Some people are waaaaaaay too invested in other people's business

[conuly]

1. DEAR NATALIE: My friend divorced recently and I was the last to know what was going on. In fact, I only found out when our mutual friend invited us to her “divorce party.” I was really disgusted to even be included in something so crass, and I told my friend that I didn’t even know they were having marital problems. “Oh yea, she’s been miserable for months,” is what my friend said to me. For months? I had just been out with her and her husband several weeks before this announcement and they seemed fine. I also didn’t appreciate my friend confiding in everyone before me. I don’t think I want to go to this party. We are very good friends with her soon-to-be ex-husband, as well. Do you think if I skip it I’ll look as though I’m choosing sides? I care about her, of course, but why celebrate something so sad? It doesn’t sit well with me. Thoughts on this? – WHY A PARTY?

DEAR WHY A PARTY: Perhaps your friend didn’t confide in you because even in this letter, I can hear the judgment in your voice coming through the keys. You don’t have to go to this party. In fact, it may be better that you don’t, considering how you feel. I would call your friend or meet her privately for coffee or a drink to learn more about what happened if she is willing to share. Don’t center yourself in this. When people are going through a traumatic experience, it is important that they are sharing space with people who will be supportive and empathic. It’s fine to remain friends with both parties as long as you realize that one of the parties may not want to remain friends with you for that decision. Very rarely does remaining Switzerland work out well for friendships during a divorce. If you can’t be there for her right now, I suggest you send flowers or a card at the very least.

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2. My sister staged a fake wedding years ago. Her boyfriend’s mother was giving money to her children, and the married ones got double the amount of those who were single. We flew cross-country, in good faith, for this charade and spent thousands of dollars. I discovered the truth only six years ago, when I learned that my sister receives Medicaid benefits as a single person who earns little, even though she lives with her boyfriend in a huge house with many trappings of wealth. Now, my mom wants me to invite them for Christmas dinner with my sisters’ families, but I can’t overlook their lies. My mom says it’s none of my business, but as taxpayers, my sisters and I are outraged at the way they scam the system. I think inviting them would end in a big fight. Advice?

SISTER

It’s your house. You can invite whomever you like for Christmas. From my perspective — which is not as close-up as yours — your sister and her boyfriend are still together many years after the fake wedding. That’s better than most married couples. Would you be less upset if they had called the event a commitment ceremony? They made a poor choice in response to an unusual decision by the boyfriend’s mother. I’ve made poor choices before. Have you?

As for your sister’s Medicaid benefits, you haven’t presented enough information to judge whether she is scamming the system. Generally, unmarried couples are not considered a household in establishing Medicaid eligibility. If your sister’s boyfriend can’t (or won’t) include her on his health insurance, her small income and other factors may, indeed, qualify her for Medicaid.

You are entitled to your opinions about your sister’s gamesmanship when it comes to rules and bureaucracy. I don’t see why they should take center stage at your Christmas celebration. Still, you are free to exclude her if you like, but I agree with your mother: We don’t have to admire every decision a sister makes to invite her to dinner.

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3. Dear Carolyn: I am 39, and I have three younger brothers. One of them is engaged and living with his fiancée, and one weekend last summer we all stayed with him. And I cannot stand his fiancée.

Part of it is on principle: My brother is 37, and she is 26. He is a doctor, and I think he focused on getting established, and when he wanted to have kids, he picked a younger woman. I have a lot of female friends in their 30s who describe dating as very hard specifically because men want younger women.

The other part is that she is such a Stepford wife. She is a teacher and was off for the summer. Their entire house was clean and organized, she had meals or local restaurants planned, she made activities suggestions for our other brother’s kids, and looked incredible — thin, young, hot. It feels like my smart, accomplished brother picked a young, hot woman instead of somebody his own age who is too busy with a career to put cereal in plastic bins.

I agreed to be a bridesmaid because I couldn’t think of a way to say no. But I don’t know how to fake it for an entire wedding.

My husband just says, “She was very nice to us,” which is true if you just look at the surface. I need help not tearing my hair out.

— Anonymous

Anonymous: Please reread your letter. It is ageist, petty, cruel, bedazzled with cheap assumptions and ungrateful to the point of comedy.

