I’d Prefer My Disabled Cousin Not to Attend My Child-Free Wedding—and Other Advice From the Week

Slate publishes a lot of advice each week, so we’re pulling together a selection of our favorites. Here are a few of the most compelling questions from the week and links to hours of advice reading. This week: wedding guest dilemmas, porn habits, and holiday budgeting.

Not a Bridezilla: My fiancé and I are in the early stages of planning a black-tie optional wedding in late fall/early winter 2024. I know my parents graciously want to pay for most of the wedding; however, my fiancé and I are in a position that we are happy to contribute, as we are in our mid-30s and established in our careers and finances. Most of our friends have younger children, and we know they will welcome a kid-free night they can get dressed up for. My mom is very supportive that we want a kid-free wedding, with the exception of my fiancé’s niece who will be a flower girl and then be tucked in for the reception.

I know my mother also wants to keep the guest list pretty exclusive, which aligns with the intimate vibe my fiancé and I are envisioning. I told my mom I was not interested in inviting my 13-year-old special needs cousin “Abby.” My mother was pretty dead set on inviting her, because “she would love it.” I tend to disagree, but since my parents are paying, I am happy to give them a say so, and I have no interest in making any issue with my parents over the planning and execution of this wedding. But my gut is strongly telling me I’m justified to invite or not invite anyone to my wedding! I have no desire to be a bridezilla about this or anything!

I just don’t see Abby having fun at a wedding like this, and it seems silly to serve her a plated dinner I know she won’t eat, and I feel like it would fall on my parents and the rest of my mom’s side of the family to entertain her. I’m not sure my mom has really thought about what the day would be like for her, my dad, and the rest of the family who may be inadvertently left to entertain and care for “Abby” and if that’s something they are really okay with. Is it okay to invite my uncle but not his daughter?

Theater Trouble: I have a 14-year-old son, “Ed.” Ed’s in his school’s theater club, and they’re putting on production for the end of the year. Normally they do Shakespeare adaptations, but this year the club president decided to shake things up and they’re staging an adaptation of some old sci-fi video game, about a group of people (aliens, I suppose) trying to reclaim their homeworld after an exile. Ed is playing the senior fleet intelligence officer. I’ve been to a few of his practices, and the character he plays, as well as the degree he gets into character, is extremely disturbing. It’s this extremely cold, callous, ultra-professional in a very nasty profession sort of character. He has another character tortured to death and later relates it to the other bridge crew/major characters with a completely casual “Subject did not survive interrogation.” He pretty much never shows anything on his face when playing the part, and several of the other characters are noticeably uneasy around his.

I get that Ed isn’t the characters he plays. But the way he shifts into this character and holds that role makes my flesh crawl. I’ve seriously considered pulling him out of the theater club over this, although I haven’t pulled the trigger on that so far. Am I going too far with this?

Mild-Mannered Old Guy: I’m a 40-year-old man, and I have for my entire adult life pretty much watched pornography. That fact doesn’t seem especially weird—I think most men do.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve started to wonder if it’s unhealthy to watch videos of very young women. I don’t seek out porn of young women. I just subscribe to one of those porn mega-sites. But most porn sites tend to hire women who are pretty young. When I was in my 20s, the women in these videos were contemporaries, and when I was in my early 30s it wouldn’t be thought of as odd to be attracted to a 22-year-old. But now I’m 40, slightly balding, with a gut. If I checked out an attractive 20-year-old in public people would think I was a creep, and I’m not sure why it’s different in video form.

Is it wrong or creepy to watch porn of young people when you aren’t young? Is this something about myself that should worry me and I should rectify or am I overthinking this?

Holiday Daze: Are there any good ways to budget for the holidays? I feel like every year, the spending spirals out of control—but maybe that’s just the nature of the holidays! I try to set spending limits for each person I’m buying gifts for but all the unexpected costs eventually add up. Think going over budget on gifts, agreeing to go see a Christmas show/event, buying things to bring to festive parties, etc. How do I plan for that and stay on track?

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