It’s not something I would break up with him over — we have a great sex life together and are very creative about satisfying each other. But, it does concern me for the future — and I have to admit, there is a selfish part of me that does want him to be able to orgasm while we’re having intercourse. It feels like a “dirty little secret,” something that I can’t really talk to my friends about, because any time I’ve brought up something similar, they say it’s weird or strange. I try not to attach stigma to it, since this has become more or less normal for me — but I’ve generally had to change the whole way I look at sex. I sometimes miss that moment that a guy (of course, with all possible forms of protection in place) reaches that moment, and then pulls you into his arms, breathlessly. We girls always get kind of a thrill out of that moment. I’ve learned to reframe that thrill into the moment where a deftly applied hand job or blow job does the trick, but it’s just not the same.

My best friend, who is the only one I’ve confided in about this, has said that I should just hang in there, be supportive of him, and if it really bothers me, ask him to talk to his therapist about it. I’m scared of pushing him away or creating more anxiety for him.

I’d like to think that there’s something that can be done for him — if nothing else, if he’s “the one,” I’d like us to be able to make babies the old-fashioned way. And I know he does, too. He’s told me so.

Sincerely,
(insert clever name here)

Dear Insert Clever Name Here,

Perhaps the reason he becomes so tense during intercourse is that he is overly concerned about being a competent and efficient love machine. You say that he is extremely conscientious and skilled and so forth; it’s possible he’s a sexual overachiever, to whom the desired result you describe may represent a kind of failure. He may also have had some unsatisfying or traumatic experiences of rejection early on that he never wishes to repeat, and so he has resolved to be an excellent lover in all these other ways but has sacrificed the opportunity to let go, to surrender, at this crucial moment. He may also have some deep fear of making you pregnant.

Or it could be a thousand other things that you and I can’t even imagine, things only doctors and therapists know about. There’s probably a Latin name for it.

You and he have been together only a few months, you say. He may not feel safe yet; he may still fear that if he isn’t the 60-minute man, that if he doesn’t provide the deluxe all-purpose detail and finish job, that you won’t stick around. If it is indeed an issue of trust, or fear of abandonment, if you stick together a while longer he may get comfortable enough with you for this to happen.

The sad thing is, when he becomes comfortable, he may get lazy, and then you’ll be writing to me saying the sex used to be fantastic and now it’s getting boring.

Meanwhile, if it’s really weighing on you, I would suggest that you first learn as much as possible about the issue from outside sources — books, scholarly articles, etc. But if you absolutely feel you must discuss it with him, I would start by asking him to talk about it with his therapist, and ask him what he or she says.

You know, it sounds like everything is just great between you two, and it would be a shame to get all twisted up about this. So go easy on it.

Dear Cary,

I’m a 34-year-old never-married male, living and working in a Midwestern college town. I earn a decent living in IT administration and have settled into a comfortable routine, taking the occasional vacation to break the monotony. My problem: I can’t seem to meet any single women my age.

There are literally thousands of gorgeous nubile undergraduates about, but in general I find them to be vacuous, naive, selfish, arrogant, or all of the above. Also, they tend to see me as a dirty old man. (I take exception to the “old” bit.) Women my own age are nearly universally married, engaged, or living-with.

Part of the problem is the transient nature of the town; people come here to go to school, they associate primarily with people they meet in class, and then leave when they’ve got their degree. At work, I’ve watched the most attractive women in the building marry their longtime sweethearts; these people seem to have the most perfect blissful relationships, there’s not a single crappy one I can even try to bust up. (Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider this an option, but hey, I’m getting pretty bored.)

I’ve tried the bar scene, but they come in two categories: massive sports bars crammed with binge-drinking undergraduates, or smaller, pub-style places where grad students huddle around a table and discuss their classes and professors and don’t talk to anyone else except their waitperson. I’m not much of a joiner, but I took a yoga class last year hoping to meet some women. It worked: I met married ones.

Married women adore me; they generally think I’m good-looking, stable, smart and funny; and they frequently try to set me up with their single friends. This always goes disastrously; either I don’t like them or they don’t like me, right off the bat. Personal ads are just depressing. I think personal chemistry is paramount, so these blind situations have never ever worked for me.

“Sex and the City” seems like a dream world to me, where attractive 30-somethings are actually single and looking. But perhaps that’s my answer: I need to hit the big city. Chicago is just a few hours away, but I’ve done the long-distance thing before, and it was only frustration and pain.

Spinning My Wheels

Dear Spinning,

When a man can’t find any eligible women in his village, he leaves his village on a quest. He goes to Chicago, the windy city of broad shoulders and blues and graduate students in economics. You should move to Chicago. That’s probably where all the women went after they graduated, anyway. They’re waiting for you at the train station, all in a row, with their pretty hatboxes and their stockings with those seams that run up behind the knee and their espadrilles and lipstick and lifetime earnings expectations.

Stop being so damn comfortable. No wonder your married women friends like you. You’re so settled, you probably remind them of a husband, safe and harmless. But no single woman wants a man who has already settled into a routine. Routines are for after you are captured. You must be a man on a quest. You must have a purpose in life. Make your purpose in life to move to Chicago and find a wife.

That should keep you entertained for years to come. And it will be a good story to tell. When you meet a woman in Chicago and she asks you, as she will, what brings you to Chicago, you can tell her, “I’ve come to Chicago in search of a wife.”

That should make life very entertaining indeed.

Dear Cary,

I’m 25. Two weeks before my 20th birthday I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; it got progressively more annoying, and I’ve spent most of my out-of-the-house time in a wheelchair for the last three years. This was damn hard to deal with, I’ll admit, lots of time in the counseling office at college, but I’m actually doing better than I would have expected even without the extra added bullshit of a major illness. I have a job I like, a fantastic boyfriend, decent apartment, cute cat.

My only problem, and this might sound really petty, is that people in wheelchairs aren’t sexy. Now, I’ve never thought of myself as sexy or even particularly attractive, but there’s something kind of nice about thinking that someone somewhere sees you on the street and thinks you’re cute. And I know the boyfriend thinks I’m attractive, tells me all the time, far more compliments than I’m comfortable with, so I shouldn’t be complaining in the first place. But when I’m in my chair, wheeling my ass around NYC, I can’t help but feel completely asexual, and that’s not a good thing to feel. I’m young and thin and I’ve been told reasonably attractive and funny and such, but I feel like I don’t exist.

So, I dunno. Any thoughts? If you have any brilliant ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Nothing Cute to Sign Off With

Dear Nothing Cute,

What is this sexiness that you don’t feel as you’re wheeling your ass around New York? Is it a feeling you used to get because of how men looked at you, that told you they desire you, and thus that you exist? To live in someone else’s mind as something he wishes to possess, or as a symbol of something he wishes to possess, is indeed a kind of existence, but it is existence that depends on the watcher, the follower, the gazer. It is also a kind of power over them, though limited and dependent, because of the value they place on what they see and desire, because of what they might give you in order to possess you, to experience your sexiness directly.

But the power and dependency of being seen and desired is not the only kind of power. There is some other power and sense of existence that does not depend on any other people, but it must be found inside.

I would say that it is possible for someone to exist even though people confer no value on her, but it requires one to turn inward long enough to cultivate an enduring love of self. You must cultivate a tender sense of awe about yourself, so that in your own presence you beam the way a satisfied wife beams in the presence of her husband. Then you have displaced that empty dependency on the kindness of strangers with a limitless source of amusement and pleasure that is yours and yours alone.

