DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a 20-year-old student in an interracial relationship. In the days pre-lockdown, my girlfriend flew into NYC from Paris while I flew into Connecticut from SoFl. Because we hadn’t seen each other in three weeks, I told my father I would take the train into NYC to visit her. He said that was, “okay.”

My girlfriend advocated for LGBT rights throughout high school and college, so we went to the Gay Pride Parade with her two friends. She took a picture of her friends and I with a Rainbow Flag in the background. She posted it to Instragram, and Facebook. All was good.

Next thing I know, I received a message from my sister, “Dad is pissed you went to the Gay Pride Parade.” I shrugged it off. Despite my father’s brother being one of the thousands of homosexuals who died from AIDS, he’s a homophobe. Not wanting to fight with him on his settled ways, I ignored it.

The next day, I received a phone call from my mother (she and my father are divorced). She demanded I take the photo down from Facebook because I pushed one of my father’s buttons (there had been a little bit of tension between my father and I on something else). I told her I couldn’t ask my girlfriend and her friends to take their photos down. Although I could untag myself, I thought it would be silly to comply with such a request.

My sister picked me up from the train station when I returned to Connecticut. She told me, “Dad went off on your girlfriend yesterday. He called her a ‘slut,’ a slew of Asian racial slurs, a bad influence, and insulted her political stances. He threatened to not help you pay for school.'” This took me by surprise because my girlfriend has had dinner with him, and she spent a weekend with me at his place.

My father’s said terrible things. He’s one of those, “If black people can say the n-word, then anyone can say the n-word (except he says the word)”, “Bisexual people don’t exist” (he doesn’t know I’m bisexual), “You can’t rape your SO,” pieces of s

t. But, he’s helped pay for my living expenses (I attend a school in NYC. Apartments can be cheaper than dorms, and work won’t be enough to pay for it on my own). Given that, I’ve put up with his s

tty comments. This crosses line several times over. Even if this is resolved, I would be very uncomfortable with my father seeing my girlfriend again, or my girlfriend’s parents (who are wonderful) meeting my father.

Should I tell my girlfriend about this? If I should (and I’m inclined to think I should), how should I do it? Even though she’s one of the most kind and intelligent people I know, she was extremely nervous before she met my father. When she spent the weekend at his house with me, she was nervous. She wants him to like her.

Thanks,

A Conflicted Boyfriend

DEAR A CONFLICTED BOYFRIEND: The problem isn’t what to tell your girlfriend, it’s how to manage your father.

You’re stuck in a s

tty position, Conflicted. It’d be one thing if he weren’t a dominant presence in your life; you could treat his bigoted piece-of-s

t dinosaur ass like an embarrassing inconvenience that crops up on occasion. Unfortunately, you’re forced to put up with him for now because he’s got you by the financial balls and the leverage this gives him over your life is going to put some serious strain on your relationship with your girlfriend. This is especially true if he’s going to use his financial hold over you to bludgeon you into toeing his line. As a result, you’re stuck in a situation where you basically have the s

tty option on one side and maybe less s

tty option on the other.

There’re really aren’t any easy answers. If you tell your girlfriend about the things your Dad has said, she’s probably going to be incredibly hurt. On the other hand, if you don’t, the odds of his doing or saying something horrible in front of her (or her family) or worse, to her are likely going to go up exponentially. There’s nothing to stress out a relationship when you feel like you’re constantly having to defuse bombs every goddamn day.

So what do you do about all of this?

Well… unfortunately in this situation, just about the only thing you can do is try to thread the needle as best you can. There’s going to be a natural conflict in the desire to confront him, to try to educate him, to try to avoid things entirely or to just grit your teeth and hope you can get out of the interaction without his saying something horrific. There’re going to be consequences to any of these actions, which will inform just what you might be willing to do. And frankly, a lot of it depends on whether your father is the sort of person who’s full of bluster and hot air or if he really would try to use your financial dependence on him to control you.

The first thing I’d suggest is that you give your girlfriend and her parents an edited picture about your father. You don’t need to tell her about the things he said about her – there are things that our partners have a right to NOT know, especially when knowing is going to hurt her needlessly – but you should tell her that your father is bigoted as hell. The more she understands what he’s like, the less of an incredible surprise it will be if and when he does blow up at her. It will also help her understand why you don’t want to bring her to events where he’s involved; the last thing you want to do is to paint a target on her forehead. The odds that he’ll like her are low; the odds that he’ll say something that’ll hurt her are very goddamn high. 

