And so here I am, getting married to a sincere, sensitive man with a perfectly normal family who will, for the first time, meet my dysfunctional, fractured, and still very unaware-of-it-all family members. This scares me to death.
But what scares me most is my father, who is the person at the source of most of the pain I felt as a child. I’m torn about whether I should invite him to my wedding.
After years of noncommunication, my father, though in possession of many, many, many faults, has recently found his way back into my life. He is a big part of my youngest brother’s life. And now, my fiancé wants to include him in our wedding. The last time I saw my father, he was stoned out of his mind and drunk. He was supposed to drive my brother and me to the train station (and didn’t).
So I’m conflicted. I don’t expect my wedding day to be perfect. Part of me feels like, despite all of the drama that could occur, maybe this is an opportunity to include my father in an important part of my life and that this could be healing for him, and even cathartic to some extent. But then I imagine my mother’s face when my father has drunk a few too many, while my fiancé’s family looks on in horror. (My father isn’t the friendly, funny kind of drunk.)
I want to turn the proverbial page, but my hand is frozen, unable to make a decision. The easiest thing to do would be to just not invite him, not run the risk, so I won’t have to be nervous on “our day.” But I never have chosen the easiest thing. Please help!
Daughter with (Maybe)
Expired Daddy Issues
Dear Daughter,
Every time I read your letter a terrible screeching alarm goes off in my head. Please don’t invite your father to your wedding. There isn’t one word in your letter that tells me that you want to or should.
Let us first dispatch with your fiancé, since he—not you!—is the one who’d like to include your father in your wedding. I presume he had good intentions when he proposed this—Hollywood-inspired visions of profound revelations and touching reunions brought on by the magic of the day, no doubt. But you know what? His opinion on this matter has no bearing whatsoever. The decision about whether to invite your father isn’t even a tiny bit up to him. Your fiancé’s suggestion tells me that he has neither a clear understanding of your familial history, nor an awareness of your deeply dysfunctional dad. I suggest you have an exhaustive conversation with him on these subjects rather soon. Like now.
I commend you for working so hard to come to terms with your childhood. I know how painful that is to do, and I know how very much richer your life is for having done so. But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong. Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer). Sometimes those we forgive continue being the jackasses that they always were and we accept them while keeping them approximately three thousand miles away from our wedding receptions.
It sounds to me like your father fits into the latter category.
Which means you need to look sharp. If the words love, light, acceptance, and forgiveness are written on one side of the coin you’ve earned by creating the beautiful life you have in the wake of your ugly childhood, on the other side of that coin there is written the word no.
No is golden. No is the kind of power the good witch wields. It’s the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.
I’m talking, of course, about boundaries. I’m talking about taking a level gaze at “the man at the source of most of the pain” and making an informed decision about an important event in your life in which you put yourself and your needs and your desires front and center. It’s really very clear when you think about it, isn’t it? Your father wronged you as a child. He wronged you as a woman. And he will very likely wrong you on your wedding day if you give him the opportunity to do so.
This is not because he doesn’t love you. But love doesn’t make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist not a narcissist or a jackass not a jackass. At your wedding, your father will most likely behave the way he has behaved for all the years you’ve known him. Even if he doesn’t, what’s the best-case scenario? That you spend your wedding day worrying that your father is going to make an ass of himself and humiliate you and enrage your mom and alienate your in-laws, but he doesn’t? Does that sound like fun? Is that what you hoped for? Is that what you want?
Of course not. You want your father to be a prince. And if he can’t be that, you at least want him to be a decent human being. You want the enormity of your big day to be bigger than whatever measly little shit shack he’s been living in all of your life. I know this. I understand that ache. When I think about my own father for more than five seconds at a stretch, I can still feel my daddy sorrow all the way down to the very tips of my toes. Oh, but baby girl, your father is not going to do anything you want him to do because you want him to do it. Not one damn motherloving thing! You simply didn’t get that kind of dad. You got the kind who will only do what he can.
That you’ve gone to the door of his shit shack and knocked is a noble act. The strength and faith you called upon when you sought to repair your relationship with your father will shine through your life, regardless of what happens between the two of you. That is a magnificent thing, Daughter. It was created entirely by your grit and your grace. It belongs to you. Let it be the thing that guides you when you speak to your father about why he isn’t invited to your wedding. You wrote that not inviting him is the “easiest thing to do,” but I encourage you to make it the hardest thing. Use your decision as an opportunity to have a frank conversation with him about how his behavior affects you and your ability to truly let him back into your life.
If your father is a man worthy of your deepening affection, he’ll respect your decision even if his feelings are hurt. He’ll understand that his exclusion is not a punishment, but rather a consequence of his lifetime of poor fathering and bad behavior. He’ll tell you that there are other ways for him to celebrate your marriage and he’ll find a way to do it.
