying to advance himself for the greater good of the family.

You can't accurately judge your relationship until you're going after your own dreams without making excuses for yourself. Right now, deep down inside, you hate yourself. You can't figure out if your husband is bad or good if you truly believe that you are bad. You aren't seeing anything clearly. Good, loyal, kind, lovable guys are not a dime a dozen, and having a great friendship with your husband, despite all your issues, is also pretty rare. If you get your shit together, you might just inspire your husband to turn his own life around. Or, you might see more clearly that he will never, ever change one iota. Either way, though, you have to get your shit together. You have to become a superhero, and cover all your bases. You have to reward your husband for saving money instead of nagging him for not saving. You have to be kind to him during this important sober first year, you have to believe in him, but you also have to make it crystal clear that you won't stay with a drunk, no matter what. Explain that this isn't about words; there won't be any discussion. He will be out, that's all. Again: Therapy, Al-Anon, exercise, day care, job, school, dreams. You need to go from doing nothing to doing everything if you're going to crawl out of this hole.

It's a lot. But you know what? That's the way life is when you're an adult. You juggle, you grit your teeth, you work your ass off, and you take a minute, every now and then, to look at how far you've come. Don't you want to feel proud of yourself, for once in your life? Nothing is better for your kids, your husband, and you, than you feeling proud of yourself for once. That alone could change everything.

Polly

Hi Polly,

I have been dating a man for a little over 6 months and things have been wonderful from day one. We have a ton in common, love being around each other and have great chemistry. He has a tremendous moral core, is the funniest person I know and loves me (and shows it) more than anyone I have ever been with. I love him tremendously and the possibility that this could move toward marriage is strong, although its still too early to say. (BTW, I'm in my mid-20s and he's in his early 30s.)

And now the problem. He was sexually abused as child from the age of 4 up until around 8. He has problems having sex on a semi-regular but occasional basis due to pretty severe flashbacks and almost never sleeps well because of nightmares. When they're really bad he can be in a pretty dark mood for a couple days, I believe suffering from bouts of depression, inadequacy and shame. He also has a very hard time talking about what he experienced (or is experiencing when having a flashback) but has made huge efforts to do so when I ask and despite clearly wanting to shut down. However I have never asked specifics about the abuse. Not only because it would be terrible for him to talk about but also because the details seem irrelevant.

All that being said, he is one of the highest functioning people I know. He takes good care of himself, great care of the people he loves, plans for the future, has a good career and is a very social and well-rounded person, with a strong support system of friends and family (who have no idea what he went through). He has no violent or abusive traits and, from what he has told me, conquered the worst of the depression (bordering on feelings of suicide) that he felt in his teens.

When we first met he said he would go into therapy because he did not want his issues to prevent us from being together, aka prevent us from having sex. However, after a 4-6 weeks of taking things slow and building up trust we got over the hump. I suggested different methods of therapy after doing some of my own research and found therapists in the area that might be a good fit. At a certain point I expressed to him that for us to get very serious (move in together or get married) he would need to go to therapy and begin addressing the abuse and then left it at that. I don't expect this to be something he will leap into immediately but he has also told me that he doesn't think therapy would help. I think my request made him feel like he's being punished given how far he has come all on his own, by pushing through all the shitty and horrible feelings.

My question is this: Is asking him to go to therapy when he functions so well in the world an exaggeration or asking too much? Is this a reasonable request if there don't seem to be any outstanding issues that effect the core of the relationship outside of very occasional bad moods or inability to have sex? Or am I simply expressing a reasonable degree of concern over an issue that could take on more negative proportions as he gets older, loses some of the strong emotions of early love, has children, etc.? I am perfectly happy to let things unfold as they will for the time being but I do want to know what reasonable expectations are under these circumstances (with a timeline if you're into that kind of thing).

All this being said, I also have my own problems of expecting the worst and am semi-obsessed with trying to avoid making bad choices, especially when it comes to men. Maybe I'm trying to control the uncontrollable, like another human being's future behavior, or trying avoid the unavoidable: the inevitable downsides and pitfalls of any relationship.

Lots of Love and Some Concern

Dear LOLASC,

I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to ask him to go to therapy. He said he'd go when he first met you, and you're haunted by what the ramifications of this abuse could be, even if he isn't. You can't really commit to someone who's committed to not knowing himself, that's all. It's absolutely understandable that he'd be afraid—deathly afraid—of relaying his abuse to anyone. But you love him, and you need to trust him as much as he needs to trust you. There's a giant, frightening thing in his past that he can only hope doesn't come up later, either in emotional problems or health problems. You don't want to have a pretty okay sex life, you want to have a great sex life. You don't want him to sleep well occasionally, you want him to sleep well consistently.

It's not wrong to want those things. You should talk to him about it, and lay out all of your reasons for wanting this to happen. You two are really great together, and he's done an amazing job without therapy up until now. You want to aim even higher. I don't think that's controlling. I think that's you daring to be happy.

Maybe this will take time, and he'll resist. Maybe you'll need to talk to a few experts on abuse and get their input on how to proceed. Obviously, you should be kind and patient about the whole thing, and you should hear him out and be respectful of how scary this prospect is to him. It might feel like asking him to face down death. So you have to be cautious.

