Dear Coquette,

My boyfriend and I have an open relationship. Last week I decided to go for dinner with a guy I met the other month. It wasn’t anything crazy, and I wasn’t looking for it to be a date or anything. During dinner my boyfriend calls, and I tell him I’m having dinner with the guy. He seems totally fine, and doesn’t care just like I’d expected. Forty-five minutes later he calls again and is kind of drunk and short with me. When I leave dinner I give him a call. He answers the phone normally, but then in the middle of our conversation out of nowhere he flips out on me.  He says he hates me, I’m disrespectful, and that he’s never going to speak to me again. Then he screens my calls the rest of the night.

I figure that he’s drunk and just being crazy, and by morning he’ll be fine. The next morning he comes home to his house (where I am staying, but I also have my own place, and he had been staying at his parents’ the night before) and is sober and just so cold and proceeds to kick me out, saying that if I don’t leave he’ll call the cops. He drops me off at my house with all my stuff and says we will talk later. The rest of the day he is hot and cold with his phone calls. We meet up later and he acts like everything is normal again. When I bring up what happened he says he’s embarrassed about how he acted, he’s sorry and blamed it on the alcohol. He said he made a bigger deal out of it than he should have, and that he would never want me to feel like I couldn’t go out for dinner with someone.

I feel like the openness of our relationship might be something he isn’t as comfortable with now as he was in the beginning. Do you think this is the case? He has never acted jealous at all in the past, so his behavior was out of character. My friends think that our age difference (I’m 22 and he’s 41) might have him feeling nervous if I’m going out with someone he perceives to be an actual threat.

Please help me understand this behavior 🙂 Thank you!

Your boyfriend is a middle-aged man-child with a drinking problem who had to spend an evening with his elderly parents while you were off being twenty-two with another dude. Are you so much of a gentle idiot that you can’t do the math on this situation? Come on — this one is a big fat DUH.

This isn’t really about you or your open relationship. This is about your boyfriend’s relationship with his parents and their failed expectations of him as a son. I guarantee that’s what sparked that particular evening’s negativity, and the alcohol just helped it explode. His behavior wasn’t an expression of jealousy so much as it was a temper tantrum. He lashed out at you in a predictable fit of misdirected rage at the emptiness of his life and the inevitability of your break-up.

That’s right. Sorry, babe, but you two aren’t gonna live happily ever after. It doesn’t matter how much you think you love him. One day, you’re gonna grow up and move on. He knows it, and it’s starting to bother him. Your boyfriend has a textbook case of Peter Pan syndrome, and he doesn’t like being reminded by time spent with his parents that he won’t always be able to date women half his age.

Fair warning: this kind of silly chaos going to turn into a pattern of behavior. He’ll throw drunken temper tantrums every once in a while, and then he’ll scramble back to you embarrassed and apologetic. Eventually, you’ll get fed up with it, and you’ll be the one to break it off.

Maybe then, you can both start dating adults.

Dear Coquette,

My 19-year-old sister recently told me that she is pregnant. She is unemployed, hasn’t graduated and has been with her boyfriend for about two months.

The rest of my family is being really supportive, as are many of her friends, but I can’t find the energy to be supportive. I recognize that she has every right to have children, but as a feminist and children’s advocate, I don’t believe the environment and situation she is bringing this child into are healthy or fair to the child.

Am I being a really awful sister by telling her that I don’t think she is making a good choice? Should I just back this decision 100 percent like the rest of my family?

Hell no. Don’t you dare back her decision. You know damn well she’s not ready to be a mother, so be strong and lay down some brutal truth. Don’t just tell her that she’s making the wrong choice. Help her through a very tough decision, and be there for her every step of the way if she changes her mind and decides to terminate her pregnancy.

You’ve only got a couple of months before it’s too late. This is one of those “speak now or forever hold your peace”-type situations, so get in there and plead your case. She is an unwed, uneducated, unemployed teenager about to turn a guy she hardly knows into an accidental father. She is in desperate need of a reality check, so do your best to show her she’s making a massive, life-defining mistake.

