My Sister Is Using Magic to Try and Steal the One Thing Most Precious to Me.

Dear Prudence He’s drifting away from me and I think I know why. 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 16, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by mheim3011/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 believe my sister is doing magic to try to take my husband. Before anyone dismisses this outright, understand that I come from a culture where magic is taken seriously. I am not asking whether it exists. What I am struggling with is whether that is what I’m seeing. The problem is that I don’t have proof. What I do have is a sister who seems unusually interested in my husband. She asks about him constantly. She wants to know where he is, what he’s doing, whether we’re happy, whether we’re fighting, whether he’s stressed. When we’re all together, her attention seems fixed on him. She laughs at everything he says. She remembers tiny details about his life that even I have forgotten. On its own, maybe that wouldn’t mean much. What troubles me is the way my husband has changed. He used to be polite toward my sister, but not especially close to her. Now he brings her up in conversation when nobody else has mentioned her. He goes out of his way to defend her. If I say something as harmless as “That was a strange thing for her to do,” he reacts as though I’ve insulted him personally. A few times I’ve caught him staring off into space after talking with her. The most unsettling part is that he seems irritated with me in ways he never used to be. Small disagreements become arguments. Things that once rolled off his back now provoke a sharp response. Meanwhile, he has endless patience for my sister. Maybe there is an ordinary explanation for all of this. But from where I’m sitting, it feels as though the closer she tries to get to him, the more distant he becomes from me. I can’t shake the feeling that she wants my marriage, or at least the attention she sees my husband giving me. And because I was raised with stories of what people can do when jealousy takes hold, I can’t ignore the possibility that magic is part of it. How do you handle a situation when you can’t prove what you suspect, but every instinct tells you that someone is working against your marriage? —Something Doesn’t Feel Right Dear Doesn’t Feel Right, Assuming you don’t have a history of being super suspicious of people in your life for no reason, you should trust your intuition here. All signs point to something going on between these two, even if that something is just mutual attraction and flirtation that has not crossed a line to become an actual affair. But I do have to note that the way you’ve framed your letter is a little odd. Why is the central character and potential bad guy in it your sister, and not your husband? Why is your focus figuring out whether she is “working against your marriage” instead of figuring out whether the person who is actually in the marriage is stepping outside of it, failing to honor the vows he made, or wanting to get out of it? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that if she’s betraying you or lying to you, that’s really hurtful. But she wouldn’t be having any success if your relationship was solid and if your husband was operating with integrity. The fact that he’s treating you as if you’re irritating and being more adversarial than ever before is bad. And we know that without having to do any detective work to figure out what your sister is trying to do or what’s in her head. I imagine it’s much easier to contemplate “Is my sister being diabolical because she’s jealous?” than “Is my husband over me?” but I promise you that even if you were somehow able to give her a lie detector test and prove that her first priority was being a homewrecker, and even if you confronted her and cut her off, you wouldn’t feel settled. You’d still be left with the person who stares off into space thinking about her and has become less and less warm to you. I assume you aren’t going to end your marriage based on bad vibes alone, and that is totally understandable. If you plan to stay in it, you are going to have to do the very annoying work of taking the lead on repairing your connection with someone who doesn’t seem to care that much about it. This will mean going to your husband and telling him you’ve noticed that there’s more tension between the two of you, and that you feel he’s become more distant, so you want to work on your relationship. Obviously, a therapist would help a lot here. Hold off on accusing him of falling victim to your sister’s plan to steal him. He’ll only get defensive (and probably go straight to her to complain). 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, My friend has gone through a lot in the past year—addiction; rehab; infidelity on the part of his spouse; and a lot of therapy to try to cope with all of this. I’m supportive of him and want to be a safe space for his journey. But one thing is driving me crazy—when he communicates, he seems to be running everything through AI. I get these long missives about family patterns and systems that are at least 75 percent ChatGPT. There are clear AI patterns; plus, I ran it through Claude, which confirmed what I was seeing. I would like to talk about these issues with my friend, not exchange emails with a robot. It’s not just the irritation of communicating with a robot. It’s also that the AI seems to ramp everything up. My friend says he wants to be in communication with me and sends me texts, but the “big AI emails” are constantly threatening to cut off his family of origin and me, and go no-contact. It’s really hard to understand what is him and what is AI. How do I get this to stop and have actual conversations instead of these weird mediated exchanges? I’ve said nothing so far because I don’t want to trigger him or spook him. But I am worried about him and can’t really tell what’s going on. —Over AI Dear Over AI, Call him! I’m as phone-adverse as the next elder millennial so I get it, but if he’s your friend and you really want to know how he’s going, we have the technology for you to hear his voice in a way that’s not filtered through a chatbot. You could even be lighthearted “I know you’re taking advantage of modern technology but the chatbot emails are pretty intense! Just wanted to reach out the old school way to make sure you’re doing OK.” Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, I have three grown children and six grandchildren that live in different states. I remarried and now have a 12-year-old. I want to take a vacation with all of the kids and grandkids, but my husband refuses, saying the adult kids depend on us to watch kids, cook, etc. so it’s not really a vacation. The adult kids do like to enjoy each other’s company and rely a bit much on us, I agree, but I just want to get all of the family together at a beach rental. It would make me so happy as a mother to have everyone together on vacation. —Miss Dawn Dear Miss Dawn, Ask him, as your spouse who is supposed to support you, to help you with bringing to life your vision of having everyone in one house and helping with the kids. You don’t have to call it a vacation. Frame it as an experience that you want to have. One that is not designed for his relaxation. You two can go to an all-inclusive resort another time. That said, if there’s only time and money to do one thing a year or whatever, it’s understandable that he doesn’t want his only getaway to be labor intensive. So even though it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t want to help out, if that’s the way he really feels, the vibes will be better without putting him on babysitting duty. Tell him he can go golf while you make the memories with your grandkids—memories that he will look back at the end of his life and wish he had. OK, don’t say all that, but don’t shy away from how important this experience is to you, whether he’s an active part of it or not. Classic Prudie I have always raised my daughter to be a proud, body-positive woman. When she came back from her first year of college, there was a change in her that threw me for a loop. When she is wearing a bikini, there is at least half an inch of thick, dark pubic hair sticking out the sides and top. We are the house on the block with a pool, so now she has been hanging out with her old high school friends (male and female) with her bush sticking out. Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Dear Prudence