I am a divorced 49-year-old man who is in a happy, loving relationship with a 23-year-old woman. We first met and got to know each other shortly after I separated from my wife, but we did not begin seriously dating until after the divorce was formalized, six months later. We have been together for six months now, and I am happier than I ever was with my ex-wife. There are, however, some potential problems with our relationship. They are all related to the obvious substantial difference in our ages.

First is the marked difference in the circumstances of our lives. I am a successful professional and businessman, and she is a financially struggling graduate student. (When we first met, she was still an undergraduate.) I have no problem paying for all our dates, our meals, traveling together, etc. It seems only natural, since I have the means to do so, and the financial impact for me is truly negligible. At times I have done even more for her financially, such as pay for many of her material needs, e.g. textbooks, school and living expenses, etc. She has never asked me to do this; I have always offered without prompting. On occasion, my girlfriend has expressed some discomfort about the things I have given her, saying that it feels like a sugar daddy-sugar baby relationship; but conversely, she has not turned my gifts down either, mainly because I insist. For both of us, there is definitely no sense of obligation or strings attached or quid pro quo. To me, it just seems like a natural thing for me to do, to help take care of someone I love. My family, however, is concerned that she is taking advantage of me, and I can certainly understand their perspective. They do not understand why a beautiful, young woman would want a relationship with someone old enough to be her father. Early in our relationship, I posed the same question to her. She told me that she has always been attracted to older men (she had earlier ended a relationship with a 35-year-old man) and found "boys" her own age to be immature and superficial. How can I convince my family -- and I suppose to a certain extent myself -- that she is not a gold digger?

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My mother is on a ventilator. She is 94 years old. The decision to put her on it was not mine, but my older sister's. I find it grotesque.

My sister seems to believe that some cure will be found for what is essentially old age. We just need to find the right doctor. She thinks we must leave no medical procedure untried.

It would be unsafe for my mother to return home without around-the-clock help, and even with it, I cannot envision much quality of life for her.

My sister believes she is doing what my mother wants, but my mother is unconscious.

The doctors keep telling us that my mother's organs are failing; they need machines to keep her "alive."

I am worried that my sister is freaking out, is terrified of losing our mother and is not dealing with the situation rationally.

How can I keep her from losing her sanity?

Thank you for considering my question.

Trying to Stay Calm

Dear Trying to Stay Calm,

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My younger sister is a 21-year-old college student who is "trapped" in an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who is 35 years old. She first met him when she was 19, fell in love with him and eventually moved in with him. After they started living together, she discovered that he was emotionally and verbally abusive, to the point that after six months, she had had enough, broke it off and moved out. The problem now is that for over a year, he refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Although he has not physically abused her, he has "forced" her into his car, screamed at her in public, in front of her professors and classmates, snatched her cellphone out of her hand to see if she has been talking to/texting other guys. He stalks her, physically, following her around town, staking out her apartment, and electronically, constantly checking her cellphone, email, Facebook, Amazon accounts, etc. (During the time that they were living together, he managed to get access to these accounts, and somehow manipulate the password access such that he continues to have access, despite my sister's attempts to change passwords, etc.) 

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My dear friend is about to marry the wrong person. He is a brilliant, outgoing man, always willing to put others first, and in this case to a fault. His fiancée has pursued him since high school. He avoided her romantic advances for years, knowing he could do better, but she is a very smart and manipulative person and succeeded in landing him as a boyfriend. In the early years, he occasionally expressed a desire to break up with her, but could not build the nerve to do so. Since then, almost a decade has passed, and they are still the only partners either has ever had. I know that if he could press a button and wake up tomorrow with her happy and living in another city, and him happy and single, he would do it. However, a number of factors have kept him from leaving her. Their best friends from childhood are very close-knit (for example, his older brother is best friends with her older brother), and their families are close friends as well. Understandably, he feels like to break up with her would shatter this group of people he cares so much about, not to mention the emotional impact it would have on her.

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I have a friend that cannot speak about the president of the United States without using the word "monkey" or "chimpanzee."

There have been presidents I was not thrilled about, but certainly I would not stoop to this.

This individual is well-off, has a degree and is considerate about most other topics.

What the HELL is his problem?

Thanks Cary,

Bewildered

Dear Bewildered,

Your friend's problem is that he is a racist.