And then, because you seem so complete, because there is a kind of invisible fire in you, then people cannot help but notice it and find it sexy.

Now, I know that’s abstract, so as a practical matter I would also urge you, while you are busy cultivating this inner fire, to join an organization of other people who use wheelchairs. I think that would help you very much. You may not wish to do it. You may wish to accentuate the differences rather than the similarities. But I think you will find it helpful.

Dear Cary,

I met this man four years ago, when I first moved to a new town and was looking for a place to live. We were good friends for a while, then we slept together. Two days later we go out for a drink and he says that he doesn’t want to be with me, doesn’t want to marry me, doesn’t want to have babies with me.

I’d never thought about that, but I said OK and then we went back to being friends. This pattern continued for about a year, with a hiccup when he met somebody else (which didn’t amount to anything): We’d get together, then he’d panic and dump me. After that we got closer — I really loved him — and eventually I moved into his place, a room in a shared house. This was a disaster, no room for my stuff, no privacy, lots of mess. We fought all the time.

After getting some counseling I pulled myself together and got another job. Then, I went to London for a couple of days and he goes out in my absence, takes Ecstasy and gets off with a work colleague. I found out about this soon afterward and he starts to stay out all night at her place, leaving me in our room, in bed, alone. So, distraught, I moved out to some friends for a while and tried to concentrate on my new job and getting a place to live.

He came over to help me paint my new room and we ended up back in bed. So this goes into a year of him going to and fro between me and the other woman and me ending up distraught, a total mess, having panic attacks, unable to drive my car. She generally takes precedence over me in his affections and time, but each time I try to cut him off, he hounds me with e-mail and phone messages until we’re back together. He says that he has little in common with her and prefers my company, but praises her matching underwear, social connections and thinner body. I met a couple of other people during this time, but nothing ever happened, as I was too wrapped up in this man.

I slept with a work colleague on a couple of occasions, but it was a mistake. I told him about this and he went ballistic and very jealous, even though he’s mostly with her. Then she moves back home (she is from Europe). I’m really happy about this and he says that it’s over be between them, but she continues to write (I read some of the letters lying around his room, which was a bad mistake), visit and phone. Each time she visits, or he visits her, I’m totally devastated as he drops me like a stone, but then afterward he makes a big effort to win me back.

Then, earlier this year he hangs around for a bit, unsure about the future. I spend ages being supportive of him and trying to encourage him to do what he really wants to do — he hated his last job anyway and wanted to change careers. He even asks me to buy a house with him — as a business venture — but I decline as I know he’s still seeing the other woman. So he decides that he wants to travel and goes away to Africa for a month. Then he comes back and we go on holiday together. She finds out about this — we have some mutual friends — and according to his story dumps him. So then he moves back home to Scotland and we have three or four months of living apart, spending as much time together as possible visiting or going away together, getting on really well. Then, as is his dream, he decides to go and travel the world by himself, not at any point asking me to go (I don’t have the money to give up my job and travel anyway). In the meantime, my mum has offered to help me buy a house, so I’ve just bought my own place with a great deal of help from my parents.

So we’ve been e-mailing each other (he’s in the Far East) most days and talking and keeping in touch. He says that he misses me all the time and wishes I were there. This is tearing me up, as I love him, but I don’t trust him at all. I think it’s only a matter of time before he meets somebody else, though he claims to be only thinking of a future with me and that he’s changed. He’s going to New Zealand and wants to live there, perhaps permanently. I’m trying to sort my house out, working away, trying to pay off my considerable debts from postgraduate study, trying to work out want I want to do next. I haven’t been totally honest in my relationship with him either. I’ve seen (and slept with) a few other people this year — four to be exact. My ex is an extremely jealous and possessive person and would be devastated if he knew of my infidelities to him. He comes from an extremely messed-up family background (alcohol, divorce, infidelity, child abuse) and I think this explains, though does not excuse, some of his behavior.

He’s also the first person I’ve met who I click with totally: We get each other’s jokes, have the same interests, love to do things together, and we have house-shakingly great sex. We also fight and disagree all the time, but that adds to the attraction. But last week, after a great deal of heart searching, I decided that I should stop having any contact with him and e-mailed to tell him so. I’m 31 and I’d like to meet somebody to settle down with and have babies. I’m sick of all the mess and the hurt that I’ve been through in the last four years. I don’t want to go to New Zealand to live, I’m happy here. But (and most of your letters seem to be about the “buts” in life) I miss him terribly already. I feel empty, but I feel free. Should I be practical and rational and tough and stick this out and hope to meet somebody else who’s more, erm, functional? Should I e-mail him and demand that he come home? Should I just e-mail him, so we can be friends and see what happens? Should I be honest with him? I’m scared that I’ll never meet anybody else that I have the same feelings about, but I’m also scared that he’s the wrong person and that if we stay together, I’ll be unhappy.

Bereft in England

Dear Bereft,

What kind of unhappiness do you prefer? Do you prefer the kind of unhappiness that makes you scream with rage and break windows, or the kind of unhappiness that makes you wander the moors, bleakly wondering if you are alive or dead? The unhappiness of rage leaves no doubt as to your existence but often brings harm to others. The unhappiness of melancholy, or depression, on the other hand, is a kind of emotional suicide, an abnegation of desire, a turning away.

Choosing your brand of unhappiness is a way of beginning to think about happiness. The happiness that is the opposite of rage is ebullience. The happiness that is the opposite of melancholy is serenity. Which appeals to you? You could swing between both. In fact you probably are doing that already. Perhaps what has occasioned this letter is that the rage has tired you out and now you are ready for depression. I would guess that ebullience would appeal to you, and that therefore it is probably what you most despise, and why you would never marry a soccer player.

Does this make any sense? Are you beginning to see that you are at war with yourself?

Being at war with yourself, you must know your enemy. I think that the enemy in your case is the woman who is tired of the excitement and would like nothing more than to sit calmly and drink a cup of tea with her mum. That is such a boring and uninspired thing to do that somewhere in your battle manual you have instructions to destroy that boring and uninspired person, because she is not desirable to the kind of man who is writing you letters from New Zealand. So you have been systematically destroying that woman, in order to keep him happy.

Of course, the obvious truth is that if you win the war against yourself, you die and are thus disqualified. So you and the boring woman you hate have to find a way to peacefully coexist. She does not like this guy who keeps betraying her. You, of course, betray her as well when you accept his betrayal, but she accepts that from you, because you are her twin against which a war cannot be won without death.

The more I talk about you, the more you begin to sound like Sylvia Plath. But she would know what to do. She would go write some poetry and then kill herself again.

So please, don’t kill yourself. Just accept the fact that you have had enough excitement for one lifetime and that it’s time for you to settle down with your mum and drink a cup of tea.

I’m talking to people who feel like everyone else in the room is just a little bit cleaner than they are. I’m talking to those who don’t even admire the rest of the people in the room, though it might be nice to be a little cleaner. I’m talking to the dirty people. I’m talking to the people who walked in late and missed the lecture on rolling closing costs into the loan amount.

