I cringe reading plenty on facebook -- it's not just parents who tell too much. I have a professional friend who regaled us all with details of her food poisening...ICK! Another friend has carried out fights with her ex husband. I thought only kids were foolish enough to do this.

Why on earth didn't the police call someone the mom could count on and get her to a safe place and go pursue the SOB who'd hit her? What would have the police thought if she'd just let the stressed out baby cry? Sounds to me like a mom who's on the edge -- and probably much less likely to call for help the next time the bully socks her.

I've been trying (desperately) to have an intelligent conversation about the health care reform opponents with a friend of mine who is a knee-jerk Republican. I finally gave up when her reply to my suggestion that she go find the facts that she insists are unavailable to the public was "Maybe I don't like the facts."

Since I consider her a friend I did not suggest that she just make up some of her own as is her party's wont, or have an attorney write up a memo or two asserting that they weren't, in fact, facts.

Then she said that Obama said "Your grandmother should just take a pill." It took me less than 3 minutes to find the quote in context. Of course, Obama did say that -- in a context of end of life counseling between a doctor and her patient.

What should we DO with these people? I don't think they want to be educated on being a sensible consumer of news. I don't think they even want to think. I am afraid they just want to fear and be angry!

I've got my own alcoholic dad and my own passive/aggressive mom, so I feel somewhat uniquely qualified to respond to the LW. Cary's right -- if she wants the relationship, (and I think it sounds like she does), she needs to reach out...but I found that the safest way for me to reach out was via letter writing.

Now, there are probably a lot of reasons that I started down that path rather than phone calls/face-to-face lunches, etc. First, he became deaf after a head injury about 20 years ago, so phone calls aren't an option. We tried with TeleType for the Deaf, but once email came about, we found that to be much more satisfactory. I live across the country, so the face to face thing just plain can't happen often.

So, with emails, the best thing is that if you sense when you open one that he's not in a good frame of mind for communicating, you can delete it or save it til later when YOU'RE ready to handle it. I'm not saying we haven't had fights over email, we have. But after the second or third turn in the fight, one or the other of us feels foolish and stops. Sometimes we stop writing for a week or two then, other times we just carry on like the argument never happened.

Healthy --? Maybe. Safe? ABSOLUTELY. And I've felt the need to be safe in my relationship with him. I give him what I feel I can lose (sort of like taking just the money you're comfortable losing to Vegas), nothing else.

Good luck. I'm glad you're thinking about this when you're 25. I don't think I realized until about 10 years ago (I'm 46) that my relationship with him was better now than it had been when we were much younger.