Okay, a little lesson for those who do not really understand how the media industry works:

1. VF did NOT try "to make her (Gretchen Mol) an "It" girl by draping her coyly posed nude body in a mink stole and featuring her on the cover." Her publicist, along with the publicity and marketing departments of the studio for whom she was making a film at the time, did. That's how she ended up on the cover of VF. Magazines don't try to "make" it girls. There's nothing in it for them. Studios, production companies, and networks, on the other hand, have a vested interest in creating stars.

2. Many talented actresses take off their clothes. Sometimes, they do it for a role (Glenn Close, for example). Sometimes, they do it to get famous (Joan Crawford, who started in "nudies"). If they're good actresses, it doesn't hurt their careers, and can even help. If they are lousy actresses, it's not going to make them good. If they are somewhere in the middle, it could launch them (Sharon Stone).

3. Oy vey! People are so touchy!

This "problem" really is an easy one to solve. The guy should just tell his wife that an old friend is moving to town, and he's excited for the wife to meet her so that they can all become friends. No tortured explanations, no martyrdom, no soul-searching. Make it easy. Once the cloak-and-dagger nature of the relationship is removed, the relationship will lose its forbidden quality and become a friendship. Or it will die, because there wasn't much there to begin with. As an added bonus, once the guy and his wife get to know this letter writer as a single woman, they can perhaps introduce her to someone compatible and available.

The greatest gift my parents ever gave me and my brother was letting us eat whatever we wanted. As a result, neither of us has a "relationship with food." We eat, we don't eat, sometimes we eat healthfully, sometimes we eat junk food, but food is something we enjoy, not something we have emotional or neurotic issues about. And, left to our own devices, both of us happily ate an after-school snack of fruit or cereal, while all the snack-food deprived kids in the neighborhood scarfed up all the potato chips, cookies, and candy we had in the house. By not forbidding us certain foods, our parents didn't make these foods disproportionately attractive to us. Also, they never forced us to clean our plates, or to eat anything we didn't like. As long as we tasted it, that was good enough for them.

Oh, and today, we're both slim, healthy adults with wide-ranging tastes and curious palates. And neither of us has ever had to diet. You don't get fat from just eating food. You get fat from feeding your emotions and neuroses.

I'm a straight woman, but I had sex with another woman a few times. It happened when I was engaged to the man who is now my husband. No, he doesn't know about it. And no, I am not gay. I was just attracted to this particular woman, I was about to get married and take myself of the market for keeps, and I wanted to experiment a little. You know what? I really enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoy having sex with men. And I don't enjoy having sex with anyone as much as I enjoy it with my husband. The point is, everyone might be over-reacting here. I did the same thing, it hasn't hurt my marriage, it hasn't "turned me gay," and I don't stay awake nights wondering what that last crazy fling might have been like. Maybe everyone should just chill out.

My husband and I keep our finances seperate, primarily for tax purposes. I'm actually kind of surprised no one else has mentioned this yet. We have a joint savings account, but to make our bookkeeping easy, we keep seperate checking accounts and credit cards. That said, we treat our money as OUR money. We pay bills as they come in - whoever happens to catch the mail that day handles it - and we've never had a problem. There have been years during which I made more money and years during which he did. There was even a two-year period during which he made nothing at all. Who cares? We're a team, and because we trust each other, we're totally comfortable having seperate finances. At the end of the day, it's all about trusting your spouse to support you and take care of you when you need it, and to not steal you blind when you're not looking. Easy.

Okay, apparently this is unconventional advice, but I say pick Robert. Joe is going to get more and more set in his ways and more and more withdrawn, and eventually, more and more dependent on LW. Which will suck. She'll start to resent him, and wish she had picked Robert. Anyone who has a successful relationship knows that each partner has to be secure as an individual and has to have some personal sphere in order to make things work long-term. With Robert, she'll have a partner in crime, not a clingy, needy fella.

You know what? The Chinese parents already know that you're living together. They're not stupid. They're just waiting to see what happens. And because their son won't come forward with this bit of information, they're hoping that if they don't acknowledge it either, the "problem" will go away.

No wonder people hate artists. Or, to be more accurate, self-proclaimed artists. Yuck.