CaptainAwkward.com

Advice. Staircase Wit. Faux Pas. Movies.

• About
• Site Policies and FAQs
• Support/Donate

#189: My girlfriend moved here to live with me and now I feel trapped.

Dear Captain Awkward,

I’ve been in a relationship for over four years now, initially long-distance but much closer for the past year and a half. We went from long-distance to living together in my mother’s house, and then, when she went to university in another city, living apart on the weekdays and back together on the weekend. This is the first proper relationship either of us have been in, and a lot has happened in the four years we’ve been together. We’ve broken up twice before, both times initiated by her, although they were apparently facilitated by her mother, who was becoming more and more mentally ill towards the end of her life. Her mother died in 2009, while my girlfriend was living with her uncle. Obviously this was a terrible time for her, but I did my best to support her through it.

Read the rest of this entry »

#188: Dealing with a coworker with a severe mental illness.

Dear Captain Awkward:

I have a coworker diagnosed with bipolar. Let’s call her Cosette.

Cosette and I work in the same field, and share many colleagues. When I moved to my current job with Cosette, our colleagues told me about her diagnosis. Some did this in a really ableist sort of way (“Look out for Cosette, she’s crazy”), and some did this in a helpful specific way (“Cosette has certain problems with boundaries, here’s what worked well for me.”)

I also know about her diagnosis because our former boss disclosed to me. This was all kinds of HR and ethical wrong, I know, but context: I and another coworker witnessed Cosette having a pretty serious and disturbing psychotic break. Because we already knew something was up, Former Boss put us in charge of the cleanup of client fallout (Cosette had called our clients while hallucinating, and continued calling them from the psychiatric ward when she was briefly committed), and running interference with Cosette at the office (Cosette called the office constantly, and we wanted to keep her location and current state as private as possible from other coworkers who might answer the phone first).

Cosette is not always easy to deal with. She has serious boundary issues, like calling your home number for work issues at midnight, or standing WAY too close (like boobs against your back close), or grabbing things off your desk or out of your hands if she wants to look at them. She sometimes gets very “up”, talking extremely fast, with trains of thoughts that are difficult to follow, making group projects very problematic sometimes. She can also get very snotty during the “up” times – if you don’t understand what she’s saying, or ask for clarification, she will repeat herself in the kind of voice people use when they mean to insinuate that you are a dumb child. You know, this very slow, “What. I. Said. Was. Get. The. Widget. Do we all understand now, hmm???” She will also do this with clients, becoming very hostile and overbearing at them. During these snotty times, she also tends to try to rope some coworker into being her assistant, dropping many tasks on them, calling them at all hours, etc. Each request, in isolation (and with difficult to parse explanations), can be considered reasonable, but taken all at once, it’s like being hijacked.

Read the rest of this entry »

#187: I want a divorce and don’t know how to tell anyone.

Captain-

I’ve been keeping a secret from everyone I know. My husband, my best friend, my family. I haven’t even written it down until now.

I want a divorce.

I met a great guy in high school, and we started seeing each other. Things got serious fast and we moved in together, and that was it. I’ve never dated anyone else. Hell, I haven’t ever been sexy in any capacity with anyone else. Kissing, heavy petting sex, you name it. We didn’t marry until about a year ago, but we’ve considered ourselves married for a long time. Until recently, we were trying to get me pregnant. I really care about him and love him and want good things for him. But I also want good things for myself, and more and more it looks like that’s not going to happen with us together. We’ve been over these things in the past, they’re still problems and they’re problems I can’t swallow anymore. I don’t know if I’ve changed or simply reached my limit, although I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Read the rest of this entry »

#186: The lie of “strength.”

Stoicism is overrated and may lead to cosplay.

Dear Captain Awkward

I am currently going through the tail end of a massive crisis involving my Dad having an affair, leaving our state and moving across country, effectively running off and abandoning us for his now girlfriend. This has left my family and I stuck up financial poop creek without a paddle. As you can imagine there is much aftermath to be dealing with, and I am admittedly not coping well.

Before this happened I always tried to be there as much as I could with my friends, helping them and listening to their problems, offering advice and alcohol where appropriate and they have always expressed their gratitude in my doing so. However now I feel I cannot always bring my best self when helping friends.

