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My wife has been on a real Tahiti kick in the last year or so, which is weird because she’s never been there. She has been bugging me about going over and over, and well, I don’t want to go. It’s far, and remote, and there are beaches several thousand miles closer. Should I just suck it up and go? Or should she relent, and we can go somewhere else?
So this is very much an issue of balancing the levels of your desires. It’s not so much about “She wants to go to Tahiti vs. You don’t want to go to Tahiti.” There is no real answer to that question in a relationship where people are equal partners.
In fact, quick aside: if there is a pattern in your relationship where you both want different things, and one of you always wins out, maybe work on that. It’s not inevitable, it’s not cute if “she always wins! Haha! Oh women!” It’s inequitable and stupid, and It’s a problem. Fix it.
So anyway, I’m going to assume you otherwise have a healthy, equitable relationship. So this ultimately boils down to how much you fucking hate the idea versus how much she really wants to go there.
Generally speaking, if this is a major dream of hers, suck it up and go. The want generally should win out over the don’t want when the want is super strong, because the reasons we often have for not wanting things are stupid. Your reason of Tahiti being “far” sounds pretty weak. I mean it’s possible your mom got murdered in Tahiti and you have legitimate PTSD from it, and you just didn’t want to tell me that, but I’m guessing you’re more just like “Bleh…pass,” which works for nixing the idea of going to the Olive Garden tonight, but not for an important decision.
The important part here is that both of you need to ask yourselves: “Why do I feel the way I do?”
First let’s look at her angle on this, because one important element rings true to me: when people suddenly want to vacation somewhere, their reasoning usually has to do with Instagram and is actually kind of dumb.
I’m not saying this is true of your wife. I am however saying she should ask herself why she wants to go so badly, because if it is a matter of, “I saw something that looked cool on Instagram and it made me feel happy, so I wanted to go to there to have more happy,” there’s a chance it was totally stupid, and won’t necessarily make a great vacation spot.
That sounds totally dumb of her and totally condescending of me to phrase it like that, but that ultimately is how we end up wanting a lot of vacations that we go on. We see a picture and build up an idea in our head.
What I mean is, if you don’t know what you’d do during the time of your vacation besides staring at a view, maybe that idea sucks. Maybe once you get past the novelty of the one Instagram photo, you won’t really like the rest of what the place has to offer.
Again, maybe there’s more to it. I just think it’s worth getting the reasoning out into the open.
Similarly for you, maybe your reasons for not wanting to go are dumb as shit. Figure out a clear description of what they are. You’ve already described some of the reasons, but are there more? If you look to make the best of where you are, is there really that appreciable of a difference in how much fun you’re having between Tahiti and, I don’t know, Switzerland? How would your view of the situation change if you stopped being such a lazy, pouty asshole?
That’s a legitimate question. Ponder it.
As is often the case, the key is in getting to the bottom of what your deals are, and getting that out in the open, so that you can each identify why you feel the way you do, and you can measure against who wants what more, and whose reasons are less stupid.
I finally reached my wit’s end and quit my job. I just couldn’t do it any more, and I’m mostly happy I did. The down side is that I have no plan. I have like ten things I’ve daydreamed about, but I don’t know if any of them are good ideas. I just don’t know what to do. Help!
First priority, in this situation and I’d think in life in general: make sure you don’t go homeless. I haven’t done it myself, but I’d think it really puts a damper on everything.
So it doesn’t really matter how you pull it off: maybe you already have some savings, maybe you can borrow from someone with money, or drive for Lyft, or take those savings and buy a Winnibago, and cook meth in it (I’m rewatching a certain all-time great show right now). Just make sure you don’t die and you have what you need.
I know that’s not the most profound advice, but once you can ensure not dying for a couple of months, you’re actually free to sit for a second, figure shit out, and get a plan in place.
Once you have that plan in place, hooray! Time to re-shape your life!
Here’s the good news: your possibilities are literally endless. You could still become a brain surgeon if you wanted to. You’d have to cram more information into your brain than previously thought possible, and work so hard you lost all of your friends and incur massive amounts of debt without making real money for quite a while, but the point is, it’s an option. Everything is an option. The options are literally infinite.
Here’s the bad news: there are only so many options that won’t suck for you, so it’s time to buckle down and sort those out.
So as you look forward at the next step in your career, there are four basic categories to measure before you move forward.
1. Enjoyment: How much you wouldn’t hate the job you’d be doing. This is unfortunately often unknowable. You can guess that you’d have a great passion for human resources, but how will you ever know until you fully jump into that wild adventure? Point being, do your best to guess what you might like.
2. Pay: Duh.
3. Future – It’s also worth looking at where a job could go in the future. Sure you might find something that ticks the other boxes pretty well right now, but where will that course take you in ten years? Twenty?
4. Sacrifice – This is the most underlooked but maybe most important part to your current job search. Do you need extra training for a new career? Do you need to get your masters? Do you need to start in the mailroom at age 35? Are you gonna need to show a little butt cleavage to move forward? Is any of this worth doing?
There is no objectively wrong answer here. There are only wrong answers for you. And those are for you to figure out. So, you know, do that.
My mom really wants me to come home for Christmas, but so does my boyfriend’s mom. It’s giving me major anxiety, and I just want to make everybody happy. I don’t know what to do!
This is, historically speaking, a problem full of bleh solutions where nobody really wins. Everybody either has an incomplete holiday season, or ends up in a situation where they feel out of place, or feels a couple of truck loads of guilt. So, you know, enjoy.
There isn’t a great end to this, but you can find the least bad end.
There are some rules of thumb here. The first one is to figure out–definitively–what everyone’s priorities are. This seems so simple, and yet, we generally totally suck at actually doing this. We try to pick up signals, and guess as to the degree to which everybody wants someone around, and it doesn’t really accomplish anything, and as a result, we universally suck at this process.
If you and your boyfriend need to divide and conquer with your own families, sure, do that. But the most important thing here is to allow for zero bullshit. Allow zero passive aggression, and zero wishy-washy nonsense. Call out every, “Well if that’s what you guys want,” that you hear. Find out exactly how everyone in the family feels, get that down in writing (not literally, that would be weird). Repeat their statements of how they feel back to them. Do this over and over.
This is the basis for your decision. From here on out, here’s what you do: With any situation where there is a diametric opposition (i.e. both sets of parents want you there for the full holiday season), split it down the middle. One family gets you one year, then the other family gets you the next year. Flip a coin to see who goes first, make your decision, state it clearly, and listen to no bullshit about it. This is the best possible solution for your anxiety. You rip off the decision like a band-aid, and if the families don’t like it, throw the band-aid at their faces and say, “This is the best I can do,” and feel zero guilt.
Outside of that, once you have the clear priorities, find where one family might be more okay than another with missing Thanksgiving, or New Years, or Kwanza or whatever, you can start to develop a system outside of the split down the middle.
The system is what’s most important. If you have a system for when you spend time with each family, then the family decisions can never be taken personally. Every decision about holidays with the family are based on your system, and therefore can’t be taken personally.
And voila. You have the least painless, least awkward distribution of family holiday time possible…which is to say still totally painful and awkward and terrible, and maybe consider breaking it off with your boyfriend just to avoid it.
