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Let’s have another Boston meetup! 

When: Saturday, August 16th, 2025 at 1pm

Where: Cambridge Common, in Cambridge, MA, near the Civil War Monument

Closest T stop is Harvard Square on the Red Line. Cambridge Common is a 5-10 minute walk.

The Civil War Monument is the big statue in the center of Cambridge Common, with lots of benches around (but no tables).

Accessibility notes: The park has good pathways to the area where we’re meeting, but no bathrooms in the park. Best nearby public restrooms are in the MBTA station.

I’ll be sitting on one of the benches and I’ll have with me a Catbus plushie (from My Neighbor Totoro). I’ll probably be working on a crochet blanket.

If the weather forecast wildly changes and we have to move indoors, weather location is the Harvard Art Museum Cafe, in the central atrium of 32 Quincy Street.

Feel free to bring any crafts, games, puzzles, etc to work on or share. I’ll also have some art supplies and paper to share.

If you have questions, comments, or are trying to find us, you can reach me at bostonCAmeetup AT gmail DOT com.

I’ve been on hiatus to deal with some health issues and focus on book revisions due at the end of July, but I miss you all and this seems like a good way to at least visit. Let’s engage in the periodic ritual of using the search strings people typed into find this place as if they are questions. No context, all guesswork, assumptions, and snap judgments.

Here is a melancholy song with “May” in the lyrics. Sorry/you’re welcome for the earworm.

1 “Wanna clear the air on how a girl sees us.”

The most searched-for term is still “how to answer what are you looking for in a relationship” because people are still playing the game of trying to guess  what their dates want to hear and tailor their answers accordingly, like it’s a job interview. Could we possibly break this habit?

Before you talk to this girl, get clarity about your own wants and plans. How do you see her/the relationship? Is there an “us”? Do you want there to be? Starting from right now, in a perfect world, where you have this conversation and then everything works out exactly as you hope, what does your future relationship or level of interaction with this girl look like? What, specifically, is making you feel like the air needs clearing? And why now?

Is this air-clearing talk about getting closer or about creating more distance between you?

My advice is, figure out what you want and how you feel, own your decisions, and then level with her. “I feel…” “I hope….” “Going forward, I want…”

Don’t try to sell her on agreeing that what’s best for you is the same as what’s best for you. And don’t try to draw out all her vulnerabilities before revealing any of yours, especially if this is a “we need space” conversation. Instead, be honest and forthright and give her enough information about what you want so she can decide what’s best for her.

2  “How to motivate boyfriend to take his career seriously.”

You can’t, and even if you could, you shouldn’t.

Transforming a relatively unambitious person into an ambitious one is only possible if all the people in this sentence are you. You can be as ambitious, serious, and focused as you decide to be about your own career. If you decide what you really need is a partner who matches your ambitions and career focus, then you should probably go find someone who is already more compatible.

Either way, let go of the idea that it’s your job to fix or motivate your partner to be other than what he is, and especially let go of the notion that you can influence him without his consent and active participation. Treating a fellow adult like a rehabilitation project is a recipe for misery, and it’s hard to respect someone as an equal while you’re simultaneously trying to gentle parent them into being who you really want.

Either accept your boyfriend for who he is and what he already brings to the table now, or set him free to pursue his own happiness in his own sweet time.

3 “Friend got me a nice birthday gift but I didn’t get anything for their birthday last month awkward.”

Good news: Your friend knew and accepted that you didn’t get them anything and wanted to get you something anyway. Not everyone keeps score about that stuff the same way. Your job now is to say “thank you” and enjoy the gift to the fullest. There’s nothing to apologize for or fix about what’s happened so far, though your awkward feelings might help you re-evaluate how you want to handle things going forward.

Is this an important friendship that you want to nurture? Make a note in your calendar of when their birthday is and resolve to get them a present next year. Or treat them next time you go out. “I have an extra ticket to [neat thing], be my plus one?” Or talk to them and hash out how you want things to be from now on. “I loved your present but felt bad I didn’t get you anything. Next year should we plan to swap gifts, or maybe treat ourselves to a night out since our birthdays are so close together?” Only suggest things you’d be happy to do, not things that make more chores or obligations.

If this is someone you’d rather not be on gift-giving terms with, don’t fret. Say a polite thank you for the gift now, and then keep right on not getting them a birthday gift next year.

4 “Just found out high school best friend’s mom died six months ago what to say after all this time.”