It's not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.

But he's still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What's worse, it can spread. It's each person's job to not be a racist.

He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.

Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.

Don't punch him. That won't help.

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Recently my husband of 18 years has explored his sexuality with other men. He admitted having four sexual encounters with random men he solicited from Craigslist. After a week of hell, and many a shouting match, he begged me to take him back, claiming that his experimentation is not worth losing his family. As in a textbook scenario, he, somehow, convinced himself that I, being very liberal and supportive of gay community, would understand, and maybe even approve, his urges. Having two teenage daughters and being a stay-at-home mom, I have initially agreed to let him back into the family fold, after all his STD tests came back clean.

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I don't know how to put this any way but bluntly, so here goes. My mom let me and my brother breast-feed really, really late-- until we were 4 or 5. She let us touch and play with her breasts for years after that. She never told us what sex was, and later when I found out for myself, my body changing on its own, I felt revulsion at the all-too-recent memories of how I touched, and wanted to touch, my own mother. I hated that she hadn't stopped me.

Now I'm 18 and have a little sister. Just like with me and my older brother, Mom breast-fed her really late, and now at 9 years old, my sister still likes to feel my mother's breasts. My sister is my mom's last child, and so in several areas Mom persists in regarding her as a baby.

I try to understand my mom. I realize the idea of her last kid growing up must be scary and depressing. But this behavior is disgusting to watch or even to know it is going on when you're not there. Additionally, it's delusional and perverse to excuse, and even encourage, such behavior in a growing young woman on the grounds that she's an infant. Who knows why I wanted, and now my sister wants, to touch my mother's breasts at age 9? Certainly not because we wanted to breast-feed. But Mom's so convinced of my sister's innocence that she refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses that my sister is too unaware to understand.

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The last thing my mom said to me was, "When I was young ..." and then she died. I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. Then I found a letter she had written to a friend saying that the man she was in love with is my actual biological father.

My dad and I were in shock with the DNA results and now I have spent countless hours trying to find out who this man is. I can't ask anyone as they are all dead and my dad said it must have been this guy who was in town for a short time while attending ammunition-inspector school in Savanna, Ill., but didn't know a name.

I hired an archival researcher and a private investigator but no one can help me. Can you help me? I found out that many people came from all over the U.S. to attend this school and all I need is a list of names from around November 1961.  Please, please help me.

Into the Past

Dear Into the Past,

I love a mystery. I'm tempted to begin investigating myself. But I can't do that. So you will have to keep at it.

It is hard to sustain a search without regular encouragement. So while I can't fly there and help you look, I can offer encouragement to keep looking. Setbacks are to be expected. It will be slow going. You have to keep moving forward.

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I'm on the cusp of my 30s, in a life partnership and polyamorous. My personal history involves a graduate-school education, a grade-skipping, semi-home-schooled childhood and several coming-out stories. So I'll ask you to picture me as I am right now. I have crazy hair and clothes. I'm finally allowing myself to feel young after many years of trying to look mature and serious; I am secure enough in my spiritual and political beliefs to remain quietly confident about them, but I used to be quite the crusader. There's a strong creative vein that runs through my family. I learned the hard way that to repress my artistic impulses makes me go quite mad. I make music, perform and dress up whenever I can. I get hooked on things and experiences very easily, but I have enough self-awareness to unhook myself before I get too damaged. I used to drink too much and get in fights, I used to have a really haphazard, risky sex life -- till I laid out rules, got some help and learned to watch my moods and habits. Mostly I get by. I read a lot of philosophy, I meditate, I do the spiritual stuff and try not to live in my head all the time. I still get a bit obsessed with ideas and concepts and lifestyles, and of course, I get hung up on wonderful people.

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There is a lecturer in my faculty whom I find devastatingly attractive. I find him so attractive that I have to actively control myself in his presence. I think about him nonstop. I am a graduate student and he is a lecturer. He is probably about double my age, and I am 22. I took one of his classes a few semesters back but won't be in any of his classes in the future.

I am sure I have made my attraction as painfully obvious as possible. Should I try to proposition him? What do you think of this sort of age gap? And how do I handle the possible (probable) rejection? I am aware of the imbalances of power, experience and maturity, as well as the conflicts of interest and possible repercussions that may ensue.

