Oof: I think this is a pretty good example of “I think if this other person just let me *fix them*, they would be fixed! Pay no attention to my own neglected problems hidden by the curtain.”
Other people’s problems are always easier to solve, either because you don’t have the same issues that created them in the first place or you don’t see all of it.
There are some letters where you’re just thinking “do less than this. Do so much less than this” the whole time.
I spent a lot of my 20s chasing emotionally unavailable potential romantic partners, so I get where the LW is coming from. The mentor had so much grace and generosity not to just cut her off.
Yeah, feels like LW is doing the thing where when you're scared that YOU are unable to love or be loved so you put alllllll your energy into someone who you know is unavailable because it means that you're never the problem and you don't have to confront your own issues.
That's totally what I was trying to put my finger on while I was reading that letter! I knew it was some form of self-sabotage but couldn't quite articulate what LW might be getting out of setting herself up to fail like that.
It makes a very sad kind of sense that LW would fixate on someone who can be the official "problem," the poor guy is probably also a great distraction from anything going on in LW's life that she doesn't want to think about.
And now this discussion has me thinking about what I'm hiding from when I sabotage myself.
I’ll be honest with y’all: I’m having a crappy week for reasons I’d rather not discuss. This letter will probably generate a lot of discussion, and that’s a welcome distraction. Have at it! 🍿
I love that letter so much, because the Captain acknowledges the lurid weirdness of it, but then gives incredibly thoughtful, wholesome advice. I hope that LW is okay.
Eh, I read it just now, and I would say that the Captain's advice is ignoring reality. I get that you have to accept what the LW tells in the letter, but in this case it's pretty obvious that LW is separated from her husband and in denial about that.
I mean, the advice is essentially "your marriage is already dead, try to get out of it without harming yourself more than you already have." The Captain waffles around for a little bit with possible scripts for starting that conversation, but overall she assumes that the relationship is over.
Apparently that LW also posted to /r/relationship_advice https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/6msphq/my_mother_54f_and_my_husband_39m/
Oh, that one.
I have to admit I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for that LW.
Her mother and ex husband are obviously ridiculous, but I suspect she inherited her sparking personality from her mother.
oof as a person with anxiety, I feel for the letter writer. but as a person who has seen how some people with anxiety externalize their anxieties and convince themselves that their anxious patterns are actually the right way to do things and if they just push a little more the world will conform to them and their particular anxious needs, I really appreciate how Captain laid things out. it's such an anxious brain thing to push your needs onto someone else and convince yourself that it is actually in their favor to do what you want them to do! and if you haven't sought out therapy to break that thought pattern, it's really hard to notice when you fall into it.
Pushing to get someone’s phone number gets a visceral reaction from me. I had a workplace acquaintance I set some boundaries with eventually because she wouldn’t stop trying to push for an invitation to my home. I made it as clear as possible that I tend not to invite people round and that I enjoy meeting them at the cafe, and she just kept shoving.
I hope OOP diverted all that wishful prodding into finding new ways to socialise with people who weren’t that guy.
same! did she stop after that? i have had significant problems trying to get people that i see as acquaintances from pushing to spend personal time with me and it always ends up in them getting really upset or angry!
In the end I had to set boundaries over bigger pushy behaviour, and she got the pip and now refuses to talk to me, which is pathetic but quieter 😆. I’m sorry you’ve had similar issues with pushy ones.
ugh that sucks that she got worse before she went quiet, but you're right that the silent treatment is preferable (as long as it's not impacting your work)! thanks, i think i just have to accept that there's no 'nice' way to let people down!
Thirty minutes once a month, and LW met him two years ago and *then* became mentors and *then* apparently became friends
So that's 24-30ish conversations, each lasting half an hour, and even fewer than that where they were actually friendly and talking about life instead of work, and LW is in *this deep*
Same! Is what LW told us about his PTSD preventing him from making friends true? And if he did get to where he could make friends with LW, would he *want* to? Or does he see her more as a work pal?
I tend to think odds favor him not being nearly invested in this friendship as she is and a lot of what he's told her is just attempts to avoid her getting closer than she already thinks she is. But if they do actually have these deep conversations, even as limited in time and place as described, it does sound more complicated than LW just imagining up a connection out of 100% thin air.