A very close family friend died this spring, and we’ve had news of several other premature and awful deaths of people we’re connected to, so this topic has been on my mind more than usual.

The best time to say something to your grieving friend is right now and the worst thing to say is nothing.

As for what to say and how to say it from a distance, death is a circumstance where postal mail comes in incredibly handy. They make greeting cards just for this, and you can write your friend a short note expressing your sympathy inside. Sample structure for the note:

“Dear friend,

I just heard about your mom, and I’m so sorry.

I still remember [how she made us pose for prom photos][ how she made us walk up and down with books on our heads to help our posture][her amazing homemade birthday cakes and bespoke Halloween costumes][her giant laugh][this very cool and useful piece of advice she once gave me][her flawless fashion sense][how kind she was to let me shadow her at her job when I had to do a presentation for Career Day][how proud she was of you at graduation][how much you loved it/hated it whenever she sent you recipes and coupons she clipped in the mail all through college][how much you always looked forward to your visits back home with her][the stories you told about her].

This note is just to say that I’m thinking of you. If you want to reach me for any reason, my current info is _____________.

With all my sympathy,

Your name

Do: Keep it focused on your friend and their mom. If you interacted with her mom, try to come up with one true memory of her like the samples in the brackets, and if you didn’t meet her, try to come up with one true thing your friend told you about her or their relationship. If you can’t say something positive you could let the greeting card industry do its “in sympathy” work for you and remember that losing a shitty caregiver is still a loss worthy of acknowledgement. There’s no pithy, perfect, idealized thing you could say that would un-complicate this for your friend, but “I’m so sorry” and “I’m thinking of you” are classics for a reason.

Do not: Say gross stuff about how the dead person is “in a better place now.” Overdo apologizing for not being in touch sooner or comment on the closeness/lack of closeness in your friendship. Marvel aloud at how long it took you to find out, especially not to guilt trip your friend about not informing you personally amid everything else they had to deal with. Make generic offers of support you have no intention of following through with. Pry into what happened. Take this opportunity to catch your friend up on all your neat life events. Make big promises about staying more in touch or getting together in the future. Expect an immediate (or any) reply.

If you weren’t actively in each other’s lives enough to learn about the death at the time it happened, then take it as a given that everybody missed some stuff about each other in the interim and that catching up can be its own entirely separate conversation.The ball’s in your friend’s court.

Doing it this way gives you the benefit of a familiar, established, recognizable structure for expressing condolences, forces brevity, and removes pressure from your friend to have to react a certain way or do anything about it. I’m not in the pay of Big Greeting Card, and I don’t know your friend, so if another communication medium works better for you, please use that. I mostly just want to help break the impasse and avoid the horrible, forced, calcified silence that so often comes after after the funeral when bereaved people and not-immediately bereaved people start to mirror each other’s internal monologues in the worst possible way:

Not-directly bereaved person: Oh nooooooo, if I don’t say something I will feel like a callous jerk, but if I bring up the loss after all this time I will remind them of their loss, put them on the spot, and make them have to talk about feelings and death, and then I will feel like an even bigger jerk. Howabout this:  They can bring it up if they are comfortable doing so, but I won’t bring it up if they don’t.

Bereaved person: Oh noooooooo, if I mention death (a thing that requires no reminders when it happens near you), then I’ll make it weird and bring the whole vibe down. Nobody understands or cares about grieving people for very long, and that’s why  I must hold my shit together and pretend everything is fine so I don’t make people uncomfortable..

It’s understandable to want to avoid having to perform grief or forcing someone else to perform grief, but when the “safest” course defaults to “never ever bring up or talk about grief, in case it’s awkward somehow” the end result is grieving people feeling ever more isolated.

Fuck that! Mostly I think the worst thing you can say to a grieving person is nothing. Death is awkward and there is no smooth etiquette move that cancels out the crater that’s left whenever an irreplaceable being departs from the world. So my vote is to acknowledge the loss, some way, somehow and trust that if you accidentally mess up the grieving person will steer you in the right direction. “Thanks but I’d rather not discuss it here/right now/with you.” => You can rescue the situation by saying “Of course” and then helping them change the subject. “Yeah, I would like to talk about it very much, thanks for asking.” => You can ask questions like “What was ____ like?” and then listen to the answers without judgment.

5 “I love my boyfriend and my parents don’t like him what will I do?” 

