Hi Polly,

I have been married to my husband for two and a half years. He is a good guy, always doing favors for his family, trusts people implicitly, works hard at his job, loves me and our young kids (2 years and 3 months). Most of the time I enjoy his company, mainly because he has a good sense of humor and is very laid-back. Also, he’s one of the few people who can take my shit and not mind.

But (you knew this was coming), we are so different when it comes to a lot of important things. I have goals — I want to go to school to become an anthropologist. I want to start working out. I want to start saving money so we can move out of my parents’ extra room and get our own place again.

However, he seems to share none of these goals. I mean, he says he does, but I have a strong feeling that he only says that because I nag him so much. This belief is supported by the fact that he only makes steps (and tiny ones, at that) after I’ve bugged him about it for days. And after making a tiny bit of progress, he slumps back onto the couch, and I have to bitch at him for days again until he does something else.

Oh, and did I mention he doesn’t have his license or G.E.D., and he’s 30? WTF, right? Yes, I knew this going into the marriage, but I honestly thought he’d make an effort to attain them. He hasn’t. Not on his own, anyway. He works at a fast food restaurant and has the whole time I’ve known him. He seems so content with his level of mediocrity, and I’m so not. This is a huge factor in what I consider incompatibility.

In addition, we differ in many aspects of our personality. As I said before, I am trying to be healthier; he’s completely okay with being overweight. I don’t want to sound arrogant but I am much more intelligent than he is and it makes having a decent conversation difficult. I find his scatterbrained approach to everything very frustrating, causing me to lash out at him often, which in turn often leads to arguments.

He is also extremely irresponsible with money. I have created countless plans for our money, which always get tossed aside the second he has a craving for a cheeseburger. I try to remind him of the plan we made but if he doesn’t get his way he gets all sulky, and I hate when he acts childish so to avoid that I usually just give in. As a result we are constantly broke.

And, as I mentioned before, he is an alcoholic.

Granted, he’s been sober for about a month now, but he’s gone longer than that before without a drink and then gone and fucked it all up. He’s let me down and lied about drinking so many times that my trust (which I had issues with to begin with) is completely gone. He agrees that he’s an alcoholic, but I can’t be sure whether he means it or he just agrees with me to shut me up. He went to twelve-step meetings for a few weeks in the beginning of this year at my insistence, but after about five meetings he began coming up with excuses — he felt sick, he was worn out from work, etc., and eventually he stopped going. He said he felt he didn’t need them anymore. But about two months ago he drank again. He hasn’t since, but after so many relapses (and there have been many — forty, at least, since I’ve been with him) I find it impossible to believe him. Of course I hope he’s done for good, but I can’t bring myself to get invested in that hope.

So there’s all of that, plus the fact that I very frequently find myself daydreaming about being on my own. Not with other guys, really, just on my own with my kids and my own life, free of this dumb, idle alcoholic I call my husband.

But as I said, we have two young kids. I’d hate to rip their lives apart. Our finances are entangled, so that would be a bitch to figure out. I don’t want to disappoint my parents (who paid for our expensive wedding when I was 19) by getting a divorce this young. Also, at the moment I’m a stay-at-home mom, so if I left him I’d have no immediate source of income.

That’s a lot on the line, so that’s why I’m coming to you for advice. I am only 22 and I don’t want to be stuck in this idle place for my whole life, and it really seems that he can’t (or won’t) change (not for lack of trying on my part!). But at the same time, he’s a good guy at heart, who (when I’m not frustrated with his level of intelligence or bitching at him to get his damn license already) I enjoy spending my free time with and loves me and our kids.

What the fuck do I do?

Sincerely,

Stuck Between a Husband and a Life

Dear SBAHAAL,

First you need to tell your husband that you’ll kick him out if he drinks again. You will not spend the rest of your life with an alcoholic, because that is the path to misery, and you won’t do that to yourself. But you must be prepared to back up your words. Every time you give in, you seal your own fate.

