My High School Girlfriend Contacted Me With a Bizarre Request—and Other Advice From the Week
Slate publishes a lot of advice each week, so we’re pulling together a selection of our favorites. Here are a few of the most compelling questions from the week and links to hours of advice reading. This week: reconnecting with old flings, out-of-control kids, and sexual sailing trips.
The Son of Mommy Dearest: I am a happily married man with two awesome kids. My high school girlfriend “Lisa” has recently gotten in contact with me and dropped a bombshell. She confessed that, unbeknownst to me, I got her pregnant 20 years ago when we were teenagers and my mother bribed her to have an abortion. I no longer have contact with my mother, but this type of controlling behavior is very characteristic of her. Lisa, who is childless and unmarried now, has a lot of regrets about the abortion and requested that I father another child with her to replace the one she lost then.
I realize this is an extremely unorthodox request, but I feel very badly about what my mother’s toxic behavior put Lisa through. I can just picture Lisa coming to my mother to ask for help and my mother verbally berating her into submission. I asked my wife for her thoughts on the idea, and she angrily shot it down and said it would be cheating. To be clear, I get that extramarital sex is literally the definition of cheating, but this scenario is kind of different because I’d only be doing it to help Lisa. Can it really technically be considered cheating if it’s for an altruistic reason? I’m considering going ahead with it despite my wife’s objections. Do you think I’m justified to do so, or is my wife correct that this would be cheating? If I do go ahead with it, should I tell my wife I’m doing it despite her objections, or just leave her out of it entirely?
Help Me Tame the Tornado: I have three boys, who are 2, 4, and 6 years old. Overall, I think I’m a reasonably good parent—setting and enforcing boundaries, instilling values, planning ahead for situations, talking about expectations in what we are about to do, etc. But I feel like we are a wild tornado of chaos in any non-kid-oriented public situation. Waiting in line at the airport is absolute torture with the older two fighting, then wrestling, then knocking over one of the line poles while the 2-year-old tries to run away. Similarly, waiting for the bus is me constantly yelling at them to stop it and stay away from the road while other kids wait calmly. In restaurants, the kids are too loud and usually have to be separated, and at least one thing is always spilled.
They each behave great on their own and at school. I can manage their behavior at places where I can enforce immediate consequences, but at places like an airport or restaurant where I have to accomplish other things and we can’t stop for a consequence, I feel like it quickly spirals, usually with fighting between the oldest two and general toddler-ness from the youngest. What do I do?
Caught Between the Orgy and the Deep Blue Sea: I was invited by my close girl friend to go sailing with folks that she didn’t really know. It was us (both women in our late 30s), the boat captain (married man old enough to be our dad), and his friends. We had a great time sailing, swimming, and drinking wine. Everyone got quite drunk except for me. To make a long story short, my friend got blacked out drunk, put the moves on the old captain, and he ended up fingering her loudly while I sat shocked nearby. The other passengers heard the whole thing too. My friend made eye contact with me, and I’m pretty sure she got off on me watching. She doesn’t remember any of this, and I’ve given her a watered-down version of the events.
My questions are: is this normal? I don’t like to think of myself as a prude or a kink shamer, but my sexual experiences are very vanilla. I have juicy fantasies, sure, but seeing the live show was somewhat shocking to me. Did I react appropriately in the moment by basically pretending like I didn’t notice? In the future, should there be consent from me to be a participant in this kind of scene? And should I give my friend the full details and let her know that I was uncomfortable? I just don’t know the etiquette here.
Preparing for the Worst: My wife and I (we both use she/her pronouns) are both graduate students who got married recently. We’d been friends for a long time and lived together before so I thought we had all our bases covered but lately I’ve realized that we probably should have talked more about money first. I’m lucky enough to have gotten a generous scholarship including an OK stipend for my MA and also worked for a couple of years first so I’d managed to save up about $30,000. Keeping as much of this as possible in savings is really important to me since I’ll be graduating this year and jobs for journalists are notoriously scarce so I might be unemployed for a while. She went straight into her Ph.D. and has been out of funding for the past two years, although she does have a part-time job. We initially kept our finances totally separate and split essentials down the middle but eventually, we got tired of trying to keep up with who owed who what so we got a joint account.
The deal was that I’d put in $1,500 a month and she would put in $750 and we’d pay for joint expenses out of that. I also put in an extra $3,000 at the beginning to get us started. Well, now it’s been nine months and she’s never put in the full amount, and I’ve been having to pick up the slack. She always says that she’s having a bad month and she’ll make it up later, and she seems genuinely really stressed about money, but also she’s been doing a good amount of retail therapy. Part of the reason for keeping our finances mostly separate is so we wouldn’t be monitoring each other’s spending, and I’m trying to stick to that but also getting increasingly frustrated as my own savings are dwindling trying to make up for her shortfall. On top of that, she’s started making “jokes” about divorce and this has me wondering: If she does file for divorce, what does that mean for me financially? Would she be entitled to the money I’ve saved even though it’s not in a joint account? If so, is there anything I can do now to safeguard my savings? Is there any risk I’d have to pay alimony since I’ve been basically supporting her?
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