I’m no expert. I’m another bozo. But, listen, the cab driver next door bought a place and moved to Hercules last week. He was a nice guy, a handsome, soft-spoken, Middle-Eastern looking guy. A few months before he moved to Hercules, he stopped me out front on the sidewalk one morning and he said, “You bought this house, right?” I said yeah, I think I did, kind of sheepish about it but also eager to tell him yeah, I’m a bozo and I could do it so you could probably do it, too. I told him what I’m about to tell you, and then a few months later, there he is with his girlfriend, packing up the rented pickup truck and moving to their place in Hercules that they bought. I was happy all day.

I didn’t really give him any concrete advice. I gave him more of a pep talk. I said, “Sure, you can do it, and you should!” The pep talk sounds optimistic, but it is based on the assumption that the world is full of bloodthirsty people who don’t give two shits about you. It is based on the assumption that this fundamental awfulness in the world is a good thing and is what will allow you to buy a house.

The way I see it, and, like I say, I’m no expert and you probably smell better than me right now, is that it’s to your advantage that the world is full of evil people who don’t give two shits about you. Because all they want is your money and your house. If they think they might get some money from you, or a free house, or both, they will sit down across from you at a table and hand you a pen and say, sign this, X that, initial that, for an hour or so and then the county recorder will record a deed with your name on it and you will own a house.

They would love to see you default on a mortgage. That’s how I look at it. Because then they get the house. They only lend you 80 percent of its value to begin with, and then they get the whole 100 percent house back. How can they lose? They act like foreclosures are sad and shameful and a big headache but I kind of doubt it. I have a feeling that banks like it when people screw up and, oh, what a shame, they have to come and take your house away and sell it all over again for more money.

So to people who say they don’t think they could get a mortgage, I say there’s always somebody out there willing to lend you money if you sign something that says if you can’t pay it they get the house. I know it’s more complicated than that, and it may actually be a lot of work for banks to take your house away from you and sell it all over again for a much higher price when they could have just had your money coming in every month for doing nothing, but seeing it this way keeps my spirits up and makes me feel lean and youthful. It’s part of my pep talk.

Here is how we ended up buying a house. We were renting out by the beach. We were in one of two units in a two-unit domicile not protected by rent control in the late 1990s when we noticed little bubbles forming on the surface of the real estate market — like the bubbles that form in a pot of water right before you put the pasta in — and we started to feel like vermicelli right before it goes in the water. It was annoying to the point of we couldn’t sleep. We thought we remembered seeing For Rent signs all over the city but that seemed like a long time ago.

Suddenly every sidewalk was blocked by Volkswagen Jettas, which came to symbolize the affluent and arrogant youth who were pouring into town to build the World Wide Web. Nothing was for rent and we couldn’t sleep so I felt the way you feel when you’re out surfing and you’re paddling out but you’re not quite out far enough and a big wave is coming and you just think “Oh, shit,” and you know you have to either paddle faster, really, really faster, and risk getting out of breath just when the wave hits you, or get a big deep breath now and dive down deep and hold on.

Actually, in the water, I just dive down and hold on because I’m lazy and it’s rather cool and pleasant down there even while you’re being batted around by tons of water, but be that as it may, for some reason, I guess because with the real estate market starting to bubble, I knew if I dove down under the real estate market and held on, I’d come up on the street like a piece of boiled, homeless pasta in a wetsuit. I decided shit, fuck it, my daddy bought a house, my sister bought a house, all these hardworking fashion-negative Chinese people all around me who had the good sense to flee their Godforsaken failed Berkeley of a country have bought houses, so I imagine I, with part of a graduate degree and hundreds of years of equity in my Protestant Americanism, can buy a house.

So I got that book “Home Buying for Dummies.” I read it yada yada no big whoop, but being the type who is looking for an angle, I saw in the back an inspector’s report and the book said he was absolutely the best inspector and he lived in my town of San Fran so shit, who cares, I called him up.

So many people are in the phone book it’s amazing. You can just call them up. Hell, they want you to call them up because they’re always thinking maybe they can make some money off you. So I called him up and I said I saw all about him in the book and he sounded great and I was thinking of having our place inspected by him and blah blah blah we had a conversation.

Advice: Have conversations. Just have regular conversations with people. It leads to things. Other advice: Do things differently from other people. If all the people are going through that one door, try the other door and see if you can come out inside the office, behind the desk, and act like Columbo then, patting your pockets for your glasses, saying excuse me.

For some reason he referred us to a buyer’s agent. She turned out to make all the difference.

Next week: The buyer’s agent: Like having your own personal real estate pit bull.

Recently, the boyfriend took a vacation to another country without even telling her he was going. That plus several suspicious “online chat” sessions with other women led her to her last straw. She decided to move back, finish her degree, and start over. Now she has been back three days and has been constantly talking with her boyfriend, and yes, folks, is on the verge of returning to him.

In my view, she’s idolizing an inferior partner out of insecurity and should just make a break and start over, so that she has the opportunity at least to have a career, a normal husband, and kids (all of which she says she wants).

I’m afraid now that my anger and dismay could seep into the advice-giving, and that might scare her into returning. I’ve spent a lot of time coaching her to make this move forward in life, and now I feel frustrated that it was for nothing. I’ve also fallen into the trap of trashing the boyfriend that she keeps going back to. I’ve tried to get her to talk with a counselor who would be neutral, to help her sort things out — I don’t think she will.

How do you stand by and watch a loved one waste precious time in their life? Do you?

Not My Sister’s Keeper

Dear Not Her Keeper,

It’s painful to watch people you love suffer and make mistakes. It’s especially painful when it seems avoidable, when it seems that if they only had some good advice, if they could just step back and see the situation clearly, they’d stop. But that’s the trap: People screw up on purpose. They just don’t call it screwing up. They call it living their life.

Maybe she sticks with this guy because she believes that if it weren’t for her he’d be screwing up much worse. Maybe she’s trying to save him from himself because she loves him. She could plausibly have learned that behavior in your family. By trying to fix her, you may be doing the same thing she is doing. To answer your question, your role in this situation should be one of loving but determinedly hands-off sisterhood. Yes, it is a little arrogant to assume you know what’s best for her. People have to make their own mistakes. Sometimes they have to do that their whole lives. When do you give up on giving advice? When it’s been given. Which means, definitely, by now at least. The same advice given over and over is no longer advice. It’s a hammer. It just happens to be made out of advice.

Think about what you really feel toward your sister, the person. Don’t divide her up into the sister that you love and the sister who’s screwing up. It’s all the same sister. It’s possible, if you get really honest with yourself about it, that you are really angry toward your sister, or that you don’t really like your sister that much. You love her of course, but you don’t like her, at least not now. But that may be too hard to admit, so your hostility toward your sister comes out as assistance to the bad person who is screwing up, not to your sister the whole person.

It may be that you are actually quite pissed off at her for wasting your time. It may be that you have lost respect for her because of her repeated failures to do the reasonable thing. You may even feel, deep down, if you can admit it, angry at her because she reflects poorly on you.

I am suggesting that our noble efforts to help people we are close to who are screwing up can sometimes mask deeper feelings of superiority and contempt that are not so charitable. But if you can navigate through your conflicting feelings to a point where you let go of your judgments and just love her as she is, maybe you can go to her and tell her honestly that you think she’s screwing up but you don’t care, that you love her to death and that’s all. Just tell her if she ever wants your advice again, or your help, that you will help her or give her advice. But until she asks you for your advice, you’re just going to love her and leave it at that.

