User blogs

Hi Captain! 

My best friend of over a decade and I live several states apart, and last week she and her boyfriend came to visit me and my husband. They’ve been together for nearly a year, but this is the first time I’ve really interacted with him for a long period of time.On this trip I have been confronted with the fact that they are an incredibly annoying couple to be around. They spent about 50 percent of the time we were together having one on one conversations that me and my husband were not included in, including in spaces where we couldn’t get away or do something different, like when we were all driving somewhere together. They are sugary sweet romantic — calling each other baby/dear/etc constantly, constantly complimenting each other and calling each other hot, TONS of PDA (like to the level where they will be standing next to us, totally ignoring us, and borderline making out). They both seem to be putting on a kind of weird persona with each other that isn’t their actual personality, as if they are “on their best behavior” (I can’t say for sure for him, but I got that vibe. For her, it was a weird version of her I’ve never seen before).

They were also really disrespectful of our time. For example, they cancelled an outing with us — that we had planned weeks before — as we were walking out the door to meet them, because they “wanted time alone” (this trip was allegedly to visit us?). Similarly, one night they showed up over half an hour late to our dinner reservations and didn’t apologize or text to tell us they were running late. They have big “new young couple energy,” but it’s been a year and we are in our 30s. I honestly don’t have any sympathy — I thought the whole thing was rude as hell. I didn’t say anything about it initially to my husband because I wasn’t sure if I was just being jaded, but he brought up how uncomfortable he was without me even saying anything.

We also all got dinner with a mutual friend and he texted me after to say, essentially, “what the hell was all that about?” They had pretty much ignored him for the entire dinner and only spoken to each other. When he said goodbye, they didn’t even look up from cuddling each other. I’m at a loss as to how to move forward. Frankly, I’m confused because I think that all of this (the lateness and flaking, the constant PDA, the one on one conversations in front of us) is really unlike her. She didn’t seem like herself at all, and I couldn’t believe she was treating us like this. It was also disappointing to think I was going to have a fun trip with my best friend, and instead get flaked on and ignored the whole week. I also have some light concerns about the partner. It worries me that I feel like he’s putting on a persona, and the obsessive vibe of this relationship gives me pause. I don’t know what, if anything, to say. She is head over heels in love and sure she is going to marry this man. I don’t know how to address this without putting the friendship in jeopardy. 

Thanks,

Not Feeling The Love in California 

Dear Not Feeling The Love,

My sympathies! I have been at what I thought was a gathering of friends and our various romantic partners that turned out to be two people on a hot date with the rest of us as background characters and it was ungood for all the reasons you describe. The part where it all feels like a performance is the worst for me, and it gets even worse when the new relationship energy wears off and the performative foreplay turns into performative arguing and now everyone is trapped in an amateur production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the rest of the night. It’s been a while since anyone has inflicted this particular horror on me, personally, but I well remember the glazed expressions of my fellow NPCs around the dinner table and my own internal screaming. “Where even is my friend right now? Does she know that we are here? Is this happening because we are here to see it, or are they like this all the time when they are alone? Which of those is worse to contemplate? If I slip out and go home, will they even notice? If say something, will it make it even more awkward?”

I would love to tell you that I figured out a snappy way to shut it down, obtain anything resembling accountability, or relay concerns about a relationship that required so much performance while it was still happening, but I never did. In the moment, there was always something happening under the surface that wasn’t really about me or the other bystanders. Something that went beyond being naturally demonstrative and affectionate, something that was about proving something to somebody. The nature of the “something else” varied from friend to friend, partner to partner, and setting to setting. Occasionally it felt like people who had been single for a long time while surrounded by happy couples were trying to stake their claim to something they’d felt excluded from. Other times it felt like people were picking fights in public that they didn’t feel comfortable having in private, taking advantage of safety in numbers. Troubling! Sometimes they just loved me and loved their new partner and really wanted us to love each other and to bask in validation and togetherness on all sides. If it was a matter of introducing a new partner to a group of friends, if I squint I can see it as overcompensating to make sure the partner doesn’t feel left out. Alcohol may have been involved. These are all conjecture on my part, but the worst instances shared a level of demonstrativeness and inattention to surroundings/me/other people that crossed a line, even if that wasn’t the intention, and an unfortunate tendency to double down if challenged because any attempt to wrest the couple’s attention away from each other posed a threat to whatever underlying doubt or need required that kind of proof.

Truthfully, I think your options are limited here, especially now that the trip is over. It’s like in the original Darth Vader Boyfriend post where your friend is getting something that you can’t see out of whatever this is, and she’s unlikely to want to hear anything you have to say as long as she’s still dickmatized in thrall to that thing. To be clear, I don’t think any of your concerns are misplaced, or that you aren’t within your rights to call your friend up and say, “What just happened?” or think that her partner is off-putting in the extreme.You know her better than I do, so if I’m wrong to be skeptical, definitely reach out in whatever way you think might work. “Can we talk about the trip? I was really looking forward to seeing you, but at times it felt like I was interrupting a romantic vacation with your boyfriend and other times it felt like I was watching the Best Friend-Boyfriend show. I’m so happy that you are happy, but next time can we [plan some stuff for just us][set some PDA ground rules][draw clearer lines between romance time and friend time]?” Do I think that conversation will go well? No. Does that stuff maybe need to be said anyway? You’re the only person who knows the answer to that. In the meantime, let’s discuss other options.