Unsure

Dear Unsure,

You may have thought and read about conflicts of interest and imbalances of power but are you ready to find, in the agonizing grip of an affair, a visceral unhappiness unlike anything you have ever known? Can you handle wanting to scream or grab a crowbar while also wanting to weep and beg forgiveness?

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This problem has been eating away at my brain and heart for a while. I cannot decide what to do. I know your answer will help me, even if you also don't see a clear answer.

One of my children was recently diagnosed with a rare disease. That is not the problem, but helps to explain how I developed a close, trusting friendship with the mother of a child with the same disease. She has helped us so much and has given good medical advice and emotional support. She also works as a baby sitter. For us, the arrangement was perfect: this kind, well-informed person needs money and we need her special medical skills. For months, my husband and I considered her the only possible baby sitter.

Recently, we were tipped off through the school PTO grapevine that she has a criminal record and is an addict, and that stories about her have appeared in the town paper, and also that she has been banned from volunteering in the school because of this.

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This is a hard letter to write but I will try anyway. I am now married for a little more than a year to the kindest, gentlest, most understanding wife any man can ever dream of. She is an angel in every sense of the word and this is not influenced by any guilt that I am feeling.

She is a foreigner from another country and we both met studying Mandarin in China and subsequently fell in love. Three years of long-distance relationship later, I proposed to her and we decided to get married on the basis that we both felt our relationship was special and our expectations in life were very much in sync. A few months after proposing, she found out that I have been sexting an online stranger, the contents of which were very explicit. She was very angry, disappointed and sad, but I managed to convince her to carry on with the wedding, with the promise that I will not do it again and that I will be seeking professional help via a psychologist.

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Though my "problem" (which may not be seen as a problem for some) has been on my mind for a long time, I was triggered to write after seeing the "I get paid to do nothing" letter from a professional who was in a decent position, making decent money, but really not doing much. I feel very similarly, and wonder if there is more to it than your recommendation to "give money away and enjoy the low-stress."

For years, I was told how smart I was, over and over again. Not genius-level, mind you, but "very bright" and "advanced." Parents, teachers, other students all echoed the same thing. School was easy up to a certain point, and early on I had the chance to skip a grade (I didn't do it for fear I wouldn't fit in with the grade above me, and my parents agreed emotional maturity might be an issue). Then ... I don't know what happened. Maybe it was laziness, under-confidence, or an extreme penchant for procrastination, or maybe everyone else just caught up. I was never a straight-A student but did fine, and went to a decent college. After graduation, big dreams gave way to crummy jobs, one after the other.

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I'm a 17-year-old guy and I'm a junior in high school, and I've had this friend, this girl, that I've known since our freshman year. I've liked her since freshman year and I've just now this year become really great friends with her. My best friend moved to Missouri last year and he just moved back. Him and this girl that I've liked forever started going out (they have only known each other for four or five months). This made me wonder what I've done wrong for the past three years of my life with her, but that's not the end of the story. They went out for three weeks and then she broke up with him because he was "too clingy" and she "sucked at relationships," or at least that's what she told me. She trusts me with EVERYTHING. She goes to me with things, tells me I'm funny, hangs out with me, and constantly drives me crazy for her. Right now I feel confident enough to do something about the way I feel, but since her and my best friend went out doesn't that make her "off limits" according to the man law or guy code?

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I am a grown-up, well-educated, privileged American. I had several hellish years. Like, hellish pain. Dead children, miscarriage pain. The pain of all the losses was overwhelming. My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I both drank to dull the pain. I managed to escape and rebuild a life, thanks to my money and education. Now I can't quit drinking.

My soon-to-be-ex-husband and I struggled to have children -- he was the infertile one. His masculine pride really made the whole ordeal much, much more agonizing than it needed to be.

We were together from teenagers, and went to college together, same degrees, same professors. Learned all the same languages. Read all the same books. Watched all the same movies.

We achieved real academic success that led to financial success. We lived in a lovely, lovely Midwestern town, and enjoyed a very, very high status of living.

But the children we had dreamed of -- it is such a long and painful story. He had cancer as a youth. His father threw his sperm away. True story. I do not want to revisit it in any more detail. I have re-told it once in the last year and I cannot again. Anyway, the children we dreamed of for so many years will never exist.

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At first I thought it would be funny to write to you. I thought, your name sounds like a sneeze. I will make this funny.

