My Ex-Girlfriend’s Parents Wanted Her to Leave Our Small Town and Make It Big. I Was the Enemy. Now They’ve Realized Their Mistake.

Dear Prudence I don’t know how to feel. 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? Aug 31, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos 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 parents were best friends with “Matthew” and “Delilah.” They had a daughter, “Bea” (an only child), who was the same age. We grew up together. As we got into our late teenage years and early 20s, we seriously dated and even talked about marriage after she graduated from college. I stayed in our small, Midwestern town to work for my family business. She was only two hours away, so I visited her regularly and vise versa. At the start of her senior year, she said the long distance wasn’t working out; it wasn’t me, it was her, and we were growing apart, and she broke up with me. I was heartbroken. I was nice to her when our paths crossed, and I moved on with my life by marrying a local girl and starting a family. After graduation, she moved to a large metro area on the East Coast, married, and had several kids. My parents passed away several years ago, and I only occasionally saw Matthew and Delilah until recently, when they moved into the same assisted living facility as my aunt. My family and I almost always stop to say “hi” to them when we visit my aunt. As we talked about our families, theirs has gotten darker and more depressing. Bea has not been back to visit in two years. They haven’t seen any of their grandkids in over five years. And Bea will soon be a grandmother (Matthew and Delilah will be great-grandparents), and there are no plans for them to see the baby. Bea lives near her husband’s family, and they are her priority in life. This past weekend, Matthew and Delilah asked me to visit them by myself. They ended up apologizing to me. They were the ones behind Bea’s breakup with me because they felt Bea had so much more potential than to be stuck in a small town (with me) with minimal career opportunities for her. They got what they wanted: a high profile/high paying career for Bea. The price? Work and her husband’s family left little, if any, time for them. There are so many thoughts running through my head. Why did they decide to tell me this? The “what could have been” if Bea and I stayed together (she was my first love, and a little piece of my heart still aches for her). The anger toward Matthew and Delilah for what they did. How do I deal with this information? —Ex-Girlfriend’s Parents Let Me Know Their Secret Dear Ex-Girlfriend’s Parents Let Me Know Their Secret, What you learned is unsettling, but perhaps not as unsettling as you’re making it out to be. Yes, Matthew and Delilah encouraged Bea to break up with you. But you are infusing that choice with way too much power. The story all three of you seem to be telling yourselves is that if they hadn’t stepped in, you and Bea would be happily married and living in your hometown, brightening Matthew and Delilah’s lives by making regular visits to the assisted living facility with all your adorable kids. That’s possible, but there are a lot of other possibilities too: You and Bea could have broken up for any number of reasons. You two could have decided to move away. The dynamics or personality traits that make Bea feel comfortable having little contact with her parents (which I’m going to go out on a limb and guess might have something to do with their tendency to be controlling) would probably limit her closeness to them no matter who she’d married. Plus, the very fact that she was willing to follow her parents’ advice to break up with you suggests to me that there may have been some cracks in the foundation of your relationship. People don’t generally say “OK, Mom and Dad” in response to advice to break up with someone they truly love and want to spend their life with. I’m not saying she didn’t love you. But if she didn’t feel sure enough about you to dismiss her parents’ concerns, that should tell you something about her level of commitment. Your sadness that you didn’t get to have the relationship you wanted with Bea is real, and so is Matthew and Delilah’s yearning for a deeper bond with their daughter. But you shouldn’t torture yourself by feeling so sure that these things are connected. 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 getting married in a few weeks, and my brother is planning to fly in on the morning of my wedding. This surprised me, since we have a good relationship and he has known the wedding date for over a year and a half. He is not planning on attending the rehearsal dinner, and I’m worried that if his flight is delayed, he might be late for my wedding or even miss it completely. I’m not sure whether I should tell him that his plan worries me, and potentially risk a fight between us. Should I talk to him about my feelings, or just accept that he has made his travel plans? —Stressed Sister Dear Stressed Sister, It’s worth discussing this with your brother in a low-pressure way. He’s likely made this choice because of obligations at home (work or kids), financial constraints (maybe the early Saturday was much cheaper?), or youthful optimism and a lack of experience with air travel nightmares and how they can ruin plans. Say something like this: “Hey, I wanted to reach out because Mom told me you’re flying in on Saturday morning. If it’s at all possible on your end, I would love for you to be there for the rehearsal dinner or even fly in late Friday night just to make sure travel delays don’t make you miss the wedding! If you are open to it, I would be happy to help pay for the flight change. But I know you’re juggling your own schedule, so if not, I understand, and I will just cross my fingers for good weather. Sorry to micromanage your travel. I just love you and really want you to be there!” Prudie Wants to Hear From You! Readers often have great suggestions for our