Still, this is a reasonable request. Maybe he'll resist for a while, but you have to make your desires very clear. Paint a clear picture of what you think you'll both gain, and offer to go into couples' therapy with him as well. It's not wrong to make your position clear, and to push for something that most victims of abuse credit with their ability to live normal, happy lives.

Polly

Do you have a problem with eating too many caramels in a row? Are you still feeling haunted by the Red Wedding? Then for fuck's sake, write to Polly right now!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.Drunk bunny photo by Stuart Conner; scary nightmare photo by Meighan O'Toole.

Dear Polly,

What do you do when a Facebook friend who you vaguely know dies suddenly? What's the most sanity-inducing route of dealing with the fact that you have weird online links to their internet presence? A childhood friend passed away this week at the age of 32. It was a surprise. I had not talked to her in about five years, after a fairly disastrous night at a bar that ended with her drinking too much and haranguing me for an hour. But we were childhood friends, and played sports together, and I played at her house, and I enjoyed talking to her when I knew her from ages 8 – 18, so hearing about her death inspires feelings, but I'm not particularly sure how to classify them. Is there new etiquette around death these days, considering the variety of spheres in which we have avatars? Is it rude to defriend her on Facebook, even though I've looked at her page probably about ten times in the past few days, and it's her life, frozen, forever? How do you grieve today?

I'm just thrown by this information. If you had anything to say about processing grief, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you!

FB Stands For Feeling Bad

Dear FB,

Without a doubt, we are embarking on a strange new way of dealing with sickness, death and grieving. An old friend dies and you find out way too late, then end up reading backwards on Facebook, tracing the horrible path from early sickness to fundraising blogs to hopes of experimental treatments to a sudden death announcement by a spouse or friend. Or you do that with a friend of a friend, because you're morbid and you can't stop yourself. Thanks to the way the internet functions in our lives, sometimes it's tough to separate mourning from rubbernecking, supporting from procrastinating, mourning a loss from obsessing about our own eventual death.

I can understand why your old friend's death feels so disconcerting to you. You've been friends for years, lately you've been out of touch, and now she's gone. Maybe you need to track down a mutual friend and talk about it. But sometimes that's not possible, or it feels inappropriate, so you have to find a way to mourn on your own.

But processing these things on your own can also be seriously disconcerting. Two years ago, a close friend of mine was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. He and his wife (also a close friend) set up a Facebook page and shared regular updates on how his treatment was progressing. These two had an enormous group of friends, and posts to the page by that wide circle ranged from moving to hilarious to sweetly supportive to tone-deaf. There were a lot of thoughtful, smart people in the mix and they often made me cry. But there was so much updating and commenting that it often felt overwhelming. Even though I was in close touch with my friend's wife, she mostly disseminated info on the page because it was too exhausting to do otherwise, so I started to worry that I'd miss some crucial bit of news if I didn't check the page first thing in the morning and right before bed.

Having cancer is hell. People with cancer should do whatever they want to do, from broadcasting to a wide group to telling the world to fuck right off and then disappearing into a cave. Our job, as friends, is to show up, bring food, make calls, respect boundaries, send emails, listen, help, repeat. We have to deal with our own shit on our own time so that we can be dependable, helpful, ego-less friends when we're needed.

But that doesn't mean that we're well equipped to deal with the extreme sadness of death in private, staring into the lonely glow of a computer screen. Reading, late at night, that your friend's liver levels are fucked but that the doctor says that "there's still plenty of time and lots of options left," is the very definition of news you can't fucking use. Or rather, it's news you can use—to keep you up all night, tossing and turning. And when you get up in the morning and start looking for information online and freaking out about his prognosis, and your mind is awash with too much information, but you did it to yourself? That's a brand new kind of stupid, isn't it? You are on a terrible private journey, and even though you know you should put down the computer and get some fresh air and try to put things in perspective, you keep compulsively looking for more information, as if that will set your mind at ease.

When I invited my friend's wife to lunch, we would just say, "This fucking sucks" and look at each other and cry. I didn't need to lose an afternoon reading up about HAI pumps. I didn't need to sift through 45 comments by various friends, sometimes feeling connected, sometimes wishing I could block this one friend so I didn't have to read his oddly grandiose statements of support. But there were also incredible old videos of my friend, great photos of him, and lots of disturbingly morbid jokes (his favorite aspect of the page by far, when he was still around).

My friend died. We took care of him. There was a memorial. Those events were traumatic and complicated in different ways. Two years later, though, his page remains as a place that people—his friends, his widow, his mom—can honor and remember him. We will spend many years missing him and wanting him back. His page allows us to express that, or to read a note from someone else who feels the same way.

That said, I have mixed feelings about all of this online emoting, honestly. Or maybe most of us have mixed feelings about dealing with death online because we have mixed feelings about death, period. There are endless layers there, and endless ways to paint the world black with your pain. The only thing I can tell you is to make a distinction between thinking and feeling. If you need to work through your emotions about your friend, then do that. Find a way to crawl into that space where you remember her and appreciate her and celebrate her place in your life, and also mourn her loss.

