Dear Dategirl,
I am a 25-year-old girl and have been in a happy relationship with my boyfriend for two years. We live separately, but we spend most nights together and have an active, kinky sex life. He’s not the problem.
The problems are my mom and my best friend. They both think we should be married. I wouldn’t care if they just had this thought and kept it in their heads, but they remind me all the time. They’ve even had lunch and talked about it with each other! Then they came to see me at the bar I worked at and came close to staging an intervention about it! They both got drunker and drunker (my bad, I’m the bartender) and teamed up to berate me!
If it were just once, I’d chalk it up to too much exposure to their friends Johnny and Jose, but it’s all the time.
The man and I have discussed marriage, and maybe we’ll actually do it someday, but not for a very long time. Ironically, my parents’ and friend’s marriages are two of the major reasons I’m not particularly interested in tying the knot. My friend is already on her second marriage, to a heroin addict. My parents are still married, but they hate each other, and I’m almost positive my dad has a girlfriend.
I have told them a million times to drop it, but they won’t. How can I convince them to stop nagging me?
—Sick of People
As you get older, you’ll find that a lot of people have a lot of opinions, and more often than not the people doling out unsolicited advice are the least qualified.
I’m struck by the fact that the two ladies giving marriage the hard sell are locked in fairly bad unions. This reminds me of certain (not all!) parents I know. They’re sleep-deprived, stink of toddler vomit, and haven’t had the time to read anything more substantial than Pat the Bunny in years—and yet they’re inevitably the ones who tell me how wrongheaded and selfish I am to give procreation a pass. “You just don’t know what you’re missing,” they cluck with a patronizing tone. “I never knew how happy I was until little Hudson/Stella/[insert trendy baby name here] came into my life.”
I used to react with anger until I figured out why they were so invested in my uterus: Misery loves company. Same for you—your friend and mom want you to pull up a chair at the pity party they call their lives.
Like you, I’m ambivalent about getting married, especially while it’s illegal in so much of the country for gays to do so. Also, you’re only 25—in the midst of your prime fun-having years!
These two are way out of line—so it’s time for tough love. The next time your friend starts with the passive-aggressive-cloaked-as-lighthearted jabs, ask her how that savings account is working out. Junkies are known for being extremely good with money; I’m sure they’ve got quite the nest egg accrued.
Because I’m a softy (and because mine’s dead), I’d go a little easier on Mom. Tell her that while you love her, she and Dad provided you with a valuable blueprint of everything wrong with the institution of marriage, and you’d appreciate it if she’d back off.
If nasty isn’t your style, you should do what I do with my rambunctious young kitty, Inky. Squirt them. Seriously. When he’s climbing around knocking shit over, I grab one of several strategically placed squirt bottles and blast him. Yes, I’ve field-tested this method on humans. My boyfriend was not amused.
