Help! I Asked My Girlfriend to Show Me Her Hidden Photo Album. What Was in There Embarrassed Us Both.

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My girlfriend and I live together and have been dating for a little under two years. She had to push a little to move in, and I regret being stubborn about it. I love her and needed the ultimatum to get my act together and commit. I’ve improved since then, but I think my putting it off impacted her more than I thought.

I saw a Reddit post about secret photo albums on iPhones, and I didn’t know those existed, so I casually mentioned it to her. She was surprised I didn’t know about them. I asked if she had any, and she got defensive. I was immediately suspicious, which I regret now, and asked whether I could see them. I didn’t think she was cheating or anything, but her pushback felt weird. She started crying a little, but gave me her phone to look at, and the hidden album was a bunch of screenshots of engagement rings, wedding dresses, etc. Before I could say anything, she told me that she didn’t want me to think she was clingy and desperate, and knew it was pretty early to want to get married, but it was normal to think about it, and my pushing about it made her feel like I didn’t trust her. I actually thought it was really sweet that she was already thinking about it, and only felt worse that I made her feel like she couldn’t talk about it with me.

Obviously, this is my own fault for putting off getting serious with her and being so avoidant about it at the time. But when I told her I thought the album was nice, she told me that she was embarrassed and to stop trying to make her feel better. I feel bad that I’ve made her feel like I would think it was weird that she wanted to get married, and also for pushing her into showing me the album in the first place. I want to make it up to her, but I’m also not ready to get married, which makes me feel even worse. I don’t know what to say to explain that both of those things (that I want to spend my life with her and love her, but also that I’m not ready yet) are true at the same time.

—I Wish I Were Ready

Dear I Wish I Were Ready,

Just give the woman a timeline. Please! Rescue her from this anxiety. Give her friends a reprieve from analyzing your emotions in the group chat and over brunch. She needs to hear loud and clear that you’re sure about her and want to spend your life with her. Then she needs to know what exactly is standing in the way of your feeling ready to get engaged.

If it’s that before marriage, you want to get a master’s degree, start a podcast, climb Mount Everest, turn 36, have five years of therapy, or something else, tell her that. You should also prepare a brief explanation of why you’re ready to cohabitate and plan a life together, but not to make it official in the eyes of the state or before your friends and family. This will bring her a lot of comfort. There’s also a chance that she’ll think your timeline is ridiculous or that she can’t wait that long. The important thing is to give her the facts and make it clear that this is not a story about her loving you more than you love her. Because that’s what she thinks, and it’s eating away at her.

Before you have this conversation with your girlfriend, have an honest one with yourself about whether you can identify what would make you feel ready. Is there any chance that your lack of readiness is really a lack of desire for marriage in general or with her specifically? If you really have no idea what it would take to make you want to walk down the aisle, and are just waiting to be hit with the feeling (which may never come), be honest about that. Because every year that the two of you are a couple but don’t see eye to eye about your future, the secret wedding albums will become less sweet and more stressful.

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I’m a 27-year-old woman, and I am tentatively planning a vacation; my mother (who is 64) asked if she could come, and I agreed. She is retired, and I work full-time. I made it clear that I would want to go in January or February.

She later asked me if I would change my dates and destination. I decided it was clearly not going to work out, and that I would go by myself. I didn’t think it was a big deal; no actual planning had occurred. However, my mother is now saying I hurt her feelings. She says I got her hopes up, and I am being unreasonably inflexible. I’m finding the situation a bit bewildering because 1) no concrete plans had been made, 2) she invited herself, and 3) I need to plan carefully to account for vacation days, while, as a retiree, she can go whenever. Am I really being the unreasonable one here?

Your mom’s request to reschedule was annoying, but you handled it incorrectly. The reasonable response would have been, “I actually can’t change the dates. I hope you can still make it.” And if she said no, that would have been on her.

I suspect there’s some history here that made her initial request to travel with you feel like she was imposing in an unpleasantly familiar way. You probably said yes while the resentment built inside you because that’s the way the two of you have always operated. Your decision to go on the trip by yourself when she merely asked about a change in plans was your attempt to stand up for yourself and not bend to her will. I like the spirit of what you did, but it came at the wrong moment, and I get why it upset her. The time to assert yourself and risk making her mad was when she first invited herself. You could have said, “Sorry, it won’t work this time because I really want to do this trip on my own.” She might have still been upset, but you would have known you were clear and fair from the beginning.