The best course is going to be highly context dependent (are you an adult, do you actually need their permission, will it fuck up your access to housing and education if they decide to play dirty, are there some legit red flags or worries here), but here are some options for *a* course of action that gives you some agency over the situation.

1. Ask your parents, one time, to share their concerns and detail their objections and commit to hearing them out. Don’t defend him or argue in the moment, even if their objections are crap. You’re not going to change their minds right now, everybody is just going to double down on their original position, and getting “emotional” or signaling noncompliance will likely be held against you. Your best bet is to listen calmly without interrupting, take notes, and promise to think about what they said. (You will think about it even if you do nothing about it, so this isn’t technically a lie.)

2. Process the substance of their objections (if any), preferably with a trusted person or people that aren’t your boyfriend. Look for patterns and themes, such as:

• Are the objections about this specific boyfriend or do they not want you to have any boyfriend at all without their permission? Is this more about objecting to him or is it about controlling you? The second thing sounds a lot like “You’re just too young, you need to focus on your studies, this is a distraction, what if you get pregnant, my house/my rules.” Controlling parents tend to be controlling about more than one thing, so if this is what’s happening it should be pretty obvious.
• If the objections are about him, are they mostly about behaviors they’ve observed or are they mostly about demographics (age, race, class & family background, money, gender, politics, religion) or physical characteristics (clothes, hair, body modifications)? Compare these sample scripts:

“He’s from a poor family and has too many tattoos and doesn’t go to our church, we want you to hold out for someone better (where better = more like us)” is not really a statement about whether he’s a good person or a good partner for you. If he treats you well and makes you happy, your happiness  over time will be the ultimate evidence of whether this guy is the right partner for you. In the meantime, remind your parents that you did them the courtesy of hearing them out and now that they’ve said their piece you expect them to be courteous if they expect your attendance at family functions.

“I’ve noticed how he interrupts and talks over you, and how quiet you are/how on edge you seem whenever he’s around. He sometimes makes mean digs about your smarts or appearance, or says rude things about other people’s bodies, and while he and you insist he’s only joking, I never see you laughing. Plus, since you started dating him you’ve stopped spending time with your friends or doing things you love, and even when you try to hang out without him you’re distracted by his constant texts and keeping tabs on you the whole time. He moved the relationship along very quickly and doesn’t seem to have any friends of his own or interests besides you. I can get why that feels romantic and like you’re meant for each other, but it’s healthy for couples to have their own interests and support systems.” If your parents’ concerns sound like that, I hate to break it to you, but these are all indicators for coercive control, and your parents might be legitimately trying to protect you.

If that’s the case, what does your gut say? Do your closest and most trusted friends echo your parents’ concerns? Have you ever found yourself minimizing or hiding stuff your boyfriend does or says to you because you know your friends and parents will object on your behalf? That’s not a green flag. For more info, here’s an expert opinion/resource that might help.

6 “How to set boundaries with needy people.”

When you’re talking about needy people, plural, it immediately suggests a pattern or multiple patterns of repeated asks where you feel pressured to give more than you’re willing to give and where you struggle to maintain consistency.

The first time you break an established pattern is usually the hardest, but once you do it new patterns become possible.The most important step isn’t finding the right words to persuade the other people to give you what you need, it’s setting boundaries with yourself to ensure your needs are met.You can’t control what other people need or when they seek you out, but you can decide what you’re willing to tolerate and control how you respond. In order to break the pattern, said response can involve words (mostly “no”) but must be backed up by actions.

For example: If a friend or relative constantly asks to borrow money, and you keep giving them the money, that establishes a pattern where it’s not unreasonable for them to assume that you’ll keep bailing them out. Even if you say words like “I hate when you ask me to borrow money” or “Please stop expecting me to bail you out” or “But this really, truly has to be the last time” or “I really can’t afford to keep giving you money like this without jeopardizing my own situation, please stop asking” but you keep giving them money, it reveals a pattern where they can expect you to hem and haw about it a bit before you give them money, but you’ll still come through. Anyone who has ever worked in fundraising knows that it’s easier to get people who have already donated to give again than to convert someone who has never donated before.

Should people believe the “soft” nos and stop asking the first time they get one? Yes, obviously. But whenever whatever should be happening doesn’t match up with what is happening, we gotta deal with what’s true. To break the pattern, you have to say “No, I can’t help you this time” and then not give them money, no matter how many times they ask, no matter how disappointed they are, and no matter what they say to try to manipulate you or how uncomfortable it gets. Their need will be whatever it is. Your consent belongs to you, and their needs don’t override that.

