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Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax recently answered a reader’s question about her new boyfriend. The reader wrote:
I feel like there are so many things I will never be able to share with him because he would judge me so severely. He continues to bring these instances up, however, as “hurdles” in thinking about my character and our relationship. He asks probing questions about the details, acts very cold and mean to me, and I walk away feeling horrible about myself.
Hax’s advice?
In my opinion, it’s nearly always a better bet to find a new boyfriend than to complain that the current one makes you unhappy.
Break up with him immediately.
Good for her. It’s about time someone else got on the honesty train and gave straightforward, unequivocal advice, instead of providing “relationship coaching” designed to get the reader to assert herself or make her boyfriend into a better communicator. I have a very different philosophy, which is why I refuse to coach women with boyfriends.
My thinking: “If you need to pay a dating coach $5000 to discuss your boyfriend, your relationship can’t be very strong. So why are you trying so hard to preserve something that causes you so much pain?” It’s amazing how few women have thought this through.
I actually had one woman get really angry at me last week when I refused to take her money and offered her free advice about her emotionally withholding alpha male boyfriend. I told her that she may be all anxious about whether he proposes or not, but that she should be cautious if she gets the ring she so desperately covets.
Because now she’ll have an emotionally withholding alpha male HUSBAND and spend the rest of her life walking on eggshells, dealing in silence and wondering where she stands. This made her very angry, of course, and she hung up on me. Such is the price for telling people things that they’d rather not hear.
Check out Jax’s full response here. I think it’s smart and hardhitting.
In my opinion, it’s nearly always a better bet to find a new boyfriend than to complain that the current one makes you unhappy. If he makes you so unhappy, he shouldn’t be your boyfriend. Seems obvious from the outside, but when you’ve invested time and emotion, it becomes particularly hard to cut bait and start over.
Having dating a series of judgmental (but kind) women, I decided in 2005 that this would be the #1 quality I sought in a partner – a woman who accepts me as I am.
As a result, I have an incredible marriage.
And that’s all it took – valuing someone who accepted me instead of criticized me.
You can do the same.
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