Relationships

Relationships

Dear Good Job, My married best friend introduced me, a single and long divorced woman, to one of her single and long divorced male clients, to discuss working together on one of my projects. After knowing him professionally for a year, he asked me out on a date. I was delighted. We hit it off. And we have been seeing each other every week ever since. This does not sit well with my bestie at all!

Sure, it's possible. It'll be even more likely to happen if your friend and her boyfriend have an honest, frank conversation about their wants and the details of their individual timetables. While it might seem obvious that, after 20 years, he should want to propose, especially considering he's already designed a dream wedding, the only way to find out what he's really thinking is talking to him about it. This is also the only way for your friend to let him know what she's thinking.

When it gets close to my menstrual cycle, he gets into an angry panic for us to be intimate because he travels for work and is home only four nights a week. If we're not able to, he pouts, then becomes angry and distant, and peppers me for updates to determine how soon we can resume intimacy. Regardless of how I feel at my time of the month, my feelings are ignored.

Most textbooks and self-help manuals about communication are based on models that are seldom about what is between and beyond the interactions of individuals. There is assertiveness training, refuting irrational thoughts, conflict resolution, and so on. All without the infinitely wider contextual applications of living. Adversarial disagreements and polarization are at a high level, and couples therapists are overloaded with the presenting problem of "They are having communication discord."

The internet is frothing. This time, over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's engagement, a spectacle reminding us how celebrities function as wish machines. Us normies ride shotgun, living vicariously through the highest peaks and, at times, the lowest valleys, making up for our own grayscale lives. But, while Taylor and Travis are about as mainstream as you can get, in the 1990s there was a celebrity couple who catered for the eccentrics, misfits, and outsiders.

She wants to see me have sex with another woman while she watches. I kind of want to try it, but I am afraid that she will ask for something else in return, e.g., sex with another man while I watch. She hasn't said this, but a few years ago, she let me go down on her friend, and for us to be equal, she went down on my friend, who's a man. She gets turned on by this voyeurism fetish.

Just the prospect of interacting with that person can be unpleasant or feel draining. There is a powerful tool that is often counterintuitive for quickly shifting your approach with such people and finding opportunities for breakthroughs. After making this shift it becomes possible to communicate effectively and in a more positive way with them. And you tend to find them much less annoying.

Guest Jimmy Fallon asked Kelce whether he and Swift had started the wedding planning process, and specifically wanted to know about the music. "Are you gonna do DJ or band? Are you thinking about all this stuff?" he asked, with Kelce revealing, "Yeah, I think we're live music kind of people, you know?" That might also include karaoke, after Fallon praised Kelce's surprise karaoke performance with his brother, Jason, in July at the American Century Championship.

My boyfriend has trichotillomania (he pulls out his beard and mustache hairs when he's anxious or bored without thinking about it). He considers it to be relatively mild because it has never caused any serious physical harm like an infection, and while I've suggested that therapy might help, he thinks that the stress of finding a therapist will just make it worse, but that is an issue for another letter.

A wily trial lawyer I once worked for delighted in asking outrageous personal questions, and people almost always answered him. "Never forget," he told me, "a question asked is not necessarily a question you have to answer." That got me thinking. When I was feeling tender, defensive, or vulnerable, I wasn't ready to explain my situation. Then I decided I had every right to skirt the subject, because my reproductive status was no one's business but my own.

A previous post summarized the many myths about desire differences and the sex- therapy approach to resolving them-using either self-help or professional therapy. The sex-therapy program helps many couples-but not all. Recently, Canadian researchers reported an effective new approach, eight weeks of group therapy that produced significant benefits. It's based on reimagining lovemaking to facilitate sex worth wanting. What if Low Desire Is a Reasonable Response to Lackluster Sex?

