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Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. For this edition, Rebecca Onion, a Slate senior writer, will be filling in as Prudie. Submit questions here. (It’s anonymous!) Dear Prudence, I love my adult daughter, but I can’t stand the person she has grown up to be. She is entirely self-centered, selfish, and materialistic. She is obsessed with status and fakes a wealthy lifestyle, but turns around and demands that her mother and I pay her bills. It has been a constant problem since she went to college and fell into a fast crowd. My ex and I grew up in very humble origins. We never had to worry about putting food on the table, but vacations were going to see Grandma, not Grenada. My ex gave our daughter an old but paid-off car. She promptly traded it in for a flashy, expensive one—and couldn’t keep up the payments. She called and demanded that I take them over, or she is going to lose her job and apartment. I told her that wouldn’t be possible. My wife and I are in the process of adopting two of our foster kids. We can’t afford to take on more debt. My daughter made ugly accusations against my wife about trying to steal her inheritance and take me away from her. She used foul language to describe our foster kids and said she would never consider them her real siblings. I told her I was going to hang up and would continue to do so until she could be civil. We haven’t spoken in a long while. I know through her mom that she is struggling and she refuses to accept any real help. My ex tried to get our daughter to either talk to a counselor or an accountant about her financial future. She refused. I feel so helpless. This isn’t how we raised her, and sometimes I look at her, and it is like staring at a stranger. Is there any hope? She turns 28 this year. —Hurting Dear Hurting, I will offer the slight consolation that I know many people who had financially disastrous twenties (I went to humanities grad school! Hey-yo!), and who came to their senses in their thirties. 28 is a little old to be a financial mess, but many people have been a mess at that age and turned it around. I say this to argue that you should not see it as your parental obligation to teach her financial literacy or talk her out of her spendthrift path. Certainly don’t cover her living expenses or her car payments—she can figure that out. Nor do I think that you can do very much, right now, regarding your interpersonal relationship. Some kind of hurt is behind this—something about the way the divorce went down, and her feelings about her status as your daughter after that divorce—that I can’t figure out from this letter, since it only gives your “side” and doesn’t contain many details about that period in your lives. Such a dramatic change in a person doesn’t happen just because they went to college and met some rich kids. I’m glad you and your ex seem like you’re in communication. That gives me hope that maybe one day, the three of you could have a broader conversation about everything that happened during and after the split. Dear Prudence, My girlfriend of going on six years and I have very different communication styles when it comes to emotions. If she is upset about something, she will close herself off, and I have to push to find out what’s wrong, even when she’s upset about something I did that I would readily apologize and make amends for if I knew it hurt her. When I know what’s going on, I put a lot of effort into talking her through it (I’ve asked if she finds this annoying, but she says it’s helpful). When I’m upset, I want to talk about what’s wrong in the same way, but when I try to engage her in conversation at these moments, I get either literal silence or a three-word response. Outside of our respective emotional crises, when I try to talk about conflicts in the relationship, sex, or other sensitive topics, it feels like pulling teeth to get her to actually talk back instead of just silently listening to me. We were raised by parents with vastly different norms around feelings and communication, and I know I can’t expect to mold her to my style, but I also feel like there’s a huge imbalance, and it’s leaving me emotionally unfulfilled. I have told her this many times, but nothing has substantively changed. I love her and I want to get married soon. Outside of this context, we have a near-perfect relationship, with lively, deep, intellectual, and balanced conversations (that was what attracted me to her in the first place!). But I’m worried that if the emotional communication status quo continues, it will either become a dealbreaker for me or my frustration will sour the relationship. Am I being unreasonable? If not, how do I get through to her? —Dying for Some Discussion Dear Dying, No, you aren’t being unreasonable. Six years, and looking toward marriage, is a great time to take out any misgivings you have and turn them over in your hands, looking to see whether this Thing will still be okay with you in 10 years, or 20 years, when life throws things at you. If it’s hard to talk through upset feelings now, how will you make