My Boyfriend’s Birthday Gift Would Damage My Body. He’s Insisting I Use It Anyway.

Dear Prudence I can’t believe he’s “offended” about 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? Sept 10, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by 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, My boyfriend “Jake” got me a really nice pair of ruby earrings for my birthday three weeks ago. They are beyond gorgeous, but there’s one problem—my ears aren’t pierced, and Jake wants me to have my ears pierced so I can wear them. The trouble is, I have a tendency toward developing keloid scars. Piercings can trigger them, and the last thing I need are keloided-up earlobes. I’ve offered to have the earrings made into a necklace (which I like the idea of better anyway), but Jake is acting all offended and it’s becoming a sore point. What can I do? —Exorcised Over Earrings Dear Exorcised, Assuming you told Jake about the keloid situation and he continued to push his piercing agenda, here’s what you can do: sell the earrings and use the proceeds to buy a new outfit for the first date you go on after the two of you break up. Because the way he’s behaving is ridiculous and shows a total lack of care for you. If you haven’t explained why you’re hesitant, well, I’m sorry to say I still don’t like him at all. Health condition or not, gifting earrings to a person who doesn’t want to poke holes in her earlobes, pushing her to do so, and then sulking over the proposal of a perfectly nice compromise is jerk behavior. Maybe try to play a mental trick on yourself: Pretend like you develop keloids every time someone disrespects you or disregards your wellbeing. That should give you the motivation to leave him. 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’m facing a dilemma in the medium-to-near future. My dear friends of 20+ years are also my dog sitters. We are all very picky about dog care, and they’ve taken excellent care of my dogs when I’m out of town. I keep their dogs, too, which I really enjoy. Happy dog “family.” But they are about 10 years older than me. I’m 65. You see where this is going. The wife of the family has always been flaky and not entirely dependable, but in recent years she’s been getting a bit dotty. The husband is mentally just fine but has some health issues that concern me. The day will come when I have to tell them we’re sending the dogs to someone else. They love our dogs, by the way. I fear this will be heartbreaking for them (and in truth, me too). How can I manage this inevitable future? —Greyhound Mom Dear Greyhound Mom, It’s best to make a change before your friends’ age-related limitations lead to your dog slipping out a door that’s not properly closed or eating something that makes him sick. That’s something that would be really heartbreaking for them (and you). This doesn’t have to be a really sad situation. In fact, there’s a good chance that your friends might be relieved to get a break from dogsitting as managing their own needs becomes more and more taxing. Over the next few months, maybe there will be a time when your planned travel coincides with an illness or procedure for one of them. Take that opportunity to say, “I’m going to let you recover from cataract surgery without Muffin underfoot” and explain that you’re using a backup sitter. Then, add, “As soon as I’m back, the two of us will come over to bring you dinner or anything else you might need.” At that visit, break the news, with a positive spin and a plan for a continued relationship: “This was so much fun. I know you two have a lot to handle with the health stuff and you’re at a point in life when you don’t need to be bending over to pick up extra poop. How does this sound: From now on, I’ll leave the heavy dog lifting to my neighbor who could really use the extra cash, and we’ll come over to hang out or can meet up at the dog park to just enjoy the fun parts.” Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, No one likes my sister-in-law, “Sasha.” But I also feel sorry for her, because one of the reasons she’s so hard to get along with is her intense anxiety. She hates having company over, but my brother wants to be the home we all gather at. So he invites us, then she sends out passive-aggressive emails about how there’s no parking, or that it doesn’t matter what time they invite us for because “no one ever gets here on time.” Clearly, they don’t talk to each other about plans, timing, food, etc. Sometimes when we show up, she’s in the bedroom sulking. If her dog bites someone (more than once, and yes, it’s really “her” dog), she gets mad at the person who got bit. There’s a long back story that partly explains her hostility. (She had an affair with my brother when he was married to his first wife, whom we all still really like. She hates that we’re still friends with wife #1. But that was 20 years ago, so you’d think we’d be well past that drama.) But she has said some incredibly rude and mean things to my grown kids, to my other brother’s wife and to my parents. So despite feeling bad about her struggles with anxiety, with weird family dynamics, and with sobriety (she’s been sober for a couple of years now), we still don’t like her. On top of all that, she’s openly mean to my brother (her husband). I’m trying to do my part to be publicly supportive on the family group chat, and not gossip. His kids with his first wife limit their time at these family gatherings and tell their dad and step-mom that they can visit separately, but not together, when they travel to see the grandkids. My brother is a jerk for not being a better husband to her, and not communicating honestly about his desire to have big family gatherings. But I can’t get in the middle of helping them communicate with each other—it doesn’t work. Now I see my niece trying to step forward and be the facilitator. We have a big deal birthday party coming up, with lots of mixed messaging about timing, food, parking. My niece (oldest daughter syndrome) sent a separate email to me and my other brother’s wife, trying to clear things up. I feel so bad for her! She shouldn’t have to take on this mess. I don’t know that I have a role, other than to meditate, watch my own boundaries, and leave early. But I am sad that my brother, despite his flaws, doesn’t get to have the big happy family gatherings he so desperately desires. —We Don’t Like Aunt Sasha Dear Don’t Like, “I don’t know that I have a role other than to meditate, watch my own boundaries and leave early” is the kind of sentence that threatens my job security. You already have this figured out. Sasha sounds like a disaster on multiple levels, and you clearly don’t need me to explain how little power you have to change that. The only thing I’d add is that your brother may not be having the happy family gatherings he desires, but he’s having the family gatherings he deserves. Maybe “deserves” is a little too harsh, but he’s living with the natural consequences of choosing a spouse with this personality type, and entering the relationship under circumstances that were never going to lead to warm fuzzy feelings for everyone. I feel for your niece, too. Why don’t you reach out to her, and without vilifying her mother, let her know that you recognize how tough the family dynamics are and how hard she’s working to accommodate everyone? You can offer the perspective that many families have these kinds of issues, that it’s really on the adults to figure things out, and that you’re available if she ever wants to vent — or to get together without all the other personalities. Classic Prudie Three years ago, my hair turned a certain shade of silver, and from that point forward, about 1 in every 20 women I work with, especially those in their early 20s, started making passes at me. Our group of eight college interns decided to have lunch with me on Thursdays, which I agreed to for mentorship purposes, but they seemed to be in competition to get my attention, doing stuff like lifting up a shirt to show me tattoos, texting me vacation pictures in bathing suits or bikinis, or trying to give me a back rub (I do not want to be touched in the office)… Advice Dear Prudence