But the more I wrote, the more melancholy I became.

I suppose what frightened me and filled me with melancholy as I attempted to write a lighthearted letter to you was that I sensed the depth and darkness of your despair and anger.

So unnerved was I that I had to get out of the house. So I walked up the shore of the Pacific to the rocks at the Cliff House and climbed up on a warm rock by a fisherman, and I sat for an hour and thought about the history of your people -- your beautiful, heroic history, the history of Persia, all that wealth and beauty. I also thought of the many Iranian women who studied at the University of Miami while I was there in the 1970s.

But mostly, as I sat on that rock meditating, I thought of all those paintings locked up in Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art, and I thought: You are the president of Iran. You probably have the key.

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I really need you to tell me how to forgive myself, and how to carry on after I had an affair. I'm sorry if this ends up really long and please edit however you need to. Basically, I have been married for 15 years to a man who really is a fundamentally excellent person. We were married quite young for a couple in our socioeconomic bracket, and have been together since college. Like any couple that goes the distance, we have been to (relative) hell and back, most of which was the byproduct of trying to make our careers fit together, dealing with each other's families, family money issues, etc. Totally run-of-the-mill problems. I have had my doubts, at times over the years, whether we were "meant for each other," which we have discussed openly and honestly several times throughout our relationship.  We always come to the conclusion that we just do not want to break up. We love each other and we love most things about the life we've built.

Two years ago I entered an extremely challenging graduate program, which also wreaked havoc on our lives, and therefore, our relationship. Though I knew that all last summer and fall was an especially low point in our communication and in our overall happiness with each other, I'm still shocked and gutted whenever I "remember" that I cheated. Which is several times a day.

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In less than two hours I will be 19 and I am not sure what to do. I actually just Googled "I am not ready to be 19 what should I do," and your site came up, and I am relieved it did. I am a freshman in college and I am not happy. I really try to be, but it is difficult. It pretty much all started last year when I was applying for college. I had great grades, pretty good essays and a solid ACT score, but I did not get into any of my top choices, and it was devastating. And things just got worse from there. My aunt and uncle, whom I have always been really close to, turned on me, or least that's how it felt. They wanted me to go to a huge state school close to home that my uncle went to, but I ended up choosing a smaller private school over 800 miles away. My mom and grandma, who both raised me since my parents divorced when I was 2 and I have not seen my dad since, supported my decision.

After this, nothing was the same. My aunt was very cold to me and even rude. I wanted to yell at her, "What are you doing, don't you love me anymore?! I'm doing what I think is best for me!" But nothing happened. (I think there might be more to the sudden change in how she treats me but I do not know for sure.) This family chaos has really affected me because we were all so close. Being a member of a small family I loved our Sunday night dinners and conversations.

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I fear my marriage is in trouble and I need help. My wife and I used to be well matched as slightly neurotic types who worried about small things. Perhaps it's better to say that we were both risk-averse types, and worried that things weren't going to work out. That made us work to manage our lives in order to minimize risks.

Five years ago my dad died. He had heart problems and so it wasn't wholly unexpected. After this I searched for some good books to help me understand how sons deal with the death of their fathers. One sad thing about our culture is that there are few cultural references for this event. I guess that's liberating in a way, but I also really wanted to know how others had responded to this shock.

Through my own searching  I've come to realize in these years one important way his death has changed me. It has enabled me to value the days more, and fear living less. This is a wonderful thing. Having been visited by the experience of the death of someone close to me, I feel like I am now much better at understanding what matters and what does not. That's helped me to become a more relaxed person, and more adventurous too.

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I am 24 years old. Sometimes I get so angry that it is hard to function. Other times I get very anxious and I feel like I am on the verge of a breakdown. I think it stems from my parents. I don't know what to do, and I need your advice.

My father is an engineer for a large oil company, and my mother works in a doctor's office. My father has always been steadily employed (although I have lived in three different states growing up because of his job). However, I feel like my family has always been struggling financially. This has deeply affected me, especially when I graduated from college in a time when jobs were difficult to find. One problem is that I am not sure why it is this way -- they live in a nice house, but definitely not one out of their means. They do not buy nice cars, and we did not go on vacations growing up. They do not eat out very often or buy anything that would be considered luxurious.

However, they have filed for bankruptcy twice.

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