I Just Ran Into an Old Friend on a Trip. What He Revealed Has Thrown My Life Into Chaos.

Dear Prudence I was definitely not expecting this. Advice by Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Jenée Desmond-Harris? July 25, 20268:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by SpicyTruffel/Getty Images Plus and PeopleImages/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here. Dear Prudence, I’ve had a roller coaster of a year so far, including the devastating end of a long-term relationship that I thought was forever and uncertainty in the stability of my work. I’ve worked really hard over the past months to pick up the pieces and pull myself together. I moved across the country from where I had no support network to being around friends and a place more my speed and found a new role that I’ll be starting in a month. Unsurprisingly, my confidence took a huge hit this year, and I was struggling to feel confident in any part of myself, including my ability at work, my attractiveness, my intelligence, why my friends were my friends, etc. I was working through a lot of this in therapy, but a major shift happened a month ago when I took a trip and connected with a friend I respect, admire, and am attracted to. It turns out they are in an open relationship, and during the week of the trip, we spent such a romantic time together, just enjoying each other’s company, sharing about ourselves, and I just felt really seen and loved. We kissed that week but didn’t go further, and agreed that while we had a really special emotional connection that we’d like to keep going, the circumstances likely won’t line up again for us to meet in person. Well, we’ve texted every day since. Their partner knows about me and we’re being super transparent with each other about fears, hopes, overthinking, and we’ve started talking about meeting up in August. I expressed anxiety around having them come visit me in my space, and they totally understood and immediately thought of other options, so we’re discussing getting away for a mini-vacation for the two of us. So what’s the problem? I’m so anxious! This person is all the right things: transparent, clear, kind, understanding, loving, comforting, but I’m still anxious and scared about so much: the leap from just spending a bit of time together to going away on vacation together, sharing a small space (which I haven’t done with anyone but my ex in eight years!), and opening myself up again so soon. I’m also new to ethical non-monogamy, so I’ve tried to be respectful and ask when I don’t know (e.g., are we still going to text while they’re on a family trip?), because I don’t want to hurt them, their partner, or myself. I believe this is actually really healthy for me right now because I’m actually seeing what a secure and transparent relationship can look like, but I still can’t get over my fears! How do I get over this anxiety and just enjoy myself? I have a new therapist and we haven’t quite gotten to the place where she’s totally helpful yet in allaying my fears. —Bundle of Nerves, But Shouldn’t Be Dear Shouldn’t Be, I am sold on the idea that your connection with this friend is special. I really am! I’m also totally with you when it comes to being impressed by their thoughtfulness about your nerves around the visit and their transparency about their relationship. This person sounds amazing. However, none of that means you should be dating them—and jumping into non-momogany before completely understanding what that means in this case—at a moment when your confidence has recently been shattered, your life feels unstable, and your anxiety is through the roof. You’re so scared of getting hurt that you’re unable to enjoy this connection, and I want to suggest that that fear is your internal alarm system trying to tell you “Not right now!” I’m not against ENM, but I just can’t recommend it—or any relationship that makes you terrified, for whatever reason—to a person who can’t afford any disappointment, stress, or instability at this moment. You’re totally understandably in a vulnerable state. I would suggest either not dating at all until you feel solid enough that the prospect of things not working out doesn’t fill you with terror. Or, if you do choose to date, you should look for connections that make you feel safe and relaxed. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it’s possible to turn off your anxiety in a relationship that is activating it. You could use all the familiar tools like deep breathing and exercise and journaling and continuing with therapy and even taking medication, but that seems like a huge energy expenditure for a situation you’re not required to be in. I’m sure you’re reading this thinking “But I don’t want to lose them!” My position is that if you don’t step away gracefully with a “It turns out I’m not ready to date right now but I’d love to try again sometime in the future” explanation, your anxiety is going to get between the two of you and ruin things anyway. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Prudence, I just got engaged and I am so happy! My fiancée and I are on the same page financially—neither of us have student debt, and we want to have a wedding, but one we can afford. My parents are willing to chip in, and his parents are great but have less to contribute. We are thinking of a small wedding: I have two sisters and a brother, and he has two male cousins and one sister who he is super close to, so that would be our wedding party. The issue is extended family. I have aunts, uncles, great-aunts and uncles, and a lot of cousins. I’m not close to any of them. I don’t have any living grandparents. He has an uncle (father of his cousins) and two single aunts who he is super close to. He also has one grandma who he adores. If we had a small wedding with immediate family, a wedding party and about 10-15 close friends, we could totally afford it and it would be the wedding of my dreams. But we can’t invite one extended family member without drama with the others, at least on my family’s end! He has some extended cousins who would not expect an invite, and his father’s family live abroad and would not expect or accept an invite. But his other family is literally four people (five counting his grandma who would like the ceremony but wouldn’t participate in the party). To make it worse, while my family is already pressuring my mother about the wedding, his family members are totally supportive, asking if we will have a wedding or not, etc. His one aunt works in fashion and has gifted me the veil I want (worth $5k) with no expectation of even being invited. I would love to plan the wedding with these people