First, whether you and your friend hash this out or not, you’re certainly never doing that again. You can’t go back in time, but you can change how you prioritize and plan in the future. Now that know that your friend’s boyfriend cannot hang, or that she is unable to hang when they are together, or some combination of those things, you should remain leery of scheduling any double dates or group dinners or intruding on their romantic getaways in the future. Try to look at the night they cancelled “to be alone” as a gift, and use that same logic for carving out quality time for just you in the future.”Instead of everyone meeting up, why don’t you enjoy a nice date with partner tonight, and then you and I can go out tomorrow and really catch up?” “Why don’t you and me just go for a long weekend somewhere, no boys allowed?” And if you ever do end up in the same situation again, hopefully at least you and the other flabbergasted dining companions will  be more equipped next time around to embrace side conversations and tag-team on the occasional “Get a room, you two!” “Is this a private conversation or can anybody join?”

That’s what I did to maintain friendships while minimizing my own exposure to any Dinner-And-A-Show dynamics. I enthusiastically planned things and RSVP’d to anything where it was just me and my friend(s), and absented myself from anything that wasn’t. That became the new default setting, with rare exceptions for special events like birthdays and weddings where putting my foot down to make a point would make me the jerk. I figured I can get along with almost anyone for a couple of hours, and maybe after repeat exposure some of the novelty of “Nobody Has Ever Been This Much In Love Before!” would wear off and everyone could chill out. Other times, I hid behind wanting advice about my own personal stuff or arranging activities I knew that the partner would absolutely hate* to try to carve out a little privacy. And I thought a lot about venues that set everyone up for a good time. If booze or other substances repeatedly brought out the worst in certain people, then I would plan to see them when everyone was more likely to be sober. Since I’m a person who doesn’t really enjoy altered states, I could blame it entirely on myself and my own preferences. I need an early night. I would rather do lunch than dinner. Order whatever you want, but I’m not drinking today.

After seeing the same cycle repeat itself more than once, I also learned to give it time. Even if I was annoyed and felt ignored at times, I wasn’t going to end important friendships over this. Over time either a person I loved would be so happy that I could ignore the occasional oxytocin chemical spill for their sake, or they would break up with the human velcro and it wouldn’t be a problem anymore. I also learned that even if I spotted red flags correctly, if led with judgment and advice when my friends were head-over-heels and thought things were good, they would be less likely to come to me when things were bad. So I tried very hard to let go of the need to be right about their lives and focus on my own boundaries. I didn’t have to argue or fix anything. As long as I could engineer hangouts where my friends and I could be fully present with each other most of the time, then their romantic dynamics could be their business most of the time.

When conflicts arose, I tried to find something honest I could say that kept the focus on myself and not an implied judgment of the relationship or my friend. “It seems like you never want to do anything with me and Partner!” “That’s fair! I get to see you so little as it is, so when I do I selfishly want you all to myself.” “But I do stuff with you and Mr. Awkward all the time!” “That’s true! But if you ever want to hang with just me, I’m happy to set that up.” (I left out the part where he and I don’t wear each other like a sweater when we go to restaurants.) Sometimes a more direct challenge arose, something that teetered close to truths that nobody wanted to admit. Trouble is, I can’t not admit those things once someone says them out loud, so I aimed for a breezy joking-but-definitely-not-joking assent. “You’ve never liked Partner!” “If you say so! I do know that you tend to be pretty caught up in each other, and I’d rather not intrude on any more of your dates.” “We’re not like that! You just don’t want me to be happy!” “Sure, that must be it. Anyway, let me know if you, singular want to grab breakfast tomorrow.”

I don’t know if any of this is helpful as advice, but you definitely have my commiseration and hope that things will get easier over time.

*Incidentally, the 2004 micro-budget horror film Fear of Clowns **which is at this link you should NOT click** is terrible, and I don’t recommend it unless you can cackle through it with your best friend while her terrible (now-ex) boyfriend hovers in doorway of the room you’re watching it in for 106 minutes straight, fuming about how bad it is even though you both told him ‘yes, we are watching bad movies on purpose’ and ‘you will definitely hate this’ and ‘we rented it to watch together, there is no need for you to stick around’ but his rarified media tastes and even more intense FOMO simply will not allow him to either sit down or leave and do something he enjoys instead. The more we laughed at this convoluted tale of a homicidal clown named Doug who never wears shirts and only refers to himself in the third person (“Doug take murder van?”), the more he fumed. The more outraged he became, the funnier it was. Someone so transparently pathetic should have been way more used to the derisive cackling of women, in my opinion, but I’m sure the seventeen years since I last saw his squinched-up rageface and flaring nostrils have afforded multiple opportunities for growth on that front. Cheers to a complete toilet!