Then you need to go to Al-Anon, look into affordable day care, find a job so you can help support your family and save some money, find a used double-jogging stroller online and push those kids around the neighborhood for an hour a day, insist on cooking healthy meals and lead by example on that front, look into a local marriage and family therapist or social worker that offers very cheap sessions for you and your husband, and write down your accomplishments in a journal every night.

In other words, first you need to make it very clear that you won’t be with a drunk. Then you need to get off your ass and change your life, and you need to stop blaming him for everything that you yourself refuse to do. I’m sure there are lots of reasons why you landed here, as a nagging, helpless woman who doesn’t take charge of her own life. Your parents paid for an expensive wedding when you were 19, so it’s not hard to see how you landed here. I understand that it feels like it’s been a long, lonely road. But you’re the only person who’s going to change this picture dramatically. It’s up to you. Right now you’re just sitting in one place — in your parents’ house, no less! — and complaining about what your husband isn’t doing right. You’re making things worse for him, not better, by giving in about money, giving in about drinking and taking him back, giving in about everything, and then screaming at him about all of it. That’s exactly the kind of behavior you’d expect from the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic. If you’d gotten off your ass and gone to a single Al-Anon meeting, you’d already know that.

I know you’re in a tough spot. But you can’t expect him to change a thing if you’re sitting back and doing nothing yourself, whining about money but not making any, and waiting for him to get his act together yet never quite insisting on it. Yes, I know you have your hands full with the kids. It’s impossibly difficult, having a toddler and a baby. Under your current situation, though, you have to suck it up, find some daycare, and get a job. It’ll make you feel better, and the time that you spend with your kids and your husband will improve dramatically. Right now you’re idle and depressed and powerless, and you have to change that in order to be happier.

Instead of yelling at your husband and blaming him for everything that’s wrong with your life, write down the things you expect from yourself and from him over the next year. Tell him you both need to stop acting like pathetic babies. Tell him you can’t see the relationship working if you both don’t grow up. For you, that means taking on some of the financial burden of the family you created, pursuing your dreams either by going back to school part-time or by trying to find work in a field that excites you, living healthily, working out, and trying to be a better friend and partner to your husband, particularly when he’s sober. For him, that means staying sober, learning to drive, and trying to advance himself for the greater good of the family.

You can’t accurately judge your relationship until you’re going after your own dreams without making excuses for yourself. Right now, deep down inside, you hate yourself. You can’t figure out if your husband is bad or good if you truly believe that you are bad. You aren’t seeing anything clearly. Good, loyal, kind, lovable guys are not a dime a dozen, and having a great friendship with your husband, despite all your issues, is also pretty rare. If you get your shit together, you might just inspire your husband to turn his own life around. Or, you might see more clearly that he will never, ever change one iota. Either way, though, you have to get your shit together. You have to become a superhero, and cover all your bases. You have to reward your husband for saving money instead of nagging him for not saving. You have to be kind to him during this important sober first year, you have to believe in him, but you also have to make it crystal clear that you won’t stay with a drunk, no matter what. Explain that this isn’t about words; there won’t be any discussion. He will be out, that’s all. Again: Therapy, Al-Anon, exercise, day care, job, school, dreams. You need to go from doing nothing to doing everything if you’re going to crawl out of this hole.

It’s a lot. But you know what? That’s the way life is when you’re an adult. You juggle, you grit your teeth, you work your ass off, and you take a minute, every now and then, to look at how far you’ve come. Don’t you want to feel proud of yourself, for once in your life? Nothing is better for your kids, your husband, and you, than you feeling proud of yourself for once. That alone could change everything.

Polly

Hi Polly,

I have been dating a man for a little over 6 months and things have been wonderful from day one. We have a ton in common, love being around each other and have great chemistry. He has a tremendous moral core, is the funniest person I know and loves me (and shows it) more than anyone I have ever been with. I love him tremendously and the possibility that this could move toward marriage is strong, although its still too early to say. (BTW, I’m in my mid-20s and he’s in his early 30s.)

