Category Archives: Relationships
Isolated by controlling girlfriend – Detroit Free Press
Carolyn Hax is away. The following first appeared on Aug. 8, 2004.
Dear Carolyn: I love my girlfriend – although she says I never say it enough. I have always been faithful, but occasionally I will get a call from exes with whom I have remained friends. Most of the time, I don’t even pick up the phone. Afterward, my girlfriend lets me have it for allowing them to call. She says they are not respecting her by calling. I have introduced her to a few of these girls. We argue for hours on this.
She has even made comments about my parents calling and bothering us; they would call once a week, but now don’t because they know she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like my friends to send emails, either. I have told her these people mean nothing to me but friendships, and she is who I want to be with.
– Isolated in Arkansas
So which is it – the bottomless arguing, the jealousy, the lambasting for innocent behavior, or the alienation of everyone else you care about that makes her so lovable?
You aren’t a doting boyfriend, you’re an abuse victim. You can both dress it up as love, devotion, respect or some other romantic gesture so that you’ll feel obliged to comply, but what she’s demanding of you is servitude to her emotional problems.
Read more:
Your parents can’t call once a week. Wow.
I don’t doubt she can justify each stand she has taken. Maybe your parents aren’t nice to her. Maybe an ex or two flirts. Maybe you spend less time with her than you do online. In any of these cases, a plea for respect would make sense.
But when everyone who touches your life offends your girlfriend, and when every offense brings a demand that you sever an emotional tie, and when so many ties have been severed that she’s the only one you have left, it’s no longer a bunch of trees – it’s a forest. Walk away. Call 800-799-SAFE if you have trouble making it out.
Dear Carolyn: I am not interested in casual dating and would like to find one great man to date. But I keep meeting people who are interested only in dating multiple people. Is there any way to tell if a man wants a committed relationship without outright asking, which seems desperate? I would just rather not waste my time dating someone who isn’t open to the idea of committing.
– Washington
I was going to say the best way to tell was to casually date multiple people, but now it’ll just sound facetious. And I wouldn’t want that.
Fortunately, there’s no limit to the ways this same point can be made (as I seem bent on proving).
The way to find “one great man to date” is to get to know a bunch of men well enough to see who among them is great. That requires getting to know a bunch of men. Since there’s no one right approach, pick your venue: work, church, bar, volunteer gig, friends’ parties, alumni association, team, commitmentphobe-phobia support group, multiple casual dates.
And if you regard each person you meet, male or female, for whatever purpose, as one stage in a long education, I think (/hope) you’ll stop using “desperate” and “waste of time.”
Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax or chat with her online at noon Eastern time each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.
Read or Share this story: https://www.freep.com/story/life/advice/2018/12/28/isolated-controlling-girlfriend/2363438002/
Modern Parents: Advice for those who are single and dating – OCRegister
Dating is fraught enough, but dating when you’re a parent adds a whole new layer of trickiness. When are you supposed to introduce a date to kids? What’s the best way to make the introductions? How much should you tell a child?
Experts offered tips on dating when divorced, widowed or otherwise single (take nothing from this, husband Nick). Here’s what they said:
Hold off on introductions until the relationship is stable.
“It’s recommended that you don’t introduce your children to the person you’re dating until you’re in an exclusive relationship. It’s a transition for your children to adjust to knowing you’re dating,” said Christie Tcharkhoutian, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and professional matchmaker in Los Angeles and Orange County (threedayrule.com).
It is especially important with young children who easily form attachments with new adults.
“Signs that your relationship is in a stable place include: Both of you want a long term relationship, your partner feels comfortable being integrated into your family and there aren’t major doubts around the relationship itself or your significant other,” said Grace Lee, co-founder of A Good First Date (agoodfirstdate.com).
Keep beginning introductions short.
“When you decide you’re ready to introduce the kids, plan a fun low-impact meeting,” Lee said. “Mention when it will happen at least a couple of days out and explain that it’s just for them to meet, say hi and do something fun. A cafe with hot cocoa and cake or an ice cream in the summer are easy ways. The time will be measured by the event and if it’s going well, you have the option of doing another activity. In a short meeting there’s also minimal chance of anything going wrong.”
(bullet) Introduce a date as mom or dad’s friend instead of bringing up the romance part.