Nobody who has a hard time saying no got that way overnight, and undoing the habit of putting other people’s needs over your own safety, comfort, and pleasure does not disappear overnight either. Unlearning these habits are a process that can take tons of time and trial and error. Disappointing people is a skill. Skills can be learned. It might never feel good or easy, but abdicating your own needs doesn’t feel good either. Sometimes there’s no way to meet everyone’s needs at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that yours always come last.

I could (and have) write a million more words about boundaries, but this is where I want to leave off for now: The first time you break an established pattern of compliance and back it up with action, you reveal a possible world where nobody is allowed to override your consent. The more you live in that world, the more you make it real.

Howdy Captain,

Thanks for your work and for cat photos.

All players in this story are mid 20s. I (call me Emm, she/her) have been in a wonderful, spellbinding relationship with Ell (he/him) for about a year and half now, and we’re getting engaged in a few months! He has gotten along swimmingly with all the people I care about in my life except…I’ve been unable to get May (she/her), one of my longest-tenured friends, to meet with him.

May and I lived together for three years in college. We’ve been super close since then and she means a lot to me. May has never been in a relationship and has told me she’s insecure about that fact and feels stuck, but doesn’t want to try online dating and works in a field where she has little free time or energy to go out. She’s surrounded by people in serious relationships (both her siblings, her work friends, and mutual friends from college) and I was her last and only single friend –something she was vocally very aware of.

She’s known about my relationship with Ell since shortly after we became official, but the two have yet to meet. Whenever I try to broach the idea of a meeting, she balks.
Examples of this include:
“Hey, I’ve wanted to show Ell this great restaurant that we’ve been to a few times. How about the three of us go on Thursday?” Either ignored or pushed away, with her saying she only wants it to be the two of us.
Okay, maybe it’s because May doesn’t want to be a third wheel. No problem…
“Cee (she) and Ess (he) [college friends, engaged to each other] told me about this cool escape room. Can I tell Ell about it, and the five of us give it a try one Saturday this month?” gets the same sort of response.

We can’t really do low-key, low-effort hangouts at any of our houses since May, Ell, and I all live with our parents. The only event I know of in the near future in which Ell and May will both be in attendance is…Cee and Ess’s wedding in which May and I are both bridesmaids. And by that point, Ell and I will be engaged. It’ll really hammer in the “wow, May, everyone you know is in a committed relationship but yoooooouu” feeling that I know really gets to her.

How can I navigate this situation and have two of the most important people in my life meet with as little stress as possible?

All my best,
Middle Manager

Dear Middle Manager:

Stop doing work about people who aren’t doing work about you.

If May wanted to hang out with you and Ell, she would. You’ve invited her. You’ve suggested. She declines consistently. That puts the ball firmly in her court. She will throw it back when and if she wants to, and she will feel however she feels about it when the time comes. If you want to hang out with May, make plans to spend time with her solo for her own sake. But until she says “I’d love to meet your fella” of her own accord or you’re throwing a general gathering (“Everyone, come have birthday drinks!”), stop trying to cross these streams. Occam made a whole razor about this, and Bartleby walked so that May could prefer not to run.

It’s understandable that you want people you care about to like each other. It’s understandable that you’d like to get the showdown over before you’re at…and in…somebody else’s wedding. You are trying very hard to head off potential awkwardness, but that’s not really possible when the other person in the situation wants completely different stuff than you do, if it’s ever really possible. (Usually trying to head off potential awkwardness later just creates different but equal awkwardness now, and you end up having to pick between which kind is the least worst.) One potential upside of handling the introductions in the midst of being busy at a wedding is a) being too busy with the wedding and too aware of the occasion to have much energy to fight b) there will be lots of other people around to buffer things, including lots of new people neither of you have met, of which Ell will be one more face in the crowd. Either way, it’s time to make peace with the scenario where it probably won’t go how you want it to and there’s nothing you can do about it now.