And now the problem. He was sexually abused as child from the age of 4 up until around 8. He has problems having sex on a semi-regular but occasional basis due to pretty severe flashbacks and almost never sleeps well because of nightmares. When they’re really bad he can be in a pretty dark mood for a couple days, I believe suffering from bouts of depression, inadequacy and shame. He also has a very hard time talking about what he experienced (or is experiencing when having a flashback) but has made huge efforts to do so when I ask and despite clearly wanting to shut down. However I have never asked specifics about the abuse. Not only because it would be terrible for him to talk about but also because the details seem irrelevant.

All that being said, he is one of the highest functioning people I know. He takes good care of himself, great care of the people he loves, plans for the future, has a good career and is a very social and well-rounded person, with a strong support system of friends and family (who have no idea what he went through). He has no violent or abusive traits and, from what he has told me, conquered the worst of the depression (bordering on feelings of suicide) that he felt in his teens.

When we first met he said he would go into therapy because he did not want his issues to prevent us from being together, aka prevent us from having sex. However, after a 4–6 weeks of taking things slow and building up trust we got over the hump. I suggested different methods of therapy after doing some of my own research and found therapists in the area that might be a good fit. At a certain point I expressed to him that for us to get very serious (move in together or get married) he would need to go to therapy and begin addressing the abuse and then left it at that. I don’t expect this to be something he will leap into immediately but he has also told me that he doesn’t think therapy would help. I think my request made him feel like he’s being punished given how far he has come all on his own, by pushing through all the shitty and horrible feelings.

My question is this: Is asking him to go to therapy when he functions so well in the world an exaggeration or asking too much? Is this a reasonable request if there don’t seem to be any outstanding issues that effect the core of the relationship outside of very occasional bad moods or inability to have sex? Or am I simply expressing a reasonable degree of concern over an issue that could take on more negative proportions as he gets older, loses some of the strong emotions of early love, has children, etc.? I am perfectly happy to let things unfold as they will for the time being but I do want to know what reasonable expectations are under these circumstances (with a timeline if you’re into that kind of thing).

All this being said, I also have my own problems of expecting the worst and am semi-obsessed with trying to avoid making bad choices, especially when it comes to men. Maybe I’m trying to control the uncontrollable, like another human being’s future behavior, or trying avoid the unavoidable: the inevitable downsides and pitfalls of any relationship.

Lots of Love and Some Concern

Dear LOLASC,

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for you to ask him to go to therapy. He said he’d go when he first met you, and you’re haunted by what the ramifications of this abuse could be, even if he isn’t. You can’t really commit to someone who’s committed to not knowing himself, that’s all. It’s absolutely understandable that he’d be afraid — deathly afraid — of relaying his abuse to anyone. But you love him, and you need to trust him as much as he needs to trust you. There’s a giant, frightening thing in his past that he can only hope doesn’t come up later, either in emotional problems or health problems. You don’t want to have a pretty okay sex life, you want to have a great sex life. You don’t want him to sleep well occasionally, you want him to sleep well consistently.

It’s not wrong to want those things. You should talk to him about it, and lay out all of your reasons for wanting this to happen. You two are really great together, and he’s done an amazing job without therapy up until now. You want to aim even higher. I don’t think that’s controlling. I think that’s you daring to be happy.

Maybe this will take time, and he’ll resist. Maybe you’ll need to talk to a few experts on abuse and get their input on how to proceed. Obviously, you should be kind and patient about the whole thing, and you should hear him out and be respectful of how scary this prospect is to him. It might feel like asking him to face down death. So you have to be cautious.

Still, this is a reasonable request. Maybe he’ll resist for a while, but you have to make your desires very clear. Paint a clear picture of what you think you’ll both gain, and offer to go into couples’ therapy with him as well. It’s not wrong to make your position clear, and to push for something that most victims of abuse credit with their ability to live normal, happy lives.

Polly

Do you have a problem with eating too many caramels in a row? Are you still feeling haunted by the Red Wedding? Then for fuck’s sake, write to Polly right now!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.Drunk bunny photo by Stuart Conner; scary nightmare photo by Meighan O’Toole.

“George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Sales Skyrocket in Wake of NSA Spying Scandal”

“In the west shall be born a twin-headed beast while a dual-pastry fusion ascends in the east” is what Nostradamus might have written about all the stupid stuff going on in the news right now if he really had the ability to see into the future. Anyway, the signs are all there: a kitty with a pair of faces, a monstrous amalgam of donut and crossiant… we are opening all the seals, people. This will not end well.