Apologize to your mom for the back and forth about this vacation. But if I’m right about the fact that you have issues with her that run deeper than this particular conflict—that you often feel bullied, smothered, or deprioritized by her—think about addressing that. It would be great for the two of you to have some honest conversations about the kind of relationship you want, how you treat each other, and how the way you were treated as a child shapes the way you react to her now. Or at least you could (probably with help from a therapist) try to become more aware of what her relatively innocuous statements and behaviors get under your skin and create some distance between your knee-jerk emotional response and how you react. This won’t be a quick fix, but it would be good to work on in the coming months and years when things are relatively calm between the two of you and there is not a lot of money and vacation time on the line.

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My husband and I have temporary custody of his sister’s 11-year-old daughter over a serious family conflict (parents are personally abusive and unstable toward each other, and my niece is left behind). To be blunt, it is a shit show.

We have a three-bedroom house, and we have my 15-year-old daughter (my ex and I share 50/50 custody) and a 7-year-old son together. We got a college loft bed so my daughter can have her own private space, and we put a twin in for our niece. My niece refuses to sleep alone—at all. She acts like a toddler, making excuses so she doesn’t have to go to bed by herself. My daughter suffers from insomnia and can’t fall asleep easily. Her cousin can’t stay in her own bed and will try to crawl in with my daughter, which wakes her up.

We are all waking up in the middle of the night over this. The girls are fighting at 2 a.m. My husband works the late shift, and I work an early one. We are going into work as zombies, and both have gotten warnings over our lack of focus. My daughter has been caught falling asleep in class, and I have had to watch her break down in tears over failing a test because her cousin woke her up. We tried putting a camping bed in our room so our niece could sleep with us. She ignores it and tries to crawl in with us. We both woke up. We can’t afford to wake up like this every night. It is torture. We tried bedtime rituals, cuddles before bed, and even letting the dog sleep with my niece. Nothing works.

My ex has basically said that he will be looking to seek full custody of our daughter over this. It is basically killing her that she can’t get a full night’s rest with me. I want to scream. I know my niece has it hard, and it isn’t her fault, but I am ready to shove her bed in with my son because he could sleep through a bomb. I need help. We all need to sleep. And yes, my niece is in therapy, which hasn’t changed anything. My husband is basically bailing out the family ship with a holey bucket. There is nothing left here. Help!

Nothing in this family is going to work if you and your husband are sleep deprived, so you might have to do something unconventional to deal with the situation. Pull out the living room couch or get two air mattresses and sleep there with your niece. (I would say your husband should do it because this is his side of the family, but obviously, the gender dynamics would make that weird.) If this arrangement seems appealing and makes the other kids jealous, everyone can have a sleepover. You could even let them doze off while watching a movie or something. I know this is not considered ideal and is not something you’d want to do forever, and obviously, you would rather sleep in your bed with your spouse. But you have to think of this as an emergency—both in the life of this obviously troubled and scared 11-year-old, and in your household.

After a couple of weeks, everyone should feel more rested, and I’m also hopeful that your niece will begin to feel a sense of security that will make sleeping alone feel less frightening. Then maybe you can start to deploy some of the tricks recommended to parents of toddlers, like letting her know that you’re getting up to do something but will come right back, and slowly stretching the amount of time you’re away from the room. I know this feels impossible right now. But just remind yourself that in several years, you’ll all look back and remember that the meaningful thing about this time in your lives was that you provided a safe, warm, loving home for a child who’d never had one. The details of how bedtime worked won’t matter.

My girlfriend “Katie” (33F) and I (30M) have been dating for three months, and so far it had been going very well. I even thought we could become very serious. However, something has changed, and I’m worried that she’s getting cold feet. This all started a few days ago, when my parents dropped by my place to chat. Katie was in the kitchen, making the two of us dinner. My parents and Katie have met a couple of times before, and they seem to get along. Additionally, Katie’s normally very calm and easygoing…