But don't obsess just because you're doing this alone. Sort through your feelings, then get up and go outside and take a deep breath and appreciate how very fucking alive you are. We're all running out of time. Knowing that is a gift, not a curse. Getting a glimpse of death might send you down a rabbit hole of mutual Facebook friends and Wikipedia entries on Long QT Syndrome or heroin overdoses or autoimmune disorders, but at some point, you have to turn away from the darkness and say to yourself: Life goes on. And also: I think I'm in the mood for a chocolate malt, motherfucker.

Polly

Dear Polly,

My family is ultra conservative. I am pretty liberal. Instead of being rejected by my family, though, something else has happened: they have 100% accepted me, but they do not accept anyone else in the world who holds my beliefs. For instance, I moved in with my boyfriend without being married (oh the horror), and they accepted it. But if they hear of anyone else living with their partner unmarried, those folks are full of sin and immoral and terrible people. When I ask "Am I full of sin and immoral and terrible, too, then?" they say no, of course not, I'm different. I'm certainly not different—I'm having the same unmarried sex everyone else is having! The only way I can understand this whole thing is that this is their weird coping mechanism to deal with my lifestyle and also keep me a part of the family.

My question is what to do about it, if anything. Their beliefs drive me crazy, and if they had rejected me as a whole in the beginning, I would have walked away completely. My friends say that I should just be grateful they haven't totally rejected me and therefore should keep the peace (i.e., keep my mouth shut). A part of me, though, says I should take a stand for those other folks out there that my family is judging, and rub it in their faces as much as possible. ("Oh yeah? You don't like how the morning after pill is now sold over the counter? Well I have one in my medicine cabinet to use JUST IN CASE! What do you think about that?!") Another part of me says that this is all politics and politics should remain outside the family. What do you think?

Bipartisanal

Dear Bipartisanal,

As someone who spent a decade or so digging into my mildly dysfunctional past (I even wrote a book about it), I would strongly advise you to accept your family for who they are.

I'm not saying I regret my path. But I haven't always been that sensitive when I was challenging others to change their ways. I would lay out what I wouldn't accept any longer in what I fancied was a courageous and bold manner, but I didn't always listen so well. I basically chose not to accept and respect other people's limits and boundaries, without realizing that's what I was doing. I was reckless, and I'm lucky that my relationships survived that.

When you're young, you think that you should simply stand up for what you believe is right, and those closest to you can either align themselves with your beliefs or fuck right off. But families of origin rarely work that way. In order to have strong, fulfilling family relationships, you have to shut the fuck up a lot. You can't always say exactly what you believe. For the longest time, my mom couldn't trust that I wasn't going to get flinty or criticize her or launch into a self-righteous diatribe or hint vaguely that she'd let me down as a kid. Of course I underestimated how hurtful I was being; I thought that anything that served the truth was justified. I thought I was helping my mom by dragging her into openly contentious conversations.

I didn't get why she always seemed so mad at me. It made me feel terrible, and angry, and lonely.

Pretty babyish, huh? It took me a long time to see that I would be a lot happier if I just accepted the people in my family for who they were. With spouses and friends, maybe you push gently for change here and there. But with family, you have to be careful. Your family brings more to your life than you realize right now, and you need to try to respect their boundaries and keep the peace. They're not antagonizing you (and maybe that takes some effort on their part), so maybe you should try to return the favor. Your life can be filled with people who back up your beliefs and make perfect sense to you; there will just be this one pocket of people whose crazy beliefs you're forced to tolerate. If they were torturing small animals or spreading hatred that would be one thing. Instead, they're just petrified of the idea that people out there might be fucking without a marriage license. I know, I know. It's bigger than that. But if you cut them out of your life, I think it's going to cause you a lot of pain for a long time. Why do that?

I get that this choice feels unethical to you. And look, when random people mention that they're against gay marriage, or that they think poor people are just lazy motherfuckers looking for handouts, I can't keep my mouth shut. I turn into a giant asshole on the spot. I tell people that they're going to go down in history as bigots. People love it when I say that!

You can wage those wars with acquaintances, knock on doors, preach, change minds. Don't take that battle home, though. Changing your family's mind about politics rarely works. If you want to nudge them, respectfully, maybe you'll see some changes over time. But I wouldn't be aggressive or walk away from them entirely. You'll only hurt yourself.

As Wallace Stegner wrote in "Angle of Repose," "Wisdom is knowing what you have to accept." Let your family's comments fuel your dedication to your causes. But don't let them prevent you from seeing clearly that these people really do love you. They love you enough to set aside their differences. It makes sense for you to do the same for them.

Polly

Are you anxious to break up with your closest friend? Do you have a pet squirrel living in your home with you? If so, write to Polly immediately!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Top photo by Loren Sztajer; bottom photo by Dion Hinchcliffe.

The post Ask Polly: How Do You Handle The Death of a Facebook Friend? appeared first on The Awl.

Dear Polly,

I feel like such a cliche: I can't get over my ex.

We'd been dating for 2.5 years when I was awarded a full scholarship in a city across the country, to a school I'd literally DREAMED of attending since high school, to pursue a lifelong artistic dream. His entire life—extended family, small business, and industry was in this city, coming with me wasn't really an option. He hated that I had to leave, but offered his full support: he would stay in our house so I always had a place to come home to, and while I was getting my masters, he'd build a nest—focusing on his small business with the aim of buying a home for us, and I would return after school to start a family. That was the plan.