Read the rest of this entry »

#185: My friend is obsessed with someone who barely knows she exists.

Not a role model.

Hi Captain.

I have a friend who has become obsessed with a man who has never even spoken to her (no, the “friend” is not me). She has spent hours and hours ruminating about this man, to the point that I am concerned how she has let this seriously affect her life.

It happened like this: she first encountered him at work. He moved aside to let her pass through a doorway, their eyes met, and she felt that they had some sort of intense connection, that affected her. By her account, he seemed to be responding to her, too, and just looked sort of stunned. She seldom dealt with the higher ups, but this man turned out to be the boss of the large business, which she did not know at the time ! She was injured at work soon after, and went into a retraining program, so she no longer works there, but remains friends with some of her former co-workers.

Read the rest of this entry »

#184: Confusing dude is confusing. Should I reach out to him and tell him how I feel?

Ethan, my friend Virginia drew you this side-eye.

Oh Captain, my Captain–

I was in a serious relationship with a man, let’s call him Ethan, a few years ago while we were both in college. We met through our ROTC program. He was a very good guy, and a great boyfriend. I broke up with him around our one-year anniversary, because we rarely had sex, and it was killing me. He’d told me he didn’t have much of a sex drive, and it had gotten to the point where, despite caring about him deeply, and being happy with our relationship in every other way, I was starting to think about cheating on him. I didn’t want to break his heart (or mine) by doing that, so I thought the best thing to do would be to separate.

We remained good friends, and after a short period of separation for healing purposes, we kept spending time together, talking, being there for one another, etc. Eventually he told me that he’d lied about his sex drive–he actually had a libido much like mine! Flabbergasted, I asked him why he’d convinced me otherwise. He’d done it, he said, because I’d been very much hurt by a friends-with-benefits relationship I’d had previous to our relationship–I cared deeply about FWB Dude, and he didn’t return the feeling. Ethan didn’t want me to think he was using me for sex.

Fast forward to last summer–Ethan and I had graduated from college, and he came to visit me while he was on leave. He was to be deploying to Afghanistan soon. We had a very nice visit. Then he asked if I might like to get back together. I wanted to say yes. But I was also very worried about him going to Afghanistan, and I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t screaming “yes! yes! yes!” inside my head because I was mistaking my anxiety for his safety for a desire for a relationship with him. So I told him I needed to think about it. We cuddled in my bed that night. He returned to his home base, and less than two weeks later, I log on to facebook to discover he’s “in a relationship” with a woman there!

Read the rest of this entry »

Question #183: Should I break up with my “over-sensitive” partner?

EXTREME CRYING...tonight on the Ocho!

Dear Cap’n,

Hello! I could use some advice. I have been with my girlfriend for four and a half years. I am 23 and she is 21. We have both had a couple of previous relationships, but nothing remotely serious. We currently live about 200 miles away from each other (3 hours by train) and our relationship has always been long distance in some capacity due to university, and now work.

We are both smart, capable people but we are quite different; in general I am very calm and balanced (though sensitive) while she is extremely emotional and over sensitive, mostly due to family problems. She is doing some CBT to deal with this and feels like she’s becoming much happier because of it.

The problem: over the last year we have started fighting about things. Stupid, insignificant things more often than not. It started when she was living with a group of people quite unlike her who she seemed to be conforming to; I got upset with this because I didn’t like what I felt she was becoming. We had a lot of fights there. She later agreed and recognised that they were mainly a bad influence, and now lives with some pretty cool people who I have no problem with. I expect that I probably sound like a jerk, but the situation was honestly ‘I am really not happy with how you are acting around these people and I want you to know that.’

After she had just moved out and the summer holidays had arrived, we went on holiday with my family (eek) and promptly broke up in our shared hotel room; it was like the pressure from the previous few months went critical. This only lasted one terrible day, where we were in separate hotel rooms crying constantly. She left the hotel and went for a walk at night without notifying anyone in a completely unknown place. I was worried sick. The next morning, after hours of tears and discussion, we agreed to get back together and were happy for a while.