If he’s not a man worthy of your deepening affection, he’ll throw a fit. He’ll blame you for his failures. He’ll tell you that you’re selfish and mean. Possibly, he’ll X you out of his life. Or maybe it won’t mean anything to him that his conduct is so deplorable that his daughter has chosen to exclude him from her wedding. Perhaps he’ll simply let this—like so much else—roll right on by.
But you know what? No matter what he does, one thing is certain: he won’t screw up your wedding day. Which, really, should be perfect. Or as close to perfect as it can be. And hard and sad as it is, it’s up to you alone to make it that way, just like it’s been up to you to make your perfect life.
I know it will be, dear one. I don’t even need an invitation to see.
Yours,
Sugar
ROMANTIC LOVE IS NOT A COMPETITIVE SPORT
Dear Sugar,
I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman who started dating a wonderful man a couple of months ago. He’s smart, good-natured, funny, and he definitely turns me on. I’m extremely happy to have met him, and even happier that he likes me as much as I like him. Our sex life is great, but my man has this bad habit of mentioning past sexual experiences. He doesn’t go into detail, and I don’t think he realizes his stories bother me. I think he genuinely trusts me, and simply wants to talk about these things.
Recently, he started to tell me that he’d once been in an orgy. I stopped him and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to know anything about this.” He was not upset, and he respected my request, but now this image is floating around in my head. Constantly. Haunting me. I keep imagining what it was like, what
he was like, what the women were like, and it’s making me sick: Sick with jealousy. Sick with insecurity. Sick with fear. It intimidates me, makes me feel crazy.
I’m not worried that he’s going to cheat on me to go have an orgy, but I do worry that maybe I won’t be enough to satisfy him. I don’t know what to do. This image is still in my head—as are others—but I don’t know if talking with him about it (i.e., finding out more details, that my imaginative little mind will feast on in potentially terrible ways) will help or just make it worse.
Is this something that, if left alone, I’ll eventually just realize is a natural part of his healthy sexual past or do I need to tell him how it makes me feel, at risk of sounding like an irrational, insecure, jealous woman who doesn’t trust him, possibly pushing him away? And if I do have to talk to him about it, how can I keep from fanning the crazed fire that’s already burning in my head?
Love,
Haunted by His Sexual Past
Dear Haunted by His Sexual Past,
Hmmm, so let me see. Your boyfriend is
1. Wonderful.
2. Extremely smart.
3. Good-natured.
4. Funny.
5. Terrific in bed.
6. As into you as you are into him.
7. Trusting.
8. Trustworthy.
9. Respectful.
10. Interested in talking intimately with you about his life.
Am I going to have to remove my silk gloves and bop you with them?
You aren’t haunted by your boyfriend’s sexual past. You’re haunted by your own irrational, insecure, jealous feelings, and if you continue to behave in this manner you will eventually push your lover away.
I don’t mean to be harsh, darling. I’m direct because I sincerely want to help you and because it’s clear to me that you’re an incredibly good egg. I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.
So let us dismantle your mania.
You say that your knowledge of your lover’s past sexual experiences makes you feel jealous and insecure and afraid that you won’t be “enough to satisfy him.” Really? One thing about love—especially free, unfettered, and uncommitted love such as the kind you and your man are in—is that people pretty much do what they want to do. If you weren’t enough to satisfy him, you’d know it because he wouldn’t be with you. The fact that he is means that he likes you. A lot. And he doesn’t want to be with all the other women he’s fucked. Or at least not all that much.
Contrary to what the Bachelor/Bachelorette television franchise and the entire spirit-decimating Hollywood Industrial Complex would have you believe, romantic love is not a competitive sport. Some of those women your boyfriend used to fuck have nicer asses than you. Some are smarter or funnier or fatter or more generous or more messed-up than you. That’s okay. That has no bearing on you whatsoever. You’re not up against those women. You’re running your own race. We don’t dig or not dig people based on a comparison chart of body measurements and intellectual achievements and personality quirks. We dig them because we do. This guy—your lover, my anxious little peach? He digs you.
Don’t ruin it because at some point in time he dug other women too. Of course you’re going to get a pinchy feeling inside when you think of those women rubbing up against your man! I get that. I know what that’s like. It was not so long ago that I was standing in my basement and I came across an envelope addressed to Mr. Sugar, and when I picked it up, out fell about seven thousand little bits of glossy paper that if you put them all together would be a photograph of the woman who was the last woman Mr. Sugar had sex with who wasn’t me. And this woman was not just any woman, but an impossibly lithe modern dancer, her body so tight and taut and bitch fiddle-esque I might as well be the Pillsbury Doughboy. And these seven thousand pieces were not the result of Mr. Sugar ripping up the photograph because he didn’t want to see the image of the last woman he had sex with who wasn’t me anymore. No. This was a love puzzle she made for him—I know because I also read the card inside, which basically said, Come and get me, Tiger.
