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The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heartsick.
Sugar is here, the both of us, speaking straight into your ears.
I'm Cheryl Strayed.
I'm Steve Almond.
This is Dear Sugar Radio.
Share some little sweet days with me.
I check my mailbox every day.
Sugar You sinned my way Hi, Steve.
Hi, Cheryl.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Actually truthfully, I have been worrying something and I've been trying to figure out which way I should go with this.
And in fact, Erin and I have been worrying together.
This sounds so silly, but...
We're having some boundary issues around our property and our home because we're like loosey-goosey and all the kids from the neighborhood come and play in our messy backyard that we do not take care of at all.
And it's gotten to the point where our kids are running inside with some complaint or another and we're realizing hey, people just walk into our yard all the time.
And the thing we noticed in our own weird, like self-involved ways everybody else on the street, every other person has a fence.
And bearing in mind, you know, good fences make good neighbors.
Like we suddenly realize, oh, we need a fence.
We need a physical barrier.
But then inside of me, I had the feeling that was, wait a second, that's against my ethos of –
You know, I don't want to put up fences.
I'm all about taking fences down.
And if there are boundaries, they should be emotional, psychological, not physical.
So I'm trying to figure out whether, with Aaron, whether we should build a fence, whether we should actually put that barrier up.
Yes, you should.
Just like that.
Absolutely.
I have no doubt.
And here's why.
That fence.
Obviously you invite people into that fence, into the other side of that fence sometimes.
And so what it is it's really if you have that emotional and psychological boundary.
The physical fence is just proof of that.
You're saying this is my home and you are welcome to it, but you need an invitation.
You need permission.
So what Cheryl just did, despite my guilt, is made the call.
You just made the call.
And it's true.
And I can now go home to Erin and say, OK, honey, we're going to build a fence.
Why?
Because Cheryl says we should do that.
She made the call.
She said look, if you're going to have these, you want to set up these boundaries, then why not have a physical representation of it?
Get over your liberal guilt about it.
Indeed.
And that is what we are doing today on Dear Sugar Radio.
We so often are talking about the complexity of issues and we don't give a definitive answer about what our listeners should do when they send us letters.
But today we're going to give answers.
We're going to say, yeah, we think you should do that or this or the other thing.
And we're going to do it rapid fire fashion.
We're going to read a whole bunch of letters with a whole bunch of problems.
I'll read the first letter.
Dear Sugars, I'm a 23 year old woman dating a 26 year old man.
We started dating about a year ago despite us being two very different people.
You see, I come from a much more liberal background and a mother who taught me the importance of being strong and independent.
My boyfriend comes from a conservative small town and was raised by a much stricter, Bible-reading household.
For the most part, these differences help us grow.
We both love the outdoors, and we've gone on many adventures in our year of being together.
Up until about four months ago, things were perfect.
Then my boyfriend made a huge lifestyle change and basically said I had to make that change with him or I could leave.
When we first started dating, we were sexually intimate, but then he decided that he couldn't keep having sex outside of marriage because of his religious beliefs.
At first, I was angry and didn't understand.
I believe sexual intimacy is a strong and important part of a relationship.
I need to feel both emotionally and physically close to the man I'm dating.
In spite of this, I agreed to no longer have sex because I didn't want to ask him to compromise his value system.
I tried to understand where he was coming from, being a Christian myself, but far too often I'm filled with resentment.
Since we stopped having sex, there have been many screaming matches and make-ups.
For the record, not having sex has made me no closer to God.
I love everything about my boyfriend and I could honestly see myself marrying him in the future, but some days the resentment is too much and I wonder if it's worth it to stay together.
Sugars, does resentment ever really go away?
What do I do about the fact that I feel like my values are now being compromised?
Yours truly, Stuck.
Stuck.
Cheryl Strayed, you make the call.
I'm going to make this call.
Oh, man.
Stuck, I think you should break up with your boyfriend.
And I think you should have a conversation with him first about how important sex is to you and how important that kind of intimacy in a relationship is.
And give him the opportunity to rethink his position and maybe meet you in the middle.
The one compromise you could come up with is maybe define what is sex for you.
If sex is just intercourse in your mind.
There's a whole lot of other really fun sexy stuff you can do.
And you know, one question before I guess that breakup, that advice that I give you is you know, is your boyfriend willing to do that?
And if he's not, then I think that you've already answered your own question.
You said that you believe sexual intimacy is a strong and important part of a relationship.
And your boyfriend has told you he's not going to be giving you that.
To honor that, yeah.
Yeah, to honor that.
And so I do think that resentment will only grow.