Read the rest of this entry »

Question #182: The Three Sentence Rule, or, How do I get my partner to shut up about Karl Popper?

Brilliant men who like to think out loud, ay?

Hi Captain Awkward,

This is a pretty short and sweet question, I’m not sure if it’s been asked before so if it has, sorry! It kind of ties into your request for stories about using your words to say the honest truth.

My boyfriend lives and breathes philosophy. I love this about him, even though I’m not that interested in philosophy myself, because I really admire how passionate he is about it and that he is so good at what he does. The thing is, he really likes to work out philosophy problems by talking them out; so when he talks about philosophy he’s more talking at me than with me. When it’s just us, I generally let him go on for five minutes or so to let him get whatever he’s thinking about out of his system and then say something like “I’m not really interested in this, let’s talk about something else.” and he goes “yes okay, sorry” and we talk about something else. I think part of the problem is he doesn’t have anyone in his life he can really talk to about this stuff but that’s not why I’m writing to you, because that’s an issue for him to solve, not me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rape: Still Awkward, or, Dear Prudence: You Suck

Read the top post in today’s Dear Prudence chat. And then join me in a shiny hatefest.

I link to Dear Prudence in my sidebar because her constant slut-shaming (and every other kind of shaming) makes her one of the reasons I do what I do here. She literally never resists the chance to tell someone “Well, guess you should have thought of that before you wound up here, sucks to be you, ha ha!”

In today’s answer, she becomes several of these people at the same time.

We don’t have any details in the letter about what happened, and I’m not a detective or any of the principals involved in the story, which means that the truth is out there and I don’t know it.

What I do know is that if your friend says “I got really drunk to the point of incapacitation, and I had sex with this guy when I didn’t really want to and I really regret it” one day, and a few days later she says “I’ve been thinking about it more, and I think I may have been raped. Maybe he put something in my drink,” the correct response 100% of the time is:

1. Are you okay?

2. Do you want to talk about it?

3. What do you think you’ll do about that?

4. Can I help with anything?

And not “Well, I’ve seen you really drunk before, so you’re probably lying, and also, let’s think of the poor guy here. Do you really want to ruin his life with your trivial concerns that he put his penis in you when you couldn’t meaningfully consent to sex? I mean, where’s your evidence?“

Let’s talk about the particular horror of this sentence:

“Tell her that she needs to think very long and hard about filing a criminal complaint against this guy if there’s any way her behavior could be construed to be consensual.”

“Construed to be consensual?” What the everloving fuck? Is that the standard now, where if one partner “construes” things to be consensual it doesn’t matter whether it was actually consensual? How convenient.

The letter writer’s friend may in fact have a very weak criminal case.

The letter writer’s friend may well have holes in her memory and be confused about events.

The guy may have been just as drunk, making it a big gray area.

The letter writer’s friend may have gotten really drunk before….guess what? Putting your penis in really drunk people who can’t meaningfully consent is rape! It would have been rape all of those other times, too! Getting drunk doesn’t mean you automatically consent to whatever happens to you.

That’s theoretically why we have police detectives, prosecutors, and ultimately juries. If the lady makes a call to the cops, it doesn’t automatically mean that guy will be thrown in jail forever and ever, no matter what MRAs would have you believe. Maybe there will be some uncomfortable conversations and some fact-checking. If there is really and truly no evidence it will never even go to trial, much less “ruin” the guy’s life.

Whatever happened between the letter writer’s friend and that guy, the standard of what rape is does not depend on having a perfect victim who has never ever been drunk before and who also has never expressed doubt or second thoughts about anything, assaulted by a slavering beast stranger in a dark alley after saying “no” loudly and clearly and fighting back in the presence of several witnesses, calling the police immediately, and making sure there is a full array of damning forensic evidence conveniently on hand. So thanks, Prudence, for sending the message that being less than perfect means that you deserve whatever happens to you and that you better not speak up about it, and reminding us that if you say you are raped everyone will immediately scrutinize your behavior to figure out how you brought it on yourself.

Christ, what an asshole.

Question #181: “I’m afraid if I end my relationship I’ll lose all of my friends.”