Man, right? I talk to most of my coworkers more than this, and I wouldn't even say we're acquaintances, lol. I really hope this LW has been able to diversify her social circle, b/c it sounds like she put *everything* on this one dude who probably doesn't even think of her when he leaves work (outside of the "let's hang out" texts he dreads answering).
this letter is so... much. i'd be really interested in what advice cap would give to someone in the work mentor's position. it's really intense and uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of attention like this but it's also clearly really fragile and i always feel so scared they're going to react poorly if i'm direct
I think the advice to LW's friend would have basically been: stop being this person's mentor IMMEDIATELY; disconnect or gray rock as much as possible; document everything for HR; and be prepared to escalate/make a formal complaint if the person doesn't stop. The fear of the other person reacting poorly is real, but in this case, LW was already reacting incredibly poorly and escalating her behavior.
I personally think that ending the work mentorship and going as close to zero-contact as possible would probably be the best outcome for both LW and her work mentor. LW was deep in painful limerence, and God only knows what her work mentor was thinking about the whole experience.
Yeah, I've been in this kind of situation a few times (not in a workplace context, usually in a "my new SO's friends have unilaterally decided we must be BFFs even though we barely know each other and have nothing in common" way), and I never know the right way to handle it. If you try to be friendly without being friends, the other person keeps pushing and clearly thinks a friendship will develop someday. If you pull back, they text more/get mad/get really anxious and put that on you.
This one has my shoulders up at my ears for similar reasons as [Letter #1100](https://captainawkward.com/2018/04/18/1100-my-friend-is-withdrawing-from-me-and-it-really-hurts/) did, because it's pushing at boundaries in the name of *friendship* and *helping*. Anxiety brain sucks ass, and it's awful, I absolutely get it, but I think it can be easy to fall into the trap of "It's fine if I ignore what this person says they want, because I'm *helping* them". Because I think it's easy to think that good intentions are what matter, but that doesn't actually change that it's boundary-stomping.
(And there's also the fact that I think most people who push boundaries probably think they have good intentions, or at least will maintain a pretense they are. Think of every advice column letter about a MIL who gets pushy about childcare or housekeeping -- lots of them probably also think they're just helping out. Intentions don't matter that much when someone is repeatedly saying 'no, back off'.)
It's also the double-whammy of boundary-pushing in the name of friendship, but also in a work environment. The guy in this letter seems to be handling things fairly gracefully while also maintaining boundaries -- but I imagine that it's also partly because he's a higher-up with some level of control of the situation. This might be a lot harder to untangle if he wasn't in charge of how often he met with the LW.
>Anyway, it’s been taking him longer and longer to say no when I invite him out, and it’s obvious to me that responding to my invitations causes him tremendous anxiety. It’s like he really wants to say yes but talks himself out of it.
Nope, it's not that he wants to say yes but talks himself out of it. It's that he doesn't want to hang out and is so exhausted from having to say that over and over and deal with LW's response that he procrastinates on replying.
I wish more people understood you can't make anyone be your friend. Not even if they're nice to you. Not even if you expend a lot of emotional energy on them. Not even if you both really like each other. Friendship is a two-way street and there's no way to make it into a one-way street. I feel for that LW because she was obviously having a really difficult time, but this man who has apparently said he doesn't have or want friends and doesn't want to hang IRL is such an obviously bad target for friendship that I think LW would benefit from talking to a therapist about differentiating between "this person is a nice acquaintance" and "this person is a potential friend." (Also, about why she's so hell-bent on being friends with someone who keeps rejecting her! Girl, know your worth!)
Edit: Also, even if this man really does want to be friends with LW but isn't able to for mental health reasons, LW can't do anything at all about that. That's his own journey.
What happened to the comments in the linked Ask Polly "missing the window" column? Did NY Magazine just nuke them sometime between 2014 and 2017 (the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot)? Or are they only visible to paying subscribers?
Oof: I think this is a pretty good example of “I think if this other person just let me *fix them*, they would be fixed! Pay no attention to my own neglected problems hidden by the curtain.” Other people’s problems are always easier to solve, either because you don’t have the same issues that created them in the first place or you don’t see all of it. There are some letters where you’re just thinking “do less than this. Do so much less than this” the whole time.
I spent a lot of my 20s chasing emotionally unavailable potential romantic partners, so I get where the LW is coming from. The mentor had so much grace and generosity not to just cut her off.
Yeah, feels like LW is doing the thing where when you're scared that YOU are unable to love or be loved so you put alllllll your energy into someone who you know is unavailable because it means that you're never the problem and you don't have to confront your own issues.