The first semester we missed each other like crazy. He was able to visit about twice a month, and I came home as often as possible, which amounted to about 8 weeks from September to January. In many ways, it strengthened our relationship because we realized how much of a team we'd become, and we talked more on the phone, about our dreams, goals, values, etc. We spoke earnestly about getting married.

I was home for winter break and it was pure bliss. We never left each other's side, and went engagement ring shopping. We went on vacations. Leaving was painful, but I felt like our relationship was stronger than ever.

And then… everything changed. He started travelling, a TON. He was neglecting his business and running around the world. He'd always loved travel, but this seemed excessive—literally 6 countries in 3 months. I became a stopover for him on his way to and from his vacations, and when I got him he was usually tired from ten-hour plane rides and jet-lagged. He complained that I couldn't come home as much, even though I was up to my eyeballs in grad work. When I told him that so much travelling didn't feel right, like he was pulling away from me, he responded that he was getting his yayas out before he was settled with me in a couple of years. On one of these trips, he travelled with a friend and friend's younger (by just a couple of years) sister. I thought is was odd, but trusted him—he continued to write love letters, we continued to talk everyday, sometimes 3 times a day, and, well, I was in love with the man.

You know what's coming.

The week I was preparing to come home from my first year of school, I was trying to sublet my place, finish finals and papers, and get home to him. He wasn't available as much, even telling me that I would have to find a ride from the airport. After I FLIPPED OUT about this he agreed to pick me up, but we fought the whole way home. We were split up within the week. I felt completely blindsided, as did everyone around us. His mother said that she was sure he was planning to propose, and his friends and siblings called me with their own surprised consolations. He told me that I had abandoned him, I had moved away from him, and that he couldn't bear to be alone for so long. He basically blamed the entire demise of the relationship on me, saying that he tried his best but it was all just too hard. Even though I'd come home for the summer—4 months—he was already over it.

Long(er) story short, I found out that he was dating friend's little sister—the one who travelled with him a few weeks prior. She's also worked for him at his small business, and while she and I weren't close, I counted her among friends. I was DEVASTATED. I felt so betrayed, so dumb, and in a fell swoop, I lost my house, my home (he'd originally moved into my place, and he still lives there—he refused to move!!) my future, my friends (our families and friends were so meshed, he still hangs with half of them regularly) and my ability to trust other people, and myself. I feel like he got everything, I lost everything, and I don't know what I did to deserve this.

A year, lots of therapy, and an advanced degree later, I still don't know HOW THIS HAPPENED. I'm not okay. I miss him, or who I thought he was anyway, but I'm also still so, so angry. At him. At them. We don't speak—whatever limited contact has been cold. He is clearly better than fine without me. I feel old, undeserving of love, and an enormous amount of guilt—if only I'd stayed, hadn't pursued my dream (which seems so silly now), if only I'd valued what I had instead of chasing a life that wasn't mine, been more this, less that… I know, cognitively, that this isn't true, but my heart/feelings have yet to get the memo. I now live in a city I didn't intend to live in, far from my support system (my friends in previous city),with a fancy degree, jobless and broke. My family is completely fucked (story for another day) so they are not a supportive option. I miss my old home, my lifestyle, my close knit crew of friends. Moving back is not an option—it's a tertiary city and job opportunities are quite limited for my field; I'd been banging my head against a glass ceiling as it was before I'd left, and was pretty much coming back to start a family with him.

I'm in my early 30s, and it seems like EVERYBODY is blissfully engaged/married/starting a family, or the VP of their company, etc. I'm starting completely over, fighting for entry level jobs, with no relationship in sight. I go out, I have fun, I flirt, I date—from outside appearances everything is awesome. I'm in therapy, meditating, and working towards a healthy mind. But inside I'm miserable. I don't know how to shake this past hurt, how to let go of the guilt, the anger, the betrayal, and even begin to hope for a family, a home, a thriving career. All of those things seem so far away. I want to stop being the victim of all the things he did to me, I want to trust myself again to make good decisions, and I desperately want to trust that everything is going to (ever) be okay. I want to MOVE ON. If I'm doing everything right, but nothing's working, what do I do?

Thanks,

Fetal Position On The Kitchen Floor

Dear FPOTKF,

You are not in control of what happened, and you never were. You didn't make it happen. Your boyfriend freaked out. He was going to do that before or after he married you, and he chose to do it before. That part is good. Think of Don Draper: He wants a wifey who has no life. You aren't that person. I know that your boyfriend was probably pretty nice in a lot of ways, but ultimately, he was going to have a problem with you pursuing your dreams. Whether your dreams seem arbitrary and fucked at the moment or not, that guy's shitty attitude about you becoming your own fucking person wasn't going to work for you over the long haul.

And let me just add: I don't like that guy. He was a fucking dick. I mean, "Find a ride home from the airport" instead of "I'm dating someone else"? Screw him. Only a tool does stuff like that. Believe it, sister.