When the time comes, probably tell May you’re officially engaged the same way you would anyone else in your life who you expect to be happy for you, and let her reactions be whatever they are. “Great news, we’re engaged! The wedding will be around [time].” Until then, maybe tell people within your circle you trust to be happy for you and not convert your good news into a personal attack on them. You’re not getting married at May, and the more you try to manage her reactions, the more you risk being unintentionally patronizing. Just know, there is literally no way you can tell her, no timing, no inviting, etc. that will change an unpleasant reaction into a pleasant one. That’s all up to May. Let’s hope she says “Congratulations!” and takes her complicated feelings about ubiquitous coupledom to:

• a therapist or counselor
• other friends & family members
• online communities of like-minded people
• her diary
• a weekly kickboxing or pottery class where she can convert emotional energy to kinetic energy
• literally any option that isn’t “taking it out on a supposedly close friend for existing and being happy with her life.”

People can have complicated feelings, including scorn, spite, shame, and other not-so-pretty ones, but they also have choices about how they treat you. Part of growing up is to separate the process of feeling our feelings from making choices about how (or whether) to act on them. If you tell May your good news and she is a jerk to you about it, maybe don’t default to how it’s your job to reassure her about why she was a jerk to you or second-guess how or when you caused her to be a jerk to you. There’s never a perfect way to tell people stuff they’re determined not to hear, and if you treat people with scorn when they tell you good news, one reasonable result is that they will eventually avoid telling you any stuff.( Bonus: If you have fantasies of May being *in* your wedding, maybe let go of those until after you see sustained evidence that she’s willing and able to be nice to you about the fact of getting married and nice to Ell in general. )

I hope this all goes more like you hope it will than I fear it might. And congratulations on your happy news!

Here’s a recent Henrietta Pussycat photo drop for your winter viewing. Mood: BABY, but also MURDER

Dear Captain Awkward,

Last year we had a blow-up in the friend group involving a lot of brewing issues left unsaid (especially frustrating when I have made a point generally asking people to let me know if I am doing something that upsets them so that I can address it) and general communication problems. After a while of everyone feeling bad, we had a conversation to address it (which didn’t work for parts of it but that’s how it goes). In that conversation, it was brought up that I should have reached out to people, so afterwards I made a point of sending a message to each person to see if there’s anything they wanted to discuss with me one-on-one. Some did and we largely had good chats, or at least useful ones!

I messaged one friend who had specifically brought up a problem with me in the large group conversation to address said problem. They told me they were overwhelmed that day, but would get back to me the next day. After a couple weeks I messaged asking if they had sent me a message on another platform and I had missed it, or if they just hadn’t had the spoons to message yet. I specified that if it was the latter, that was totally find and understandable, I just wanted to check because my brain was getting anxious that *they* were waiting on *me* and getting frustrated about it. They told me that yes it was spoons (they’d had a death in the family, so that was very fair!) and they appreciated my patience.

It’s now been two and a half months since the initial message. I’m afraid to message again because of the fragile nature of everything after the initial blowup, and because it might seem demanding when the initial blowup placed myself and my partner largely in the wrong (that’s a whole other can of worms). My partner still talks to them casually on a semi-regular basis, and I’ve asked him not to pressure them on my behalf because that feels bad and would probably also go poorly anyway. I just don’t really know what to do at this point. I’ve been pulling away from the friend group more because being there makes me anxious about the one person who definitely does hate me after the blowup, and because the friend group is basically friend-who-won’t-get-back-to-me’s group (I would bet that they wouldn’t see it that way but many others would). I spent the first couple months anxious and spiraling about it most days, and now I’ve internally written them off as a friend to some extent… but that feels unfair and also still lacks closure. Maybe that’s how it has to be though.

Hello!

What the heck did you do to upset these people?  There’s a thread here of acknowledging that you were in the wrong but displacing some of that blame on how others failed to notify you in a timely manner or to discuss it at length to your satisfaction which is not emitting “reliable narrator” energy or (more importantly) helping you resolve this and feel better. It’s hard to fully answer without knowing what your part in the conflict is, but I can address your search for closure. Namely, closure is something you create for yourself, not something you demand from others.

So, what would you do if what you’ve been told so far is everything you’ll ever know?

Based on whatever discussions you’ve already had, what are the behaviors that need to change to avoid the same thing happening again in the future? Make a list. Is it a reasonable list? Like, you can see why these people are upset and acknowledge your role in upsetting them? Are there specific behaviors that could be addressed with effort, or is it more like “change your entire personality (but also we still won’t like you if you do)”?