On Grady Harris's wedding day, his father, a Presbyterian preacher, presided over the vows. And when my father told us to kiss, and we did, I felt a sense of joy that I'd never felt before, Harris says. I've had a life full of happiness But that was a new joy. Harris was 60, and marrying for the first time. Now 69, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Marcia Wood, 66, who has an art gallery in the city.

I visited the hospital regularly, bringing cookies and offering support to his girlfriend, who is also in the program. During my last visit, I unknowingly arrived at the exact moment doctors began withdrawing life support. I had no idea it was going to happen and witnessed the kind of raw grief that comes in moments like that. Afterward, I hugged his girlfriend and quietly left.

I found out that someone within a friend group completely faked being a student at a relatively prestigious university in the area. Nobody had a clue. He basically came and hung out with people and pretended that he also attended classes. He had actually dropped out of school years ago. He'd even pretended that he graduated and had attended the ceremony.

My kids' maternal grandfather (my father) is declining rapidly with dementia. Christmas is right around the corner, and making plans has been a last-minute thing due to figuring out whether maternal grandparents would be able to host Christmas. In the previous 25 years, we have worked around the schedule of [my daughters'] paternal grandparents and [my] sister-in-law. This is the first year that we informed my mother-in-law that we would be going to my parents' [house] on Christmas Day.

When partners are unhappy, they communicate this mostly indirectly. They don't just express unhappiness during arguments - they're meaner, sabotage their partners, and deliberately stir negative emotions. They often have the attitude "If I'm unhappy, you're going to be unhappy too." Below are seven communication patterns people exhibit when they're unhappy in their relationship. This article isn't meant to be judgmental. Readers may notice they're enacting some patterns and on the receiving end of others.

Dear Eric: My mother-in-law, Dana, 79, was married for 51 years before her husband passed six years ago. She visits us frequently. When she does, she stays at our house or with one of my husband's sisters. Within the last six months, Dana began dating a senior gentleman, Peter. Apparently, they knew each other in high school and recently reconnected. As of this writing, only the two sisters have met Peter.

When my son was just a year old, our family of three packed up our lives and moved nearly 2,000 miles from our home state of Colorado to Massachusetts. In doing so, we left behind family, life-long friends, and everything familiar to us. It was a decision driven by a vision I shared with my husband: a chance to reset, create new opportunities, and build a future on our own terms. That was more than 13 years ago, and I've learned a lot since then.

Our planet of thoughts, communication, and all that is in our minds, Mercury enters Libra on September 18, 2025, where it will remain until October 6, 2025. Whereas Mercury is thinking, Libra is harmonizing. It is beauty, connection, and balance, although the air sign brings the kind of balance that can be measured not only in tangible ways but in the harmonic frequency of the moment.

Last week, I learned a new online phrase, courtesy of the Men On The Internet: 'the fridge protects the snacks'. The 'snacks' in question are young, hot, dateable women who are tasty, delectable, moreish. The 'fridge' part refers to their less attractive, more frumpy or larger, refrigerator-dimensioned friends. Charming, right?

Ask your roommate to have a household meeting. At the meeting, point out that you have noticed the many notes all over your home with your roommate's requests for work to be done. Push back. Explain that you do not appreciate the notes. You prefer having a direct conversation about the delineation of duties in your shared space. Acknowledge that the two of you have different standards,

It's become a bit of an inevitability: I'll be scrolling social media at night, as one does, when I stumble upon a drama-filled reel about someone going through a divorce. Then the algorithm does its thing and, before I know it, I'm being served countless #DivorceTok videos. It doesn't matter that I'm happily married - I can't seem to scroll past one of these reels without staying tuned in until the end. Many of my friends report being served (and watching) the same things. Which begs the question: Why are happily married people obsessed with watching breakup content?

My college bestie has many wonderful qualities, and I won't go into those because this is an advice column letter. I'll get straight to the meat of it. She's an unabashed social climber. Her design firm has a lot of high-net-worth clients, and as she moves up the ranks of her company, she's getting to work on more high-end accounts.