Next: you’re going to want to take a two-pronged strategy of saving up as much money as you possibly can in order to remove his leverage over you, while also trying to keep the peace… for now. It absolutely sucks to have to knuckle under to somebody who’s acting like a bigoted s

t-head, but if he is likely to make good with his threats, then the only real option is to go along to get along until you can make your escape. That might entail cutting your expenses to the bone. It might mean having to dial back on courses while you take on work to start saving up enough that you won’t have to rely on him. You might look into getting roommates to make living on your own more affordable. Or it might mean biting your tongue, keeping your head down and white-knuckling it until you can get your degree and get the hell out… while also keeping your girlfriend and her family at a distance from him.

It can feel like you’re selling out your soul for the cost of your education. At the same time however, this may be the price you have to pay to get your degree and not be dragged under financially by impossible student loan debts. Like I said: it’s a s

tty option and the other options are just different degrees of s

tty.

In the meantime, you can take steps to keep your sanity and minimize his ability to directly affect your life. The first is to lock down your social media accounts. Now, if you block him or unfriend him, he may well notice and this could end up making things worse. Therefore, you need to get very familiar with Facebook’s privacy settings. The current set-up gives you options that allow you to control who can see what you post with a fine level of granularity. Use them. Set up a filter that includes everybody but your father and set it so that he doesn’t see anything. No shared posts, no comments from mutual friends, no tagged photos, nothing. This is where you will want to spend the majority of your activity, especially if it’s things that’ll set your father off. If you have friends or family members who may provide that information – telling him that you checked in to an LGBTQ advocacy meeting, f’rex – then they need to get filtered as well; it doesn’t do you any good to lock him out if other people are just going to give your secrets away anyway. You’re going to have to be very on top of any changes to those privacy settings. Facebook has a tendency to change them without warning, and that can leave you unexpectedly vulnerable.

If you absolutely need to, you can also consider setting up a new Facebook profile entirely and migrating as many friends over to that one, while keeping your old one as a dummy to pacify your father.

Next: consider doubling down on your education. His hold on you is contingent on paying for school; getting done as quickly as possible cuts one of the ways he has of controlling you. If you can manage some summer courses and a higher course-load, you’ll be out of his reach that much quicker. You should also look into other possible sources of funding for school. You may be able to apply for scholarships or aid programs that will make it easier for you to afford your classes – hopefully without saddling you with mountains of debt after you graduate. The more you can minimize the power he has in your life, the less of an obstacle he’ll be.

Once you’ve got your degree and you’re out from under his thumb… well, that’s up to you. At that point, as long as he doesn’t have that financial hold over you, you are the one who has the leverage. You can use the threat of your presence (or lack thereof) in his life as the stick to make him shape up his act; if he’s going to be a bigot, he can do so without you being there. Leave him with a copy of “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo and tell him that if he wants to be part of your life, then he needs to f

king evolve already.

It’s an incredibly s

tty situation, Conflicted and you have my sympathies. I hope you can get through this with your sanity and relationship intact.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: So this may not be your typical question. More or less I need to bounce some ideas.

I want to ask my girlfriend to marry me. We’ve been together for over four years and she’s helped me become a better person and reach for things I doubted I could do before. She’s smart, funny and attractive. I love her more every day and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together.

Thing is, I was planning on making a proposal in front our friends at a party I wanted to hold after I completed work on a big project of mine. But then the coronavirus hit and changed everything. We can’t have gatherings so I can’t invite a bunch of people over to look at this thing and then make the proposal in front of them all. I couldn’t have done it without her, so I want her to be a part of the whole thing.

If this was normal I’d probably just be like “well whatever, I’ll just do it in private” but it’s not exactly normal. You see, my girlfriend is trans. This is a non-issue for me and our friends, but one thing I know what she wants is for the engagement to be a big deal. She’s expressed that she feels she deserves a special proposal just as any woman would. I agree that she deserves to have a big deal be made about getting engaged, and I want to make that a reality.

But we’re all stuck at home and that makes it difficult to make my plan a reality.

Thing is, we have no idea how long this will last. Some estimates are over a year, and I don’t want to wait that long. Honestly I was hoping to have done it by now already.

My girlfriend’s needs and desires are important to me and I want to make her dreams come true, but I also want to be engaged to her and call her my fiancé, like, yesterday. I’ve already almost messed up and called her my fiancé a couple times. So what do I do? Do I just go for it and make this finally happen in as special a way as I can in isolation? Or do I wait to make the day as special as it can possibly be?

And just for the record, I have no doubt she’ll accept. We’ve talked about it before and she’s made it clear she expects me to propose eventually. This won’t be a surprise besides the day, time and way I plan to do it.

Thanks for the help.

-Isolated in Indecision

DEAR ISOLATED IN INDECISION: First of all, congratulations on your impending engagement, IOI; it’s great that you and your girlfriend are at a point where you’re ready to tie the knot. It’s a damn shame that you — like so many others — have had your lives and plans turned thoroughly upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

So let’s talk proposals.

