Letters to the Editor
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boundaries, communication, working together, everyone taking responsibility for their own baggage.
1.LW, I'm sorry for all the grief you're going through. Since you aren't cheating on her, I wonder what would happen if you put the solution to the problem on both of your shoulders. For example: Sweetie, I love you, and trust you, and want to be in a relationship where my partner offers me that same respect. So I think we need to figure this out. Imagine that I am not cheating. Imagine that it is very hard for me to hear you accusing me of cheating. Imagine that it could hurt our relationship. What should we do about this, because we are in this together.
The thing is, you don't know what, if anything, would calm those fears in her head. But she's got to be the one to tell you-you can't second guess it. And she's got to seek the help she needs, realize that your relationship is worth the effort. You've just got to identify your own boundaries. What can you live and not live with in terms of behavior? Can you tell her this and set those boundaries? So, in sum: boundaries, communication, working together, everyone taking responsibility for their own baggage.
2. Folks, sometimes Cary knocks it out the park, sometimes the ball just kind of plops. But It's all part of the lovely thing we have going here, and so are we all - offering our advice to this probably nice LW who wrote in because he wanted to hear other perspectives in the topic. In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps commenters who get all disrespectful towards Cary for being Cary (He's waxing longwinded philosophical! He's f**king wrong! My advice is soooo much better than his, Salon, when *will* you see that?) are an important part of it too.
The thing is, I don't think Cary needs to be *right* (whatever that means) 100% of the time. I think he gives his perspective, I give mine, you give yours, and this fellow thousands of miles away hopefully gets picture of the many ways he could view this and feels a little bit more like he's part of a community, asking for advice from a columnist he reads and a commenting community he's probably been part of for a while.
And you know, I can dig it.
June
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Sailor, if you fall for Tennis's advice, you're on a sinking ship
I keep looking for limits to Tennis's monumental stupidity, but he always surprises me.
What has he come up with this time? A sailor writes in to say he has never cheated on his wife. Tennis's reaction? To assume that the poor fellow is being dishonest. Why? At least the wife has the excuse of PTSD. What is Tennis's excuse?
"It takes time to build trust," is Tennis's startling insight, and like most of his advice, it is irrelevant, since they are already married, and if the woman hadn't decided she could trust the guy before she married, and if, as he asserts and Tennis has no reason to doubt, he has done nothing since to forfeit her trust and yet she still doesn't trust him, why does anyone imagine this will change?
"To build trust, you need a clean foundation," Tennis writes. The man has a clean foundation already, which Tennis simply ignores. "Is there anything you have done in the past that would give her a valid reason not to trust you?" our wise advice columnist asks. "[I]f she knows about incidents like this and you have never talked about them, I mean honestly talked about them and told her that those are things you will never do again, they may be interfering with her ability to trust you."
Well that's quite true. And if the sailor has ever been a member of Al Qaeda and not told her, or an enforcer for the Colombian cartels and not told her, or a child molester and not told her, but she suspects these things about him, those behaviors would also explain the problem--if they had anything to do with it. But they don't. And neither do any of Tennis's inane comments.
I can't help but wonder: if a woman wrote to Tennis and said, "I have been faithful to my husband, but he constantly accuses me of cheating, yells at me, calls me at work to chew me out, suspects all my male friends of being my lover, and even hit me over this," would Tennis write back and ask her if she was truly faithful and advise her to do what it took to build trust?
But then our sage writes, "What is trust, anyway?" which, in the context of Tennis's utter inanity, reminds me of nothing so much as the opening of one of Bacon's essays, in which he wrote, "What is truth, asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Finally, Tennis writes, "I cannot give you advice on how she can handle that." It would have been more honest to say, "I cannot give you advice," but then he had already taken several hundred words to prove just that.
Does anyone on Salon's editorial staff read this travesty of a column besides Tennis himself and his outraged readers? Is anyone at all aware that Tennis is completely unqualified to give advice and that this entire enterprise is a bad joke?
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Three words of advice
You've only been married a year? No kids? Get out now.
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If there is one thing I learned
from hearing the women around me tell it, it is that women are always right.
so, that makes you wrong.
guilty and don't even know it...
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You can't prove a negative...
...and Cary's advice here was way off-base. Isn't it more likely that wife needs a lot more help with her PSTD than she's getting than that her husband is cheating? LW could "build trust" for the next twenty years, but that's not going to help if wife is ill and behaving irrationally--in fact, no matter what he does, he's gonna be screwed because his wife won't believe him. She's got a bad idee fixe--the kind that often leads to military-spousal abuse and murder. LW needs to seek heavy-duty help for her and for himself.