**You clicked the link, didn’t you. And you glimpsed “Doug” in all his shirtless not-glory. Well, now you know. Happy almost-Halloween!

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Dear Captain,

Thank you for telling me years ago (in an unpublished letter) to dump my boyfriend. This one may be tougher.

When my best friend, “Leah,” and I met, we were both in our charmingly messy mid-20s, full of joie de vivre and liquor. It was one of those friendships that felt like we had always known each other, and we bonded really closely despite ultimately having a long-distance friendship. We text almost every day and have flown to see each other at least twice a year ever since. She is so funny and interesting, and we’ve always based our friendship on not judging each other, but it’s getting harder for me to hold up my end of that.

It’s been almost a decade, and Leah and I have been growing in different directions. Or, from my perspective, I have been growing, and Leah hasn’t been. She’s still partying all night, getting fired from a series of jobs, and having what feels like middle-school drama with friend groups and the people she dates. She’s still running into the same life-disrupting stuff that happens in early adulthood, like when you don’t know how to book a doctor’s appointment so an infection festers, or you have to cancel a trip you planned because you didn’t renew your passport. Her main interests have become astrology, reality TV, and partying. Her primary ambition seems to be TikTok virality. It often feels like I’m listening to a teenage niece talk about her life instead of a peer. I’ve never told her to do anything differently — we’re not supposed to be judging each other! It’s HER life! — but I just keep thinking, dude, grow UP.

Her choices aren’t objectively or morally wrong, but I’m just in a different part of life! I’m interested in the “boring” “grown-up” stuff now! I have a marriage (which I rarely talk about with Leah, because her default response to any conflict with a partner is “well, just break up with them” or “lifelong monogamy isn’t realistic”), and a demanding but rewarding (unglamorously corporate) career, and now, I’m having a baby. I am so psyched about this baby! But I’ve been dreading having to tell Leah, because I am afraid that once the baby enters the chat, we won’t be able to pretend we’re compatible any more.

Leah has expressed MANY times that she never wants kids, that she hates how her friends who have kids can’t party, kids are gross, etc. I have never said to her “Hey, that makes me sad, because I want kids,” but I’ve talked about wanting them. One time she angrily vented to me about her friend who had just gotten pregnant before her wedding, because it meant they couldn’t do “anything fun” for the bachelorette “or ever again basically.” And since then, she’s kind of dropped that friend! I have no idea how she’ll take it when I tell her. I hope she’ll be happy for me? I hope she’ll stop saying stuff about how kids mean your life is over and how they wreck your body and make you lose your whole identity? I hope she won’t be mad I didn’t tell her I was trying to get pregnant. I hope we can find a way to talk about how we’re at really different places in our lives and we still love each other but there’s less and less that we have in common.

I’m not sure if I’m asking “how do I tell my anti-kid Peter Pan friend that I am permanently leaving Neverland” or if I’m asking “can this friendship survive this baby and/or is it already dead” or “am I an asshole who needs to have more patience for a really good friend who is just making different choices than I am” but hoo boy, I need some wisdom.

Anxiously,

Ticking Time Bomb Uterus

Dear Time Bomb:

Congratulations on your good news, I am so happy for you! And thanks for the addition to the “Dummmmmp Himmmmmm!” happy ending file.

It’s very possible that your friendship with Leah will not survive this news or the big changes ahead. You were outgrowing the friendship even without this, and she’s made her views very clear in the past. If she reacts unpleasantly, as if this is something you are doing AT her, or drops the friendship altogether, then that is certainly her choice. But before you blame yourself or the bundle of cells and possibility you’re incubating, remember that Leah has the same opportunity to show up for you in the ways that make sense for her that you’ve been doing all along as your paths have diverged. So when you tell her your good news, I want you to think about it as good news (because it is) and as a gift to her in the form of a chance to rise to the occasion.

Postal mail is your friend here. You can organize your thoughts in a card, send it off, and not really think about it until she answers. Leah can have her initial reaction in private, and then decide how she wants to respond to you. It probably beats watching three dots appear and disappear again in a text message window and sharply reduces the risk that anyone will blurt out anything they regret. And if you do put your news in a letter, you can also include your honest fears about her reactions and your hopes about what happens next.

Sample:

“Dear Leah, I have some big news: I’m pregnant, due around [date]. I’m a mix of overjoyed and nervous, like every prospective parent. One of the things I’ve been nervous about is telling you, which is why I have held off until now.

