Dear Coquette,

Coquette, I’m coming to you because no one — not my guidance counselors, not my relatives, not my friends — has said anything that has helped me at all. 

I live in a very small town in Texas, a kind of cultural wasteland. I whine a lot, but there are some good people here. I just don’t belong in this place. I’m not country, I’m definitely not religious, and I cannot live in such a vacuum for the rest of my life. I’ve always known this, but the time is coming to decide where I’m going to go and what I’m going to do. I want to go to college; I always have. I love learning, however corny or whatever that sounds. But I also love to experience. Traveling has always been something I love to do. 

But I don’t know how to fit this all into what I’m going to do when I graduate. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Music has been the only passion I’ve ever had, but just listening to it, and critiquing my friends’ bands. I don’t know what kind of career I could have with that or if I could ever pull it off. I want to live in New York or Chicago or Seattle or Los Angeles or somewhere fascinating, but all the colleges out-of-state will swallow me in debt, and the only way I’d want to incur such debt is if I was going to do something that I’d make a lot of money in, and there’s no guarantee I will if I go the music route. And that’s just settling tuition. I’ll be supporting myself because we don’t have a lot of money, so I’d have to be working through college too. I honestly just don’t have any answers right now. Austin, Texas, is an amazing city but I want more. Maybe I’m just being a whining high school girl, but I can’t put anything together. 

Sweetheart, please just go to Austin. You have to trust me on this. You are a teenager with a high school education and no support network outside of your small town in Texas. You simply are not ready for New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Those cities will eat you alive if you wander into them alone, wide-eyed and without a plan.

Enroll at the University of Texas. Pay in-state tuition and get financial aid. Spend the next few years working part-time and getting a degree in whatever gets you off. Try your hand at the local music scene and learn how the industry works before you make any decisions about a career.

You don’t have to have anything figured out yet, and not to spoil the surprise, but there are no answers. There are only lessons, ones that you should learn gradually.

There will be plenty of time for you to move to a metropolis, and in the meantime, Austin is a fantastic place to dip your toes into adulthood. Again, trust me. Once you hit that city, you’re gonna find yourself surrounded by bright, interesting people who think like you do, and you’re gonna love it.

Baby steps, girl. You’ll get there.

Dear Coquette,

I am really in need of your help. I’m a senior in high school, and last night I went out to dinner with a man 15 years my senior who isn’t a teacher per se but advises some activities at my school. He’s a guy I’ve really enjoyed spending time with and he’s moving away in a month which is why I was excited to have a friendly dinner with him. Which is why I was even more shocked and uncomfortable when he started telling me how hard it was for him that I was 17 and that he connects with me better than he does with women his own age; that in a perfect world, we’d go on a road trip together and do comedy shows and “make love by a campfire.” He told me about how for the first time in his life he’s single and non-virginal and how that’s big for him. He didn’t try anything physical, but I am so beyond out of my mind uncomfortable and have no idea what to do, especially when I see him next. I’m planning on talking to his supervisor, but need some more broad ideas about how to deal with this on a personal level, i.e. the anxiety I feel when I see him, feeling slutty for whatever cleavage I’m showing, etc. Please help. Thank you.

Yikes. Sorry, kiddo. This dude is so gross. It sucks that you have to deal with this kind of skeezery in the last few weeks before you graduate high school.

First things first, don’t you dare for one second feel ashamed. You’ve done nothing wrong. I know it can be rough out there, but you’re not slutty just because you’ve got a pair of tits. This is a harsh lesson in the power of your nascent womanhood, but it doesn’t have to be a negative one. The silver lining here is that you can learn what it feels like to stand up for yourself in the face of inappropriate behavior.

Definitely talk to his supervisor, and if at all possible, refuse to be put in a position where you would have any further contact with this guy. It’s not that he’s necessarily unsafe. More than likely he’s just an emotionally stunted man-child with no clue how to relate to women. Still, what he did was wrong. A 30-something adult in a mentor role simply cannot be acting this way to a high school-aged student, and you don’t need to be dealing with his kind of creepiness. Let the supervisor and the school administration handle him.

On a personal level, don’t be surprised when your initial anxiety shifts into something more akin to anger. If you catch yourself getting a bit snippy with your friends and family, just take a deep breath and recognize what you’re really feeling. Don’t swallow your emotions. Allow yourself to feel them. That’s a big part of processing stuff like this. Eventually, that sick feeling you get in your stomach will mellow, and you’ll be left with little more than pity for this guy.

You’re gonna be fine. In fact, you’ll probably come out of this with a fresh chunk of emotional maturity you can take with you to college, and with any luck, this whole episode will lead to you developing a healthy aversion to dating actors.

Read my column every Wednesday and Sunday in The Daily. Thanks!

Dear Coquette,

How would you suggest dealing with loneliness?

After graduation, I moved away from my family and where I grew up in Oklahoma to New Haven, Connecticut for work. My job is an amazing opportunity, the likes of which was not available to me back home. Work requires me to put in a lot of hours, which of course, does not leave much free time for socializing.

It has been about a year and a half since I moved, and I don’t have any friends here. I have taken a few classes at the local community art school and I regularly attend Pilates classes in an effort to meet people.

I am afraid that I am not a very open person; it is difficult for me to approach someone. I would like to overcome this. Even though I am friendly with people, I am not sure how to move beyond that to really make a friend.

Art and Pilates classes are fine, but they’re also introspective and singular pursuits. They don’t really offer anything more than cursory social interaction, and it’s pretty easy to end up lonely in a room full of people with a similar interest.

What you need is a team — either a team sport or a team-based volunteer group — an activity that builds interpersonal relationships. Most importantly, you want something where you and the gang all go out for drinks afterward.