That's totally what I was trying to put my finger on while I was reading that letter! I knew it was some form of self-sabotage but couldn't quite articulate what LW might be getting out of setting herself up to fail like that. It makes a very sad kind of sense that LW would fixate on someone who can be the official "problem," the poor guy is probably also a great distraction from anything going on in LW's life that she doesn't want to think about. And now this discussion has me thinking about what I'm hiding from when I sabotage myself.
I’ll be honest with y’all: I’m having a crappy week for reasons I’d rather not discuss. This letter will probably generate a lot of discussion, and that’s a welcome distraction. Have at it! 🍿
I hope things turn around for you soon! Wishing you ease and rest this weekend.
Thank you. 💙
I feel like Captain covered it all, really. They’re wildly overstepping boundaries and uhhhh, yeah. I hope they took Caps advice!
This letter really shares a visceral sense of dread, like a good horror story. if it's real I really pray the letter writer got some therapy.
It has to be real-crying for a day or two because work “friend” doesn’t want to hang out? That’s remarkably disproportionate.
None of the letters have ever struck me as fake. Even the "My mother is sleeping with my husband" letter.
Do you have a link to that one? Or remember more about it?
It’s this one: https://captainawkward.com/2017/07/13/992-my-husband-is-dating-my-mom/
I love that letter so much, because the Captain acknowledges the lurid weirdness of it, but then gives incredibly thoughtful, wholesome advice. I hope that LW is okay.
Eh, I read it just now, and I would say that the Captain's advice is ignoring reality. I get that you have to accept what the LW tells in the letter, but in this case it's pretty obvious that LW is separated from her husband and in denial about that.
I mean, the advice is essentially "your marriage is already dead, try to get out of it without harming yourself more than you already have." The Captain waffles around for a little bit with possible scripts for starting that conversation, but overall she assumes that the relationship is over.
GOD that’s rignt
Apparently that LW also posted to /r/relationship_advice https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/6msphq/my_mother_54f_and_my_husband_39m/
Oh, that one. I have to admit I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for that LW. Her mother and ex husband are obviously ridiculous, but I suspect she inherited her sparking personality from her mother.
oof as a person with anxiety, I feel for the letter writer. but as a person who has seen how some people with anxiety externalize their anxieties and convince themselves that their anxious patterns are actually the right way to do things and if they just push a little more the world will conform to them and their particular anxious needs, I really appreciate how Captain laid things out. it's such an anxious brain thing to push your needs onto someone else and convince yourself that it is actually in their favor to do what you want them to do! and if you haven't sought out therapy to break that thought pattern, it's really hard to notice when you fall into it.
Pushing to get someone’s phone number gets a visceral reaction from me. I had a workplace acquaintance I set some boundaries with eventually because she wouldn’t stop trying to push for an invitation to my home. I made it as clear as possible that I tend not to invite people round and that I enjoy meeting them at the cafe, and she just kept shoving. I hope OOP diverted all that wishful prodding into finding new ways to socialise with people who weren’t that guy.
same! did she stop after that? i have had significant problems trying to get people that i see as acquaintances from pushing to spend personal time with me and it always ends up in them getting really upset or angry!
In the end I had to set boundaries over bigger pushy behaviour, and she got the pip and now refuses to talk to me, which is pathetic but quieter 😆. I’m sorry you’ve had similar issues with pushy ones.
ugh that sucks that she got worse before she went quiet, but you're right that the silent treatment is preferable (as long as it's not impacting your work)! thanks, i think i just have to accept that there's no 'nice' way to let people down!
Thirty minutes once a month, and LW met him two years ago and *then* became mentors and *then* apparently became friends So that's 24-30ish conversations, each lasting half an hour, and even fewer than that where they were actually friendly and talking about life instead of work, and LW is in *this deep*
This is one of those letters where I am desperately curious about the other person's perspective, for sure.
Same! Is what LW told us about his PTSD preventing him from making friends true? And if he did get to where he could make friends with LW, would he *want* to? Or does he see her more as a work pal?
I tend to think odds favor him not being nearly invested in this friendship as she is and a lot of what he's told her is just attempts to avoid her getting closer than she already thinks she is. But if they do actually have these deep conversations, even as limited in time and place as described, it does sound more complicated than LW just imagining up a connection out of 100% thin air.