You’ve consistently been very vocal not just about remaining child-free yourself (which I completely support!) but also about distancing yourself from friends who made different choices. That’s also up to you, but it makes me sad to think about potentially losing one of my favorite people. I have zero expectations that you’ll suddenly become interested in babies or toddlers, the same way that I have not so far become a TikTok trendsetter or amateur astrologer, but we’ve managed to stay friends this long despite our lives being very different, so is it silly to think we could find a way? Things are going to change for me, very rapidly, but down the road, I like to imagine girls’ weekends away from the kids and perhaps even Cool Aunt Leah advising my surly teen about being a [Star Sign] and knowing the difference between fun bad decisions and the kind that are just bad.

If that’s something you can picture too, then what I need the most right now is for you to hold off on the kind of comments you’ve made in the past about kids being gross and ruining lives. You don’t need to come to any baby showers or fake enthusiasm, but I do need you to keep that kind of thing to yourself around me from now on. Even when it’s a happy choice, pregnancy is hard, and the last thing I need is to be treated like I’m wrecking your life somehow by living mine. I hope I’m wrong about your potential reaction and that you’ll find a way to be happy for me.

At least by putting all this in a letter, hopefully you’ll have a minute to whine to your fun friends about how I’m joining the Pod People and get it out of your system before we talk, at which time you can say normal stuff like ‘Is it true pregnancy makes you have to pee all the time?’* and ‘You aren’t going to give it some dickhead name like [Worst Ex Ever] or [Celebrity Crush] or [Erstwhile Nemesis] right?’**

Talk soon,

Ticking Bomb”

*Yes, it’s upsetting.

**Prospective names are top secret between me and [Spouse] until there is an actual baby, but if you’ve kept a good list of dickhead grudge names we should definitely not use, please send it along. I trust you especially to think through the potential nickname pitfalls that could arise on the playground.” 

As always, adapt and discard anything that doesn’t work for you. You may not want to go into this much detail in whatever you send (“Hi Leah, I’m pregnant and I need you to not be an asshole about it. Cheers!”), but I figure that if you’re worried the friendship is going to end anyway, you lose nothing by being very honest about how you’re feeling and what you want to happen. Plus, it’s not like her past views are a secret! There’s nothing unkind or unfair here as long as your musings on her relative maturity levels and choices remain between you, me, and the rest of the Internet. The perfect letter is not going to fix anything that’s already broken or suddenly make her into a different person, but sometimes the kindest thing you can do is give people a chance to pleasantly surprise you and enough time to find out.

Again, I send you all the congratulations and hope for the safest and easiest possible ride. And I hope you are surrounded by people who are excited to show up for you even if they don’t have 100% of everything in common. Some of my favorite people made small people, and no identities were lost in the process.

Hi Captain,

I’ve dug myself into a friendship hole and would like to get out of it without hurting anyone’s feelings (probably impossible, but who knows).

About two years ago, I moved cross country to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. It was a pretty rough adjustment period, and I had a really difficult time finding a community and making friends here. After almost a year of intense loneliness, I met another person who was also new to the city, and we started hanging out pretty regularly. For a while, spending time with her was my only social interaction outside of work and we would hang out almost weekly. She seemed to really like me, which was flattering, and we had similar interests. Fast forward a year and I’m doing much better. I’ve made some good friends, devoted more time to my hobbies, and gotten involved with creative projects that I find really fulfilling. The only problem is that hanging out with that first friend is now an unbreakable habit that I am finding myself really wanting to break?

To be clear, she is not a bad person or a bad friend, but she is someone that I now am not sure I’m entirely compatible with. She has a large friend group that she’s always talking about, but I haven’t met most of them and she almost never invites me to spend time with a group – she’s mentioned that she finds it “relaxing” that I never try to introduce her to people, which kind of hurt when I was torn up about being friendless in a new place. A lot of our conversations just turn into her telling stories or giving long lectures on topics she’s interested in while I just smile and nod. 

While I know these things are fixable if I get my shit together and talk about them, I just don’t want to fix them/hang out with her other friends/have more reciprocal conversations. I also don’t want to pretend that these are huge friendship deal-breakers. Hanging out with her is fine! The grudge clock is not ticking! But I’ve reached a stable enough point in my life where I don’t really want to spend a day a week on something that’s just….fine. I also feel like when we first met I was so focused on being agreeable and likable and making A Friend, Any Friend that she never really meaningfully got to know me, and now it’s a habit I can’t break.

 I’ve read everything in the Art of No section of this website, and can say theoretically that it’s not better for me to keep putting myself in situations I don’t actually enjoy for the sake of sparing someone else’s feelings, but when someone says “you’re one of my best friends, I like you so much, let’s hang out weekly forever” I can’t actually stop myself from agreeing because doing anything else in the moment would be so hurtful. (This is not hyperbole she has said this to me and in the moment I said “aw yeah I like you too” which isn’t technically a lie! I think she’s perfectly nice! But I know I don’t mean it the way she does.) My inability to say no to well-meaning people has caused me problems in the past—I don’t really date bc I can’t trust myself to be honest about my boundaries in a way that gets ugly fast in a romantic or sexual relationship. I’m in therapy, it’s a work in progress. But now I’ve become a boundariless extension of the first person I met in this city and I don’t know how to make it stop.

