Help! My Good Friend Seriously Endangered My Health. I Don’t Know If I Can Trust Him Again.
Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.
Dear Prudence,
I have a good friend who I’ve known since 2019. He’s really come through for me before, and I’ve always trusted and respected him. The day after we spent an hour together, he notified me that he had just become symptomatic and tested positive for COVID. He also disclosed that he had not received the most recent vaccine. Two days later, I came down with COVID myself. I’m quite angry because he knows that my roommate has a compromised immune system, and he works out in public most of the day. I didn’t think to ask whether he got prior vaccines, or if he’s been putting my roommate and I at risk from the moment we started meeting in person again.
I have very strong feelings that I need to convey. I want to protect my roommate and our friendship. I want to confront him but also still be polite. How far do I go to stay courteous? Do I need to avoid words like “reckless” or “selfish” altogether, and if so, how do I still bring home the impact of how hurtful this was?
—Cautiously Confrontational
Dear Confrontational,
The goal here should not be to tell your friend how reckless and selfish he is, or even how angry you are. That will just open up a debate about the appropriate level of COVID caution at this moment. And you two clearly don’t agree about that. Don’t get me wrong—it would be wonderful if everyone would get the latest vaccine or warn their loved ones if they chose not to, but I’m not sure it’s a realistic expectation.
Instead, you should tell him how his choices affected you and what you’ll be doing differently moving forward. I’m guessing that could sound something like “I think I got COVID from you, and I was really surprised to learn that you hadn’t received the latest vaccine. I wouldn’t have spent time with you indoors and unmasked if I’d known that, because it’s really important to me not to put my roommate at risk. I feel awful that I exposed her because she could suffer really intense consequences if she ever gets sick. Now that I know you’re not fully vaccinated, I think it’s best if I take more precautions when we meet up.”
Dear Prudence,
I recently became a mom and am one of only a few moms in the friend group. I love being a mom and I have really settled into the role, while still enjoying my hobbies, traveling, and seeing friends, and I have a very supportive and involved partner. I have a friend who does not have as much support and does not seem as happy with her life as a mother, and I feel like feelings of jealousy/resentment are constantly being directed towards me, as well as other friends in group, if she misses out on things or isn’t included. It is getting worse, and I wonder if I should address it, but I am not sure how. I also feel like it makes me less interested in hanging out with her, which is only going to make the problem worse with time if no one says anything.
—Don’t Kill My Vibe
Dear My Vibe,
You can certainly tell her she’s killing your vibe or hang out with her less. Those are options. But another choice would be to rally around her and try to make her life better. One of the people in the group without kids could babysit so she could hang out with the rest of you. You could brainstorm some events that she could attend with her baby. You could ask her more about her jealousy and resentment and affirm how hard things are for her right now rather than changing the subject to something lighter. Again, you don’t have to do any of this. But do keep in mind that our lives tend to change over time. When it comes to who’s doing well and who’s going not-so-well, things ebb and flow.
Right now, you’re thriving, while your friend is having a tough few years. In the future, you might be facing joblessness or a divorce or dealing with a sick child or living with a challenging medical diagnosis of your own, while she’s out of the weeds of early parenthood, married to a different, more supportive partner, and loving life. I’d like to think that in that situation, she would be in a position to say “Letter Writer was so amazing and supportive to me when I was overwhelmed and miserable, and now it’s my turn to be there for her.” And then she’d listen to you cry and vent without complaining that you were being negative. To me, that—not turning away from people when they temporarily become downers—is the beauty of real, authentic friendship in a world where it just doesn’t make sense to expect everyone to be happy all the time.
“I tend to think the issue is more ‘she’s negative and sad’ than ‘she told us we were all heartless bitches for going to brunch when she didn’t have a babysitter.’”
Jenée Desmond-Harris and Joel Anderson discuss a letter in this week’s Dear Prudence Uncensored—only for Slate Plus members.
Dear Prudence,
My recently married friend “Lisa” has confided in me that she and her husband “Luke” are struggling sexually. They waited for marriage to have sex (which I am also doing, for many personal reasons), and now Luke has come out as bisexual and asexual (though not aromantic). This has devastated my friend Lisa, as she feels he does not desire her sexually. Lisa confided in me that she feels shame when others question whether Luke is actually gay and he just doesn’t want to have sex with her for that reason. (We have all grown up together in a religious environment, though we as friends are supportive of the gay community.) She was supportive of him coming out as bi, but now that he is also asexual, she doesn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know how to console her, as I am so sexually inexperienced.
My issue here is that I think I might also be asexual. Seeing my friends suffer as they waited for marriage to have sex, only for it not to turn out the way they thought it would, has given me major doubts about how I should be approaching potential future partners. Lisa said if she had known Luke was asexual, she might not have wanted to get married to him. I don’t want to put my future partner in the same position that my friend Lisa now finds herself in. I don’t want to have sex before marriage, but I don’t know how else to discover for myself whether I really am asexual.