letter writers, occasionally disagree with a point Prudie makes, or simply want to provide some additional advice. Each week, Prudie will be replying to some of these comments and suggestions from readers, which will be featured on the site on Fridays for Slate Plus members. Write to us! Or submit a question here. Dear Prudence, I imagine you get a lot of letters about people who sing their spouse’s praises, except for one minor issue that then turns out to be a litany of episodes of abuse/cruelty/etc. This is not that letter. I truly love my husband to the moon and back, and he is an extraordinary human, great partner, and the love of my life. My (entirely manageable but hopefully fixable) problem is that we have very mismatched disgust thresholds. His tolerance is very high, which means not much fazes him and he’s fine with all manner of smells, tastes, and sights. I, on the other hand, have extremely sensitive senses, a very, very low bar for disgust, and a real distaste for even talking about things like normal bodily functions. With young kids around, I obviously deal with my share of gross things (and talking about gross things, usually at the dinner table), but I can set limits for them; plus, for some reason, I don’t have the same visceral reaction with them as I do with everyone else. My husband tries exceedingly hard to accommodate my sensitivities, and I love him even more for that. But I would really like to raise my disgust tolerance. Some part of it is biological and innate (hence the lesser reaction to my kids), but I know some part is socialized/learned and fixable. I’m fine with my current standards of cleanliness, which are reasonable and not obsessive, so I don’t want to change everything, but my life would be easier if, for example, I could just be chill about things like pooping, farting, etc. (I kid you not, just writing that sentence made me recoil.) Any advice? —Grossed Out Dear Grossed Out, I love that you and your husband are both doing your best and that you want to do even better. You’re right that it was refreshing for me to get a letter with no villain, and I think it’s great that you want to take responsibility for your side of this. I wish you’d said more about how your low tolerance for gross stuff is affecting your daily life. Are you constantly anxious that your husband will slip up and mention something that disgusts you? Are you fleeing the house when you see him walk toward the bathroom? Does it ruin your day if he blows his nose in front of you? Answers to those kinds of questions would have helped me understand exactly how urgent this is. Since I don’t have them, I’ll assume that your husband is doing such a good job accommodating your sensitivity that you don’t often have to confront things that freak you out, but you wish he didn’t have to work as hard to make you comfortable. And you also want to avoid the bad feelings you have when you have to do something like type the words “pooping, farting, etc.” In a Psychology Today article about exactly the issue you’re dealing with—what to do when disgust sensitivity interferes with relationships—Jennifer L Keluskar, a clinical psychologist, offers a few tips for building disgust tolerance. I think you already have three of them covered: tying your desire to increase your disgust tolerance to your values, talking about how you’re feeling when you’re disgusted and why, and being open-minded when it comes to other people’s experiences with disgust. A tactic you may not have tried is to pair the feeling of disgust with something pleasant. Here’s what Keluskar wrote about that: One strategy used to help children with food aversion is to have them play with food, thereby pairing it with fun. Borrowing from that technique, I cope with anticipated disgust by pairing it with a competing (pleasant) sensory experience. For example, I suck on candy when I use public bathrooms. This is calming and gets my mind off bad odors. Now, I don’t know if I would personally want to eat in a public bathroom, especially if I were prone to disgust (or ever), but you get the idea. If you share my reaction, maybe you could listen to your favorite song or something similar. Keluskar also mentions a new way of thinking about disgust that could possibly provide you with some relief. “I have found it helpful to give disgust a prosocial twist by showing gratitude for resources that allow me to live hygienically,” she wrote. “Understanding the discomfort of disgust has increased my empathy for those whose dire circumstances render them unable to avoid it as easily as I can.” So maybe if your husband slips up and begins to describe the symptoms he experienced after eating contaminated bagged salad, you could take a moment to appreciate that those symptoms will be contained to a bathroom with a fan and a door that closes, and that you have plenty of soap, water, and hand sanitizer. Try it out! It might keep you from spiraling. Professional help wouldn’t hurt either. A lot of the information I found about treatments mentioned a fear of contamination (which is often linked to an OCD diagnosis). I can’t diagnose you, and I’m not sure you experience that. But it’s safe to assume that a therapist would have some ideas about how you can supplement what your husband is already doing by figuring out how to make life feel a little bit less disgusting to you. Classic Prudie You know how some people are fine, absolutely unobjectionable, but you just don’t click with them? You don’t dislike them, but you don’t much like them either—you just don’t think about them much at all. That’s how I’ve always felt about my sister-in-law, “Janice.” She was kind of dull and a bit smug, but my brother loved her. I passed her the gravy at Thanksgiving and was glad I didn’t have to spend the rest of the year with her. Well, now I’m in love with her, and while it’s not directly connected, her marriage to my brother is in trouble. Advice Dating and Relationships Dear Prudence