This is all completely my own fault, but now I feel like I can’t be honest. Is there a not-insanely-cruel way to say “I just don’t like you that way” after a year of close friendship? Can I ethically ghost when like last week I said yes great idea we should TOTALLY plan a road trip to her hometown (something I desperately don’t want to do)? I know I’m the villain here but all I want is to extricate myself from the crushing weight of hanging out with a perfectly nice person who likes me without making it worse for her than it needs to be. Help?

Yes, Anded Myself Into A Friendship (they/them)

Hello Yes Anded!

This seems to be a sequel to #1406 (How Do I Stop Giving Rides To Someone I Don’t Like?) and #1338 (*Surprised Pikachu Face* Another Friendship That Stresses Me Out!). Maybe with a little bit of #1335 and mistaking expressions of enthusiasm about hanging out for commands stirred in. You have replaced your own desires with a combination of adhering to other people’s expectations (real and projected) and force of habit, and that giant ball of guilt and resentment you’re rolling uphill is getting heavier and heavier. Let’s see if we can reverse this process and lighten your load. Or at least get you out of this re-enactment of the “I Love Lisa” episode of The Simpsons before you explode.

I think nerds as a group are *very* accustomed to living in the point of view of the serially rejected person who yearns for what they cannot have (Ralph) but not so comfortable with the role of person with options who gets to choo-choo-choose who to hang out with (Lisa). Many of the original Geek Social Fallacies result from people misapplying standards of fairness to stuff that is inherently subjective and unfair (like affection and desire) by wildly overcompensating in the present for the perceived “wrongs” of the past. In imbalanced relationships where rejection is The Worst Possible Fate, constructive conflict with people who interpret any criticism or dissent as rejection is impossible. The thing is, authentic friendships need to be able to weather instances where the people inside them want slightly different stuff. We have to assume that your friend doesn’t want you to fake your way through a friendship out of fear that she’ll crumble to dust if you don’t want to go on road trips and sometimes want to prioritize other friends. (If she does want that, that’s a different problem, and the friendship definitely needs to end.)  So you need to find a way to proceed authentically, or not at all.

Sometimes you just outgrow relationships and it’s better to end them. It’s always an option! But from here on, I’m going to assume that’s not what what you want. Fortunately,  there is a ton of middle ground between getting matching friendship tattoos and telling her to fuck off forever. As in any negotiation, you don’t get to the middle ground by aiming there, and that goes triply for negotiations with yourself, which this is. So get ready for a sharp resetting of priorities and perspectives.

Almost everybody who writes to me about a mismatch like this wants to know, “Aaaaahhhhhh how do I convince other people to not have these unrealistic expectations of me (that I keep acquiescing to)? Then I would never have to disappoint them! What is that one expectation-setting script I can say where no one is ever hurt or mad but they all get the message to back off?”

The longer I do this, the more my default strategy is to reclassify persuasion problems as boundary problems. Persuasion is nice, but there are a whole bunch of things we get to decide for ourselves without consulting anyone, so howabout we adjust our own behavior so that we’re no longer complying with expectations we find unreasonable or unpleasant? Once everyone has a more realistic and consistent picture of what is on offer and a little chance to adjust, the relationship will either adapt and improve over time, or else come to a necessary and natural end because there’s no way to bridge the incompatibilities. Either way, the pressure and the dread disappear.

Yes Anded, it’s time to perform a factory reset on this friendship and your role in it.

Step 1: Hit The Reset Button.

Imagine you could push a button and have a completely clean slate with this person. You get to keep all the good memories. You get to look at everything that has happened over the last two years and forgive yourself for needing her a little more than you liked her at times. You get to forgive your friend for not being a mind reader, for being a little more attached and (I suspect) a little more naturally effusive than you are. You get to forgive yourself for not knowing how to handle something nobody really teaches you how to do.

Forgiving and forgetting means removing prior assumptions about what your friend expects and wants from you. From now on, all of your important questions and decisions start with “From now on…” and all of the defaults are set to what you want and expect. From now on, if there is something she wants, she can say it, but until she does, you will assume nothing.

Step 2: Choose New Defaults.

From now on, in a perfect world, where everything goes exactly how you want it to, and this friendship unfolds in exactly the right shape, intensity, and serving size for you, what does that look like?

This only will work if you are completely honest with yourself. Nobody is going to see your answers and her needs will be right there where you left them when you’re done. The second you try to appease her in absentia inside your own mind, you’ll be back where you started.

Figuring out what you want will be a process, but we already know a lot about what you don’t want. In that perfect world, at minimum you will go on zero road trips with this friend and not plan weekly hangouts. That all seems very possible, so let’s start there.