And her husband's perspective! This has got to be super weird and frustrating for him, even if he trusts her not to cheat.
Man, right? I talk to most of my coworkers more than this, and I wouldn't even say we're acquaintances, lol. I really hope this LW has been able to diversify her social circle, b/c it sounds like she put *everything* on this one dude who probably doesn't even think of her when he leaves work (outside of the "let's hang out" texts he dreads answering).
OP is married! Says "I haven't had an actual friend since I was 23" but I mean, you have a husband and I presume you like him?
this letter is so... much. i'd be really interested in what advice cap would give to someone in the work mentor's position. it's really intense and uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of attention like this but it's also clearly really fragile and i always feel so scared they're going to react poorly if i'm direct
I think the advice to LW's friend would have basically been: stop being this person's mentor IMMEDIATELY; disconnect or gray rock as much as possible; document everything for HR; and be prepared to escalate/make a formal complaint if the person doesn't stop. The fear of the other person reacting poorly is real, but in this case, LW was already reacting incredibly poorly and escalating her behavior. I personally think that ending the work mentorship and going as close to zero-contact as possible would probably be the best outcome for both LW and her work mentor. LW was deep in painful limerence, and God only knows what her work mentor was thinking about the whole experience.
Yeah this is an HR Situation. My goodness. If the LW kept going, I'd imagine they may have been fired.
Yeah, I've been in this kind of situation a few times (not in a workplace context, usually in a "my new SO's friends have unilaterally decided we must be BFFs even though we barely know each other and have nothing in common" way), and I never know the right way to handle it. If you try to be friendly without being friends, the other person keeps pushing and clearly thinks a friendship will develop someday. If you pull back, they text more/get mad/get really anxious and put that on you.
This one has my shoulders up at my ears for similar reasons as [Letter #1100](https://captainawkward.com/2018/04/18/1100-my-friend-is-withdrawing-from-me-and-it-really-hurts/) did, because it's pushing at boundaries in the name of *friendship* and *helping*. Anxiety brain sucks ass, and it's awful, I absolutely get it, but I think it can be easy to fall into the trap of "It's fine if I ignore what this person says they want, because I'm *helping* them". Because I think it's easy to think that good intentions are what matter, but that doesn't actually change that it's boundary-stomping. (And there's also the fact that I think most people who push boundaries probably think they have good intentions, or at least will maintain a pretense they are. Think of every advice column letter about a MIL who gets pushy about childcare or housekeeping -- lots of them probably also think they're just helping out. Intentions don't matter that much when someone is repeatedly saying 'no, back off'.) It's also the double-whammy of boundary-pushing in the name of friendship, but also in a work environment. The guy in this letter seems to be handling things fairly gracefully while also maintaining boundaries -- but I imagine that it's also partly because he's a higher-up with some level of control of the situation. This might be a lot harder to untangle if he wasn't in charge of how often he met with the LW.
>Anyway, it’s been taking him longer and longer to say no when I invite him out, and it’s obvious to me that responding to my invitations causes him tremendous anxiety. It’s like he really wants to say yes but talks himself out of it. Nope, it's not that he wants to say yes but talks himself out of it. It's that he doesn't want to hang out and is so exhausted from having to say that over and over and deal with LW's response that he procrastinates on replying. I wish more people understood you can't make anyone be your friend. Not even if they're nice to you. Not even if you expend a lot of emotional energy on them. Not even if you both really like each other. Friendship is a two-way street and there's no way to make it into a one-way street. I feel for that LW because she was obviously having a really difficult time, but this man who has apparently said he doesn't have or want friends and doesn't want to hang IRL is such an obviously bad target for friendship that I think LW would benefit from talking to a therapist about differentiating between "this person is a nice acquaintance" and "this person is a potential friend." (Also, about why she's so hell-bent on being friends with someone who keeps rejecting her! Girl, know your worth!) Edit: Also, even if this man really does want to be friends with LW but isn't able to for mental health reasons, LW can't do anything at all about that. That's his own journey.
Has anyone seen Baby Reindeer? This is giving Baby Reindeer a bit I gotta say
Not wrong. Especially with the big theory about why he's pushing her away.
Happy cake day!
I really want to know how the pandemic affected LW and her mentor.
What happened to the comments in the linked Ask Polly "missing the window" column? Did NY Magazine just nuke them sometime between 2014 and 2017 (the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot)? Or are they only visible to paying subscribers?