included, but my parents think it’s all or nothing. Should I just go with the easy spirit of my in-laws (the uncle said he would host a “after-honey moon party” at his house for the family, and one aunt said they could always come to see me in the dress and see us off), or do I just make a plan that invites the extra four people and let the chips fall where they may? —Four’s a Crowd Dear Four’s a Crowd, Getting married is an opportunity to become part of another family, and one of the best parts of that is that you can borrow the traditions and norms and overall vibes of that family when they make you feel good. For example, in my family of origin, the tradition around holiday meals was to tell everyone three weeks in advance about the 15-minute window in which they should arrive, and then get totally worked up and descend into despair every time the food inevitably got cold because the guests coming from an hour or more away with one to three children were late. When I got married, I learned about a different way: Prepare the food, tell everyone to come over at some point during the day, and let guests heat up a plate whenever they are hungry. And nobody’s nervous system is thrown into disarray obsessing about the clock or food temperatures. Here is your chance to do something similar by adopting the “easy spirit” and thoughtful outlook of your fiancé’s family: Have the tiny wedding with your small guest list and his four extra people. Maybe your excluded relatives will be upset if they learn that his second cousin was present and there wasn’t a parallel invitation on your side. But you don’t have to post the guest list or share photos of everyone who was there if you’d rather not rub in anyone’s face that they weren’t included. Plus, I am absolutely convinced that a person who would stress you out about your wedding guest list is not someone who will ever bring you a lot of joy. So if some members of your family get mad, oh the hell well. You want to be surrounded on your special day—and throughout your life!—with people who are understanding and kind and want you to be happy. If you pay attention, it will be very clear who those people are. And if you make the right choices for yourself, the wrong people might see themselves out of your life. Dear Prudence, My family consists of two parents, a daughter, and a son. We live in a small one-bedroom apartment. My daughter has a big desk in the living room and the rest of us work on the dining room table. She leaves her desk a big mess. She has a large bench with storage in it which is full of her stuff and she leaves stuff on top of the bench and under the bench and the desk. When we ask her to clean up, she gets angry. She insists it’s her space and it’s her right to have it messy. What do you advise? —Helpless Dad Dear Helpless, There is definitely a school of thought in some families that everything has to be completely cleaned up all the time because the parents said so. But it’s a huge commitment to teach a kid to meet that expectation and to enforce it. If you want to choose that path, you can’t just tell your daughter to clean up. You have to teach her how to not make a mess in the first place, by creating systems and routines that work for her and are easy to maintain. This would probably involve some combination of getting rid of clutter and unused items, ensuring that each kind of item (pens, paper, books, etc.) has a designated home, and—this is key–that it’s as easy as possible to put things back where they belong. In my life, this involves a lot of baskets without lids, because removing the top of something is a step that will stop me from doing it. I suspect something similar is happening with your daughter’s storage bench. It’s closed, or she’s even sitting on it at the moment she has something in her hands, and this creates an obstacle when it comes to putting things away. So if there is space, a big, attractive open box or basket on the floor or even a set of baskets attached to the wall could go a long way. Sometimes you just need somewhere to throw things! You’d also need to establish some habits. “Clean up” is not specific enough. I’m thinking of something like “Every night before bedtime, we put all the papers in the paper basket and all the pens in the pen basket and all the random items in the basket that we carry around the house to put them where they belong” and “On the first Saturday of every month, we go through the contents of the bench to throw away anything you don’t need anymore.” Depending on her personality, whether she has ADHD, and if your wife is on board, this might be something you establish over a month or so, or it might be something you need to hold her hand through for the rest of her life. But the space will be clean! If you feel ready to dive into the world of clutter-clearing, minimalism, and organization and drag your daughter along (which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea considering the small space you live in), there are tons of great podcasts about this stuff that I personally find very inspiring, including this one where the host kind of yells at you to work on something around your own home while you listen. To create some excitement around this and decrease her resistance, maybe you could also invite your daughter to help you redesign her little corner so it’s a place that she really likes and enjoys keeping clean. If keeping the desk area clean proves to be a lot of work, don’t be too hard on yourself or your daughter. It’s totally normal for parents and kids to butt heads over the messiness of the kids’ space, but usually the mess is contained to a room and can at least be hidden behind a closed door. You guys are living in really tight quarters, and she doesn’t have any privacy, which really intensifies a totally typical situation. So it’s possible the solution could involve some physical tweaks that could give her her own space, instead of a whole lifestyle overhaul. How about a room divider, a curtain, or a few large plants that would block off the area so she could go ahead and be messy and you wouldn’t have to see it? Catch up on this week’s Prudie. More Advice From Slate I recently had a birthday party—the first one in years thanks to the pandemic—and I wanted a BIG, wild celebration full of fun, raucous friends for my 33rd trip around the sun. As my birthday neared and the RSVPs started rolling in, I felt some kind of a “social contact high” from the excitement and anticipation. So much so that I randomly invited a work peer named “Stella.” Truthfully, I didn’t know Stella very well—but that was about to change. 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