Your brother chose, from your description, a kind, generous, inclusive and conscientious person with one of the most difficult, underpaid and self-sacrificing careers out there, and she busted her shapely backside to host you all — and you hate her for her looks. Holy tap-dancing mean.

If she were 26 and fat, would you like her then? Or still thin, but 36? What about 26, thin, leaves dishes stacked in the sink? Unthreatening enough?

You offer no examples of her being thoughtless, destructive, mean, passive-aggressive, dishonest.

I’m sorry your friends can’t get dates. That you correlate one man’s choice of one woman with collective female suffering just gave me “domestic supply of infants” flashbacks that I could have done without today.

You can worry about demographic trends, yes — but using trends to impugn individual choices and presume you’d make better ones crosses just about all the lines.

Here’s my advice: Sit with your reasons for trashing her — and some reasons not to — for a good, long time.

Readers have thoughts:

· Please stop judging people’s life choices, especially women’s. Sisters need to pull together instead of tearing each other down.

· As a married working mom who at 37 still had time to buy cereal in bulk and decant it into storage bins, I am struck by just how many insecurities the fiancée brings out in Anonymous. Actually hating a person for their age and approach to housekeeping looks like misplaced energy.

· My superstar, 10-years-older sister-in-law used her words and told me well in advance she had no need to be part of our wedding party. If she disliked my anxious, insecure self, she’s never given any indication, and I have appreciated the chance to get to know her over time.

· I absolutely struggle with the urge to hate thin, young, beautiful and competent women, so I empathize. One thing that helps me is remembering that it is society’s fault for suggesting humans only have worth if they are young, conventionally beautiful, productive, etc. That is NOT TRUE. Don’t hate the future fiancée, hate the systems that make you want to hate her!

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Comments

[conuly]

1. I'm not actually sure this woman thinks of LW as a friend at all. I cannot believe the audacity, on the one hand judging her up and down first for getting a divorce and then for celebrating it, and on the other hand sniffing that this woman should've made a special point to inform LW - what, so she could be judged in person? Pass.

2. What Philip Galanes was plainly trying and failed to say is that the validity of a marriage has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an outside authority such as the state recognizes it. He should've spelled it out more clearly, the comments are chock-full of self-righteous jerks who are just incensed that this woman and her husband are getting a bigger inheritance than they would have otherwise.

And listen, it may be your legal right to split the inheritance however you like, but doing it this way is still shitty. This couple didn't come up with "poor choice in response to an unusual decision", they came up with an unusual choice in response to a hurtful decision.

As for the Medicaid and the big house... I don't know what's going on here, but it sounds like Sister urgently needs more healthcare than BIL can afford and this is why they're not legally married, because Medicaid turned out to be a better deal and they couldn't risk it for a marriage license. LW stops short of saying that these people are wealthy, merely that, in LW's opinion, they have "the trappings of wealth", which could mean anything. It could mean that they live in a "huge house" that costs a fortune to heat, that has a roof that they can't fix, and that they can't offload because they don't actually own it and can't afford to buy anything else in the same area. It could mean that they have a lot of things which they got secondhand from friends and relatives - after a few generations you're allowed to use the word "antique", but a lot of them are still hand-me-downs.

Or it could mean that they're scamming the system, in which case Sister's lifestyle is very precarious precisely because her marriage is not legally recognized. It seems like a risky thing to do in exchange for Medicaid you don't technically need.

3. What really gets me is that LW heaps all this scorn on her brother's fiancee, but almost none at all on him.

[ethelmay]

I'm wondering if "mutual friend" is the one throwing the party (since she's issuing invitations) and making the assumption that the woman getting divorced and LW are closer than they are. They may all run in the same crowd of people who go out together, but not really be on confidential terms. Because frankly it is weird to get invited to a divorce party for someone you didn't know was getting divorced. I'm thinking of an analogous situation in my own social life where I was surprised to hear that a couple I had met many times was getting divorced, but I wasn't surprised at all that they hadn't told me, because I'm aware that we are friendly but not intimate friends.

[green_grrl]

Do these Judgey McJudgersons even read their own letters before hitting Send?