“You don’t want your children to immediately become defensive. Give your new partner a chance to get to know the children without those defenses,” said Kristen Skiles, founder of stepmomming.com.
Skip the PDA.
“Stay cool in front of the kid,” Skiles said. “No hand-holding, canoodling, or otherwise, in front of the kids. Give them time to adjust to the new relationship before you cross that line.”
Don’t use kids as confidantes.
New love is exciting and sometimes wrenching but save the post-date forensic analysis for your friends.
“Kids like carnival rides, but emotional roller-coasters are not only scary but cause unnecessary anxiety and stress,” Lee said. “Don’t share the ups and downs that you experience and whatever energy the relationship brings you, keep it to yourself. Your kids want you to be positive and stable and to the extent you can hold it together, do.”
Prioritize time with your kids.
“If your children are small, they have a right to be primary in your life,” said Dr. Tina B. Tessina, psychotherapist and author of Dr. Romance’s Guide to Finding Love Today. “They should not have to compete with your new relationship for your time, attention and affection. Don’t sacrifice your children’s alone time and don’t miss sport or school events in order to date.”
Don’t compare your significant other to your kids’ parent.
“No child likes to hear negative things about their parent and making the comparison will only work against you and will also stress the relationship you have with your ex-partner,” Lee said. “If their parent doesn’t come to your child’s baseball game but your (significant other) is routinely there, the child will realize it on their own. By staying out of the comparison, you’re giving them space to appreciate your partner without it being attached to negative messages about the other person.”
Don’t date just to give you kids another parental figure.
“Don’t get seriously involved with someone because you think having a partner will make caring for your kids easier. It won’t. Involving stepparents is incredibly hard even for mature and well-intentioned people. This is doubly true if you each are bringing kids to the relationship,” said Elisabeth Stitt of Joyful Parenting Coaching and author of Parenting as a Second Language.
Be safe with who you bring into your kids’ lives.
“Trust your intuition and red-flag warning signs,” said Rosalind Sedacca, author of “99 Things Women Wish They Knew Before Dating After 40, 50 & Yes, 60!” “In the past, you may have dismissed those inner warnings, but now you need to learn from your life experiences and not repeat old mistakes. Notice any red-flag behaviors like jealously, too-quick attachment, mood swings, anger issues, verbal threats or distorted accusations.”
Let’s Stop Taking Financial Advice from Boomers in 2019 – VICE
When she started her podcast, Bad With Money, in 2016, Gaby Dunn went to a coffee shop and asked patrons what their favourite sex positions were. She got a variety of answers from people happy to chat, including the barista. Then she asked everyone how much money they had in their bank accounts. She was met with a lot more resistance—money is deeply personal, after all.
She went about challenging this social hangup with her podcast, and with her subsequent memoir-cum-self-help book, Bad with Money: The Imperfect Art of Getting Your Financial Sh*t Together, coming out in the new year. When a certain generation of experts claim millennials are increasingly “deciding” to freelance, it might be time to turn elsewhere for financial advice.
Dunn isn’t a financial expert in the traditional sense. She’s someone who freely admits to being bad with money (if the title didn’t make that clear). A journalist, novelist, YouTuber, podcaster, and former BuzzFeed writer and performer, she exemplifies a lot of what makes personal finances so hard to manage for anyone born after 1980(ish). In short, millennials have been sold the realities of our parents—affordable education followed by stable employment and comfortable retirement—despite the fact that all three of those things have become fantasies for many of us, and have gotten farther out of reach for those who were already marginalized beyond such goals.
Dunn has built up her online brand while jumping from job to job, contract to contract, freelance gig to freelance gig, and she’s done so while saddled with a ton of student debt. So she’s learned a few things about money, often by fucking up. And with a background in journalism, she’s cobbled together enough experts to fill in the blanks that her own 20-something experience has left open.
Dunn’s is a holistic approach to personal finance, and a few pages in it becomes clear that this is the only sane way to treat any relationship with money. Your student debt, for example, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t manage it without also looking at the city you live, your healthcare needs, your family supports, or your relationship status—are you dating or married to someone who makes significantly more or less than you? It matters! (and especially so for Dunn, a queer woman who navigates layers of gendered social norms around money and relationships.)