If it’s a reasonable list, then change the behaviors to the best of your ability, without demanding more feedback or putting more emotional labor on others to correct you if you step out of line in the future. The time for “Let me know if I do something to piss you off” is over. You pissed them off. They let you know. The remainder of the “work” here is yours. Convert whatever issues they’ve made you aware of to date into self-awareness, and do your best not to repeat the same errors in the future. Sometimes that’s all you get, no credit, no applause, just the knowledge that you did your best to fix whatever is wrong and grow and learn from your mistakes. If it’s an unreasonable list of “actually we think you suck no matter what you do and you are now the group scapegoat for everything that’s wrong” then grieve the end of these relationships and do your best to move on. Sometimes the lesson is how there is no point in working on relationships with people who fundamentally do not like you.

Above all, assume that this one friend does not want to talk to you about this conflict anymore, perhaps ever. Stop chasing them! Someone died! They have made it clear that you are not their priority or focus at this time, which is not ambiguous! If they change their mind, they know where to find you. People mostly do not enjoy having fraught conversations about boundaries or constantly auditing the state of their relationships, and this person sound like they really don’t wanna do that with you.

If their lack of interest or ability to sit down and talk stuff out with you changes your own level of investment in the friendship, that is…. fine, actually? It doesn’t *feel* fine, but “withdrawing from relationships that don’t feel good to me” is something you can actually do about this that doesn’t make the problem worse. Channel your energy into relationships that aren’t a constant source of conflict and anxiety, ones where you feel safe and comfortable both giving and receiving feedback, and where you don’t have to tiptoe around people who hate your guts (which it sounds like at least one person does). Friend groups are not a monolith, so if a sincere apology and changed behavior on your part heals some of what’s broken with some of the people you like the most, hang out with them individually or in smaller-subgroups as long as it’s enjoyable for you. If finding compatible, comfortable, safe friendships means seeking some new friendships in this new year, then redirect your energy there and relegate these people to sometimes-friends you interact with occasionally via your partner. And if your anxiety is fucking with your ability to function and enjoy life, seek available anxiety treatments and see if that helps. At least consider that people who aren’t really speaking to you are unlikely to make you *less* anxious.

That is the best I can offer without knowing the nature of the initial rupture. For more about making amends even in the absence of participation of whoever you’re making amends to, I highly recommend On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends In An Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg. It was one of my favorite reads of 2024.

Most Esteemed Captain Awkward:

My partner R (she/her) and I (she/her) have been together for 3+ years. She is definitely antsy to get engaged and I thought we’d be planning for children by now, but things have come up that make it hard for me to imagine taking the next step. We mostly have a great relationship, but R often has criticisms that boil down to me not being thoughtful enough. However, I genuinely don’t know how I can fix this. It’s tough because, due to my abusive childhood in a controlling religious (cult) environment, I have a lot of issues with Never Being Good Enough, and I get so triggered by R sometimes. I’m working hard on being less defensive in these situations, but I don’t know how to take accountability and apologize for something that I don’t actually think is wrong without sounding fake.

A few examples:

• A few months into dating, I learned a show I was obsessed with was leaving Broadway and decided to go see it before I couldn’t. I purchased two tickets and told R that I’d love for her to come but that I understood if she couldn’t. (I figured that if cost was an issue, she’d let me know and hopefully let me cover it, but I didn’t want to assume that would be OK or pressure her.) However, she was very offended and said I made her feel like I “wasn’t thinking of her at all.”

• R’s sister has a toddler and asked R’s mom to travel (~2 hr flight) to them to watch the kid while she went on vacation. R asked me if I wanted to join and I said no immediately. R was upset and said that I had “said no too quickly/I wasn’t thinking of her feelings/was thinking only of negatives.”

• I attended a conference that is directly related to my work but also personally important and meaningful to me (think, a teapot convention focusing on gay autistic tea pot makers) While we texted constantly and talked daily, R was anxious and accusatory, asking me if I was distracted or if I’d been drinking. On the first full day of conference activities, R sent me a text making it clear she felt “not like a priority” and was upset with me. I immediately called her, but she would not talk because she said I sounded upset. (Fair! I was!) We talked it out over several hours the next morning, with me missing most of the conference events I’d been looking forward to.

• Recently, it was her birthday. After weeks of asking what she’d like, she told me she just wanted a specific cake, which I promptly ordered. I did some fun decor (balloons, streamers, etc) at our house, too. The weekend seemed OK but on Monday (her actual birthday) she sent me a text saying she didn’t want to have her birthday dinner because I had failed to wish her a happy birthday and bring her coffee in bed. When she got home, we had a really horrible fight where she detailed the ways I have failed re: her birthday- it was detailed: not putting cupcakes on a plate or doing candles correctly, while attributing these failures to (apparently) my fear of vulnerability and inability to follow through. 

