LW-

Don't leave your husband because he smokes. Do negotiate so his smoking has the least impact on your kids, and do support him when he does try to quit. Took my DH several tries, and that's with my visceral disgust at kissing him after he'd been smoking. (I'm sensitive to it, and that smell and taste lingers for hours. Ewww.)

On a tangent, this is why people, especially women, should think looooooong and hard before having kids. Not the smoking, but that even a loving husband will rarely give up as much as she will when babies and small children enter the picture. Some of that is biological, but seriously? New fathers will actually go out golfing every weekend rather than give their wives a break? What sort of asshole is that, and why would a woman have kids with him, knowing that that's what his priorities are?

But maybe that's the problem--too many couples don't talk about who's going to do what and what's going to change once a baby is there.

LW, if your husband is otherwise pulling his share--looking after the kids so you get a break on a regular basis, changing diapers, doing half the midnight feedings, you know actually parenting--then the smoking really is a silly thing to contemplate divorce over.

If his smoking is emblematic of how he's not willing to step up to the plate, parenting-wise, then you have other, much more serious things to talk about.

LW:

Don't go, at least not now. You don't have to buy into the whole domesticity thing, with the picket fence and 2.5 kids, but you do have to respect that your wife is caring for an infant.

She needs her family to help her and support her right now. Being a stay-at-home parent in close proximity to family can be isolating. Do you really want her to be a stay-at-home parent with a completely dependent baby in a place where she has no friends or family?

Now is not the right time to go.

First, you've both acted badly.

Second, I think you're asking yourself the wrong question. It isn't just a matter of trust.

(Though when a partner involves himself with another woman to the point of declaring that he's leaving you for her, I'd say that, no, you can't trust him, and both of you have some major work to do. Frankly, after your retaliatory "affair" with your ex, he doesn't have much cause to trust you, either.)

The thing that stands out to me is this: can you live with a man who is so repressed that he seems unable to acknowledge that he has feelings, let alone clue you in to them before things reach a crisis point? Can you handle crisis after crisis, as he ignores his feelings until they reach a boiling point, and then he acts and you react, and it creates more and more drama? Do you really want your child growing up in a house like that?

You cannot change your husband. Cannot. Change. Him. It's up to him to see the damage that his refusal to express his emotions does to your relationship.

You can only figure out your part in all of this--how to control your reactions, how you relate to your husband, and under what conditions you will stay in your marriage.

LW-

Don't marry your boyfriend. What possible good can come from marrying someone with whom you know you have long-term compatibility issues, whom you feel you would be settling to marry?

There's nothing wrong with either you or your boyfriend. If it helps, it's quite possible to love someone, and realize that staying with them isn't the right thing for either of you. This sounds like the case with the two of you. Break up.

I'm saying this, btw, as a 27-year-old who has been married for two years. Being married young does complicate things. We weren't settled when we married--neither of us had established careers; only one of us had finished school; only one of us had any idea what we wanted to do (not the one who had finished school, funny enough); and we barely had enough money to cover the bills. Accomplishing college and grad school and starting careers is much, much easier when you only have yourself to worry about. We've sacrificed things because we're married. I can't imagine making those sacrifices on behalf of someone I settled for.

I'm of two minds on this. First, I'm tired of watching the Democratic party throw the LGBT community under the bus, always telling them to wait, wait, wait until the time is right. The time is never going to be right.

But then, there are so many other things that need to get done--the complete overhaul of the DOJ to root out the incompetent ideologues installed by the Bush Admin; the closing of Guantanamo; pulling our troops out of Iraq; restoring habeus corpus; redoing FISA (again) to strip out the more outrageous powers that it gives, and so on and so forth. All of these things are going to take political will and cooperation from the other side. Inflaming the culture wars won't help us get this other shit done.

I don't remember who posted it first, but I did like the idea of an omnibus bill meant to "repeal the excesses of the Bush Administration" that could provide cover for the repeal of DADT and DOMA.