On a strictly personal level… I’m not the biggest fan of elaborate or showy proposals. I can understand the appeal to a certain extent, but I find that past a certain point, they’re less about a celebration of love and partnership and more about showing off. A lot of those viral proposals may make for great moments on TikTok or YouTube, but they always rub me the wrong way; it feels more like they’re for other people instead of the couple.

But that’s just me; I can also understand wanting to give your partner the proposal she wants, especially in a way that gives her the validation society often denies trans women. So f

k it, let’s showboat a little. The fact that we’re stuck in unusual circumstances doesn’t mean that you can’t propose, or that you can’t make it special for her. It just requires some creativity and out of the box thinking.

The key here is to think about just what would make her feel special and why. Would it be about including your mutual friends and family in the moment? Would it be about the effort it took to make it special? Maybe it would be something in the way that you did it — something that you can put together that speaks to the things she loves and enjoys.

There’re a number of potential options and ideas, depending on how elaborate you want to go and how much time, effort and money you’re willing to throw at the project. One of the fastest and easiest would be to enlist the help of others. If, for example, a favorite celebrity of hers is on Cameo, you could commission them to help you pop the question. Alternately, you could propose — while still maintaining social distancing — by delivering the ring via drone; fly the drone up to her window, while you stand below. Another way you could involve friends or family is to propose via an online game; many couples have proposed in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, even Animal Crossing. All of these give you the chance to have your friends in virtual attendance, even allowing them to get dolled up in ways they might not be able to in the real world now. You could even arrange a Zoom happy hour… that just happens to be so you can propose. Hell, set things up so y’all serenade her

Other couples have gotten literally creative with their proposals. If you or your girlfriend have a favorite comic or artist or art style, commissioning a short comic might work. Others have used bespoke games to propose to great effect. But proposing — even a showy, special proposal — doesn’t need to be an incredibly elaborate or expensive affair. Even something as simple as a Twine game would feel special; the point is about the two of you, after all, not the amount of money or trouble you went through to make it happen.

So think about the things that are meaningful to your girlfriend or that are representative to your relationship. What has the most meaning, ties into something she loves or is reminiscent of the story of your lives together? Use that as the base and work outwards from there.

Just remember; at the end of the day, it’s not the proposal that matters, it’s the love behind it.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve been married to a wonderful man for 5 years. I grew up in a strict religion and felt sexually repressed for most of my life. Then I met a man several years my junior who loved me and converted for me to marry me. We’ve gone through a lot together, a few health scares, deaths of family members. We have an autistic son with visual impairment. He’s been my rock and support.

Our sex life is ok. I’ve always had a high sex drive and for the past several months it’s been in overdrive. I think he realized that I’ve been holding back, and he found a safe judgement free app we can use to share our fantasies with each other. It turns out we both want threesomes with another woman. We discussed it further and I told him that I’m actually bi and am interested in swinging. He said that was awesome and he was down for it! What proceeded was 3 days of great sex and fantasies. Then he jokingly slut shamed me for being interested in swinging and then that night we had a bad sex session and then he told me he wasn’t actually interested in swinging. I now feel ashamed and raw. We reached out to a sex therapist who concluded that I was the problem. That when my husband said yes and looked up swinging clubs, that that meant he was thinking about it, not that he was interested. And that I have self esteem issues that are getting in the way of my getting over this.

I feel betrayed that he essentially lured me into a false sense of security to disclose my deepest darkest secret and then rejected me. I can’t leave him. We have a special needs son and I make 5 times as much as he does and he’d take me to the cleaners. Short of inventing a time machine, I don’t know what to do or how to proceed. I found the therapist judgements and hateful but realize that if my husband and the therapist both say I’m the problem, that they’re probably right. I don’t know what to do. I haven’t had sex with my husband since. I’ve always been socially awkward and am lucky I found my husband. Do you have a script I can use in my head before psyching myself up before sex that I can use? I’m not the biggest fan of  “get over yourself, you’re damaged one” that I can from our therapist.

Thanks

Lost and Bi in PA

DEAR LOST AND BI IN PA: This is an interesting letter, LaBiPA, not so much because of the content — this is actually a fairly common issue — but because the roles are reversed. Most of the time when I hear from someone in a hetero relationship whose desire for more adventurous sex caused problems, it’s usually the man who tripped over his dick. It’s less common — not unheard of, but less common — for the woman to be both the initiator and the one who moved faster than their partner may have been comfortable with.