You know, I had a boyfriend who was super-dreamy once. I was very young and he was very handsome and funny. But he didn't really love listening to me speak as much as he loved listening to himself speak. He talked about boring shallow shit, too. Most of his dreams amounted to some extension of his ego: he was going to own a bar with red leather booths. He was going to cook something that I found amazing. He was going to have tons of fucking money someday. Not hideously bad, but really not my style. Plus? I like talking, a lot. I should've known a long, long time ago that I needed someone who found my talk talky talk talk delightful.

And look, men like that are out there! Some men love the talkers. Yes! Some men love women who are very smart, who have lots of fucking ideas spilling out of their crazy heads at all times. I know you don't believe me, but it's true.

Do you know how deeply wrong it is to put your light under a bushel? Or a basket, like Ping the duck? That's why it's a goddamn cliché in the first place. I live a good life these days. Why? Because I never, ever censor my obnoxious personality. I don't have to! I have a husband who likes my messy, preposterous self, and I have two kids who like me (for now), too. And I own a closet full of dog treats, and that makes me popular with my dogs.

You dodged a bullet, plain and simple. You'd better stop repeating this bullshit about what a dreamy angel this dick was, and start telling yourself the truth, that he was about to fuck your life over in a giant way. That guy is going to get married and then get divorced in short order. He's not an honest one. He's shopping for perfection. (I could be wrong, but that's what my gut says.)

And even if he's Prince Charming, he's not your guy. He could see that. So you couldn't see it. Time to stop taking it personally and move the fuck on. This stuff happens to most people 4 or 5 times in their 20s and 30s. You're only struggling with this because it probably hasn't happened to you before. Welcome to the human race, princess.

You need to blast your air horn a little louder, if you ask me. This thing about "healthy on the outside, hurting on the inside" makes me suspicious. In addition to your therapist, you might need to find a kind of new-age huggable woman healer, too, someone who's going to give you a little bit of common sense advice that you need to hear, plus she's going to be a soothing presence who talks you through your bummer moments and conjures the positivity of the universe and lays hands on your or something along those lines. I know that sounds stupid, but there are those times in life when you need an optimistic person with wooden jewelry around her neck to get metaphysical and talk nonsense and be the weirdo mommy you never had. Therapy can be very clinical. New age healer types sometimes loosen up the stodgy, overly intellectual part of you that keeps thinking and thinking and thinking in circles. You need to just sit and feel ok with the world, like Ferdinand the bull.

You have to own who you are, in a big way. That’s the part you're not doing yet. You need to back up the tape to where you gave up on your dreams, and you need to believe in your fucking dreams again. This dickhead didn't compromise your entire life by not letting you have babies. You're going to have all the stupid pants-shitters you can stand. But you have to believe in who you are and what you want in order to get there.

Can you trust me on that? You have to give yourself what you need first. You need to believe in yourself in a vacuum of Prince Charmings. That's step one. Step two is, beat them off with a fucking stick.

Believe it.

Polly

Hey Polly,

I'm in a bit of a situation. My girlfriend's little sister has been living abroad, and is coming home newly pregnant (will be about 10 weeks along by the time she makes it home.) Her sister is 23, which is not old, but is not young either, she is still considering her options but pretty sure she wants to have/raise the baby. She is in a relationship with the guy who got her pregnant, but he also has several other children that his mom is raising. He is not a long-term life partner prospect for her, as far as she or anyone is concerned.

However, she is pretty likely going to have a baby, and it will be a biracial baby, which is a thing her parents are going to Act Weird about, (as socially conservative white folks) which is particularly important because she will be living with her parents at least in the short term (probably). So I am in a (gay) relationship with her older sister (for three+ years) and her sister/my girlfriend is generally being sweet/supportive/trying to gently encourage her sister she should probably have an abortion. My girlfriend has been holding it together through the day and coming home and crying all night until she goes to bed at about 12:30 to 1 a.m. every night. Mostly I hug her a lot and try to tell her that it will be okay, but mostly she is not ready to hear that it will be okay.

My girlfriend and I generally have a pretty solid relationship—communicate well and often, are generally respectful and loving and fun together. But all the crying is wearing on me, and she says that she's "grieving," which I think means she's grieving the life she thought her sister would have. I also know she has this strong sense of shame and judgment from her parents, which I get is a thing that is real, but also; they are all adults now. I am trying to be supportive, but am starting to avoid her/spend time outside of the house because a) all of the crying is wearing on me, and I am better equipped to be supportive when I am not around it all the time and b) I am starting to get irritated, because ultimately, it's her sister's decision, and my girlfriend can choose what level of support she offers, but I ultimately feel like she needs to deal with the fact that she may well be an auntie in 6 months, and her sister will need both of us as allies in what will be a challenging task. It will definitely change her life but it will not wreck it forever. I don't know. Maybe crying is her way of dealing with it? Maybe she is at the depression phase of stages of grief and will swing around to acceptance in a little while?

I don't know, Polly. Am I being unreasonable? I have friends who are being fairly supportive, but ultimately I go home to my crying girlfriend every night, and shoot, I wish it didn't have to be like that. I have had girlfriends in the past who have struggled with pretty severe depression, and I know that people's lives have ups and downs and sometimes life knocks you on your ass. I guess I just want to know that it will pass, because I can hang for now, and for awhile, but we are on week two of crying almost every moment that she's not at work, and if I try to make her laugh that usually makes her start crying again. I am not sure what my limits are but I am trying to figure that out before I hit them.