So of course I stood there among the spiderwebs and laundry lint and put the seven thousand pieces together, until there she was—sculpted and bedazzling—in all her not-Sugar glory.
It felt a little like someone had stabbed me in the gut.
But that was all it did. By the time I scooped the seven thousand pieces of her into my palms and returned them to their rightful place in the envelope, that feeling was just a tiny punch. I took a walk with Mr. Sugar later that day and I told him what I had found and we laughed about it a little, and even though I already knew the story of the woman who was in seven thousand tiny pieces, I asked him about her again—what drew him to her, what they did together, and why he did with her what he did—and by the time we were done talking I didn’t feel anything in my gut anymore. I only felt closer to him.
I felt that way because we were closer. Not because I more deeply understood the woman who makes me look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but because I more deeply understood Mr. Sugar’s inner sanctum. The jealous fire that’s burning in you, Haunted—the one that speaks up when your man tries to share stories of his sexual past with you—is keeping you from being close to him. The women your lover knew and loved and fucked and had wild orgies with before you are pieces of his life. He wants to tell you about them because he wants to deepen his relationship with you, to share things about himself that he doesn’t share with many others.
This is called intimacy. This is called fuck yes. When people do this with us, it’s an honor. And when the people who do this with us also happen to be people with whom we are falling in love, it lets us into an orbit in which there is only admission for two.
Isn’t that cool? It is. It really is, pumpkin. It’s gratitude that you should be feeling in place of jealousy and insecurity and fear when your lover shares stories of his life with you. I encourage you to reach for that gratitude. It’s located just a stretch beyond the “crazed fire” that’s burning in your head. I’m certain that if you apply some effort you’ll have it in hand.
Please read the letter you wrote to me out loud to your boyfriend. This will be embarrassing, but do it anyway. Tell him how you feel without making him responsible for your feelings. Ask him what his motivations are for telling you stories of his sexual past. Ask him if he’d like to hear about your own sexual experiences. Then take turns telling each other one story that makes each of you feel a little bit like you’ve been stabbed in the gut.
Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.
Yours,
Sugar
A BIG LIFE
Dear Sugar,
My question is not about love or sex, but rather one of identity and striving for the best quality of life possible. I, as many other Americans, am struggling financially. Student loans are continuously on my mind and are the cause of almost every stress in my life.
My parents graciously co-signed for my student loans, however, I am being forced to consolidate in order to relieve them of this duty. I realize this is more out of necessity than spite, yet the situation greatly impacts my already poor financial situation and also my dream of attending graduate school. I’m so angry with my parents for putting me in this circumstance instead of supporting me to get a graduate degree for my dream job, and I feel selfish about that.
My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them. I am grateful they were able to help me with an undergraduate degree. However, I have never been close to them, and am often wary of their intentions. Our phone conversations are 100 percent concerning student loans rather than me as a person.
I struggle with student loans often defining me. I know my education, student loans, and occupation will define me to an extent. However, I am more than my job and these items combined
. I am a twenty-five-year-old woman who strives for the greatest possible quality of life and to be the best person she can be. But more often than not, I am defined by my “student loan” identity. It is on my mind when I grab a beer, buy new clothes, and in general live my life. I do not spend excessively and have always had careful money management. Yet this situation extends beyond any careful money management.
I have always reached to have a positive spin on life. I fell into a deep, dark hole a few years ago, and have crawled out slowly myself. I purposely changed what I didn’t like about my life. It wasn’t an easy process by any means, but I am finally in a place where I can breathe. Yet the stresses of student loans bear greatly, and I am having trouble keeping up any positive outlook.
Sugar, I would love your perspective on this situation. I wish my parents would see me for the vibrant woman I am. I wish I could see myself as the vibrant young woman I strive to be and would like to be in the future.
Sincerely,
Wearing Thin
Dear Wearing Thin,
I received zero funding from my parents for my undergraduate education (or from relatives of any sort, for that matter). It wasn’t that my mother and stepfather didn’t want to help me financially; it was that they couldn’t. There was never any question about whether I’d need to fend for myself financially once I was able to. I had to. So I did.
I got a job when I was fourteen and kept one all through high school. The money I earned went to things like clothes, school activity fees, a junked-out car, gas, car insurance, movie tickets, mascara, and so on. My parents were incredibly generous people. Everything they had they shared with my siblings and me. They housed me, they fed me, and they went to great lengths to create wonderful Christmases, but, from a very young age, if I wanted something I usually had to buy it myself. My parents were strapped. Most winters there would be a couple of months so lean that my mother would have to go to the local food bank for groceries. In the years that the program was in place, my family received blocks of cheese and bags of powdered milk from the federal government. My health insurance all through my childhood was Medicaid—coverage for kids living in poverty.