Dog.
While I was traveling recently, my husband started chatting with another woman, which eventually led to him sending a nude pic of himself. The woman had asked him to download an app that essentially stole all his phone contacts. She told him to send money and threatened to send his picture to his contacts if he didn’t comply. He reported this to the police, and the next day she sent his photo to several people, including my mother and his boss. He is completely humiliated and in shock. I know he is a victim here, and I want to support him, but a part of me is livid that he got involved in an intimate chat with a strange woman online. I feel like he cheated on me, even if there was no physical contact involved. It is hard to describe how betrayed I feel, but I can’t talk to him about it while he is dealing with such a public humiliation. How do we deal with this in our marriage? Do I let it go, demand counseling—what?
It’s my site and I can link to two Prudies in one day if I want to:
Q. Husband’s inappropriate jokes: Please don’t judge—my husband came home early unexpectedly one afternoon, and my boyfriend went out of the window through the balcony to try to make an exit. He ended up falling from the apartment and was hospitalized. My boyfriend also has a wife, and I have no idea what his medical progress is or what is happening with him. The story made local news—about a naked man falling out of the apartment and injuring himself. My husband, who thinks it happened from a neighbor’s apartment, keeps making vile jokes about the incident (his sense of humor is usually quite dark). It is like a fresh knife through my heart each time I hear him casually joke about my injured boyfriend. I have asked him to stop, but he thinks it’s hilarious. He has told his friends and family about it with me within earshot. I don’t want to make a huge deal out of this, but it hurts a lot, not to mention that I can’t believe my husband makes light of another man’s serious accident. What’s a subtle way to get him to stop?
A: My God, of course I’m going to judge you. What a strange request.
Adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson Girls:
One August, I drove six hours south from Sonoma County to see the place where the girls had lived. The drive took me past the apocalyptic wind farms and down the bleached interstate, the exits littered with tomatoes that fall from the produce trucks. The ranch was ten miles outside of Los Angeles, in the commuter town of Chatsworth. I had to call my sister on the phone to give me directions to the place.
“Spahn,” I said. “Spahn Movie Ranch.” I heard her typing. “Wait, it’s loading,” she said. “It’s Santa Susanna Pass Road—” I found the place, across from a grim, corporate-looking Baptist church and adjacent to a baseball field. When I pulled my truck over, I saw the field was dotted with uniformed boys in the middle of a game, their avid parents watching from the low bleachers. What was this place I was going, my sister wanted to know. I told her it was where Charles Manson had lived with his followers.
Sarah Hepola is on her second week of doing “Ask a Former Drunk” over at Jezebel, and I think it’s really good and even-handed, as was her book (this is her responding to a woman who thinks she has a drinking problem, but knows her husband will blow off her concerns about it):
I’ve heard so many stories about couples that drink together. Sometimes the alcohol is what keeps them bonded, and sometimes the alcohol is what tears them apart. (Often both.) It’s hard to see exactly how the alcohol is functioning until you remove it, and examine the relationship on its own terms. I wonder if this is what your husband fears — that removing alcohol will disrupt a dynamic that feels cozy to him. These are not low stakes. I’ve seen sobriety end marriages, although I’ve also seen sobriety save marriages. It sounds like quitting drinking will make YOU happier, but it will make HIM less happy. That’s tough. Although I would gently suggest that neither you nor your husband really have any idea what removing alcohol from your life will do. You are operating on assumptions and Hollywood stereotypes and fear, like most humans when confronted with change. I swear half my conversations with drinkers are like, “I have to change!” and the other half are like, “I don’t want to change!” And sometimes the same person is saying both.
Lab-grown diamonds are about to take off in a major way, and De Beers is shitting itself:
Official numbers are hard to come by, though there have been some speculating reports. According to Bloomberg, 360,000 carats of lab-growns were made in 2014; research firm Frost & Sullivan believes the demand will jump to 20 million carats by 2026.
In addition to synthetic diamonds’ lower price point, some consumers are drawn to the stones for ethical reasons. Accusations of exploitation and inhumane working conditions in mines cast a dark shadow over the diamond industry. Mining is also said to be devastating to the environment, due to the amount of energy it requires, the potential for chemical leaks, and the harmful effects that removing large amounts of earth has on local ecosystems.
Even with the implementation of a system like the Kimberley Process, a certification program established in 2003 that requires governments to verify that the diamonds they export are conflict-free, Diamond Foundry founder and CEO Martin Roscheisen says the mined diamond industry is one that has almost zero accountability.
ooh, this is a thorny one, also, I would want to know HOW you know they are having an affair (nothing short of “one of them told me” is acceptable if you’re gonna blow up their spot – the OP confirms in the comments that she heard directly from one of the affair partners, FYI):
Two colleagues (“Chris” and “Jamie”) are having an affair, and have been for several years. They’re both married. Only a few people know (I think), and I haven’t heard anyone gossiping about it.
But now, Jamie’s up for a promotion that would make Jamie a C-level exec and Chris’s boss. I don’t work directly with either of them, but this seems like a terrible idea. It would technically put Chris’s spouse in Jamie’s reporting line. We’re also a large employer in a small town. If things blow up, it will have a real impact on the company’s reputation. We’re already just getting over a low-key sexual harassment scandal from a few years ago.
What’s my responsibility here? I don’t want to gossip, but Jamie’s well-liked and -respected and has a good shot at getting this promotion if no one says anything (and I could even support that if I wasn’t worried about the potential fallout from the affair). If I need to say anything, who do I say it to? The search chair? HR? Chris and/or Jamie?
I did see this article, but I’m in a different position — I’m not making the hiring decision. I’d say I’m roughly equal in the hierarchy, in a very different function.
LOVED this feature on the creator of UnREAL, which also confirmed all my suspicions about exactly how accurate its depiction of reality TV production is:
“The night they were going to get dumped, I would go to the hotel room where they were staying and say, ‘I’m going to lose my job for telling you this, but he’s going to pick you—he’s going to propose,’ ” Shapiro said. After the contestant left the set, disconsolate, Shapiro joined her in a limousine while the stereo played a song that the contestant had been primed to see as “ ‘their song’ for their love story with the Bachelor.” Shapiro kept jalapeños or lemons hidden in her jacket pocket—dabbing something acidic in her eye allowed her to cry on cue, which helped elicit tears from the contestant. “I’d have arranged with the driver to have the song play just until I got a shot of her crying—then cut the music so I could start the interview,” Shapiro explained. “They’d often tell us to drive up and down the 405 until the girls cried—and not to come home if we didn’t get tears, because we’d be fired.” In hindsight, Shapiro said, being fired “would have been a great solution to my problems.”
A quick housekeeping note! IntenseDebate has always had this feature where if someone reports a comment (for spam or grossness), it goes into moderation, I get an email about it, which I either ignore (if it’s something like “crude language!”) or respond “delete” to, which automatically deletes it. But since IntenseDebate is no longer really maintaining itself, apparently that feature broke about a month ago. I had been confused, because I’ve gotten emails once or twice like “a lot of people reported this comment and nothing happened” and I’m like “but I responded ‘delete’ right away!”
What this means in practice is just that reported comments won’t go anywhere until I am physically in front of a real computer, and also that we may have to lock comments once the site ends, which I had hoped not to do (we will obviously open them when new things are posted.) But I’m going to talk to Marco about our options there!