What do you think?

It Might Be Okay

Dear IMBO,

Before we talk about your girlfriend's crying problem, let's talk to all the sexually active ladies out there, shall we? Hey ladies! Hi. Listen, if you're having sex, consider what you might do if you got pregnant BEFORE you actually get pregnant, and share that information with your sexual partner. Don't wait until you're pregnant to decide. When you're pregnant, your body wants you to have a fucking baby. Making a rational decision under those conditions is almost impossible, and delaying that decision is pretty fucked up no matter how you slice it.

Because your girlfriend's sister is in no position to support or raise a kid without her disapproving parents' help, I think we can deduce that she's basically looking for a way to fuck shit up. What better way to fuck with your conservative, racist parents, than by adhering to their pro-life dictates and forcing them to help you raise your little biracial baby bomb?

This situation would depress me, too, because it does change everything. Suddenly your girlfriend has a little sister she sees as doomed, and she's also got parents whose issues are going to rise to the surface in ugly ways that maybe could've been mostly avoided under the previous circumstances. So suddenly she has to face that her family is wildly fucked up, and maybe she is, too. This might be the first time she's ever had to openly admit that her family is a depressing dysfunctional wreck.

That said, her crying would drive me insane. Still, I think you're going to be well served to support her for another few weeks and try to draw out exactly how she's picturing the future. Part of her trouble is that she has no control over a terrible situation. This bomb is going to go off and she doesn't have any way to stop it. I get it. When you talk to her, don't skip straight to the part where everyone is fine and it's all okay, because you're going to make her feel alienated and lonely, and that will only make her cry more. You have to try to go with her to the scary place and allow her to express the ugliness of it all. Sometimes that means you have to agree, and be quiet, and demonstrate that you can tolerate her tears.

But I'd also strongly encourage her to get a therapist, because if this situation is depressing her this much, there are dimensions to it that even she doesn't fully understand. Her family is a major source of anxiety and stress in her life, and she feels responsible for her sister. She needs to make sure she has healthy boundaries, now more than ever. Little sister might be looking for someone to save her and the baby. Who knows? Maybe part of your girlfriend's stress comes from some strange dynamic between her and her sister, where her sister makes a mess and she cleans it up. I don't know much about them, but I do know that it's crucial for your girlfriend to feel some clarity about what she can do to support, help, love her sister, and what she NEEDS to avoid doing in order to make sure that her sister understands that this is her baby, her problem, and her life, and no one can bail her out if she decides to have a baby on her own. If she decides to take that on, she has to be prepared to deal with all of the consequences of that decision.

Fuck. Why does it feel like so many kids these days have babies and expect their parents and extended families to raise them?

But look, don't avoid your girlfriend, as hard as that must be right now. You can take care of yourself, but you have to be honest and tell her that you're a human being and you have your limits. You want to be there for her (ask her how best to do that) but you also need to know that she's going to get some help.

Things WILL get better. Your girlfriend is anxious about what's going to happen next. That's a big part of this. Once her sister makes a decision and figures out what she's doing, your girlfriend might relax a little. It's not her life. Right now she's tortured because she thinks she can change the outcome. She can try—and if I were her, I'd get on the phone and have a really harsh talk about what life will be like, raising an unwanted baby under her crappy parents' roof. But once that's done, she needs to wash her hands of it and move on. Life is just too short to carry other people's shitty decisions around on our backs. She can be supportive, and helpful, but she doesn't have to bear this cross.

Polly

Do you have a weakness for doughnuts, or a funny job dilemma? FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WRITE TO POLLY AND SAVE HER FROM AN UNHOLY TIDE OF UNWANTED PREGNANCY LETTERS.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. House on fire photo by Scott Teresi. Poor baby photo by Paul Keller.

The post Ask Polly: My Boyfriend Dumped Me For Following My Dreams appeared first on The Awl.

Hi Polly,

I finally have been hired for my dream internship, in my field, and utilizing my educational background. In a large international megapolis. But….

After years of dating, I am writing to you for some guidance on how to approach dating abroad/in a totally new place. I recently broke up with the last of a slew of asshole, arrogant, mentally ill prick boyfriends. One of whom raped me, resulting in years of difficult, but productive therapy. I feel like I am in a good place and want to date someone who is professional, reasonable and you know—cool. Not a meanie.

I am just really worried about ways to meet dudes that are safe, healthy and not professionally compromising. Do you have any suggestions for ways to meet people that do not involve 1. Dating people at work or people who know your coworkers (because we all know how that affects careers and work environments), 2. Dating friends of relatives (last asshole was cousin's best friend), 3. Or alcohol/drunken mistake situations (rapist was bartender).

Or, should I just focus on becoming a superstar international lawyer and let romance be second to my career?