Tell her how incredibly selfish it is to bring a child into the world when she isn’t prepared to properly support it. Tell her that she has plenty of time to become a mother after she gets her life together. Tell her that you love her, but that she’s just not ready.

It’s ugly stuff to have to say, but your sister needs to hear it. If it causes a rift between the two of you, so be it. Remember, supporting your sister isn’t the same thing as supporting her poor life choices.

I believe my main purpose in life is to become a mother and raise children. Am I a shameful 21st-century 20-something woman for not wanting the high-flying career over babies?

Don’t let anyone shame you for choosing motherhood instead of a career (or vice versa). If you know what you want out of life, go get it, girl. Be the best damn mother you can possibly be, and ignore the politics. All that “mother vs. career woman” crap is a false dichotomy anyway. Feminism (and life) are way more complicated than that.

I have a friend whose company I really enjoy, but who permanently lets me down and is not there for me when times are hard and I’m not my best. I don’t believe in bearing a grudge and I do like having this person around, so when I’ve got myself back together again and the inevitable apology comes, I accept and then I am surprised/hurt when it happens again. Do you have any advice?

Quit being surprised.

Dear Coquette,

I dated a man in my circle of friends for two years. I thought we were in a happy, committed relationship but he cheated. Three years later, he’s still with the woman and she’s become close with some of my girlfriends and is present for happy hour, girls’ night, etc.

She’s a fun, life-of-the-party kind of girl so I see why everyone enjoys her company. But I really don’t like being around her. Whenever she talks about him, she makes some sort of apology to me, like, “Oh, my boyfriend said the funniest thing … Oh, sorry, honey.” I hate it. It’s like she’s constantly trying to say that I got kicked to curb so he could trade up.

I try to be friendly with her, and I don’t let how I really feel about her show. I don’t talk sh** behind her back (except to my sister) but I feel so fake for hanging out with a woman I can’t stand. I don’t want the guy back, and I’m happier now than when I was with him. I just don’t like the bitch.

It’s been three years and I want to move on. I hate this negativity. I just don’t know what to do to shake it. I want to avoid her, but I’m afraid that if I do that, or if I let people know that I don’t like being around her, it will seem petty. It seems petty to me as I type it. And maybe it is. That’s why I need you.

You always seem to have such insight into people’s emotions. I guess I need someone who is outside of it to give me some advice. What should I do, Coquette? Do I avoid her, get her out of my life? Or do I just continue to brush off her comments?

Don’t make this about her. This is about you. You’ve been holding onto this negativity for three years because you think she’s the one you can’t stand, but the brutal truth is that you hate yourself, and you’re just projecting your own self-loathing onto an easy target.

Not that she doesn’t deserve to be a target, because she sounds like a treacherous, condescending bitch. Go ahead, say it out loud: She is a treacherous, condescending bitch. Scream it if you want, because it’s the damn truth, and you’ve been too much of a pathetic little doormat to let the world know how you feel.

Let it out, girl. Quit worrying what other people might think is petty. All you’re doing is invalidating your own emotions, and that’s the underlying reason you’re filled with so much self-loathing in the first place. Openly acknowledge that you can’t stand being in the same room as that duplicitous ho-bag, and don’t make any apologies for feeling that way. Once you do that, I promise you won’t feel fake for hanging out with her.

In fact, you probably won’t mind so much, because you’ll stop feeling the need to be friendly with her. After all, she isn’t your friend. She is and always has been the enemy, and up until now, you haven’t been a worthy adversary. Of course you should still maintain decorum, but being polite isn’t the same thing as being friendly. (Do you think she’s being friendly when she says, “Sorry, honey?” Hell no. She’s just being cordial while rubbing your nose in the fact that she stole your man.)

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you avoid this woman, cut her our of your life or continue brushing her off. She is of no consequence. What’s important is that you give yourself permission to feel your emotions, stop being a doormat, and eventually forgive yourself for putting up with this kind of crap for three long years.