Hi Carolyn: I’m the letter writer who wanted to help my boyfriend put his foot down with his mother. You replied, “No, I will not give you suggestions to help you become the next controlling person to whom your boyfriend outsources his uncomfortable decisions.” I guess I was going with the assumption that everyone in …
Hi, Carolyn: Part of my humor, and my self-defense mechanism, is to be self-deprecating. I’m getting better about it, as I learned early on that people would use my jokes against me, which never felt good. Plus, I genuinely like myself a lot better with over a decade of therapy under my belt. I still …
Hi, Carolyn: I recently came across an online death notice for an ex-boyfriend. Sadly, he died relatively young, but I’m not too surprised. He battled alcoholism, which is among the many reasons we broke up. I have a lot of photos from when we were together, whose digital negatives are stored online indefinitely (or until …
Dear Carolyn: As a mother of three young kids holding a full-time job and with a husband who frequently works late evenings and some weekends, I feel my priorities change according to what is in front of me at the time, then I’m reconsidering my choices later. How do I decide what’s most important without …
Dear Carolyn: My brother and his estranged wife have three children. I love all of them. They live out of state and send the kids to us for summers. There have always been hygiene issues, like not washing after wet beds, leaving faint urine smells on the kids. Three summers ago, the kids came to …
Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend and I have been dating for about six months, and I’m really enjoying it. He is 30 and I’m 26. I mentioned that I’ve been making my Thanksgiving plans, which involve traveling to visit my family, as I have done every year since college, and to my surprise he got a …
Dear Carolyn: One of my daughter’s new middle school friends is from a family that is clearly struggling. The girl is loved, but her parents are divorced and juggling a recent death of a relative, another relative with a severe substance abuse issue and some financial setbacks. The girl has grown up quickly and has …
Dear Carolyn: I’m a freshman at a small college and I’m involved in two groups — let’s pretend tennis and choir. At a choir event, a guy I didn’t know started flirting with me and we ended up kissing but nothing else. Someone told a girl in the tennis club they’d seen me kissing her …
Hi, Carolyn: My nephew doesn’t know that his “dad” is not his biological dad. My sister birthed my nephew out of wedlock and met the man she married years later. For his whole life, my sister has allowed my nephew to think his fake dad is his real dad. She divorced his fake dad five …
Dear Carolyn: I would like for my husband and me to give my daughter, his stepdaughter, a lump sum toward a house down payment. She and her boyfriend, both 30, are hard workers, but she’s had a career of mainly temp jobs, without much cushion for savings. My husband feels uneasy about this because we’ve …