And even if, let's say, you got married tomorrow so you could be having sex, I think that a really key point here is that your boyfriend essentially gave you no options.
He said you can either leave or... accept this.
And I think that you need to make a choice that feels good for you.
And my advice for you would be to end this relationship if he continues in that stance.
My feeling about it is essentially the asterisk that you had put by this, which is you have got to define whether you guys can agree on paths to intimacy and pleasure and whether intimacy and pleasure are incongruent with religious belief, because that's a problem that's going to plague you for a long time.
The pursuit of intimacy and pleasure has a bunch of religious strictures on it.
That's trouble.
Think about it.
This is a preview of a set of arguments that are going to happen over and over again in your marriage.
And the question is, can you negotiate these fundamentally different value systems?
Or are the strictures that he puts on them going to cause you to be resentful, two years from now, four years from now, 20 years from now, about how the children are raised, about what the spiritual practice in the house is going to be?
This is your opportunity to figure out whether you guys can work together together and both find happiness within a shared value system that isn't just his.
He's got to be able to bend on this.
The other thing stuck is I would be paying attention to this notion that he went through this radical change right.
That you went from having sex with each other to suddenly this value of like no sex because I'm a Christian.
Right.
Now Stuck, you said you're a Christian too, but what any Christian knows is that there are all kinds of ways of being a Christian.
And he's interpreting his religion in a really different way than you interpret your own.
And that's a big deal.
And in fact, I would say that's a bigger deal than whether you're having sex or not.
So this is evidence of a real divide between the two of you that you may or may not be able to bridge, but it's certainly not going to go away.
Good luck.
Okay, Steve, letter number two.
Dear Sugars, I'm a 23-year-old woman and recently finished college.
I'm in the middle of so many life transitions moving towns, starting a career, taking on my own bills.
I thought all of this change was the reason I've lately found myself in a weird unhappy haze.
But then, all at once, it became clear to me that the real reason I felt this way is because I'd been denying one important truth.
I'm a lesbian.
This is something that I'm really struggling with, not because I'm ashamed and not because I'm afraid of telling my parents.
What I'm struggling with is telling my best friends.
These girls have been like family to me for nearly a decade.
They're the loves of my life, my friendship soulmates, except for the fact that they're homophobic.
My question isn't if I should tell them, it's how.
I don't even know where to begin with all of this.
I'm afraid of losing them.
Love, questioning and questioning.
So we can't exactly make the call because she's asking a how question.
But it's clear to me.
You just need to be quite honest with them.
And, you know, prejudice thrives on abstraction.
Everybody can hate thus and such until somebody important in their life says, you know what?
I'm thus and such.
That's who I am.
I figured it out.
It's so interesting questioning and questioning the language you use to describe these women the loves of my life, my soulmates.
They occupy the emotional and psychological real estate that we often associate with lovers, with love relationships.
And every fear contains a wish.
I've said this before.
The idea that these friendships – you would lose these friendships –
Within that fear might be the desire to find a set of friendships that both give you the kind of affirmation you need from a friendship, but also accept who you truly are.
I agree with you entirely.
I think that the way to tell them questioning and questioning is to simply tell them.
And you could even confront, I think, directly their homophobia.
Mm-hmm.
You can say listen, I know that you have a negative view of people who are gay, but here I am and I love you and I hope that you'll continue to love me.
And I just want to reiterate and underline what you said Steve, which I think is really important for you to hear right now questioning and questioning.
A, they might continue to love you because suddenly their homophobia is confronted.
They actually love somebody who is a lesbian already.
But secondly, if they don't, it really isn't your loss.
As much as you love these people, you don't need people to love you for the facade that you present to them.
You need people to love you for who you really are.
Right, especially now.
And that love is there.
It's available.
I know this for certain.
And you'll find it.
And if you're rejected by your friends, you're going to go find people who love you more deeply and more truly.
Right.
Okay.
Question three.
Dear Sugars, in two weeks I will be officially divorced.
We met at our university he was an undergrad, I was in graduate school and got married less than a month after graduation.
While the relationship had been a happy one during college, it became clear early on that we simply weren't ready for marriage.
The most difficult aspect of my divorce has been in dealing with the hurt I caused his family.
This is especially true when it came to his grandmother.
In fact, the only time I cried during the divorce process was when I thought of how much it hurt her.
I loved her and the rest of his family with the very core of my being and for a long time I stuck out the marriage just because I didn't want to cause them any grief.
Lately I've been thinking about writing letters to both his grandmother and my former in-laws to apologize.
I don't want to try to explain myself or justify the divorce, but I do want them to know that my decision to leave was not only for my best interest, but for their son and grandson as well.