Then go to the Hawaii store, buy her a lei, and wave goodbye as she flies back to the islands.

Dear Cary,

I am a 32-year-old woman, attractive, in great shape, well-educated and traveled, with a professional career, an active social life, no debt and my own home. In other words, I am a decent catch. The problem? I haven’t met any men in the past several years that I am even a tiny bit attracted to, or when I have, they’ve been taken. I enjoy my freedom and always have things to do. But now that I am closing in on three years without a single relationship, I am starting to feel like a freak. I slept with one person at the two-year mark of celibacy, mostly just to feel like a normal person again. That resulted in such a negative entanglement that I decided I really needed to wait for something good to come along. The irony of all this is, I enjoy having sex (from what I remember of it).

Should I feel weird about this lack of action in my life? Would a guy think it is weird that I haven’t been with anyone in such a long period of time?

Also, do you think my 30s are going to be difficult? It seems like all my friends are married or getting married, and I’m worried that I am going to become isolated, at least until people hit their 40s and start getting divorced.

The Reluctant Celibate

Dear Reluctant Celibate,

Here’s how you know when something is wrong with you: Something hurts really bad inside. You stay up all night crying and pounding on the wall. You get drunk and slash your wrists. You’re sitting on a bus screaming the name of some long-dead boyfriend. You disrupt a party with a disjointed story about your dad and the doll that he was going to buy you and never did. You cut all your clothes into little pieces, and your best friends try to have you committed, and you are no longer welcome at your local bar because you’ve pulled the fire alarm one too many times.

That’s how you know something is wrong with you. On the other hand, here is how you know when everything is OK: You are a 32-year-old woman, attractive, in great shape, well-educated and traveled, with a professional career, an active social life, no debt and your own home.

Sure, you’re a little lonely and occasionally horny, but who isn’t? That’s normal. You’re a little insecure about your social status and how others perceive you. You’re probably concerned about the future, about maintaining close ties with others, about growing old alone. Again, those are normal fears. That doesn’t mean there’s anything weird about you.

Now face it: Not every woman gets a man. There aren’t enough men to go around, for one thing. Most of them aren’t that good anyway. It’s just statistics. Fifty percent of men are below average. Some women will settle for basically a dick and a mouth and call it a man. Some will just wait it out unless they can get one of the good ones. Like you say, maybe you wait until everyone’s getting divorced and get one on the rebound. I have a friend who made a career of marrying men and wouldn’t marry one until he’d been broken in by some other woman. Maybe, if you wait around for one to come loose, you’ll get one who doesn’t even pay child support.

But here is the part where we talk about you, where I skate on thin ice and try to get at something more primal that goes on between people. You sound so independent, so competent, and so fundamentally unconcerned that there’s something almost — speaking from a man’s point of view — almost hermetically perfect about you. Perhaps you have become so self-contained, so self-sufficient, that men do not feel any urgency about becoming part of your life.

Men are like firemen. They jump on the truck when there’s trouble, but the rest of the time they sit around the station house eating and playing cards. Men respond to situations where they can be of service and make a difference. We admire women who are competent, but we are attracted to women with problems. So if you want a man, get some problems.

They don’t have to be monumental problems. It could be as simple as not knowing how to fix a faucet or hang a picture. Get some problems that require the attributes you like in a man. Maybe some problems that require strength. Strength is a nice attribute in a man. If you like a man, ask him to hang a picture for you. Don’t tell him you need something hung. That’s too obvious. Just get him up on a chair, arms raised, with a hammer, nails and some twisted wire. That could lead somewhere.

Dear Cary,

I’ve seriously begun to question if my love of being single is just an avoidance tactic. I have trust issues, minor neuroses and an independent streak that would turn the Boston Tea Party green with envy. I’m a returning undergrad at 25, a refugee from the dot-com fallout, and currently living with five other undergrads (18-22) that make me feel incredibly old. I am quite content spending the weekend playing on my computer, reading, doing homework or driving alone all over New England finding new and interesting places. I work for one university part time while I attend classes at another, and I find myself starting study groups with mothers and other married returning students. I can’t think of one single friend off the top of my head, but when put to thinking about it, I find my single friends are the ones who are male and harass me to set them up with my nonexistent single female friends. The only thing that I envy my involved friends over is their access to getting laid.

I’m attractive, smart, chubby, able to fix my computer and car myself and recently moved all of my belongings into my new apartment alone. (Moving a queen-size mattress up a flight of stairs alone should be an Olympic sport.) Basically, not the type of girl who has guys lining up around the block to date but has them lining up to go with them to the repair shop to make sure they are not getting ripped off. A female friend recently commented that I was the most butch straight girl she knew, and that’s kind of haunted me. I never considered myself butch (and I have the nail polish collection and 32 thongs to prove it).

My last relationship, if you want to call it that, was a little over a year ago, and it was with a workaholic. Whenever we spent time together it was spent with driving to the shore, watching movies, or having sex. We had no friends in common and I think he met one friend of mine briefly when we ended up at the same movie. It ended with a conversation that started with his asking me why I didn’t demand things like his previous relationships, and ended with his stating that he was uncomfortable with my size; I hung up on him. I haven’t really looked back after two days of bitching to my friends about men and their need for petite clingy women … OK … correction … he has come to mind when I realize how long it has been since I’ve gotten laid but that’s about it.

So, is it possible to survive the wedding frenzy and remain happily single, or is it that I’m in denial about wanting a relationship? If that’s the case, I’m going to have to dust off my delicate fucking flower routine usually only pulled out to get out of speeding tickets.

Just the Way I Am

Dear Just the Way You Are,

You sound just fine to me. But here’s what you might do: Try to quantify how much you want a relationship vs. how much you enjoy being exactly as you are. Make a list. On one side list all the reasons you want a relationship and the things you think would come of it. On the other side list the joys you get out of being as you are and the things you would have to give up if you were in a relationship. And just feel which way the preponderance of evidence tilts. Do it again in six months. Do it twice a year. Right now, it would probably tilt toward remaining as you are. But at some point the evidence may tilt the other way. When it does, that’s when it’s time to consider making some changes.

Dear Cary,

I recently met a great guy — for the second time. We were introduced about a year ago, and a few weeks ago I ran into him while I was out with friends. The next few days were pretty predictable: He called, we chatted a few times on the phone, we went out on a date and had a great time, and he called me the next day. We have so much in common — we are both smart, successful 20-somethings with lots of friends and active social lives. We both love our families. We make each other laugh.

So what’s the glitch? Well, there’s been no second date. Easy, you say. He’s not interested. But then how do you explain that he has called me almost every day for the past several weeks. We still laugh when we chat. I still smile when I see his number on the caller I.D. But he’s never once suggested we get together again. Earlier this week I expressed my frustration — in a cute, casual, nonthreatening way. I thought he got the point, but the weekend has rolled around, and the best I got was a “Why don’t you come out with my friends and me tomorrow night?”

I would gladly go out with him and his friends, but I’d rather go out with him one on one, at least until I get to know him — and his friends — a little better. I’d like to politely decline and suggest we get together another time, just the two of us. But I fear if I say this, he will think I’m being pushy or too aggressive or I’m moving too fast. I’ve suggested we get together before –for lunch, for a drink, whatever — but he’s been too busy, either with work or he already has plans. (For the record, I do believe he’s genuinely busy, due to the nature of his job and the fact that he’s a very social creature.)