She covers a lot of ground throughout. In one chapter, she methodically lays out strategies for establishing good credit, or climbing back from bad credit. This includes how to shop for the credit card that best suits your needs (and why you would want one at all), as well as how to avoid making a bad situation worse when the option to accrue insurmountable debt is so enticingly available.
Then in another chapter, she movingly explores how her own bipolar II went untreated for years, how it affected her financial choices, and how mental health stigma dramatically impacts the resources we have available to deal with everything from insignificant spending habits to major financial crises. Dunn is well known for her frankness and nothing-is-off-limits approach to topics like sex and relationships, mental health, politics, and money, making the new revelation of her bipolar diagnosis in the book all the more powerful. Society doesn’t invite us to open up about mental health; it punishes us for it. Dunn didn’t owe it to anyone to share this, but I’m grateful she did. Money management is meaningless without these details, and we’re all better off for her openness and vulnerability in the face of that kind of stigma.
These issues certainly aren’t limited to millennials, but Dunn’s approach undeniably speaks to a generation caught between outdated boomer visions of success and the harsh realities of a world that increasingly makes basic financial survival a luxury only a few are entitled to. The gig economy is a scam, unpaid internships are abusive, the erosion of unions verges on criminal, and the privatization of virtually every public service is a dangerous race to the bottom. This is our collective wheelhouse now, and that’s what Dunn faces head on in Bad With Money.
VICE spoke with Dunn about her upcoming book and the financial realities of our times.
VICE: What made you choose to launch the Bad With Money podcast?
Gaby Dunn: I was experiencing, as usual, money problems, but I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to about it. It’s weird, because a lot of my work prior to this was in the sex and sexuality space, and that kind of thing was seen as taboo, but it’s actually cool to be a sex person. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone or let on at all that I was having any sort of money problems.
I was in my car, looking for quarters, basically crying, and we had just done a brand deal on our YouTube channel for like $5,000, which my comedy partner and I split, and I was getting a lot of negative comments like, “We’re just going to watch a commercial now?” I wrote an article that was called “Get Rich or Die Vlogging” that was about the disconnect between YouTubers and their fanbases, where it’s assumed that everyone who’s working in internet content creation is wealthy. That article went viral, did really well, and so I was like, “OK, there’s something here about transparency. Nobody is talking in exact amounts. Nobody is talking about money. Everyone feels like shit about this.” It would be more appropriate for me to go on Twitter and just type a screed about anal sex than it would be to be like, “Here’s what’s in my bank account.” And I was like, “That’s seriously messed up.”
I’m sure you ended up finding the same terrible financial advice as the rest of us from boomers who come from a totally different perspective.
Mhmm.
When did it click for you that the advice you needed wasn’t really there? Wasn’t matching your own financial situation?
It’s easier for me to see stuff like that because I am queer, so a lot of the commercials that you see that show retirement are a straight couple, that are old and white, and they’re golfing. Just things that were not in my sphere of reality. Or, “You’re going to need this amount of money for child care,” and it’s like, “Yeah, but how does the baby even get here?” [laughs].
The concerns of my peers and friends weren’t being brought up. I had a really good conversation with a reporter named Nona Aronowitz in the book, where she’s like, “Millennials are seen as upper-middle-class millennials who care about student loan debt or getting enough days off at their start-up job, but millennials are mostly service industry workers.” The data shows that. The minimum wage is actually a millennial issue, but we never think about it that way. We’re really getting shat on, being like, “You killed diamonds. You killed napkins. You killed whatever. And you only care about your avocado toast and your selfies.” Nobody has a 9-to-5—and if they do, 5-to-midnight is other side jobs. I couldn’t imagine this idea of being entitled or lazy, because that’s not what I’ve seen. Everyone is fully panicked and scrambling.
Doing this interview now is one of my side hustles, so yeah.
[Laughs] Hey, congrats! That’s the thing. Everyone is just making it work.
I understand that a lot of your fanbase is younger, or Gen Z. Is it hard to talk to that audience about finances from a millennial perspective?
