Slate's Dear Prudence Plus: Dear Prudence: The “Ongoing Fling with a Famous Person” Edition

January 23, 2018 7:38 AM

Prudence is joined this week by Charlotte Shane, author, essayist, and co-founder of TigerBee Press. First up - what to say when your sister compares your desire to have a child with adopting a cat...

And how can I respectfully deal with attending friends' engagements and weddings when I am still single and not feeling the festive spirit? Then - an affair with a famous person (of course we guess) has been going on for years, but do I need to alter my expectations? And finally, my wife got a great job in a distant city, but the kids and I don't want to leave...are we jerks? Hear back episodes of Prudence at Slate.com/Prudiepod.

posted by chesty_a_arthur (6 comments total)

I haven't even gotten through the responses to the first letter yet, but holy shit, the moral outrage! Back when I was twenty, I thought nobody loved me I told my roommate it was immoral to buy a new car (she had just been given a new-new car by her dad.) Improbably we are still friends! But it's one of the ones that haunts me when I lie awake at night. These two sisters in the letter are behaving like self-righteous Tumblrers, only in person.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:40 AM on January 23, 2018

Also sorry I was such a self-righteous young whippersnapper, Alissa.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:41 AM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Who is the famous person though?
posted by chrchr at 7:04 PM on January 23, 2018

The famous person thing gave me deja vu about being the one that's far more invested in the dude than they are in them. Ugh. I'm so sick of crap like that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:01 PM on January 23, 2018

It sounds like the kitten thing was a bit more heated than it needed to be, but it is waaaaay out of line for the sister to say that the question asker's choice of IVF was going to result in an "expensive, pure-bred" child. Assuming she is choosing IVF because of fertility issues, there has already been so much emotional stress that she and her partner have gone through. I do think it would probably help the situation with her sister to actually say that she has a point, and that she brings up some fair issues, but that all that stuff has already been considered and debated, and that this is the difficult decision that she is going with.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:58 AM on January 24, 2018

Yeah, jenfullmoon the famous dude thing was so achingly, horribly familiar to me, apart from the famous part. I keep thinking about it.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:03 AM on January 25, 2018 [1 favorite]