If you would like to spend a couple of hours in the company of Joni Mitchell you should go here. It’s not a terrible way to pass the time, although she will make you want to smoke, so consider that if you’re somewhere such a thing would be difficult to do.

Come Visit South Australia, Where We Will Chop You Up And Turn You Into Sausage For Our Demonic Feast

“Just thought you might enjoy this singularly creepy tourism ad for the Barossa Valley in South Australia,” writes a correspondent from Down Under. “The Barossa is a famous wine-growing and foodie area, so I can understand why someone thought ‘Be consumed’ was a killer line. Unfortunately when it’s paired with Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ and South Australia’s reputation as the serial killer state… well. ‘You know you’re never coming back’, indeed.” I kind of like this, but I am also of the opinion that pretty much anywhere you go in Australia you have even odds of ending up as the filling for a meat pie, so I guess I am responding to the perceived veracity. Local reaction is somewhat more equivocal.

by Awl Sponsors

This summer, join us for a literary road trip across the USA. We’ve chosen the best mysteries, thrillers, and crime stories from every state in the union. Each novel encapsulates the unique flora and fauna of the state, and weaves a tale of villainy and intrigue you won’t want to miss.

Handpicked by the mystery team, these tales of murder, revenge, and destructive ambition will take you on a wild ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific: from Carl Hiaasen’s sleazy South Florida heists, to James Ellroy’s dark and greedy streets of Los Angeles, you’ll never look at America in quite the same way.

To start exploring, or to find an ebook that takes place in your home state, check out our “map of mystery” infographic below, then learn more about your next mysterious destination.

And here’s the best part: from June 11-June 18, the 64 ebooks below are on sale up to 75% off. In this case, it’s all about the destination, not the journey, so choose wisely….

I went with “Respect my trendsetting” but I’m also considering “I believe luxury is to be able to go into a store and be able to afford something.” Really you can’t go wrong. #LAMPS

“Among young adult college students, we found that those who scored higher in certain types of narcissism posted more often on Twitter. But among middle-aged adults from the general population, narcissists posted more frequent status updates on Facebook.”

Today: Big Daddy Kane at the Highline Ballroom! And that highwire tightrope-walking French dude does a lunchtime chat at the Bryant Park Reading Room. Tig Notaro is on WNYC Soundcheck, Devendra Banhart is at Town Hall, J. Courtney Sullivan’s book party is at Greenlight Books, and Future Bible Heroes plays the Chickfactor 21 party at The Bell House.

by Benjamin Hart

Remember that time Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? #NotTheOnion

 — @jonhenke

“This Is Not The Onion” is a seemingly innocuous phrase that strikes such loathing into my heart that after I read it I want to punch a wall until I feel okay again. Even if you stop reading after this paragraph, please internalize at least this much: Stop. Comparing. Everything. To the fucking Onion.

As long as you’re a sentient being and you’ve been on the Internet in the last year, you probably don’t need to be clued in to what I’m over-complaining about. But just in case, here are a few recent-vintage examples of the odious phenomenon in question:

In Politico’s Playbook, Mike Allen prefaced a story about the lack of warning signs surrounding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev this way: “Not the Onion: College Friends Saw No Hint Of Trouble.” (Hilarious stuff, Mike!) There’s an entire Subreddit devoted to stories that are “not the Onion.” (Sample headlines: “GOP Congressman Uses Bible to Justify Punishing the Poor”; “Amanda Bynes in negotiations for a rap deal.”) Even the New York Times dropped it in an article about Cathie Black recently; Jim Dwyer wrote that unearthed correspondence between mayoral aides trying to salvage the tenure of Bloomberg’s erstwhile superintendent “read as it might have been lifted from The Onion, the satirical newspaper.”

Where “not the Onion” truly thrives, though, is on Twitter, where hackneyed phrases go to die a slow, repetitive death.

First of all, let’s get this key fact out of the way: none of the stories in question ever sound anything at all like The Onion, which, after all these years, remains unimpeachably hilarious — often imitated, never very well.