Am I being naive? Should I blow him off? Does he want only friendship from me? Or is he trying to take things slow — something I ought to appreciate?

Baffled

Dear Baffled,

He probably hasn’t gotten as far along in his thinking about you as you have in your thinking about him. I would take it slow if I were you. Go ahead, hang around with him and his friends. If you like him, be generous with your time. It’s a little early to start a power struggle. He may feel much better about going out with you if you seem to get along well with his crowd. If he’s extremely extroverted, and young, and a male, he may feel a subtle threat to his group identity, to his belonging, if you push him to spend time with just you. Dating may seem like it cuts him off from his crowd. Maybe try a modified dating thing with you and a couple of your girlfriends. He probably likes lots of girls around. Maybe one night you’ll end up just you and him.

If he’s quite a bit more extroverted than you, it will just be one of those creative differences, those lively stresses in a relationship that keep it interesting.

From the letters from people your age I have recently received, it has become clear that your generation lacks clear dating protocols. It’s not your fault. Nobody taught you. So keep that in mind as you navigate this thing: He probably has no clue what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t know how his behavior is affecting you. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you. It just means he’s not sure what to do.

Of course, it’s possible that he doesn’t want to be your boyfriend. But if you get along well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t hang around, have some fun, get to know his buddies, and see what happens.

Dear Cary,

I am a 23-year-old guy, I just finished college a year ago and moved out for grad school in San Francisco, and everything is seemingly going according to plan (that being “the greater plan”). During college I had my first serious relationship starting my freshman year, which lasted until midway through my senior year. She is perfect for me in every sense. She is challenging, intelligent, driven, extremely beautiful, and best of all, like me, she is passionate about everything she does, and the combined passion makes each of us better in all of our endeavors. Why did we break up? Well, we both grew a lot in college and there were aspects of the relationship that suffered during this growth, and even though we both could still admit to loving each other, we were in essence driving one another crazy.

Fast-forward one year. She moved away from the town where we went to college, supposedly to go to New York or Europe, I didn’t know which. We had each dated other people since this time and moved forward in our lives. I didn’t see her before she left, though she had wanted to meet, as there were things that would have made it very emotionally difficult; those things aren’t relevant now. A year later I had dated in the realm of 10-15 more people, with varying but overwhelmingly negative results, and never found anything that has really clicked with anyone in the way it did with the ex-girlfriend. Shortly before I decided to attend school in San Francisco she calls from out of the blue and informs me that she is living in L.A. and thinking about moving to the Bay Area. In fact, just this week she visited and despite current casual engagements we have fallen right back into a romantic situation.

Now I am a very introspective person and understand that the thrill of this reunion is largely a result of pent-up emotions and the comfort of being with someone very familiar. However, I can’t help but feel even stronger about this than ever before! I feel like I am falling and all I want to do is be around her! I know that I am very young and in a city full of fun, single, interesting people and that I should be exploring new opportunities but I can’t help feeling that if I let her go again I may be making a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I have no doubt that I love her and we are both open about the current impossibility of a relationship. The time is just wrong. She believes in fate and that what is meant to be will be and that in time we will find each other just as we did recently; I am more realistic about the possibility of losing her forever.

Should I pursue this girl who makes me feel better than anyone else in my life has ever done, or should I look for new avenues and continue with this trial-and-error dating lifestyle as we both have done for the past year or so?

Not Quite So Helpless Romantic

Dear Not Quite So Helpless,

Propose marriage. Tell her you want to be with her for the rest of your life and that’s that. Get a yes or a no.

By invoking fate, by saying “What is meant to be will be,” she may have already tried to signal to you that she has no intention of settling down. It may just be a kind, if somewhat roundabout, way of telling you no. But the only way you can find out is by giving her the question not in essay form, not as multiple choice, but as yes or no.

I’m not saying you’ll get a yes. There may be aspects of the relationship, or of her feelings toward you, that you’re not seeing clearly. Because you’ve referred only obliquely to certain past difficulties, it’s hard for me to judge. But there’s only one way to find out.

Dear Cary,

The new love of my life is the most easygoing, kind, generous, tender, loving person on the planet. We’ve fallen in love with each other and it feels wonderful. His best friend and roommate is a woman who is also a close friend of mine. Roommate told me that my new love had been in love with her, but that she was never interested.

A few days ago, after a few drinks, my New Love told me about his feelings for Roommate. He’s very self-aware, but he is normally very tight-lipped, so this was quite a confession for him. He said that he had been painfully in love with her for two years. He said they had never kissed and she had never shown him any interest and it was painful. He used the words “pain” and “painful” a zillion times. He says he still has feelings for her, even though he’s in love with me and he’s very happy with me.

New Love is 21 and I’m his first serious girlfriend. Roommate is his first love, albeit unrequited. I’m 26 and have been around a little more.

I know without a doubt that we do love each other, and that we’re compatible together, and that we want to be with each other. But I’m worried that this situation is volatile. Can we all work out as friends? Will he get over her? Or am I destined to get hurt here?

Nice Girl in Love

Dear Nice Girl,

Well, someone is destined to get hurt if he keeps living in that apartment. If you’re serious about making a go of it with him, he should move out of there — but not in with you, that’s too soon. He should move in with some guys who work on motorcycles in the garage and have guitars lying around that are all sticky from being played too close to the Cheese Doodles. He’s a frigging kid is what I’m saying. He needs to grow up a little. It sounds like his emotional attachments to women are insufficiently differentiated. It doesn’t sound like your best shot, frankly, but if you want to make a go of it, like I said, see if you can get him to move out of there. And splash some cold water on his face.

Dear Cary,

When I met Sean, he had already bought his dream house, a one-bedroom, one-bathroom place with 660 square feet plus a half basement on one-quarter acre with redwoods, oaks and various fruit trees. It’s a nice place, especially the yard. I used to hate the bathroom, and we recently had it remodeled and now I like it. We tried to do an addition last year when I got pregnant, but the county gave us so much trouble that we gave up after having poured a bunch of Sean’s money into the planning and permitting process. Since we gave up on the addition, for Petey’s room we’re planning to partition the living room by putting up a wall. And then maybe when he’s older we’ll turn the half-basement into a room, or put a trailer in the driveway, or turn the tool shed into a room. I know it could work. We can afford this house on one of our incomes, so if one of us is out of work we can still pay the mortgage, which of course is very nice and secure.

The problem is, it’s his house. It has never felt like my house even after we got married. He paid the down payment, and he pays the mortgage. I pay a car payment, and I pay for daycare, so I’m not a complete freeloader. Part of my problem is I’ve never lived in a place that I fell in love with and chose to live there.

There’s a house that just got put up for sale. I drove by it yesterday. It’s romantically perched on the side of a mountain and has a deck with a beautiful view, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a bonus room. I think Sean and I could afford it on what we make. I am dying to see the inside of it. This bigger house I’m not sure we could afford on one income, but we’re both working! Why are we both working and not living in an adequately sized house?! I guess I just think that for all our trouble, we should have more.