I want them to know that I love them and appreciate how they opened their family to me, and I want them to know how sorry I am for bringing heartache into their family and how I never intended our marriage would play out this way.
I haven't spoken to them since my ex-husband and I decided to divorce, but I don't want to leave my relationship with them without acknowledging how much it meant to me.
Should I write to them, sugars, or would it only hurt them further?
With love, the ex-daughter-in-law.
This one's really easy for me.
I think absolutely, ex-daughter-in-law, you should write to them.
It wouldn't hurt them further.
You're writing to them to acknowledge the true bond that you have shared and the love that you have for them and really the best wishes you have for their family, including your ex-husband.
I think that's a beautiful sentiment and you should do it.
I've been in this situation before.
It's a very painful part of divorce is that you divorce your spouse's family as well.
There was a reckoning we had about a year or two after my ex-husband and I broke up.
I called my ex-mother-in-law and we had a really loving conversation.
And I think that that's a really healing sort of thing to do.
So I strongly encourage you to do it.
Yeah.
I mean, I think part of the problem in this relationship ex-daughter-in-law as I hear it is you were as in love with his family, and maybe even more in love with them than you were with your husband.
And the allegiance that they feel is to their son who, rightly or wrongly, they see as hurt, if not wronged, by this, because clearly it sounds clear from the letter that you grew in a way away from him and called an end to the marriage.
You absolutely can write to them.
You can express these beautiful sentiments, but you can't do it with the expectation that they will initiate a dialogue.
They will come back into your life because the truth is, at a certain point in relationships you become something bad that happened to somebody they love.
And that's a tough part of divorce or breaking up.
But at least I mean it's significant Cheryl, that you were able to have that discussion with your, I guess ex-mother-in-law, but it was after a year.
And she's asking, should I do this and could it hurt them?
And the answer is yes and yes.
Yeah, I think the piece of it – you're absolutely right that she should ponder what is it that she hopes to get if she writes to them?
Right.
My read of her letter is really that she isn't looking for a response.
She's really wanting closure and to simply acknowledge that they did share this bond and that she does care for them, even though she has now moved on away from their family.
I just don't see evidence in her letter that she wants that response, and so I don't have that reservation that you have.
Well, here's what I would say this is not a solvable problem.
All of her good, warm feelings will be painful for her ex-in-laws to absorb, because it's a reminder of the loss.
Perhaps, but so is her silence and her absence.
I think that that has a larger presence than somebody speaking into that void and saying listen, this is hard and I care for you.
And it may be that years down the road it is much more important both to you and meaningful to your in-laws that that love and regret of the loss of the relationship that you had.
It wasn't stated.
So you're right, silence is probably not the best policy.
OK, the next letter.
Dear Sugars, I'm a 23-year-old medical student, and I absolutely love what I do.
There is nothing that would keep me from pursuing this dream.
I've been dating a wonderful man for about a year.
During that time, we've been incredibly happy as a couple.
He's respectful, brilliant, ambitious, kind, and hilarious.
The problem is he's now in the Navy, and I'm the world's worst Navy girlfriend.
I have a really hard time with my boyfriend's job involving death and killing when mine is about preserving life.
On top of that, because of the way the military works, our communication has become limited at best.
We hardly get to see each other, and when we do, it's entirely controlled by various rules that I don't understand and am not used to.
My heart aches constantly because I miss him so much.
And it's not like there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
This is how his career will largely be, and my own busy schedule with 12- to 18-hour workdays makes it even harder.
It will be years before I ever get to live with him again or see him every day.
Signed, Worst Navy Girlfriend.
I'm so glad that we received this letter and have a chance to answer it for the simple reason, before we get into specifics, that the civilian culture in the United States and elsewhere really lives in a world where we do not recognize the burdens that are offloaded onto military families.
Not just the risk of injury or psychological trauma, it's absence and the bureaucratic rules that you enter into when you're trying to, in this case, sort of move towards a marriage and a stable life together.
And it's never talked about.
The one thing I would step back from is the idea that your boyfriend's job involves death and killing because Yes, the military.
Ultimately, when called upon, that is what they do.
They defend the homeland and let's not.
You know there's killing and death involved with that and injury and devastation.
But it's a very small portion of the military.
You could still be bothered by the fact that that is the undertaking, that he's in the military, and then you have to reckon with that.
But more largely, you need to have a conversation with your boyfriend right now and you need to ask him whether his career is going to be meaning that for years, you are not going to be able to see him every day.
You know, there are people who know that they're going to be career military and that's what their parents were, or for whatever reason inside of him.
That's what I want to do.
I've got a 20 year plan.
I plan to be on tours as well as I can map it out.