Step 3: Apply the New Defaults (& Propose Alternatives That Work For You)

You agreed to plan a road trip in the moment, but you’re allowed to change your mind. You’re also allowed to not think about it again until or unless your friend initiates an actual plan, at which point you can say,  “I’m so sorry, I know I initially said yes, but on further consideration, I’d rather not. I hope you ask someone else and have the best time.”

If you seemed enthusiastic before, it would be reasonable for her to ask why. This doesn’t have to be terrifying!  Instead of cycling through your guilt and dread, this is where you answer it like a reasonable question and treat her like a reasonable person: “Again, I’m so sorry, I know I was on board last time we spoke about it, but I’ve changed my mind so you’ll need to ask someone else.”

She may feel dismay, confusion, all kinds of things. But reasons are for reasonable people, and once you tell her twice out loud that you do not want to go on this road trip, it’s kind of on her if she chooses to keep pushing. If you treat it like a boundary that you’ve decided upon rather than something you have to persuade her to accept before you’re allowed to do it, then as long as you don’t go on the road trip, you will always win. Same goes for her expressed desire for weekly hangouts: She can want to hang out every week all she wants. She can invite you to weekly hangouts for the rest of time. As long as you only actually hang out when you truly want to, you win, forever.

Since this is about managing your own behavior and not hers, you can build in lots of fail-safes for yourself to guard against your natural inclination to comply. And you can stop trying to explain or apologize for what you can’t do and start taking initiative about the things you want to do.

For starters, you can take control of your schedule and fill your free time with stuff you’d rather be doing and the people you’d most like to see. Sometimes you’re available, and sometimes you’re just not. With the available time, if you set your defaults to “not unless I really, really want to,” you can start answering invitations from your friend with “Thanks for thinking of me, but I need to check my calendar first. When do you need an answer?” Give yourself a night to sleep on it and then do a gut check before you RSVP. On a scale of 1-10, how enthused are you about whatever your friend proposed? Anything nine or higher is an automatic yes, less than a seven is an automatic decline, eights are judgment calls depending on your mood and what else you have going on.

Since this is a friendship, it’s not very friendly to set up a situation where she’s always chasing you and you’re always avoiding her. That was just a step to re-balance things. So when you want to see your friend, it’s time to invite her to things you would enjoy more than whatever it is you do now. Maybe invite her to do more activity-focused stuff like taking a class, learning a skill, or checking out art together. If you would rather be playing video games, invite her to play with you every now and then. Go ride bikes, if that’s a thing you like! If you usually hang at each other’s houses (where it’s easy to get dug into long conversations you’d rather not have), suggest meeting on neutral territory and plan shorter hangouts with a hard end time. If exploring the place you live together holds good memories, go back to favorite spots or make a project of finding new ones to try out together. If you’d like to include her when you host group things sometimes, then invite her and let it be her decision about whether to come.

Step 4: Remove Pressure, Add Time

Remember, your friend doesn’t know how you feel. She doesn’t know that you interpret her expressions of affection as unwanted pressure. She doesn’t know that you’d rather not do weekly hangouts. As long as you keep performing, how is she supposed to guess? It’s not a crime to like you a lot and it’s not her fault you have porous internal boundaries.

Once you stop performing, your friend may notice a change and reasonably have some anxiety or confusion about the state of the friendship and want reassurances that she hasn’t done something wrong. But before you start apologizing and explaining yourself, consider: What happens if she doesn’t get upset? What happens if it all goes fine and what she notices is that you are less available sometimes but much happier and more engaged whenever you are present? It’s going to take time for her to see that even if it feels like you’re pulling away sometimes, you always come back. It’s going to take time for you to become someone who can say, “Weekly? Awwww, that is very sweet, but howabout we aim for monthly instead” and let her feelings be whatever they are. Honesty and consistent behavior over time are some of the most reassuring things people can do for each other.

Remember, if at any point this feels like more work than you want to do, you have the option of ending the friendship. As does she! If she ONLY wants to be kindred spirits like Anne Shirley and ONLY on her terms, and you’re not providing that, then she has choices here. But if you’re going to persist in the friendship, it starts with you deciding what you want out of it. Strengthening your own internal boundaries is going to be a lifelong project and I’m glad you’ve got a therapist on your team. Time to be on be on your own team at least as much, okay?

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It’s presently not equal to the astounding roundness. You can feel baffled and discouraged by the pressure.

Researchers have protected quercetin within the guava’s bizarre subtleties, leaving only a small bunch of experiences. This emulsion, which is probably the most fundamental specialist in guava, has probably the most noteworthy raised reducing energy. This emulsion’s cellular help attributes might be utilized to prepare for the DPPH technique.

Essentially the most elevated ranges of phenolic content material had been completed by convection cookstove drying leaves of guava. It likewise had probably the most elevated stage of monster ferric-reducing power amongst all guava passageways.

To focus on the pundit expectation of skilled limitation on boundless guava subtleties, three examples have been utilized.

