Hopefully Helpful Advice

Dear Person X,

I am in love with a junkie. We went out when I was 19 for a bit over a year, and I am now in my mid-20s. I’ve seen other people but not felt the same way as I did about him — and I still dream about him and think about him, etc, etc, etc. Whenever we see each other again, it’s amazing how easily we get along; we both have really intense feelings for one another again. 

But just — what the hell?! I don’t want to be attracted to him or see him because he is such a trashbag, taking drugs and drinking all the time. But I don’t get along with anyone else like I do with him.

I’m not sure whether I’m being reasonable with boundaries around destructive lifestyles, or being an arsehole for judging the habits of someone who loves me. I have been reading about relationship co-dependency and analysing the shit out of whether that’s what we’ve got going on. But whether it is or not, I am still torn over.

Should I walk away because of his habits (which I doubt he will ever stop), or love him for what he is?

Anonymous Inner Conflict Battle Soldier

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Dear AICBS,

Perhaps you don’t realise it, but you have answered your own question:

Should I walk away because of his habits (which I doubt he will ever stop), or love him for what he is?

It’s in a tangle, but you already know what to do. Let’s walk through this together.

To love this person for who he is means walking away from him – as a potential partner. It doesn’t mean walking away from him as a friend. To love someone for who they are means accepting the reality of their life. The reality of this guy’s life at the moment includes taking a lot of drugs and getting wasted a lot of the time. You say yourself that you doubt he will ever change that behaviour. Logic dictates that this means you have to stop seeing him as a romantic option for you.

What does logic have to do with love? A lot, actually! From what you’ve written here, it seems that you aren’t in an actual relationship, but rather you’re stuck, badly, in that constant push-pull of knowing that it’s not going to work, but not being able to take the step of actually walking away from a romantic entanglement. That is not a relationship; that is being a pinball stuck in someone else’s game. That is illogical. So here is how you change that:

You stop seeing him.

That sounds easy, right? Except, no. If it were easy you would have done it already and not have written your letter to me. That’s because you have the exact same problem as your manfriend does: you have an addiction. You aren’t addicted to substances; you’re addicted to a poisonous relationship.

This probably speaks a truth to you that you are already trying to reconcile within yourself. You know that this particular combination of the two of you cannot succeed, but there are things about this person that you find irresistible. And those qualities are there. You aren’t crazy, and I don’t doubt there are things about him that keep you hanging on, hoping that he will change one day (even though you know in your heart that for the foreseeable future, he won’t).

But those things aren’t enough. They don’t add up to a place where an honest relationship built on mutual trust could take hold. It’s easy, when we have invested so much time and energy in someone, to think that walking away will invalidate all that time and effort that we put into something that was inherently broken from the start. It’s actually our egos that keep us in repeat patterns like that. We seem unable to face the possibility of being somehow humiliated in having chosen the wrong person, having been unable to make it work.

Here is something you need to know: we cannot fix other people, no matter how deeply we care for them, or yearn for them to be different, or want them to treat themselves properly and care for themselves as deeply as we care for them. It is not possible to change another person, and when you break it down, the thought that we can is almost unbearably narcissistic in what is presumes: control over another human being. And even if in your mind your quest is noble – I’ll save him from himself! – it is a futile waste of your energies. Another person can only ever make the choices they make for themselves. We can look on and not understand how they could possibly make those choices, but this is what I was talking about earlier, about loving someone fully in accepting the reality of their life. Loving them doesn’t  mean being with them.

People aren’t projects. Partners aren’t therapists. You can be a good friend to this person only if you can completely divorce your romantic feelings for them from your concern for their well-being. And in this case, it doesn’t sound like you can. Which, again, is not your job. This guy has, I’m hoping, other people in his life. People who he can talk to. All you can do as a friend to him is let him know how much you care for him, and how much you hope that he can get the right help. But neither you nor anyone else in his life can force him to make choices other than the ones that he makes.

So you have three options: you can walk away from him altogether, first telling him that you care for him, that you hope he can find treatment and resolve for himself whatever probably quite complex reasons he has for writing himself off all the time in the first place. Remembering also that once someone does decide they want to change and get help, that process can be very long, with potentially a lot of backsliding along the way. Years, in many cases.

Secondly, you can remain in touch with him as a friend — but I don’t recommend you try that. Your feelings are too intense for you to be reasonably able to do this without getting sucked back into the pinball machine. Which is hard, because pinball is so fun! Not for the ball though; only for the player. You just keep getting dinged around with your perfectly spherical head smacking into tiny rotating gates while alarms and flashing lights go off all around you and some omnipotent voice booms with regularity “YOU LOSE!” (I think this voice could be trying to tell you something.)

Thirdly: you can stay romantically involved. That is also an option. But if you choose that, you have to be fully cognisant of what that entails, and have total peace with the fact you have chosen to be with someone who is not emotionally able to be in a real, lasting relationship with you. If you choose this option, I would want you to ask yourself why you don’t feel you are entitled to happiness. Why do you feel you have to stay in a situation that is hopelessly doomed? Why aren’t you able to really move on and let yourself know some of the truly great, emotionally available and mature men who want to meet women?

You are probably feeling like no one will compare to what you have with this guy, because you have not let yourself be freely available in a situation where you could meet someone who would make you feel those things. Only a million times better. Genuinely. For as long as you are keeping yourself trapped in this situation, you prevent yourself from meeting someone who has their shit together. Someone real. Someone who you could honestly have something with. And believe me, they are out there. If or not you want to meet them is up to you.

Listen to the voice inside that doesn’t bullshit you. Do what she says.

Good luck,

G-NPX

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My boss sent me a save the date to their wedding a while ago, but an invite never came in the mail. The wedding is now two weeks away. Am I no longer invited? Did the invite get lost in the mail, and now I look incredibly rude for not RSVPing? Do I mention it to my boss, and risk the awkwardness of her uninviting me to my face? Or do I say nothing and risk looking like I didn’t bother to RSVP?

Awkward In The Office.

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Oh thank Yeezus, a straight-forward question! OK, this seems tricky, but it’s not! Weddings drive even the most calm and well-organised person temporarily insane. In fact the stress of weddings in itself can be enough of a horrid forethought that people never get married at all because of them! (And because of many other reasons.) So there are any number of explanations for what happened here.

In this case, it’s really simple. Just email your boss today, and ask her straight what the deal is. Something like: “Hi! I received the save the date email on (x date), but the invite never arrived. I don’t want to cause unnecessary stress at this point, but I was wondering if that meant you’d like me to come still? I’m easy, so you let me know either way. Thanks!”

Because really, that’s all it will take. If you are still invited, great! If you aren’t, then that is probably okay too, unless your boss is an incredibly close friend. I know this isn’t the case because this is not a scenario that would have happened between really close friends. So possibly your boss invited you because it might have seemed rude not to?

I’ll put it this way: I’ve been to a number of weddings where honestly I didn’t know why I was invited. It was of course lovely to be asked, but I’ve felt a few times like I wasn’t really close enough to this person to be invited into an incredibly intimate moment of their life with all their friends and family. It’s awkward! Weddings are private moments held in public. They’re weird like that.

So, just be cool with however it plays out. It sounds like you are already chill with it and more worried about appearing rude, which with a friendly and to-the-point email, you certainly won’t.

And don’t worry, there will be so many more weddings in your life. The ones that take place between our true, close friends are the ones we’ll remember forever.

Happy emailing,

G-NPX.

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Got  a problem? Send it in: [email protected] — the email will be read only by G-NPX, and you will be kept anonymous.

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Gender-Neutral Person X lives… somewhere. And everywhere! Just like God, only more judgemental.