[conuly]

They're too busy getting high off the stench of their own bullshit to realize how bad it sounds to literally anybody who isn't them.

[oursin]

I don't know how it works in other systems, but the idea that teachers are 'off for the summer' - apart from the 'needing to recuperate from stressful career', there's also 'prep for forthcoming term' to factor in - she might find a clean and organised house personally soothing after classrooms. The having stuff planned and organised and being able to suggest kid-friendly activities seem career-related strengths.

Presumably big sis has been trying to fix him up with her friends - my bruv the DOC - for years and resents that he has found someone off his own bat.

[conuly]

I honestly don't know many teachers who are "off for the summer", no more than I know teachers who actually quit working at dismissal. Mostly, summer seems to when they work their summer jobs, with the exception of teachers who are also parents, in which case their summer job is caring for their children instead of putting them in daycamp.

[goljerp]

My wife is a teacher. The summer is also when she schedules her appointments (hair cut, dentist, annual physical, etc.) that she can't do during the rest of the year because she can't just pop out for an hour or so during the work day to do these things.

[shirou]

I disagree with the motivations off these petty LWs, but nevertheless my advice to all of them is: If you don't want to, then don't.

[conuly]

I'm sure all their various siblings and friends will thank them for it.

[minoanmiss]

Sometimes people make me sad. I want to attend the divorce party and bring some homemade liquors. I want to help the person on Medicaid if I possibly could. And I want to give the teacher supplies, stickers, and a hug.

[conuly]

Seriously.

[castiron]

LW1, I bet you're also shocked, shocked I tell you! by the custom of wakes after funerals. Sometimes people need the company of other people to help process a sad thing -- even if the friend considers the divorce good and necessary, there's still going to be grief for the marriage she'd hoped to have. And the fact that your friend and her husband were able to be civil to each other in public says nothing one way or the other about how their marriage is doing in private.

LW2, if your sister had been living with her boyfriend all these years and they'd never pretended to get married, would you still be going "she should marry him so she's not being a leech on us hardworking taxpayers!", or would you be okay with the situation? Somehow I think your problem with your sister is "she's using goverment programs! that I pay for!" (Yeah, and if you're using the same insurance company I am, you're paying for part of my medical care and vice versa. Deal with it.)

That said, if your sister and her boyfriend live in one of the few states that recognize common law marriages, they might be legally married and not realize it, in which case it'd be a kindness for someone to point that out to her so she can start sorting out the legal issues. But you're not the person who should do it.

LW3, speaking as someone in a marriage with a similar age gap, maybe she'd have been happy to date a 25-year-old man, but your brother was the one who was actually interested in her and asked her out. It's unreasonable for her to say "I must reject this man who's interested in me because he should be reserved for an older woman!" (Especially given that you're not blaming your brother at all for dating a younger woman.)

[conuly]

That said, if your sister and her boyfriend live in one of the few states that recognize common law marriages, they might be legally married and not realize it, in which case it'd be a kindness for someone to point that out to her so she can start sorting out the legal issues.

Given the lengths she and her partner have gone to to avoid a legal marriage I wonder if this would really be doing her any favors.

[ethelmay]

Given what a rotten sister this doctor guy apparently has, maybe he is the type to pick a younger wife as arm candy/breeding stock (which is a thing that happens). But if so, that's basically to do with him and how he sees women. It's not a thing that she is.

[movingfinger]

Why isn’t LW3 giving her brother grief for behaving like a stereotype?

[conuly]

Internalized misogyny?

[mommy]

1. Do the divorcees consider LW a friend? I'm not sure that they do. A friendly acquaintance, maybe.

2. I might be reading too much into things, but I get the feeling that the sister is disabled and might not be in a good economic position to marry.

3. The brother and his wife are both adults. They can be married to each other without getting a signed permission slip from the LW.

[conuly]

2. I might be reading too much into things, but I get the feeling that the sister is disabled and might not be in a good economic position to marry.

That's my suspicion as well - it's one of a very few things that makes this entire narrative add up.

[ashbet]

It continues to baffle, astound, and horrify me that people simply do not understand that disabled people do not have “marriage equality” — AND that it is incredibly difficult and demeaning to get on Medicaid (for example, there are a ton of intrusive questions about the people you live with!)