Now, there’s a lot to untangle here, but let’s start with where things went wrong and why. The issue here is that it seems as though you jumped the gun and pushed things too far, too fast. This is actually a very common problem when someone starts to roll out a kink or a fantasy they’d like to try. Their partner is ok with it, maybe even finds it hot, and there’re a few days of talking it out that lead to all kinds of exciting sex. But when the kink-seeking partner tries to actually make the fantasy happen, the whole thing hits a giant brick wall at 30 miles per hour. The problem is that the would-be-kinkster took things a step too far. Their partner was warming up to the idea, even enjoying the erotic charge that came from fantasizing about it… but as anyone who’s ever thought about, say, jumping out of a plane can tell you, there’s a vast difference between fantasizing about it and the reality. Even people who are legitimately interested in trying this new thing, whether it may be swinging, threesomes or forms of non-monogamy, may suddenly discover they have second thoughts about trying it. In fact, this has tripped up many couples when it came to opening up the relationship; everyone was on board until one of them actually banged someone else and the other partner had a freak out over it.

That seems to be what happened here, LaBiPA: you and your hubby may have been getting charged up over talking about it, even looking up swingers clubs and talking about theoretical plans… but he still wasn’t ready to make that last leap. You took things farther than he was ready for and he balked. And honestly, it’s understandable. As much as society tells us that a MFF threesome is the ultimate male fantasy, it can be hard for some men to see someone — male, female or enbie — going to town on their partner. The same goes for any form of swapping; it can be fodder for fantasy, but a harder thing to do when you’re meeting the person who’s about to get down with someone you love.

Now that having been said: it REALLY wasn’t cool for your husband to make jokes about you being “slutty”. If he’s uncomfortable with the situation, actually saying “hey, y’know what, I’m not sure I’m as into this as you are,” would’ve been far better. Making jokes about you being hornier or just more into non-meat-and-potatoes sex than he is may have been a reaction to feeling weird about things, but it’s inappropriate, hurtful and profoundly unhelpful all the same.

In an ideal world — and what you should do next time, assuming there is a next time — is take baby steps. Talking about it, fantasizing about it together, even looking up clubs is one step. The next would be to talk things out: what would this look like? What would we want in an ideal guest-star? The following step would be to start considering potential options together; that might mean browsing dating apps or going to bars and just checking out people with no intent of actually talking to them or approaching them. The next step might be to visit a sex club, strictly as tourists; you both agree in advance that nothing is going to happen, you’re just going to check out the vibe and see how you feel, etc. Another step to a potential threesome would be possibly having you flirt or dance with someone else at a bar. If you get to the point of bringing someone home, then you have hard limits on what is and isn’t allowed for the first time, and so forth. Taking these steps makes it easier for everyone to gauge their comfort and to tap the brakes if it’s going beyond what they’re ready for. It also gives a more reluctant partner the chance to get acclimated to the idea and decide that this isn’t so bad and maybe the next step will be ok too.

Unfortunately, you didn’t do these things and as a result: your husband stomped the brakes (in a not-terribly great or understanding way) and you all ended up in couples counseling over this.

That’s also where I start to have questions about the way you present the fallout to the whole misadventure. It sounds a lot like you’re the frustration of coming close to fulfilling a fantasy — and your self-esteem issues — color your perception of  what went down afterwards. For example: while I get that you’re upset — you were so close to this awesome adventure! — I don’t think your husband betrayed you or cruelly manipulated you in order to… I dunno, go “PSYCHE!” because f

k you, that’s why. It sounds to me like this was an honest fantasy that he was willing to explore until it started feeling like it was going faster than he liked. Similarly, I think you need to take a step back and look at exactly what was said, rather than how you felt (and still feel) in the moment. Did your sex therapist actually say that “you’re at fault and you’re damaged,” or did it just feel this way? There’s a vast difference between “you could have done this in a different way,” and “you’re a freak and should be ashamed.”

It’s not impossible that the therapist did frame it that way; God knows there’re some truly awful and sex-negative sex therapists out there. But it sounds a lot like you’ve swung from excited for sexy fun times to “this just proves I’m an awful person” and that’s affecting how you interpreted things.

While you examine things as dispassionately as you can, I would suggest talking to a different therapist — first by yourself, then possibly with your husband. A sex-positive therapist — one who isn’t going to tell you that you’re “broken” —  can not only help you process your feelings about this misadventure, but can also help facilitate the conversation between you and your husband. They can also help develop a roadmap for future adventures, in a way that doesn’t end with one or the both of you getting your feelings hurt, or worse. The American Association of Sexual Educators, Counselors and Therapists has a referral directory on their site that can help you find the sex-positive therapist or couple’s counselor that can walk you through how to talk this through and ease the pain that this has inadvertently caused you.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com