But Sean and I split the cost of the bathroom remodel, and he just replaced the wood stove with a gas heater, so we have invested a lot in this house without yet getting the benefit of those investments. Most importantly, he wants to live in the house we’re in until he dies. And I’m afraid that even if we did move then I’d become one of those people who is never content with what she has. And I know he would think that of me if I suggest that we move.

I’m thinking of making an appointment with the real estate agent to show me the bigger house just to see if I really love it. That way I’d know if it’s worth fighting for and dreaming about. But would that be almost like cheating, seeing the house without telling Sean? Yesterday when I drove by it, I told him I was going to the post office, so I’ve already told one lie. Am I just being super-bourgeois for wanting to love my house?

Thinking of Cheating … on My House

Dear Thinking of Cheating,

We might put our bodies next to lovers, but we put our dreams in houses. If the chemistry is there it can feel like adultery. I hope you came back from the “post office” with some mail, or some stamps!

Even though it feels a little disloyal, I think you should make the appointment with the real estate agent and give the place a look. It’s not really adultery. It’s just a house. This kind of desire is no threat to your marriage. It’s a positive thing. You need to test this desire against the possible.

It’s true that your house is too small, and it’s going to keep shrinking as your kid grows. But it sounds like it’s also in a very wonderful place, and it represents a lifelong attachment to the land for your husband. I have a feeling, given economic reality, that your best bet is to stay there and continually improve the place over the years.

You have options, though. You gave up on the addition, but you didn’t burn the plans, did you? There’s a possibility you could still build the addition, either without a permit or after steeling yourself against more paper torture. It does seem a shame to give up on it. Good luck.

Dear Cary,

I love my boyfriend very much, and while our fledgling relationship (going on a year now) may not be perfect, I treasure it. He spent much of his adolescence abusing, and being abused by, drugs. He dealt drugs, he dropped out of high school, and he learned to hate himself. Several months before we met, he came to the decision that he hated who he had become, and he quit. The town he lived in is absolutely inundated with drugs, and there’s barely a person in his peer group who doesn’t use them. In order to quit, he had to isolate himself completely, since no social circle was safe.

The wisdom, strength and determination it took for him to make this decision were qualities I greatly admired in him when we met. Though I have never done drugs, they’ve played a terrible and destructive role in my life. I was able to completely appreciate the magnitude of his decision. I fell in love with him for many reasons, but what this action said about him was certainly one of them.

The first half of our relationship was long-distance and at times extremely trying. Then I found out that he had smoked pot again, once or twice. He confessed it to me in a conversation we were having about adultery. I made a comment about it being possible to be unfaithful to your lover on a similar level, without it being of a sexual nature. I used a hypothetical example of him abusing drugs behind my back. There was a long and horrible pause, and then he said, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

It hurt like being cheated on hurts. It made me feel inadequate, betrayed and lied to. I cried so hard I lost my voice for a day.

He had told me the truth, immediately after I had casually stated that if such a thing ever happened I would consider it a total betrayal and probably have to break up with him. We talked about it, and he swore he would never do it again. He seemed to understand exactly how important it was to me and the reasons it mattered so much.

I’m not just some over-the-top anti-drug loon. My father became addicted to pain killers and, in the fugue of depression and self-loathing, killed himself five years ago by overdosing on the same drugs. My stepsister and childhood hero killed herself while tripping on acid when I was 8. One of the best friends I ever had died in a drunk-driving wreck, a week after confessing to me that he feared his friend’s and his own chemical abuse was going to kill him.

Because of that, I didn’t feel out of line when I told him that if he did drugs again, the second he swallowed, injected or inhaled, he broke up with me.

Now we live together, he’s 1,800 miles away from that town full of addicts, and I’ve been slowly rebuilding my trust in him. But last night our friend and his roommate got into a long discussion about drug use with my boyfriend. Chad, the friend, went on and on about how he misses it, and when my boyfriend said, “You’ve been clean for two years. It must feel like ancient history to you,” Chad replied that “clean” really meant just smoking pot sporadically. They kept talking about how good it felt and how much they missed it, and my boyfriend just sat there and listened, but the look on his face scared me.

In the car, I said something about being uncomfortable with Chad’s substance abuse (he drinks heavily, it appears), and my boyfriend replied that there’s nothing wrong with casual use. And I said, “Casual use isn’t OK for some people, though.” And he said in an angry voice, “Casual use is OK for some people!” I wonder now if maybe he thought my ultimatum before was only in effect while he lived in the drug-infested pit 1,800 miles away from me.

I’m scared and I want to talk to him about it. I think he’s beginning to justify it in his mind, so that casual use is OK. But for him, they have connotations that are sad and terrible. This fear is gnawing at me, but I don’t know if I have a right to bring it up with him, since he’s done nothing wrong. Since he’d feel like it was an accusation. And if it happens again, and it’s “casual,” would it be wrong of me to end it? Either way I think I come off as an intolerant, uptight wench. I just don’t want to feel the way I’m feeling.

Miserable

Dear Miserable,

It’s strange how tragic pathologies cluster about certain people, how we repeat the tawdry melodramas of funeral homes and rehabs from coast to coast no matter how many thousands of miles we run, how always right next door lives the thing we fear the most, how once we’re marked by suicide and addiction other addicts and potential suicides can spot us in a crowd as if “Fuck with me” were written on our forehead.

Well, it’s strange and yet not strange; it’s amazing and ordinary at the same time, like the turning of the earth.

The fact that your boyfriend quit in isolation worries me. I tried to kick alone once, in a hotel room up in North Beach, me and a typewriter and Mao’s “Little Red Book.” I’ve told the story many times, how I thought doing 50 pushups a day might get me clean, how a woman came along who was impressed with both the poetic nature of my habitat and the promptness and reliability of my drug connections, and that was pretty much the end of “Cary gets clean all by himself.”

I’d strongly suggest that your boyfriend get involved in some kind of community of recovering addicts. Ironically, the first thing he’ll hear is that “it’s a disease of isolation.” By trying to quit alone, he’s playing into the hands of his pathology.

And you, poor young woman, can scarcely afford to watch a loved one die because of drugs.

Casual pot use might be OK for some people who are not addicts. Theoretically, it might even be OK for your boyfriend, if, theoretically, he was not an addict. But given your history, any use by him is definitely not OK for you.

When addicts are not healthy, or slipping, or chipping, or just getting caught up in their old addict ways, the words that come out of their mouths don’t have any causal connection to their behavior. They’re just a byproduct, like sparks thrown off by a grinding wheel. So don’t get caught up in what he says when he talks about casual use. For an addict, “casual” use doesn’t exist. It’s use. Or it’s not use. Mild use. Rare use. Occasional use. It’s just use with an adjective chaser. Most addicts have a history of noun-modifier abuse. They shouldn’t be allowed near pot, or near adjectives.

Watch what he does, not what he says. You should bail if he so much as looks at a joint.

I have the feeling that today things are different, but I am not so presumptuous as to think I could know just how things are different without asking those who know. And those who know means you, who are young and articulate and bursting with visions of how life should be. (Or am I, even in that phrase, reproducing a ’60s notion of youth?)

No generation ever celebrated being young the way mine did. We are therefore profoundly unsuited to be old. Yet we are old. By any measure, face it, we are old. I wonder what we look like to you. Do we look like doddering fools? Do we look like people who have not accepted our age? Do we look to you the way our parents looked to us? I wonder. (Until a few years ago, I did not feel like an adult. When I was around other people my own age, if they had children or responsible jobs, I still felt that they were adults but I was not. I felt as though I needed their permission to go outside. Isn’t that strange?)