decisions around big, fraught couple issues, like whether you should move to a new city for one partner’s job when the other is happy where they are, or whether you should buy a nicer house that will mean a bigger mortgage payment than one partner likes, or whether (sometimes the biggest one of all) you should have kids? Couplehood is all about coming to consensus on these kinds of matters, which contain great potential for upset. And sometimes you need to make such decisions much more quickly than you’d like. All of which is to say, you need to figure this out, or you may feel quite alone when you’re making these big choices in the future. I would bring it up with her, reiterate that you are with her and want to be with her, but that you are really worrying about your ability to speak with her about weighty matters. Ask whether she thinks there might be any better way, structurally speaking, to have these conversations. Maybe you happen to bring stuff up when she’s about to go to sleep, or to work, and she finds the timing stressful. Maybe she would rather plan to have the conversations, instead of having them in a surprise, spontaneous way. Maybe it could be easier to have them at a time when you’re both physically in the same location for an extended period of time, and in a relatively private spot (for this reason, my husband and I have had good luck talking things over on road trips). And, of course, offer to find (and figure out funding for) a couples counselor, if you can, and if that would be something she’d be open to exploring. Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, I thought “Wendy,” and I would be best friends for life. We were roommates in college, shared a crappy apartment after graduation, and I was in her bridal party. When she got pregnant, I thought I was going to be an honorary aunt. I organized her baby shower and helped set up the nursery and a meal train after the baby was born. And then Wendy disappeared from my life—until she needed something. My texts went unreturned, offers to meet up were ignored, or canceled at the last minute. When the baby was 13 months old, her husband got a transfer to another city, and suddenly, Wendy was back in my life. I got boxes, helped with the packing, and supervised the movers while Wendy took care of the baby. I use vacation time to help out here. Wendy claimed she would forever be grateful to me. Then it was radio silence again. Her city is halfway to where my grandparents live, so we made plans to meet up—only Wendy refused to confirm with me. I decided to drop by and say hi. We had coffee, and Wendy claimed to be just very tired but hugged me goodbye and said to stay in touch. A week later, she sent me an awful text where she accused me of stomping on her boundaries and not respecting her space. She then blocked my number. Hurt doesn’t even cover what I felt. It threw me for a serious loop, where I was examining every interaction I had with everyone I knew. So imagine my shock four years later when we both attend a mutual friend’s wedding, Wendy comes up and hugs me! She acted like we just “accidentally” fell out of touch. I figured she was just pretending to save face, but in the next few days, she followed me on social media and invited me to meet up since they had moved back to my area. I haven’t responded. Should I? Is there any chance of getting a real explanation or just more fakeness? I understand people grow apart and change, but no one deserves this kind of viciousness. —Confused in Colorado Dear Confused, I suspect you know the answer, but no. Don’t respond. There’s some of what you’ve described here that could be chalked up to the fluctuations of personality in your twenties. You can certainly be friends with someone in college and in the immediate post-college “crappy apartment” times, and then see different sides of them come out when everyone is hanging out less, and real-life-ing more. And certainly, having a baby puts a lot of people under the kind of stress that may lead them to beg a friend to take vacation days to help them move (though I have never done this, nor heard of anyone doing it). But nothing in here leads me to believe that Wendy cares about you. Did she ever? I don’t know, but everything you described here is lopsided—a friendship between two young people, with a fatally dramatic power differential, that became clearer as life took its course. I’d venture to guess that a friend willing to do everything you’ve described will not see her actions as something needing explanation, or (most importantly) you as a person owed repair. I would write Wendy off—you guys had fun, but I don’t think she’s a good friend. Classic Prudie This is a weird problem. I have two brothers. One is Zach (38). The other is my younger brother Gil who’s 15 and is convinced that I’m his biological parent and that I was forced to give him up to be raised by our mom and dad as a teenager. He’s believed this since he was 13. It isn’t true. I was 17 so it was technically possible, but it never happened. The problem is that there is no way that I have found to convince my brother of that.
