It was founded in 1976 on the corner of Front and Halleck Streets in San Francisco. I think there's a McDonald'd there now.

Gee, do you suppose this might explain some of the bizarre things turn up on popular television? America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, and the innate cruelty of so much "reality" television spring immediately to mind. But with a statistical sampling like that, purest hooey, and really not even worth mentioning.

As long as it's not the Equity card that makes you an actor, and as long as it's not the public accolades that you crave, just do it. You may never get the acclaim you deserve, but doing it for your own satisfaction - local playhouse, children's theater, whatever - may turn out to be more than you ever dreamed. It may give you a kind of satisfaction that burnishes the rest of your life, and open doors that you've had shut tight for a long time.

I've written all my life, and I have two novels - damn good, I might add - that will probably never be published. What they've given me is not easily measured, but the certainty that I am a writer has carried me into a lot of senendipities.

Don't give up. Just do it.

When you're spending the major part of your life apart from the one you think you love, you just don't give yourself the means to develop real intimacies - sexual or otherwise - in a relationship. I think LW is just a fairly reserved and serious individual who has been raised with some expectations of something that doesn't always come naturally to everyone. Without enough time together - just the two of them - it's hard to find the kind of comfort and ease with a Significant Other that makes lovemaking a natural step. She's working against distance, time, cultural expectations, and the popular press!

It's hard for someone as logical and analytical as she sounds to make sense of this sex thing - either with herself or with someone else. Sex implies a complete loss of control, and an element of fear, tied in with all that religious training probably doesn't help her feel comfortable with it, either. The best advice is the bath - try it out a bit, but don't rush things and don't expect miracles immediately. Sex may be instinctual, yes, but there's a lot of it that's learned and practiced, and it sounds as if she hasn't really gotten comfortable with herself yet.

It's really very nice to see that so many of us agree - this is an example of Cary at his finest, and there's some good advice all around.

I can only add one thing to what's been said. "Closure" is an overrated and misused word. It doesn't imply "satisfaction", it just means finalization, taking that one last step. There's a grieving process for the end of anything, and the end of a long relationship justifies some grief. It doesn't require that the two parties ever acknowledge what went before, or shake hands and vow to be better friends after all that. Sometimes you just have to tell yourself you did the best you could with the hand you were dealt. It was a tough time, but it's over now, you've come out the other side without any serious injury, and you've got a new life to live.

Make a ceremony of your new life - walk out into the sunlight and give thanks for where you are.

Oh, come on! LeCastor's got it exactly right. I live in New England, and trust me, if someone called me at 10 AM on a Sunday complaining of no power, I'd laugh.

Where I live, until the power's been out for about 24 hours, you've really got no reason to complain, let alone ask to be taken in like a homeless waif! You don't go out in a storm just to hang at somebody else's house. You stay off the roads, you light all the candles you've got, you put on your longies and wrap up in a blanket, and you hunker down and wait for the snow to stop and the lights to come back on.

Clearly there's another agenda at work here, and it's not one worth wasting time over! The passive-agressive mode of guilt-tripping somebody all the way across town into taking him in is so obvious as to be silly.

Anybody who doesn't come to a relationship with baggage obviously has never gone anywhere. It's what you do with that baggage that forms the partnership. I feel bad for LW, but it's obvious she's dealing with a guy who is either completely clueless about the etiquette of a good marriage, or else he's a very accomplished passive-aggressive manipulator.

My advice is put a quick stop to all this angst and flailing around. The two of them need to just sit down and talk about it. From what she's written, I wouldn't think there had been any kind of deal-breaker in what's happened, but like everybody else, I'm just speculating. They've both done things that are hard to justify within the typical social contract of marriage, but they need to discuss those things between themselves and work out how this relationship is going to go into the future.

This is not the end of anything but the beginning of a long evolution of a real relationship – one that is formed and tempered by both parties involved speaking to each other, instead of about each other.