Please tell me what you think. You can write to me at advice@salon.com as usual. It will help if you put “youth” in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you. I think it will be fun and it might also be profound and useful.

Dear Cary,

I am friends with a girl, Lily. Her friend Della is also an acquaintance of mine. Recently, Lily let me in on a philosophy that made them feel better about their singlehood, but which deeply offended me.

Della is a recent law school grad who left a potential boyfriend back in Albany. Although she really liked him in every possible way, one reservation kept her from dating him: He was a mechanic. Blue collar vs. professional. Della spoke to her priest about her dilemma and its resolution and his response was, “Well, life is like a tree and everyone has to find someone on their branch.”

Am I just naive about the way the world works or is this incredibly snobby and elitist? I can see how perhaps class differences could manifest themselves in other ways and therefore cause problems. However, that wasn’t the case here. Della just felt that a mechanic wasn’t quite good enough for her.

Does everyone have to find someone on their branch? How are branches defined? Some of the most intelligent people I know never went to college and are not professionals. In fact, Lily, who agrees with Della’s opinion (she only wants to date professionals), is very intelligent and changed careers last year and became a catering chef. That’s not exactly exalted work by her measure (it took her less schooling to get her culinary arts degree than it does for most mechanics to get through school), but she’s decided her “branch” includes doctors and lawyers? We all grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood alongside folks like mechanics, so it seems bizarre that they would think this way. Am I silly to think this is hypocritical?

Blind to Branches

Dear Blind,

I’m passionately, patriotically egalitarian. I hate snobbery. I don’t see much hope for democracy in the face of such class-based blindness. Sure, there are cultural differences, but if someone can’t appreciate the skill and intelligence it takes to be a good mechanic, or a good baker or garbage man or cop or Sheetrocker or roofer, they’re just small-minded.

On the other hand, I am moved by the way education and careful choices in life can allow one to improve one’s family for generations to come. The first generation of a lower-middle-class family that goes to college and learns the language and manners of the professional class can profoundly affect the prospects of their progeny for the next hundred years. Think about it. How did my father’s ancestors — hardy, rough-hewn Celts, seamen and adventurers — acquire the manners and social standing that allowed them to grasp a shred of respectability in the South? Well, they were white for one thing. That helped. And my grandmother at least, so I understand, converted to Episcopalian. But they also became educated. They were, I sense, gifted with language, as many Celts are, and they learned Latin and Greek, the languages of learned people.

They are still rough-hewn individualists but what they bequeathed to us kids was a facility for language and subtlety of thought that has allowed us to pass, as it were, among the professional classes — even though we are still wild pagans at heart — and thus improve our lives and the lives of those who will follow us.

So I think that class striving can be a good thing. The ways in which we all find ways to pass in society, to impersonate those who are in favor, to play down the telltale signs of our humble origins, is wonderful and amusing and ultimately a good thing. On the other hand, simple class prejudice is horrific and deadly, and I abhor it.

Making inflexible class judgments turns people into objects, or products. Are you going to have a relationship with a bottle of shampoo? Are you going to have dinner with a brand of mouthwash? I know you have to be practical, but rigid class distinctions just contribute to misery and oppression, and I’m sorry but I’m totally with you — that’s bogus. If she likes the guy, she should at least go out with him and see what the possibilities might be.

Dear Cary,

I don’t know what to do. I have been with my boyfriend for almost four years and we’ve been living together now for six months. For the most part we are happy, everything is fine and we don’t have real problems but lately things have been a bit “weird.”

We’ve both been busy and haven’t seen a lot of each other. (I am working full time and going to grad school part time. He is a jazz musician who has gigs and catering jobs on weekends and in the evenings.) I finally was about to get him to talk about it (like pulling teeth!) last night. He admitted that although he loves me, lately he’s feeling that we don’t have that spark. He wants to be burning for me and feel drunk with love all the time. I think that’s a lovely thought and would love to feel that way too but I have to admit most days I don’t. But is this even possible? The day-to-day routine and mundane chores of everyday life get in the way.

Is this just what happens to couples who have been together for a long time? I dread that I am going to start becoming the sort of woman who buys those silly books to try to spice up our relationship. I think we just need to spend some more time together, try to reconnect. But I’m afraid he’s already withdrawing — he says he feels bad and doesn’t want to waste my time because I deserve more blah blah blah the usual cowardly male cop-out. What do you think? Are we destined to fail? I do really love him and want to work it out. How can I explain to him the ebb and flow of any relationship?

Loving and Losing

P.S. Here’s some background — we are 29 and 28 and moving in was his idea and I’m not pressuring him for marriage. He says that he doesn’t feel trapped by us living together. And I know that there is no third party involved, though he did mention a relationship he had eight years ago — he said he felt head over heels in love but obviously it didn’t work and he was young so maybe more starry-eyed? Anyway, he wants to feel more like that with me. Why didn’t this come up sooner? He’s also way too wishy-washy for my taste on this issue — why can’t he just make a choice and take control of his life? If he continues this uncertainness, I am going to have to break it off, which I will. I just think we had/have something really good and it’s getting ruined by insecurity and doubts. Is anyone ever 100 percent sure? Sigh.

Dear Loving and Losing,

So he wants to be burning for you and feel drunk with love all the time? That’s nice. Well, he’s a musician. Musicians are children. They’re courageous children but still, only a musician — or a poet — would be nearly 30 and say he wants to feel drunk with love for you all the time.

Musicians need a lot of care. They aren’t really equipped to deal with the world. He may need to go off and feel infatuated a few more times. But face it, what this also means is that he and you are both facing adulthood, which is a kind of unconscious code word for eventual death. That’s what it’s all about. Adulthood is about dreary day after day dealing with immovable reality. Why do you think, when I had to take that job at Chevron, I ended up writing a strange novel on the train every day? Because it is intolerable to the soul of a creative person to be marched day after day through the dreary halls of ordinary life. It’s soul-killing, and I’m sure that what he is feeling is much like soul-death because he equates intoxication with life, spirituality and creativity.

The key point is that the two are not the same. Because if you talk to a composer who has actually done a lot of work, or a painter, or a novelist, he or she will tell you that the spirituality of the work comes in the dreary, regular, day after day work, applying the paint, filling in the notes, putting the words down on paper. Art and creativity, though Dionysian in certain respects, don’t move forward until you actually do accept the awful tedium of adulthood. The same truth applies to relationships.

OK, so there was Charlie Parker and there was Arthur Rimbaud. Is your boyfriend a creative genius? I doubt that he is a creative genius. He is probably like me and most other artistic people who dream big and struggle and were nearly shocked breathless with fear when they realized that that spark, that intoxicating spark that took away all the pain and made the future seem golden, was not coming as often as it used to. You know when something so awful and frightening strikes you that you can’t breathe? It’s probably hit him. Maybe he hasn’t read enough, maybe he hasn’t thought about all the other visionaries who faced this exact same problem, and he thinks he can maybe beat it. Like Charlie Parker and Kurt Cobain beat it? Sure.