So my question here is threefold: 1) How can I best support Lisa here, 2) How can I discover more about my own potential asexuality without actually having sex, and 3) How can I approach potential future partners without putting them in Lisa’s same position down the line?
—Everything’s Coming Up Aces
Dear Aces,
1. Supporting Lisa doesn’t require any sexual experience on your part. If you take the bi/asexual details out of the story, what you’re left with is a woman whose relationship has changed dramatically and who is having to reevaluate what she needs in life and how to move forward. Your support should focus on acknowledging her stress, her confusion, and the intensity of the tough choices she’ll have to make. “I hate that you’re going through this,” “You don’t have to decide anything right now,” “Do you want to do something to take your mind off the situation with Luke?” and “I’m here to listen any time of the day or night,” are all the kinds of phrases that you can deploy without getting into the nitty gritty of her husband’s identity.
2. The internet! Reddit, TikTok, personal essays. Look all over for places where you can hear directly from people who are asexual about what it feels like and how they became sure about their identities. Look for suggestions for books (like this one), podcasts, and documentaries. Really get into it until you start to pick up on themes and start to feel like you have a handle on what asexuality means. I think if you do this, before long you’ll have a gut feeling about whether this label is a fit for you.
3. Your online dating bio can do a lot of work here. You could write something like “Possibly asexual” or “No sex before marriage … and maybe ever?” And if you meet someone in person, I’d say this is second date material. There are also dating apps specifically for asexual people. Maybe you would feel more comfortable using them, at least until you feel more certain.
Submit your questions anonymously here. (Questions may be edited for publication.) And for questions on parenting, kids, or family life, try Care and Feeding!
Dear Prudence,
I have a colleague who’s been sort of a friend for over a decade—we were grad school classmates before we were colleagues. I am now part of the senior leadership team who evaluates her. We are not at all allowed to talk outside of that group about what is discussed in the meeting where we develop our evaluations, and after the meeting, employees receive a written summary of the team’s evaluation. This written report is edited to only include objective feedback, but it’s become common for non-objective factors to be part of our confidential discussion. She is significantly underperforming in one of the major evaluation categories, and her formally assigned mentor got really personal in her rant about this person’s year: “She cancels all their meetings while she’s working two other jobs outside of our workplace and is prioritizing her family and her community service and side-hustles over this job.” She wrapped up the rant with “And I know this because I’m on Facebook and I’m seeing everything.”
I think much of the objective critique is fair, but I’m concerned about the way this mentor is using social media surveillance to bring in personal factors to the conversation. Is there a way for me to tell this colleague to unfriend her mentor on socials without revealing it came up in this confidential meeting? The last part that complicates this is that I have already blocked this mentor from all my socials because she had bullied me in the past when I was a junior colleague—so there’s no way I could see that these two colleagues are connected on socials naturally.
—No More Work Friends
Dear No More,
If we were talking about a real friend, I’d absolutely encourage you to whisper “Hey, you didn’t hear it from me, but you shouldn’t let anyone from the office follow you on social media. People are nosy and weird and stuff you post can hurt you in evaluations.” But since she’s just a “sort of” friend—meaning probably not someone you can trust to refrain from letting other members of the leadership team know what you said—I think you should hold off. Especially since it sounds like she’s having a hard time doing the job and wouldn’t succeed there even without the information obtained by Facebook spying.
Dear Prudence,
My step-grandmother used my grandfather’s 2017 death as a reason to distance herself from everyone in my family, except for me. She refrained from attending my brother’s wedding; it reminded her of our grandfather, and she’d rather “love my brother’s family from afar.” She has never met her only great-grandchildren; they don’t live nearby, but she regularly travels greater distances. She had come to rely on me for updates about everything with them, even my late father’s illness, rather than rekindling her relationship with my mother (her step-daughter) or brother.
In 2020, I moved to her metro area, and the proximity has only highlighted how fake her love for my family really is. I couldn’t take it and had effectively ghosted her. Recently, she learned that my mother was visiting me and offered to help host! Never mind that my mother already visited, it feels like it’s time to explain why I’ve gone silent. Should I try to kindly explain how I don’t know how to have a relationship with her when she doesn’t want to know my family, or make an excuse about the trip and move on?
—Reciprocal Estrangement
Dear Reciprocal Estrangement,
Yes, let her know. As it stands now, she thinks she’s explained why she doesn’t want to be closer to your family, and has no reason to know that you find her stance to be fake and hurtful. Without lashing out or attacking her character, tell her what you’d need from her in order to continue having a relationship. She might surprise you and step up. Or she might not. But you’ll never know if you don’t give her a chance.
An elderly chain-smoking woman lives in the house next door. Her cigarette smoke comes directly into my study. One day I went over to ask if she could stand somewhere else in her huge yard while she smokes. She went ballistic. She repeatedly told me to go back to my country and said I don’t belong here (I am an expat in Malaysia). And she threatened to have her sumo wrestler–looking grandsons come over and mess me up if I say anything again. Why am I the bad guy for wanting fresh air?