I am trying to be less defensive when R brings up ways I’ve hurt her, but I fear that R has expectations that I cannot meet. Sometimes it almost feels like, in R’s mind, a negative emotion = evidence that I’ve done something wrong. With the first conflict about the trip, I can understand feeling a little taken aback and hurt that I was prepared to make the trip solo if she said no, but I disagree that this means I did something wrong. With the child care situation, I get being disappointed that I said no, but I disagree that it’s reasonable to criticize me for saying no too fast. Am I just too set in my ways? Can I help her to understand how this is affecting me? Is this even fixable? Am I a thoughtless ADHD jerk?

Happy Holidays,

Never Getting it Right

Happy 2025 and other holidays yourself!

Don’t marry someone who shits on your enthusiasm or regularly reminds you of what it was like to grow up in an abusive cult, is my advice for fellow ADHD-ers and everyone.

You describe a pattern where your partner continually ruins nice things you do for her and fun things you do for you. You also describe a pattern where you communicate straightforwardly, she does not, and then she punishes you for not having read her mind. Worse yet, instead of arguing about the specifics what you did vs. what she expected with an eye to better defining expectations or finding solutions for the future, the fights devolve into arguments about what kind of person you are (thoughtless). That is a sure sign of bad faith, right up there with “the more effort you make to understand the other person’s point of view and communicate yours, the worse it gets.” And I think you nailed it when you noticed that her negative emotions get recycled into excuses to blame you, which is an extremely common incubator for emotional abuse.

People have choices about how they treat you, so let’s review her choices relative to her available options at the time.

She made you feel bad about an objectively awesome thing, like getting tickets to your favorite Broadway show and inviting your shiny new girlfriend along. If she had had logistical or financial concerns that prevented her from saying yes, what stopped her from raising them? Her: “I’d love to but money is tight just now.”‘ You: “I totally understand. My treat!” Her: “Oh no, I’d love to, but that doesn’t work with my schedule.”/”I’m not really into that show.” You: “I totally understand, I had to jump on the tickets to get seats at all. But no pressure! I’ll find an friend to go with and we’ll plan something together another time.”

She couldn’t stop you from going on the work trip outright, so instead she manipulated you into spending most of it on the phone, reassuring her that she was a priority and dodging accusations that you were drinking. So what if you *were* drinking? You’re an adult, was that not allowed for some reason? And so what if your priority during that trip was to do work and make the professional connections you came to make? What would keeping you on the phone for hours get her that the words “Have fun, let’s talk when you get back” wouldn’t solve, besides controlling your time and attention and making you feel guilty? Why is you getting to do a job you care about with people who get you a bad thing? A partner is not a pacifier!

She’s had three birthdays and counting to answer the question “What do you want to do for your birthday?” with “I’d love my favorite cake on the fanciest plate we have, but my dream is to be awakened with birthday coffee in bed.” If you’d known how important it was to her, you would have done it in a heartbeat. And yet, she is mad at you for not doing stuff she never told you about, even when you asked her direct questions about what she wanted. She’s also completely unappreciative of the nice stuff you did do. The fact that she punished herself by canceling her birthday dinner just so she could make you feel extra bad about it is certainly a choice, but it’s not something you caused by existing within a non-standard brain.

I’ll confess, the “You said ‘no’ to babysitting too fast” example made me cackle with self-recognition. If she wanted you to come along, she has a right to be sad that you declined, she’s ultimately claiming to be mad that you didn’t fake interest in going before you declined. She could have communicated her disappointment, asked if there was anything that would make you reconsider, or laughed and said “Wow, tell me how you really feel!” But she couldn’t resist an opportunity for critique.

In my experience, when someone harps that you didn’t ask a question or say no just right, it’s usually because they don’t think you should have been allowed to ask that question or say no at all, but they have juuuuuuuust enough self awareness to know that if they admit that, they’ll definitely lose the argument.

This lady seems like she is very bad at being your partner.  Life is hard enough without turning fun, optional things into arguments! If she wants someone who will never buy tickets to fun shit on the spur of a moment or blurt out an answer, then she clearly wants a different person! She has the option to stop tormenting you anytime and find someone who communicates telepathically.