They’re certainly not going to listen to boomers. And I would love it if I, at 30 right now, am out of touch, that they’re all 19 and super woke and social justice oriented and not taking any of this bullshit. And questioning everything, and not bringing shame upon themselves or feeling stressed or anxious because of things that are out of their control. Because that means things are better. Statistics are showing that more and more young people identify as queer, or identify as somewhere on the gender binary that isn’t one way or the other, or that they’re more critical of systemic issues.
The rules of how you’re supposed to behave at your job—a lot of those rules are, “Let your boss abuse you.” And we stood by those so intensely because we were all scrambling for jobs. “How to do your job” is basically “debase yourself.” Gen Z is like, “Absolutely not!” Bravo. They’re not accepting basic level bullshit. Everything gets taken away and it’s like, “You’re so entitled.” I always get nervous. “You’re so entitled to healthcare. You’re so entitled to housing. You’re so entitled to food and water and air.” Where are we stopping? I’ve largely seen Gen Z be like, “No, we reject this.”
Good.
You get into your personal story with money a lot, in a way that I don’t really see elsewhere. In a way that’s relatable. On the one hand, I say this as somebody who’s a similar age, who’s a journalist, who does a lot of freelancing, who’s also bisexual, who writes about LGBTQ issues—
Hey! This is the book for you! [Laughs]
[Laughs] Yeah, it speaks specifically to me. But on the other hand, I suspect that that’s an approach that works for a lot of people. How important is it to be autobiographical in the way that you talk about money?
A lot of finance media comes from this place of aspiration. I want to come from a place of relatability. When I worked as a journalist, the easiest way to get a source to open up to you is to start with a thing that you did that was similar. I sound like a cop, but you go, “I want to ask you about this embarrassing thing, because this happened to me,” and then that makes the other person start sharing too. And whether you’re lying or not—now I sound like a sociopath—it helps people feel like they can listen to you or they can share.
I don’t think people want to hear from someone who is in an ivory tower. Why would you want to? I think people want to hear from someone who’s currently in the weeds. I spent yesterday fighting on the phone with Bank of America. I’m here, talking to you as a “money expert,” and I’m like, “Please give me back my $15, PayPal.” I’m not good! But I would rather hear from that person than someone who I’m like, “Are you lying to me, and do you live on a yacht?”
Obviously the book isn’t out yet, but what kind of feedback has the podcast gotten?
Some people think that the whole podcast is a victim mentality. It’s like, “If you behaved like me, then this wouldn’t happen.” That’s unhelpful.
I think people see money as Wolf of Wall Street or something, where it’s a power thing, or you’re supposed to act smug and haughty about it, and be like, “I’m better than everyone.” And then my show’s just, “Everything sucks.” Then they’re like, “Well, that’s not fun. That’s not dancing around in cocaine, making our secretaries do races,” or whatever the hell they did in that movie. And yeah, it’s not that fun.
Going back to your point about being a sex writer. You mention in the book going into a coffee shop and asking people about their sex lives, which they’re more willing to talk about than their bank balances. After doing this for a while, how easy is it for you talk about your own financial history the way that you do?
You get defensive, you get embarrassed. I still cry about stuff. I still have a really adverse reaction to people asking me about it, which is kind of weird, because I’ve basically made this the forward-facing thing that I’m doing.
But there’s no consequences for me. I’m embarrassed. Fine. But I’m not going to lose my job. My family will still love me. Nothing bad is going to happen from me talking about this, and I feel the same way about queer stuff. If I have the ability to talk about this stuff without there being dire consequences on my life, then I’m the one who should do it. The book is a lot about erasing the embarrassment and the stigma and the shame that comes from talking about money, which is so baked into society and ourselves. I’m also still feeling all of that.
You asked about feedback, and I definitely get emails—I have to say from almost exclusively men—either being like, “I’ll save you, little princess,” or, “You’re a fucking idiot.” The reason that other people, and largely marginalized people, don’t talk about stuff like that is because they don’t want to get yelled at by those guys.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Follow Frederick Blichert on Twitter.
Forget love, I’m looking for great soup dumplings – Toronto Star
When Daniela Castillo was planning a recent vacation to Mexico City, she opened up her Tinder app. But she wasn’t looking for a romantic date at Chapultepec Castle, or even a quick hookup while in town.
She wanted travel advice.
Grindr, Bumble and Tinder apps supply advice on staying safe when meeting strangers at home or abroad. (Dreamstime file photo)