This is the life that I'm creating.
And you can say yes or no to that.
But you have to get a clear accounting, because if you're as important to him as he is to you, there should be some room for negotiation.
Yeah, I think there are worst Navy girlfriend.
There are sort of two questions at the heart of your letter.
The first is, do I love my boyfriend?
Am I crazy about him?
And it's clear to me that the answer is yes.
But sadly, when we think about relationships and especially make decisions to really partner with another person do I love him or her?
Is not the only question.
It's the most important one, but it's not the only one.
The other question you're asking is am I willing and emotionally able to sign up for this kind of life?
And that is the journey you need to go on, both deep in your own soul and in conversation with your boyfriend.
Yeah.
Are we going to both have careers?
Is one person going to be the supporter?
Is one person going to be a struggling actor?
Is one person going to be an investment banker?
Is one person going to take A job in the military that demands this kind of life that you described, where he's off and gone for years on end?
A huge part of your life is going to be lived without him.
And worst Navy girlfriend.
I think the deepest question you're asking us is is it okay if I decide to break up with this person I love because his life is incompatible with mine?
And here I am going to make the call and I'm going to say yes.
Yes.
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Cheryl, you are making the calls.
I am trying to like equivocate and be my ectoplasmic sensitivo jellyfish over here, but you are making the call.
So let's see.
Here we go.
Dear sugars, I've become a stereotype.
I am insanely attracted to one of my professors.
He's smart, obviously, goes with the territory.
But as professors go, he's great, funny, interesting, talented, cute.
And I really want to ask him out after the semester is over.
It seems like we have so much in common.
But I wonder if pining after him until then is a silly waste of my time.
It's extremely rare for me to be as attracted to someone as I am to him and there's only a small age gap.
I'm 23, he's 27, so I feel like I'm letting myself hope for something that could happen, maybe more than I should.
It sounds so silly and so trivial, but honestly, do you think it's a bad idea?
Should I cut my losses and talk myself out of my attraction to him?
And if I were to ask him out after final grades are in, what would be an appropriate way to do it?
Sincerely, nervous, but hopeful.
Nervous but hopeful.
She's going to make the call.
Here it comes.
I'm going to make an unpopular call, I think.
Because, you know, all la la love.
I'm all in favor of love and doing what you want to do and all that groovy stuff.
And I don't think you should ask your professor out.
And here's why.
There's really a long standing sort of ethical groundwork has been laid about this dynamic of students and professors, or students and teachers dating each other.
And the way – I mean, obviously, I believe that you're attracted to him.
He may very well be attracted to you.
But I think that you need to sort of back off and think of yourself not in an individual way but as a category.
You are a student and he is a professor.
And for him to cross this ethical divide and date you, even after you specifically, are no longer his student, still puts him in dangerous waters because he's dating a student okay.
And obviously we could find all kinds of teachers and professors.
I have friends who have married each other, and how they met is one of them was the teacher and one was the student.
So I'm not saying like, you know.
It's this terribly evil thing to do, but I do think it gives me great pause and that you do need to consider the consequences of asking this guy out on a date, because they can be pretty big.
Yeah.
I'm going to go ahead and recommend that you read the story Beautiful Grade.
By Laurie Moore, which is about a professor who gets involved with one of his students.
And it's from the professor's point of view.
The age gap isn't the deal here.
Right.
And, you know, professors are especially dynamic.
Young ones are.
They're hot, man.
They know things.
They're the idealizer, sort of a faux parent.
But they're compassionate and wise.
And it's more there's a greater intellectual respect.
But that guy is not who he is. when he's teaching you all the time.
He's somebody else.
And I think you need to sort of move far enough away from the teacher-student relationship that you can start to figure out who he is.
Beyond that, I'm going to make the call that, if you want to ask this guy out, you wait another year or two until you're not worrying about what the appropriate way to ask him out is.
Yeah, I'm in agreement about that.
If you let a few years pass and still stay connected in some way some non-romantic way with this guy, then you move out of being that category.
If your relationship becomes about something other than you know, that student professor, that it becomes peers, it becomes friends.
It can evolve over time.
And then dating would be under different terms.
You know it would be a different kind of story than I crushed out on him that semester.
He was my teacher.
All right.
We made the call.
I'm so interested to hear people are going to be like, Cheryl.
I know.
She was in love.
I know.
You didn't give love a chance.
But you got to sometimes suck it up.
That's my theory.
I'm going to put that on a bumper sticker.
Yeah.
Okay, Steve, next letter.
All right.
Dear Sugars.
I remember reading at some point that you should be willing to give money you lend to friends and family as a gift if you want to maintain that friendship or relationship.