Your truly,

Moving, single and confused

Dear MSAC,

Do you mean you're looking for ways to meet dudes that are safe, healthy and not professionally compromising (i.e. don't meet them by doing acid and then bungee jumping, or by striking up conversations at the free STD clinic, or by skipping work to hang-glide drunk)? Or do you mean you're looking for ways to meet dudes who are safe, healthy and not professionally compromising (i.e. friendly, fit men in a different professional field)?

Let's assume the latter! So: You've dated a string of asshole-ish, arrogant, mentally ill pricks. Are you traditionally attracted to men with supernatural levels of confidence? Assholes, the arrogant, the mentally ill, pricks: they often have an irrational surplus of confidence in common.

Here's my tough question of the day, though: Can you tolerate regular men? Men who are stable and/or reasonably established in their lives or their careers, but who possibly appear, at the outset, slightly boring? Men who don't necessarily display their wit and charm under pressure? (The ability to do this is highly overrated in our society. Studies show that sneaky wit and charm in men tend to have better long-term payback for their partners, and it's less often accompanied by dickwaddery and dipshititude.)

First of all, though, let's just admit that the world is filled with semi-unattractive, overconfident men who believe themselves to be well nigh irresistible. Somehow the mere fact of their overconfidence attracts a herd of adoring females who are fifteen to twenty times better looking than they are—which only makes these guys even MORE overconfident. Don't start arguing with me about this, people. You know it's true.

So first of all, I feel strongly that we need to reverse this equation. Aggressive, swaggertastic but average-looking women (like me!) should always land the ultra-hot man-babes.

We deserve them, because we are smart and entertaining and seriously obnoxious, which turns into excitement and adventure over the long haul (in women, anyway). Instead, though, bland little Margarets and Marys in grosgrain headbands who can talk for 20 minutes straight about their favorite lasagna recipe land the really hot guys, because ladies like that seem more relaxing and sexually attractive. (What makes them so sexy? Is it those little sighs of resignation they make in bed that really turn men on?) Betty Draper, minus the cigarettes and the rifle, that's what these ladies are! They're Olivia Newton John—the one with cardigan sweater, not the one in the shiny black asspants! Is it fair or just that almost all of the hot men out there are awarded to these wilty little Strawberry Shortcakes? Fuck no, it is not.

Meanwhile, our semi-unattractive and self-congratulatory male peers are swimming in sexy ladies. They're very relaxed about the prospect of losing you, because they know there are fifty to sixty more just like you to choose from the second they give you the boot.

And anyway, you date one of these guys and it's all peachy at first, all adorable and romantic and special. But don't be deceived! You know that thing that Ferris Buehler does, when his dad is tucking him into his bed for the day because he's "sick"? That little growl, the coy way he blinks his big brown eyes and giggles? Kind of a Zach Braff maneuver? If you meet a guy who does that sort of thing with his parents, run the other way! You know the type. That guy is spectacularly good at charming the pants off everybody, but then he turns into a major dick overnight. He pulls you in with total focus, then wakes up one day and informs you that he's over your whole dumb girl thing, big time. (Yes, women do this, too, obviously. Right now we're not talking about them! Stop interrupting, you!)

You won't know it until it happens! But there will be clues. Maybe he'll slip up. He'll interrupt his talk about how "humbled" he is over this or that stupid thing, and instead he'll say something about his "fans"! He'll say, "I know that you, my fans, want me to be me, because I am precious and amazing just the way I am." And you'll be like, "What? Did you just call ME your 'fans'?" and you'll also be like, "Hold on. That's my line! I'm the one who matters in this picture, dummy!" Or maybe he'll roll his eyes at some woman with her back fat showing, and when you set him straight about that, he'll refuse to acknowledge that today's fashions are basically designed to display back fat at all costs, and unless you're doing Tae Bo during your lunch hour (instead of stuffing onion rings into your face, which is your birthright), you have to dress like fucking Archie Bunker to hide your (adorable, delicious, smallish) love handles.

My point is, it's time to ignore the arrogant pricks (whom you might have more in common with—if you're me, anyway) and start paying attention to the low-key, tentative but secretly hilarious and super sexy guys (who are way, way better than you—again, if you're me).

Also? Don't get drunk and then decide who to date. In fact, while you're dating around, don't get drunk at all. It's a liability. Keep your wits about you, keep your eyes peeled, open your heart, and get out into the world and see who's there. Where are the good, safe, healthy ones? I have no fucking idea where they are. All I know is, you can't see them if what you really want is to be glamoured by some cocksure bozo. Examine your priorities closely, and then set out into the world and do your motherfucking thing! (Without the tequila, though.)

Good luck!

Polly

Dear Polly,

Three months ago, I quit my job and moved four hours' drive away to live with my boyfriend, a relationship of about six months that felt especially special given that it had been the longest and deepest I'd had (other than my boyfriend from my study abroad, which, admittedly, was a five-year-er—though starting when I was 15).

Anyway, I knew it was quite a risk. We're both immensely independent and unashamedly introverted people, and a domestic partnership is not something I really imagined for myself. But I loved and trusted him, and felt in my gut that even if the relationship fell apart, we'd remain friends. We're both the type that "takes a long time to get to know/warm up to," but he's been nothing but giving. I wanted to take a few months while still young enough to move "for a boy" and see how it went.

You probably can where this is going.