Come on, you’re only a year and a half out of college, and you live in a college town. There’s all kinds of fun, social stuff you can do. Instead of art classes, join the Junior League of Greater New Haven and do some volunteering. If you work at Yale, you can participate in grad-pro intramural sports instead of Pilates.

The key here is that the activities you choose should naturally lend themselves to extended social interaction. It’s not about meeting people. It’s about finding settings that are interactive, casual and routine where you can spend the kind of time with people that it takes to get to know them.

Also, you shouldn’t overthink this. Making new friends isn’t something you need to have in the forefront of your mind once you’re a part of a group. Friendships happen spontaneously, and building them isn’t something you can plan. You can only plan to put yourself in situations where it’s likely to happen.

Dear Coquette,

We fight all the time. We’re both artists, we both get dark, we battle demons, sometimes they’re each other.

Being artists also means we have a lot of the same friends, so I don’t really have anyone to talk with this about. If I did, it would totally cross some lines and involve people we know, half-professionally.

L.A.’s a beast. I haven’t been here long, we might have to separate, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, where to go, how we stay together for a month while I find enough work to put down a deposit.

How can I empower myself to change and be more calm and collected? How can I settle the score with my demons and send some of them on their way? I am at such a loss. Sometimes I think I’d be better off single, alone, so I can’t hurt anyone, but I’m super-addicted to seduction and loving, too.

How can I let go of the darkness and anger? How can I control my emotions so that we can do business together no matter what happens to our relationship? Indeed, how can I control my emotions so that our relationship can succeed without sacrificing my own ideas?

First of all, quit referring to yourself as an artist. Only douchebags and people who work at Subway do that. It’s fine if you paint, write, sing or dance, but please refer to yourself as a painter, writer, singer or dancer.

Secondly, quit taking yourself so damned seriously. You do not have demons. You are not addicted to seduction. You’re just a crazy bitch like the rest of us, and if you’re addicted to anything here, it’s your own ego.

Finally, if you want to let go of darkness and anger, just let it go. Yeah, it really is that easy. I know, you don’t believe me. That’s because you’re a little drama queen and you thrive on manufactured chaos. Quit doing that. It doesn’t make you more interesting. It doesn’t improve the quality of your art. All it does is create a swirling mess of artificial problems that distract you from getting actual work done.

All that darkness and anger is just your ego in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of petty nonsense. It doesn’t have to be that way. Imagine your life with a little impulse control. Imagine being able to process negative emotions without your head exploding. Imagine being able to laugh at yourself.

When you recognize that the chaos in your life is a product of your own ego, all that’s left for you to do is be done with it in a flurry of smirking forgiveness. Forgive yourself for being such a pretentious twit. Forgive your boyfriend for being an enormous douchebag. Forgive L.A. and everyone you’ve met here for their multitude of sins. You can even forgive your demons for never having existed in the first place.

Don’t spend another minute wallowing in all that negativity, not one damn minute. If it means the end of your relationship, so be it. If it means you’ll be struggling on your own in the big city, so be it. Once you’ve jettisoned your ego, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to enjoy your life, even the struggle, and yes, even in L.A.

Good luck not taking any of this seriously.

Dear Coquette,

I’m a 25-year-old female in my first serious sexual relationship, after a “Welcome to Sex!” phase of one-night stands during which I hated myself, men and bodies. Since then I’ve learned to like what I’m able to share with him, and I “get it” a whole lot more, but now I’m stagnating and in danger of reviving old patterns. I’m so nostalgic for the enormous amounts of time and attention I used to give to myself that I fail to see how sex makes up for it. If I could learn to really love, love, love sex it would make my life so much easier … How do I prove to myself once and for all that closeness is not time wasted, and that vulnerability is not, necessarily, stress? Because most days I would almost rather masturbate.

Babe, sex or no sex, most days I do masturbate. I hope you don’t think getting off is a one-or-the-other type situation. More importantly, sex isn’t supposed to make up for the attention you give yourself. It’s not a zero-sum game. There doesn’t have to be a conflict between pleasuring yourself and the pleasure you get from your intimate relationship.

Intimacy is never time wasted, but intimacy isn’t about orgasms. Hell, intimacy doesn’t even have to mean sex. As for vulnerability, well, if you equate it with stress, it’s because you aren’t quite capable of detaching vulnerability from anxiety. In other words, you don’t know what its like to really let go.

That’s okay. In fact, it’s not the least bit surprising, considering your body issues and foregrounded self-consciousness. Letting go is what you need to work on, and the best way to do that boils down to what is essentially a series of emotional trust exercises in the bedroom.

It’s time you got a little creative with your closeness. All that time and attention you used to give yourself? Do it with your boyfriend. Invite and incorporate him along for what you used to do by yourself. Bring him with you.

There are no rules to this. No right or wrong way. This isn’t a goal-oriented endeavor. The whole point is just to share yourself physically, honestly and completely. 

No, I’m not kidding, and no, that’s not impossible.

Just let go. Whenever you get all up in your head during sex, I want you to remember those three little words. Say ’em with me now. Just let go.

Will it be scary at first? Sure, but the good kind. Replace the knot in your stomach with butterflies by being present in the moment and trusting that your boyfriend just wants you to be satisfied. I think you’ll be surprised at how open he is to everything.

Of course, you should also talk to him about this. Tell him what you told me. For the sake of his male ego, be sure to let him know that the stagnation you’re feeling isn’t about his performance, but about your own sexual anxiety.

Again, this isn’t about anything that either of you are doing right or wrong in the bedroom. It’s about opening up to your boyfriend and sharing all the stuff in your head. That’s an act of intimacy in and of itself.

If you’re emotionally honest with him, your vulnerability will separate from your anxiety, and you’ll finally make the transition from your “Welcome to Sex!” phase into the infinitely better phase of truly enjoying it.