But “not the Onion” isn’t just about not being The Onion. It’s indicative of a larger problem we face as a society, which falls, in its level of seriousness, somewhere between “there are too many good TV shows now” and “irreversible climate change.” That problem is a dulling sameness of phraseology, a glib shorthand that has bloomed everywhere, but especially online, and especially on social media. If you hang around Twitter long enough, you’ll become alternately inured to and irritated by the grinding repetitiveness of a few stock phrases, which come at you like a Greek chorus of unoriginality. While much has been made of Twitter groupthink — the tendency to inflate the importance of your chosen hive-mind’s opinion at the expense of what the Real World actually thinks — just as pernicious is Twitter groupspeak: everyone tweeting the same goddamn horrible stupid empty phrases over and over again.

Two distinct types of cliche are currently poisoning our Twitter discourse. The first is all about exaggeration: blowing up the significance of the item you’re sharing with the world to unreasonable proportions. “Not the Onion” fits snugly into this box: “Check out this wacky story!” you’re telling your follower. “It’s so crazy!!” (Spoiler alert: It’s not so crazy. Christ, I just dropped “spoiler alert.” That might actually be worse than “not the Onion.”)

If you see something mildly surprising and want to let everyone else know that you’re surprised, the Twitter-groupspeak way to react is “Wow,” “Whoa,” or its gratingly misspelled offspring, “Woah.” (All of these usages popped up, like clockwork, as I was checking Twitter to avoid writing this article. A new variant is the simple “Oh,” preceding an objectionable retweet.)

Whoa. This smart helmet monitors cyclists’ vitals slate.me/10FB6nj

— Slate (@Slate) May 29, 2013

Whoa RT @rosiegray: via @dylanbyers, apparently Larry King is joining RT. politico.com/blogs/media/20…

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) May 29, 2013

Woah, @michkeegan ‘had strong words with @brookelvincent’ on her birthday night out!? ok.co.uk/celebrity-news…

— OK! Magazine (@OK_Magazine) June 11, 2013

Spot a story that’s of interest to you and probably a few of your followers? Why not label it the dreaded “must-read”?

MUST-READ: “I was a liberal mole at Fox News” — @joemuto reveals inside dirt on O’Reilly, Hannity & Ailes slnm.us/pXTLzFT

— Salon.com (@Salon) May 29, 2013

Must-read lunch links: You’ve been playing Monopoly all wrong | ti.me/142SZgP (via @timenewsfeed)

— TIME.com (@TIME) May 28, 2013

Gun Makers Saw No Role in Curbing Improper Sales. Another must-read on guns from McIntire and @michaelluonyti.ms/13VK8Rp

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) May 28, 2013

Look, there are wonderful things published on the Internet every day. But must-read? Is anything really a must-read other than, say, a stop sign? Maybe “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold”? No, probably not even that.

Perhaps most egregiously — if you want to label someone an irritant, just call them a “troll.” As Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has astutely observed, that word’s definition has slowly devolved from “an online troublemaker whose specific intent is to create havoc” to “someone on the Internet who disagrees with me,” or “someone who is merely seeking attention.” On Twitter, the word pops up roughly once every three seconds. It has spawned a new mini-catchphrase, “Now he/she’s just trolling us,” which means “Before, this person was being obnoxious, but now, they have stooped to the level of actual malignancy.” Like trolling itself, the phrase doesn’t actually mean much of anything.

he’s just trolling us now, right? is this burnt sienna? twitpic.com/cthjo5

— Bomani Jones (@bomani_jones) May 27, 2013

What is the purpose of all this amplification? For news organizations — and many of these examples come to you by way of their social media editors — it makes some sense; play up your headline, get some social media love. For individuals, it’s a little more complex. Certainly we’ve all become accustomed to overzealous call-to-action headlines everywhere (“This Skateboarding Fail WILL Make You Cry With Laughter”). Following that lead, we’re also willing to promise to entertain our followers and solidify our own important in the social media pecking order. These tics are often a way of imparting urgency to followers: to get the message across that your Twitter feed is important, essential, worth paying attention to — and, by the by, so are you.