The most heroic thing a creative person can do is live an orderly life so that the work can get done. Like Wallace Stevens. Or like Gerhard Richter. You have to separate those elements of intoxication in your work from those in your personal life. You are not a painting or a work of music. You are a human being and so is he. If you and he can seek a deeper, more passionate understanding of each other as creative people, perhaps you can fall back into each other’s arms with a richer understanding of your purpose together in the world.

Dear Cary,

A recent business trip took me by the town where my ex-boyfriend lives (with wife, and dog, and cute little house). He had tracked me down by e-mail a few months before, and we had exchanged a few chatty how’s-your-life letters, so, while I was in town, he and I had lunch, and certain feelings and memories rose to the surface and stubbornly refuse to leave. I wonder, now, whether lunch was a bad idea.

Back in college, Ex and I had a tumultuous, intense relationship. There was an incredible energetic connection. We picked up on one another’s feelings — too much. Even our thoughts seemed shared sometimes. The sex, or, for that matter, just sitting in a room together, was almost spiritual and that intensity never abated over four years. For that reason, I think, the relationship never quite seemed to end, even once we began seeing other people. Rather, it did end one night when, finally, I said, “Her or me? It can’t be both,” and, without a flicker of hesitation, he said, confused, “But … she’s my girlfriend.” I don’t pretend to understand his relationship with her, but I think that he probably felt most satisfied during the relatively short interval when both she and I were accessible, and, while I know he knows us as separate, I think that in some corner of his mind an amalgam of us exists as The Woman.

That girlfriend has since become Ex’s wife, and years have passed. I am married and happy in my marriage. My connection to my husband, though not white-hot, is absolutely the finest thing that has come to me in this life. More like mahogany than like champagne bubbles. My husband is a generous, supportive, adventurous man; he makes me laugh often and well and is a fabulous travel companion. We balance beautifully.

And yet, this Ex troubles me. He desperately wants to know me again, in some capacity, and given that sitting in the same room with him makes everything seem brighter, makes the world turn more slowly, and probably always will, maybe I want to know him, too. However, there is no place for whatever connection there might be between us — managing even the most rudimentary public friendship would be awkward. And yet, there are whole tracts of my being and his that no one else will ever know as completely, that do not live when we are out of one another’s lives. I always learn from talking with him.

My heart was more peaceful before I was reminded of that. It’s hard now for me to feel happy with the thought of not knowing Ex, equally hard to feel happy with the thought of knowing him only at the secret edges of our respective lives. Stealth gives beauty a bad name.

What to do? Is this much-vaunted connection between me and Ex really such a big deal? Did everyone have The Relationship sometime between the ages of 19 and 23? Is this particular affinity precious enough to keep as a living friendship, despite difficulties, or should the memories go into a box on the top shelf of my closet along with my first short story (terrible) and the head shots from my first and only acting role? Is there a way to recycle what exists between us into something that we can use now?

Me and Ex

Dear You and Ex,

It would be a tyrannical marriage indeed that allowed neither partner private emotions and thoughts. You are responsible to your husband for what you do, but not for every thought you have, and not for your private hunger.

It’s a question of your hunger and who has the power over your hunger. This hunger you have for a lost feeling is a spiritual hunger; if you slept with him it wouldn’t solve anything. You would still be hungry. You will always be hungry. Life is a long, hungry walk. You learn to live with the hunger and use it. Because if you weren’t hungry you wouldn’t write letters or short stories. You wouldn’t get married. You’d be dead. So the trick with life seems to be to learn to contain the hunger, to carry it around with you, to reach some rapprochement with the hunger so that it doesn’t eat you, to direct your hunger at the world so it doesn’t turn back on you. Because the hunger, it is hungry for you too. It wants you. If you don’t feed it something, it will eat you. But you can’t feed it what it wants because what it wants is to sleep with this boy again and then it will control you and destroy you, it will walk over you to get what it wants. So you have to give it something else. You have to redirect your hunger. You have to be in charge of your own hunger.

Dear Cary,

You seem like a man who’s seen much and done even more. You’re just the person to help me with this crippling problem.

I have no life. I’m a young professor, and during the academic year, the job of professor becomes incredibly busy. But during the summer, my social life still consists of TV and dinner with my cat, Monday through Sunday. I have great friends who live across the country, and my family is confident that my social life will turn around. But I’m not so sure. The speck of a college town I call home (for now) offers nothing but beer-battered chicken fingers and 25-cent cups of beer during happy hour. Most of the men I come into contact with are married or have girlfriends, and many of my single woman friends in the area find themselves in the same boat.

I can’t help feeling that the endless tedium of work is souring the image of a swinging gal in her 30s. Mostly I’m fearful of being married to my job for another academic year, and I would still have no social life. I have more money than I’m used to, and I do get out once a week to the big city.

Can you suggest something more than day trips to Cleveland? Thank you in advance,

Perky Professor With No Life

Dear Perky,

I would suggest that you travel to see some of your friends. It sounds like your town is getting you down. You can travel during the summer, right?

And you’re probably thinking too much. Professors think too much and it makes them feel sad. It’s not like thinking is a bad thing. Heck, I think a little. But too much thinking will make you sad. So you have to do some silly things to get out of your rut. OK, right now, here is what you do: Get down on your floor and do some pushups, just the kind where you put your knees on the floor. Do 10 pushups. Now do 10 more. Now run in place for 10 minutes. There. Now put on some loud music and dance around the room and yell and scream and sing along.

Then call some of your friends and schedule a trip.

Dear Cary,

This past Monday, my fiancé broke my heart. We had been engaged for seven months and dating for close to three years. He came home from work and told me it “hit him on the way home” the night before that he wasn’t ready for our type of committed relationship, that he felt too young to get married (which, of course, prompted me to ask him “Well, then why did you ask me to marry you?”), and the like. As devastated as I felt considering I did not see it coming in the slightest, I was still able to respect what he was saying. He then told me he “never truly loved” me and that he “didn’t know what love was.” This was the man I had loved completely, supported through hard times, and helped unconditionally. But he still wasn’t done. Apparently, in an effort to cleanse his conscience, he told me he had cheated on me twice about two years ago.

Do you think someone can actually pretend to love someone for that long, send the flowers, write the loving birthday card messages, and say it over and over? Or was he just fooling himself? How do I deal with this breakup knowing that every memory I have of him is tainted by this doubt that he even loved me at the time? I know I need to move on and get over him, and I wholly intend to do that, but this question of what he felt all along has stymied me.

The World Is Spinning Sideways

Dear Spinning,

Wow. What a jerk. But here are the facts: Yes, it is possible for a guy to do all the things he knows he has to do if he wants to have a girlfriend, all the while having no idea what he feels.

Some guys are remarkably obtuse about what they are feeling. And because they are so obtuse, they think others are obtuse as well. They do not understand how acutely others can identify and distinguish their various emotions. Such guys will say things that are transparently idiotic and they will not even know that you are seeing how transparently idiotic it is. Meanwhile, having no idea how they actually feel, they will be sending cards, writing notes and bringing flowers. Those are all learned behaviors. In fact, they are the behaviors that women have taught men to adopt in order to be acceptable as boyfriends.

If you do not want to be surprised so painfully again, you must learn to be like a detective, to shine the harsh light of truth on the guy, interrogate him, analyze his statements about his emotional whereabouts, hammer away at the contradictions in his alibi of love.

Remember: Anybody can buy flowers.