The leaves had the choice to kill ethanol or ethyl-acidic ominous tone management, which affirmed a high-notch relationship with DPPH/CUPRAC. TPC institution contained in the leaves is linked with FRAP and CUPRAC in addition to DPPH cellular belongings work out.

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Guava might be difficult to extend inside the dear packages of the pure product. This flavorful natural product is excessive in fiber and a delicious enjoyment.

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Guava’s robust bundles might be utilized to deal with many degenerative circumstances. It comprises an unlimited variety of polyphenols and ascorbic negatives. These could be super oxidants. These equipment don’t include the highest flavonoids, they usually can’t repair their glycosides, esters, or completely different esters.

Guava moreover comprises apigenin, loosened ellagic troubling, and completely different fixings. These updates assist in battling progressives and breaking the level of the development of situations like diabetes and subverting improvement.

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Peculiar subtleties give a wealthy stockpile of L-ascorbic probability and specific sub-atomic posts. Guava Regular merchandise comprises encouraging and beautiful bundles that may be liberated from torment.

TNBC cells had been offered to guava concentrates. TNBC cells created cell cytotoxicity. Lycopene, which is a bizarre challenge in guava has been exhibited to lower illness enchantment. Examine the event of HER2-productive and TNBC cells.

Dear Captain Awkward,

Your opinion, please: My husband and I have been married for 12 years and we have done a lot of traveling and other fun things. He is a kind and good person but there is one thing that is a recurring problem for me. He often says he loves me BUT frequently “forgets” to take photos of me. I take numerous photos of him which he seems to enjoy but he will not take a photo of me unless prompted to do so. We have photos of our travels and exploits but there is very little evidence that I was also there! We have talked about this and he says he no longer likes to take photos because it is too prevalent on social media. I agree that many people share way too much and I personally don’t care for the whole selfie obsession. But the fact that he will not reciprocate in taking photos really bothers me. Am I being unreasonable or insecure?

Sincerely,

Jeanne

Dear Jeanne,

The short answer is: If you want to be in more vacation photos, your best bet is probably to find a balance between handing your husband the camera now and then and prompting him to take a photo and shamelessly embracing the selfie.

The long answer is below the cut.

Sincerely, thank you for sending this most perfect variation on one of my all-time favorite genres of advice column questions, a love that probably dates back to the first time I read Ann Landers in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette at the breakfast table with my grandparents as a tiny child:

“Dear Impartial Voice of Reason: Who is more right here (and why is it me)? 

There is a conflict over something with seemingly small stakes, like “thank you” notes or who is supposed to host baby showers. The protagonist, usually the advice-seeker, wants one thing and an antagonist wants a different thing. One or both parties attempt to justify their expectations, behavior, and the outcome they desire on moral grounds, and suddenly mismatches in subjective opinions, desires, and needs turn into negotiations between competing value systems. The advice-giver becomes a referee, responsible for consulting the existing lore about manners and cultural norms and issuing a precedent that will preserve the social contract and keep rising chaos at bay while also generating enough sweet, sweet outrage clicks from across the generational divide to meet ad revenue projections. “I now pronounce this Extremely Rude/Totally Cool and find you to be the more Unreasonable/Reasonable Party!” :bangs gavel:

What that does for any of the individual people actually experiencing the given problem has always been a mystery to me. The vindicated person gets to feel vindicated, but probably still not get what they wanted? The antagonist gets to remain unpersuaded, because the conflict was never about meeting supposedly objective standards? While I love the timeless structure of these questions and the occasional opportunity to soapbox about stuff I value for fun, I’m way more interested in whether or not you get what you want.

Because Jeanne, if you want to star in more of your vacation photos, then you should do that. Not by having more “reasonable” debates about “selfie obsessions” but by letting go of the fantasy that your husband can ever be logicked into to picking up a camera unprompted or showing remotely the same interest in documenting your travels that you do. You want him to want to. That’s unlikely to happen. So what else can you do?

It’s not that we couldn’t handily win that debate on the merits. Have you ever seen a baby during the developmental stage when the  amorphous blob in the mirror transforms into “Wait…is that…ME”? Almost immediately, they transition from tentative observer to seasoned performer, making faces and gestures and touching the mirror periodically to test where the borders of reality are. We’re not the only species that experiences that cycle of self-recognition to playful self-presentation, by the way. Dolphins and elephants do the exact same thing:

Our instinctive curiosity about our own faces, not to mention evolving narratives about who exists to be looked at and who gets to do the looking have always inspired a fair amount moral panic. There’s the ancient cautionary tale about Narcissus, who died when he fell in love with his own reflection in the surface of a pool of water. Historically, some religious groups have expanded prohibitions on constructing sacred images of gods (idolatry) to include representational art of any human face or form, whereas other faiths go all in on iconography. Attitudes change whenever technology changes, and whenever something becomes more widely available to ordinary people, the traditional gatekeepers of power and authority tend to lose their entire shit. For example, during the Renaissance, mirrors became cheaper and better, and suddenly regular people had access to their own faces in a way they never had before. If your husband were here with us, I might ask him if he thought Rembrandt was some kind of narcissistic asshole when he painted 100 portraits of his own face. If so, he wouldn’t be alone, at the time there were deep moral and philosophical debates¹ about the artist’s duties around truthful representation vs. idealized beauty.

