Ask Erin

I’m afraid I’m going to lose my wife to AA. My wife and I are both in our mid 30s and we’ve been married for six years, together for nine. When we met, we both drank socially, or I thought we did. I started noticing after we got married that her drinking increased.

This is not a complicated situation, but a person like your boyfriend wants it to feel complicated so that you feel confused enough to stay.

My best friend is married and her and her husband are moving into a new house. Now here’s the thing: My best friend wants me to move in with them, and so does her husband, to help with expenses and because they know I want to get out of my living situation.

My boyfriend is ignoring me. I am 32 and he is 34. We have been together for six months. We are both pretty busy with work etc, but I always make him a priority. I always feel like I am giving more than he does and it’s come to a crisis point.

Last week, my husband received a Facebook message from a good mutual friend of ours. We are also good friends with her husband. It was basically one long love poem!

On Sunday, my husband was in the shower. He left his phone on our bed, which he never does. It lit up with a text from “S.” That’s the name that popped up, “S.” Something about it bothered me. Before I had time to think about it, I was typing in his password, which he has never changed, and read the text which was explicit and made it clear that this person, S, had not only seen my husband’s penis, but had done things with it.

I have been dating my new boyfriend (it is so weird to write that!) for a little over a month. We just, as in this week, made it “exclusive.” I have been in long-term relationships in the past and the holidays were a no-brainer. And when it’s casual, that’s easy to figure out too. But this is foreign territory for me. Do I get him a gift?

I need help dealing with isolation as a single parent. This is my first Christmas, since splitting from my ex-husband. He left when my son was 7 months old, almost a year ago, for another woman.