Or maybe, Twitter is just full of really, truly enthusiastic people. (That would explain why roughly 77% of users label themselves as an “enthusiast” of something or other in their profiles.)

Most other Twitter clichés fit into another, less noticeable but equally irritating category: the hoary, unfunny catchphrase. These are played-out expressions seemingly meant to telegraph to the reader that the writer is a humorous person who understands jokes. (Though they’re most certainly not jokes themselves.) Like “not The Onion,” they aren’t specific to Twitter. They thrive there though, acting act as a sort of original-thought substitute, a way of saying something without actually saying something.

Take the phrase “I see what you did there.” It’s a standard way of acknowledging someone else’s cleverness that’s been around forever. It’s long been big on Twitter.

Or “stay classy,” which, nine years after it appeared in Anchorman, seems to show no signs of letting up as the default thing to say when a person or entity has disgusted you. (Anchorman 2 returns this holiday season, so, prepare.)

Or “well-played, sir” (a personal least-favorite of mine), which is usually a too-cute way of saying “you did something clever.”

Or that thing where people start tweets with “that thing where.” Or “shots fired.” Or “I can’t even with this” or “Too soon.” Or “serious question” to preface an obviously serious question. “Or apparently __ is a thing.” Or “pro tip.” Or “this is why we can’t have nice things.” Or “derp,” which recently ran into a much-deserved backlash. Or…well, I could go on for a while here.

(Oh: the latest craze, for some reason, is to begin your tweet with “in which,” as if you were a character in a 19th-century novel and this was one of your whimsical chapter headings. In Which this trend needs to stop now.)

In which, we learn “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” is an easy password to crack.arstechnica.com/security/2013/…

— NYT Bits Blog (@nytimesbits) May 28, 2013

In which Courtney Love offers advice to Amanda Bynes: bit.ly/1aw56Xd

— Jezebel (@Jezebel) May 28, 2013

In Which We Learn That The CIA Was Instrumental In Breaking The Swiss Bank Secrecy Code zerohedge.com/news/2013–06–0…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 9, 2013

What the phrases all have in common is their flatness. They feign cleverness, but, as with their real-world cousins — like the sarcastic “Really??” — they have become so trite as to be rendered filler. Each is the eighth song on a Chumbawamba album.

It’s kind of like modern TV commercials. Since “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the British version of “The Office” made awkward-silence comedy broadly popular, roughly 60% of ads feature three beats of silence that go where the joke used to be. If I were going to pitch a commercial now, it’d be a guy walking into a room, and he’s holding a bag of Fritos or whatever, and then a guy in a Batman costume crashes through the ceiling and they stare at each other for ten seconds like “Whaaaat just happened??” THAT’S NOT A PUNCHLINE. But I think the ad people would go for it, because it has all the outward appearances of “comedy.”

And I think “comedy” is what this is all about. As Salon’s Alex Pareene wrote last November, Twitter has become a sort of Improv for the masses, where everyone has to prove their joke bona fides, even if there’s nothing particularly funny to say. A choice stock phrase allows you to do that without really exposing yourself, but it’s certainly not vital or interesting. While conversational puffery has no doubt been a scourge since the dawn of language, Twitter’s endless stream of opinions makes it particularly hard to take.

In the end, all these tics, no matter how silly, come at a cost. They amplify Twitter’s verbal echo chamber, and they also make everything feel, for lack of a better word, lamer. Far be it from me to subscribe to the “Twitter is ruining everything” crowd. And I don’t sign on with the “Twitter has been ruined” folks. Those pieces are tiresome and wrong. Twitter remains great in fundamental ways. But squelching the clamor to turn everything into a quasi-joke will help preserve the things that are fun about it ,and striking rotten groupthink habits from your writing — yes, even your tweet-writing — will serve you and — more importantly, me — best. Just try to remember the fundamentals: it’s probably not a must-read, it doesn’t sound like The Onion, and it’s not trolling. Woah.

Benjamin Hart is a front-page editor at The Huffington Post. Despite everything, he’d like it if you followed him on Twitter.