And yet, your email subject line was “Am I A Big, Thoughtless, ADHD Jerk?” and your question contains a troubling pattern that I’ve observed in multiple letters from neurodivergent people, people with diagnosed mental health conditions, and people with past or ongoing experiences of abuse (and associated Venn diagrams):

a) The assumption that a history of trauma and/or a complicated brain makes you an unreliable narrator of your own life who cannot *ever* trust your feelings or reactions.

b) Leading to the assumption that you are automatically the weakest link in any unrewarding relationship or intractable interpersonal conflict.

c) Followed by the assumption that the best way to repair situations that hurt you is by repairing yourself. You will always be an imperfect being, and there will always be more You to work on, so the fact that self-improvement doesn’t work the first or tenth or one hundredth time doesn’t mean the cycle can’t repeat indefinitely!

I will never argue that trauma, mental illness, and neurodivergence have *no* effect on one’s daily experience or relationships, and if they are interfering with yours it’s worth seeking available treatment. But I will argue that when you are engaging with someone who is unkind to you, “How can I fix myself to be more ‘normal’ and make my reactions to their bad behavior smaller and more palatable?” is not only NOT the solution to the problem, it’s a dangerous trap. There is no amount of “work” you can do — no therapy, no medication, no accommodations or workarounds, no amount of masking or policing your emotions that will magically make someone stop being mean to you once they’ve started. Pretending otherwise only ever serves people who want to continue to abuse and exploit you without consequences (and their enablers).

The longer you focus on your reactions to an abusive person’s behavior, question your own judgment, and sink more and more effort into fixing and sustaining the relationship, the longer you linger in harm’s way, and the longer you reinforce the lie that if other people are assholes to you, it’s most likely because something inside you made them treat you like that.

Let’s talk about how your childhood history is rippling through this situation. Often when people invoke trauma triggers, they talking about problems like a) flashbacks and outsized reactions to present stimuli inspired by reminders of the past or encountering similar circumstances in the present and b) behaviors that helped them survive in a stressful environment that don’t translate well to *dissimilar* contexts.

If a zero-abuse world is impossible, it would be super cool if everyone only ever encountered *one* abusive situation or person in life, and that once you got through yours, you get to mark yourself safe and be done for good. But life doesn’t work like that. For abuse survivors, the necessary skill isn’t automatically banishing every troublingly familiar warning bell or negative feeling to the emotional spam filter while you take more deep breaths or count yellow things nearby or remind yourself that it’s probably all in your head. Skills for self-soothing and grounding oneself in present circumstances can be quite useful! But so are discernment and pattern recognition: Asking: “Am I reacting to something that is happening here, and now, in this room or am I reacting based on past experience or manufactured future fear?” only works if everyone understands that one possible answer is “YES, RUN AWAY, NOW!”

In other words, if your partner’s brand of making you feel like you’ll never be good enough (so that you’ll blame yourself and try harder to anticipate her needs) reminds you of how you felt growing up inside an abusive cult, the simplest answer is that it feels familiar because it is familiar. That defensiveness, anger, and sense of unreality you feel about the situations you described aren’t overreactions or artifacts of past abuse, they’re understandable reactions to how you’re being treated in the present. And your reluctance to tie the knot and your timely request for help aren’t a sign that your brain works “wrong.” These are your self-preservation instincts trying to protect you from committing to someone who makes you unhappy. Can you imagine trying to plan an entire wedding with someone who can’t answer basic questions about what she wants honestly, thinks everything you do is wrong, and everything that goes wrong is somehow your fault? NO!

You asked: Is any of this fixable?

Not from inside the relationship and not on any kind of predictable timeline. Once you break up, a lot of stuff will get instantly fixed for you, in that you won’t be around a person who continually steals your joy and erodes your sense of self. You’ll be able to lick your wounds and find a compatible, nice person who is enthusiastic about you when you’re ready.

For your partner to fix anything, she’d have to own the problem, go to a therapist, ask, “Why do I belittle, blame, and try to control my partner whenever I feel bad?” and do whatever years of work are involved in unpacking that question and choosing a different way to be. Somebody who can turn theater tickets and birthday cake into an excuse to be mean to you does not seem likely to do *any* of that anytime soon, and I think attempting to talk to her into it is only going to buy you more bullshit.

Be swift, be quiet, and go. Then pick up your loud, beautiful life where you left off before this person crawled up inside it. Love and solidarity, always.