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Carolyn Hax Live Discussion - The Washington Post

Advice columnist Carolyn Hax takes your comments and questions most Fridays about life, family, relationships and more. Some questions may be adapted into full columns, and transcripts of the chats remain available after each session concludes.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/30/carolyn-hax-chat-glossary-terms-abbreviations/">Here’s a glossary of frequently used chat terms.</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/02/08/carolyn-hax-chat-transcripts-by-year/">Read transcripts from past live chats here.</a>

The question box includes a space for your name, but this is optional. Your submissions are anonymous unless you choose to identify yourself. To reply to other posts, simply include ‘re:’ or ‘to’ the topic in the subject line of your post.

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For technical problems or questions, email <a href="mailto:livechatsupport@washpost.com">livechatsupport@washpost.com</a>.

Carolyn Hax started her Washington Post advice column in 1997, after five years on the Style desk and none as a therapist. The column includes cartoons by "relationship cartoonist" Nick Galifianakis — Carolyn's ex-husband — and appears in over 100 newspapers.

Carolyn Hax

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Carolyn Hax: ‘Paranoid’ boyfriend tracks her period every month - The Washington Post

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/12/live-chat-carolyn-hax/#link-f7de28d8bca843c287c40140a0a0fefb" target=_blank>Adapted from an online discussion.</a>

Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend and I have been together for about six months, and he’s a great, loving, generous, fun and caring guy, but he’s so paranoid that I’ll get pregnant that it makes me crazy. When we got together, he told me that he’s not sure about kids and definitely isn’t ready now. That’s fine by me; I’m 24, six years younger than he is, just starting out in a competitive field and not even totally sure about kids yet, either. I’m on reliable birth control and have been since I was 18 with no problems. He also wears a condom, which is also fine by me.

On top of that, he tracks my periods, and on the day I’m expected to get it, he’ll text me until I assure him that I got it. It makes me feel as if he doesn’t trust me or have my back, so I finally talked to him and he said he went through a pregnancy with a girlfriend when he was younger, and although the woman terminated in the end, it was all horrible.

I’m finishing up something big at work, something that’s either make or break for the next step in my career, and, as always when I’m super stressed, my period was late last month. I explained this to him, but he still insisted I take a pregnancy test, which I did. Of course it was negative. He still didn’t relax until I got it. He asked whether the same thing could happen this month, and I said probably or that I might not even get it, and he’s completely freaked out but also asking me to be patient and not break up.

I think I might love this guy, but I’m also wondering whether he’s worth this stress.

He didn’t ask me, but here’s my advice to him: Start work ASAP with a therapist on the trauma of the previous experience. If the anxiety doesn’t start to diminish soon, then talk to your doctor about sperm banking and getting a vasectomy.

He is 30, and unless you left something out, he is self-supporting, reasonably mature and has no significant health issues. If a reasonably mature and healthy self-supporting 30-year-old is this maniacally opposed to raising a child, even an oops, then he needs to take full responsibility for 100 percent effective birth control, which means surgery or celibacy.

My advice for you is to decide whether you see this as a potentially lifelong relationship. Obviously it’s early, but you probably have some idea. If you do think there’s something durable here, beneath the contraception-cray-cray, then it’s time to let him know that you will not live or scramble or talk/text/test in service of his trauma and that you would like him to get professional help.

Approach him kindly with this, but don’t mince words.

How he responds to that — to the line itself and to the fact that you’re drawing one — will tell you a lot about his willingness to face difficult things, which in turn is the single most useful predictor of whether people are able to hold up their end of a long-term commitment, to you or anyone else.

Carolyn Hax: ‘Paranoid’ boyfriend tracks her period every month

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Carolyn Hax: Engaged but still preparing for ‘the other shoe to drop’ - The Washington Post

Dear Carolyn: I’m getting married next month to a wonderful partner. He is warm, loving, accepting, patient and flexible. I feel very lucky to have found him.

My issue is that my past relationships have been with men who were sometimes these things and sometimes demonstrated very unhealthy behaviors: extreme mood instability, uncontrolled verbal anger, general selfishness. These relationships were intense on both the high and low sides. They ended abruptly and in ways that were very painful for me (cheating, sudden change of heart/abandonment).

I know my fiance is committed and emotionally healthy, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes I keep this to myself, and sometimes it leaks into planning. For example, I may take on a lucrative side gig that would let us pay off our new home in less than 10 years. My brain leaps to: “What if we get a divorce and I put so much more money into our home. How can I protect myself?” There are rational things we are doing, such as getting a prenup, which he has agreed to as a means to help me feel secure. (I think he’d prefer we skipped it.) But I know my stuck-ness isn’t all rational.

How can I get my brain to focus more on the positives (we could have our house paid off!) vs. the negatives (what if I somehow get screwed over or he disappears tomorrow)?

Trying to Be Free: The thing I most want to blurt out might help you the least: I wish more people would think as you do.

Just more broadly, though, so it isn’t all about the possibility of someone mistreating you, but instead about constructive, rational preparation for emergencies of all kinds.

The difference between what you’re thinking and what I’m thinking is the attribution. To live in suspense over the dropping of the other shoe by the person you’re about! to! marry! is unhealthy for you and unfair to a “wonderful partner.” But if you can look at it as being prepared for what life might throw at you, so you can feel free to stop worrying about the future and immerse yourself in the present and your people, then you’ll be on one of the healthier paths there is.

It might take therapy, though, to get you from the first path to the other.

It’s one thing to have history, which is normal and can sneak up on us in the form of the occasional flinch; it’s another to have trauma, which, left unaddressed, can become almost a separate being who sows doubt, discourages risk and interferes with our ability to connect with anyone else.

You’re about to marry, and you don’t feel safe. I suggest therapy for this, because you already have your rational mind convinced that you’re okay, but your animal brain is in fear.

And to continue to force your rational mind to “focus more on the positives” is one of the ways people get into and stay in exploitative relationships: They make themselves ignore warnings and fear, and treat only the good stuff as real.

A working fear-response system, one you can trust to distinguish between an imagined threat and a real one, may protect you better than any prenup can.

So, yes, think carefully about putting all your side-hustle cash into the house. Enlist a fiduciary adviser to help you figure out how to protect your assets, marital and individual, in the case of illness, death, divorce or natural disaster. You apparently can, so do it. Life comes for optimists, too, right? Insure yourselves wisely.

But also tend to your emotional assets, please, and make as full a commitment to healing from your past relationships as you have to protecting your cash. Define “healed” as when you trust yourself again to get through it if something goes wrong.

Think of it as securing your marriage, not just your divorce.

Dear Carolyn: It’s okay to be communicating with an old boyfriend, right? Husband is unnerved by it, but there is no way old boyfriend and I are getting back together. We are just having fun catching up, seeing where our lives landed after so many years. We don’t even live in the same part of this very big country.

Anonymous: So, the old, “He’s X, so we’d never Y.”

When people want to Y, they blow right through every version of X to get there. Don’t feed anyone false assurances, yourself most of all.

There is nothing inherently bad about having a conversation with an ex. Catch up, sure. It’s great to have a chance to refresh some memories, with the benefit of a witness to your personal history. We lose so much to time.

But if a current partner who doesn’t typically get unnerved by communication with past partners (I have no patience for the possessive) is unnerved by this communication with this past partner, then respect him enough to take a hard look at what you’re trying to assure away.

Carolyn Hax

Washington, D.C.

Need advice? Join Carolyn Hax’s weekly chat (July 8 | 12 p.m. ET)

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