Reading between the lines I see a mother with a large agenda of her own: "pushed the private ballet and piano lessons", "forcing... lessons she hates", "I wish my own mother had forced me".

Why is the LW forcing another person to do anything at all? In my book, that's a very poor way to live life. Certainly we have an obligation to impose on our children to, say, not drive cars at 13, but piano lessons are not in the same life-threatening category. I also doubt the importance of continuing both in making music a career; it is as if the LW has a very limited view of what a musical life might be.

In summary, it's time to start letting go and allowing this new-forming person to have beliefs, desires and goals of her own.

Two things.

Leave the poor man alone! To the extent that we try to control another, we reduce the space in which they may be themself. To allow someone to be themself is the greatest gift and honor we can bestow, and the reward is that the person feels seen and accepted and will respond by being more open, more honest and more communicative. If it bugs you, this is a cue to work on yourself, not on him. And if you must say something about it, the message should be how it affects you, not how he should change.

Secondly, no one else seems to have picked up that this is a sigh of pleasure. How wonderful it is to be with a person who takes pleasure from the world. I have known so many people who treat it as a trial and a burden.

Past is past. Letting go of it is a skill that can take a lifetime to perfect, but here are some tips. Meet her. Focus on the present. Try and use the present tense exclusively. "Your hair looks nice." "This coffee tastes great." That's because THAT IS ALL THERE IS. The past and the future - they don't exist. They're only in your head. To the extent that you focus on them, you're not present; the alternative is to be present, which means you pressent yourself to the other, and the more you can do this, the more real and authentic you become.

This is hard to do, but a very worthwhile goal. As much as you succeed with it, your world will be transformed. There's another trick to this: abandon all attempts to control others. Exorcise the word "should" from your life. By doing this along with being present, you make space for other people to be themselves. They feel heard/seen, and don't feel attacked; they blossom and grow in your presence.

You may be thinking this is all very abstract, and what does this have to do with your ex-girlfriend? This: just meet her, accept her, be with her. Walk. Go to movies. Make dinner. Shop. Speak of your pain (but in the present tense!) Buy flowers. Enjoy.

Here's your work: "it makes me so angry inside that he has no compassion for my parents". Let him be. You are trying to make him act differently, just as he would like your parents to act differently. His fear of your debt - if it makes him afraid and angry, let him be so, but it's HIS fear and anger, and you don't have to react to it. Don't run away from it; just acknowledge it and let him know he is heard and you empathise with his pain.

By taking this centered, non-reactive position, you will change the entire dynamic. Arguments go zig-zag-zig-zag along well-worn paths; by changing one response a teeny bit, you can make the entire conversation go off into previously untrod depths of communication.

The NY Times published a map http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/05/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_RECAP.html showing that a broad swath across middle America voted MORE Republican. I can only interpret this as racial prejudice. The good news is how limited it was.

People, it's hard to accept a different view of the world. In "A Brief History of Everything", Ken Wilber resurrected Arthur Koestler's Holons: autonomous structures that are themselves part of a larger structure, for instance, cells within our body. We ourselves are part of the larger structure of society, and it has just developed a global voice and conversation via the Internet, Youtube and social networks. The 2008 election was the first in which a significant peer-to-peer conversation took place unmediated by the powers that be, the main-stream media.

The trend in our culture has been a wider and wider identification. We grow up identifying with our family, our tribe; all else is a threat, an enemy. As we mature, we extend the net of empathy more broadly, until we include all of humanity and beyond. Education and communication are essential aspects of this, and the Internet offers a world-wide conversation to facilitate this.

But I want to speculate further, to suggest that maybe this is the next step in evolution, that we do not only use DNA to pass on life, but the whole of culture also; the Internet is the flood that finally is joining all the small puddles from around the world into a melting-pot of ideas and empathy, and and from it, great things will arise. We are part of a larger thing that has a life of its own, and we can no more understand it that a cell can understand the body it is in.

Finally, I will counter the nay-sayers by pointing them to Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence, wherein he talks about how violence has decreased across the millenia, centuries and decades; proof that we can change, that we are not trapped by our lower selves.