Howabout Vincent Van Gogh or Frida Kahlo, who racked up 36 and 55 self-portraits respectively? Or photographers like Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman? “Oh, but those are artists,” someone might say. “It’s not the same.” But it is the same. The tools are just more widely accessible. For every moral parable about self-absorption, vanity, and the tyranny of unrealistic beautify standards, you can find ample evidence that people who fall outside the margins of what the capitalist, colonialist patriarchy finds fuckable or marketable at any given moment use self-portraiture to reclaim agency and power over their own self-image and outward representation.²

We could make a “fairness “argument that it would be pretty weird and sad if someday your “family” photos are just page after page of beautiful locations inhabited by a dude, like one of those depressing obituaries where dead matriarchs are described solely in terms of their self-sacrificing qualities and all hint of their personality and interests get completely erased. We could also talk about the role that women play as family historians and archivists, often erasing themselves in the process.³

I realize I’m throwing a lot at you with the footnotes and all. The thing is, it’s honestly okay if your husband never becomes someone who will pick up a camera of his own accord. I am both a photographer and the photographer in my household and if there are photos of me in Mr. Awkward’s phone it’s very likely because I said, “Okay, now take one of me.” That said, you’re not a jerk for wanting to be visible in your own memories of your own life! Your letter reads as if you are asking for permission to even want to be in your own vacation photos or if there is some outside standard of reasonableness that precludes it. When your husband dresses up his personal preferences as principled objections to “social media” or “selfie obsession,” this becomes a story about a man who on some level thinks that he gets to decide how many photos of a given woman are Too Many. He’s probably not doing that consciously or on purpose, but the fact remains that if you follow his logic, photos of you during your travels only get to exist when he feels like it (never) and when you actively remind him to take them (rarely/sometimes).

And you’re not even being like, “Fuck the patriarchy and the male gaze, let’s burn it all down!” You’re being like, “Respectfully, sir, you could gaze at me a little now and then, as a treat.”

The way to acquire more of the photos you want is to stop trying to meet your husband’s preference-disguised-as-principle with more and better logic, and start un-apologetically meeting it with your own subjective needs. You want him to take photos of you because you want it. After 12 years of marriage, you both probably do lots of things that aren’t your favorite activity because it makes the other person happy, and it’s time to add taking occasional turns with the camera to that list. If prompting is required, then prompt away! He does not have to change his overall preferences, but he doesn’t get to shame you about yours. You’re not some avatar of social media gone wild, you’re his wife, and he can both take photos of you sometimes because he knows that it’s important to you and shut up and let you take your own whenever that suits you.

To get there, you need to let go of the idea that his approval is necessary or that it is self-indulgent or shameful somehow to want to see your own face from time to time. Whether you ever see yourself as an artist, on some level this really is about that bridge that every artist has to cross at some point: “Fuck it. Here I am. Like it or not, your opinion and participation have nothing to do with whether I exist.”

I took these photos of myself. Here I am on the day a little kid at the bus stop asked me if I was “Sadness” from Inside Out  (I said “yes,” obviously), right after I hung up the phone after the first time I told my favorite person that I loved him and he said it back and we both knew it was true, and on the last day of my honeymoon in Paris when I found the perfect sunglasses and sipped café au lait on a terrace in perfect weather while a street musician played accordion music and people walked around munching on baguettes like a goddamn movie montage. You know what? I think my lipstick looks pretty great in the third one, but what I documented here wasn’t vanity, it was delight. My delight. My joy. My memory of myself at a particular moment in time. When I look at them, I can feel the remembered happiness all through my body. My face is making the smile again right now of its own accord. There’s nothing “reasonable” about it. It just is, and whether anybody else sees what I see is immaterial. For most of the last several hundred years, my face would have disappeared from history unless a man with the right skills and tools happened along and decided it was worth immortalizing. I think there are worse historical and cultural developments out there than whatever lets each of us decide that for ourselves.

Notes because WordPress is being annoying about embedding links again:

1 “The Mirror in Renaissance Paintings,” by Maria Kalbech, Atelier Balbec, Issue 6, https://atbalbec.tumblr.com/post/24476662806/the-mirror-in-renaissance-paintings, link accessed Sept. 9, 2023

2 “In Praise of Selfies,” Casey N. Cep, Pacific Standard, July 15, 2013, updated June 14, 2017, https://psmag.com/social-justice/in-praise-of-selfies-from-self-conscious-to-self-constructive-62486, link accessed Sept. 9, 2023.

3 “The Hidden Mothers of Family Photos,” Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, February 12, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-hidden-mothers-of-family-photos, link accessed Sept. 9, 2023