But it's not a shitshow. I'm making progress in redefining my career, enjoying being a cat step-mom, learning to cook and living comfortably while getting along well with my best friend, as we always have.

We just don't have sex.

The quality of the sex went down steeply very shortly after I moved in, but, being naive and all "we'll figure it out as we go along," I figured this was part of domestic partnership—and the immense love I felt daily made me feel valued and warm. I struggled with feeling down about my job prospects for the first few weeks here with the kind of Eeyore fatalism of Those in Our Mid-Twenties, but my boyfriend, my partner, was supportive and kind. I thought perhaps a lack of bedroom antics may be because his view of me shifted, as my self-view did, into someone rather powerless and just around too often. It wasn't entirely pretty, but I learned to be patient. When I tried initiating sex, this is what he told me: No, but we will soon. Be patient.

Then I got a job, and then another, to make things work. And I felt more on track to being a healthy, attractive person again. Meanwhile, though, it's been a good six weeks since we've even attempted sex—this is included in the three months we've lived together, mind. Maybe that's normal, but I'm 24 and he's 30 and we've been dating less than a year. Does bed-death really happen that fast?

Two weeks ago, when I tried to talk about it in a reasonable way, he admitted that he didn't believe he'd ever want to have sex with me again. He said this had happened to him in relationships before, but that he figured I would have left by the time I "figured out" that his sex drive had dropped to zero. I handled it calmly for a day, and told him he could talk more about it when he was ready. When he refused to talk to me several days later, I broke up with him. A day after that, we got into a massive fight that ended with us hugging and crying and vowing to try to make it work. Eventually, I told him that I don't understand it—that he loves me but just doesn't have any sexual desire—but that I'd like him to see a doctor. I did not explicitly say it to him, but I think he's depressed.

So now I've decided to be patient, and we live as happy partners. Is me wanting sex too much to ask? I don't think so, but when I try to think deeply and rationally about the situation, I really do think he wants to put the breakup on pause while I look for my own place—that we're platonic roommates who kiss, and that he doesn't want to get his groove back.

That's what kills me. I'd stay with him if he just tried. He's encouraged me to date other people, which I have no problem with intellectually, but it's just not what I want, which is him. I love him for the person he is, and I'd build a life with him if it's what I felt he really wanted, and I knew was good for me. I'm hurt, offended, betrayed slightly, though—and devastated that he won't do something to figure out why he has no interest in sex.

Have I just not given it enough time? Am I allowed to really break ties with my best friend for refusing to fuck me?

Confused

Dear Confused,

Yes, I would break up with him. He sounds great, and I know this sucks, but this has nothing to do with you. He didn't say he'd work on it, or that he was wildly attracted to you but was depressed, or that this has never happened before. He said this has happened before, and that HE PROBABLY WON'T EVER WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU AGAIN.

I mean, hot damn! The fact that he can say that and not immediately put a therapist and a psychiatrist and a doctor on speed dial, the fact that he's saying "Oh well, no sex drive yet again, but no, I'm not going to talk to anyone about it," the fact that he treats the whole picture like a foregone conclusion? That's really all you need to know. He's pretty sure he never wants to fuck you again, and he's not going to talk about it, with you or anyone else.

Again, this has nothing to do with you. And it's not just about sex. Even though everything else is great, it won't be great over the long-term, even if you DID resign yourself to some kind of platonic relationship. This problem is related to other problems. Problems he doesn't want to solve. Problems he doesn't want to talk about.

Now, I recognize that there are people out there who define themselves as asexual, who would dislike me calling this refusal to have sex a "problem." They'd prefer that I call it a "choice." If I were advising your boyfriend, and if he were actively choosing to live an asexual life, that would be different. For your purposes, though, this is a big fucking problem.

He is not over 50. He did not just have prostate surgery. He did not tell you there was a problem with your relationship, and that's why this is happening. He has a problem that he refuses to fix. He won't fix it for you or anyone else.

So you have to move out and start over. You're too young to be locked into something that's not going to serve you, with someone who doesn't want to face the music (or, at the very least, define what he wants and doesn't want). You cannot waste another minute in this situation. You can't compromise yourself like that—it's bad for your mental health, your life, your career, your sense of yourself.

Honestly, I know that you're in a really, really tough place, but you should feel grateful that at least the situation isn't more ambiguous. People get locked into shitty relationships for so many bad reasons, but because those reasons are foggy and mysterious, they stay way too long and waste too many years of their lives. You don't have that problem! Your relationship is terminal.

Find a new place. Get your own cat. Move forward. You will be sad for a while. But you must repeat this to yourself: "This has nothing to do with me." He knows that, and you know it. Resist the urge to take it personally. Resist, resist, resist. If he misses you when you're gone and vows to look at his problems directly and tackle them in a few months, you can cross that bridge then. But right now, you can't wait around for him to decide. He should've warned you before you moved in together. He is broken and doesn't want to be fixed. Maybe someone out there is just aching to find a great asexual guy. That's not you.

Polly

Are your in-laws making you crazy? Write to Polly and complain away! Polly has an appetite for some good old-fashioned Dear Abby-style bad in-law letters.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Scary man photo by Arun Kamaraj. Scary clouds photo by Neil Alejandro.

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