If you’re not “disabled enough” to get Social Security, but you have a chronic illness, a condition that may make working challenging, or even a health issue that is not disabling, but is expensive to treat (say, a painful condition like psoriasis, or a condition that is manageable with medical care, but can be life-threatening without it, such as diabetes or asthma), you may find yourself in need of medical care, but unable to obtain it.

Well, a “fake wedding“ isn’t an ideal solution, I find it very hard to blame people who find themselves over a barrel, when it comes to healthcare access.

Even if none of the above is true, and the sister solely “married” to get the inheritance, that is STILL not the sister’s business!!

[conuly]

I save my bafflement and horror for the fact that people make The Poors jump through so many ridiculous hoops for the basics. If other people are naive and ignorant about reality, well, I only wish that they were closer to the truth and it was easier to get assistance.

[cereta]

Twenty-plus years ago, then-fiance' and I seriously considered driving to Vegas, getting married by Dracula, and telling no one but the few people who would need to know for me to get on his health insurance. We planned to just have to wedding we already had scheduled six months later (obviously telling the officiant). Fortunately, I got a job with insurance, but when I tell that story, I almost always hear from or of someone else who either did something similar or seriously considered it.

Point being: yes. Access to health care is no easy matter.

[ashbet]

I have gotten legally married twice for health insurance.

(Both to existing, serious, live-in partners -- I was engaged to one -- but in both cases, our hand was forced by insurance changes to domestic partnership rules. And getting married screwed me out of a lot of disability benefits that I would otherwise have been entitled to, like a program that would have paid for a wheelchair ramp for my car.)

When you have a serious chronic illness or disability, you wind up making a LOT of hard choices with regard to both marital status and insurance coverage :/

[neotoma]

One of my sibling's moved their wedding from "the wedding is in 6 months" to "the wedding is now in 3 weeks" because it would give their spouse health insurance after losing their job.

It's ridiculous how health care is so dependent on your employment in this country, and if you can't work or have chronic care needs, it can be almost impossible to get and maintain health insurance.

[mrissa]

How dare she have a clean house and planned fun activities for her fiance's family. That utter beast. The nerve of her. Why, I'd give her a piece of my mind.

...in the form of a pretty thank-you note for her hosting, WHAT EVEN, like, LITERALLY WHAT WAS SHE SUPPOSED TO DO, throw PopTart crumbs at them and hide in the laundry room? Given the response I wouldn't blame her if she did.

[firecat]

I’ve searched through the whole constitution for hours trying to find the part that says people have the right not to pay taxes to people doing things they don’t agree with. I can’t find it! But, given the number of times I’ve seen people objecting to something because they’re taxpayers*, it sure seems like it must be in there.

*my fave example of this is taxpayers objecting to the existence of fat people on the basis that we need more health care

[conuly]

Well, hey, I don’t agree with the USA spending so much on the military, so can I selectively stop paying my share of that bill? It’s gotta cost less from me than that Medicaid. This is a great idea, and you’re right, it must be in the invisible sovcit only version of the constitution.

[melannen]

LW 1: It is kind of weird that your friend and her husband were pretending everything is OK with you so recently and then dropped this party invite on you out of nowhere - seems like if you're a good enough friend to go to the party, you were a good enough friend to know before the invite dropped. But your friend has a lot going on right now and might have just dropped a ball; if you don't think you're a good enough friend to her to go to the party, don't go.

It probably is a good idea to reach out to both friends one-on-one with sympathy before you start taking sides; it's hard to say what was really going on or why they made the choices they did, but I feel like by inviting you to the party they're inviting questions, so go ahead and ask them and see what happens.

LW 2: I get feeling betrayed, but also, if they had a big party for all their family and friends to celebrate their commitment, and stayed committed, it wasn't fake?

If you think inviting sister for the holiday would end in a big fight, because you won't be able to resist starting one, I suggest just starting the fight now when it won't ruin everyone's holiday, and then you probably won't need to worry about whether she's coming.

LW 3: Literally every problem you have with brother's fiancee is about something your brother did. Maybe sit with that.