I get this.
I've lived by it for a long time.
However, I went against my better judgment and lent a friend a lot of money, multiple thousands of dollars.
She said she would pay me back quickly, but now it's been almost a year were more family friends than anything, but I did spend a lot of time with her last year and I've always considered her like a sister.
I never imagined that she would avoid the topic the way she has, but after I lent her the money, she never mentioned it again.
My heart hurts when I think about it.
If it were a few hundred dollars, I would feel okay with the gift, but this is a big amount of money.
Should I assume that if I bring it up with her and ask her to pay me, that I'm going to lose the friendship?
It feels so incredibly unfair to me that this is on me.
I love her, and I care about her, but it's quite frankly really shitty for her to not acknowledge that I loaned her money.
I'm also wondering, why me?
Why did she seek me out to ask for this large sum?
Do I have sucker written on my forehead?
How can I avoid being taken advantage of again?
I'm thinking of emailing her with the original message, in which she asked me for money and promised to pay me back quickly.
What would you do, signed burned?
This is a question about the conversion of shame into power.
Yeah.
And it's almost not about the money.
It's about the avoidance and about the onus being on you to have to bring this up.
But you have to understand that your friend, Bernd, is not trying to hurt your feelings.
She's not trying to – she's ashamed.
And because she's not in a financial circumstance to pay you back, she assumes you have power over her, which you didn't ask for, but you did in consenting to this loan precipitate without meaning to.
And this is why money is so complicated.
It's about ultimately, power and shame in ways that we can't anticipate when we make that well-meaning loan.
And you're right that it shouldn't be on you.
And you're right that you have a right to her at least broaching the subject and saying here's a payment plan or here's what I think I can do, or I know I owe you this money, but for these circumstances I can't.
But those things are too shameful for her to say.
So to make the call, I would initiate a conversation.
And I would be honest about both your wanting the money back and also feeling that the loan has somehow put you at odds.
You asked, you know, how can I avoid being taken advantage of again?
This has been your lesson.
This has been your teacher, that there is no free loan.
There's no loan that doesn't involve this transaction of power and shame, and you're right in the midst of trying to somehow extract not the money so much as the intact friendship.
Yeah, I disagree with you about the idea that there's no loan that doesn't involve the transaction of power and shame.
I can speak so directly to this experience Bernd, because I, over the course of the last decade, have had several loans from friends.
So I've been on that side of the transaction.
And now over these last few years, I have given loans to friends.
I have about three or four outstanding loans right now.
And Bernd, I'm kind of a little bit in your situation with a couple of them.
Mm-hmm.
And what I want to say is when it's gone well, we've been really open about it.
I have said I'm so ashamed that I have to ask you for this loan, and here's when I can pay you back.
And then, if it comes to pass that I can't pay back on that schedule that I proposed when I asked for the loan, we make a new schedule.
And that releases the shame because then we're talking about it.
Correct.
I can say to my friend listen, is this putting you in a pinch, if I can't pay you till another six months?
And then that friend can say yes or no.
And everything's out in the open.
And it isn't shameful.
Now, the flip side of that is it can also go sour.
And when it goes sour is when we retreat into silence.
And this is all about shame.
Bernd, I want to say to you I really believe that your friend is going to pay you back and has every intention of doing so, but because she hasn't been able to pay you back as quickly as she initially proposed, she's embarrassed.
And so she's doing this thing that we do when we're ashamed and embarrassed is we go into denial.
And we think if we don't mention it, it maybe doesn't exist.
And she's hoping that you're not sitting there thinking, why aren't you paying me back?
And meanwhile, you're thinking, why isn't she paying me back?
So the solution is to talk about it.
And, you know, I would say you ask, okay, is the friendship over if I ask her to pay me back?
And I would say absolutely not.
The opposite is true.
The friendship is over if you stay silent about this, because what's happening is you're becoming resentful.
I don't think it's a bad idea to give friends loans.
I think it's a bad idea to allow shame then to rule the kind of way that that loan is managed.
So if I were you, I would maybe just a random email fresh, nothing below it, just say hey, just checking in about that money.
If you don't need it in a rush, you can even say that.
And you could even say, look, we could work out a really long-term payment plan, $25 a month.
Most people can do something like that.
And it adds up over time.
And more importantly, it makes you feel...
You know the loan you gave her is being valued and respected in the terms that you hoped for when you gave her the money.
So, you know, this isn't – it feels bad now.
And trust me, all it will take – is that email.
All it will take is that exchange.
And your friend will be happy for it too.
That's right.
I wish you luck.
That's our hope.
All right, here we go.
Next letter.
Dear Sugars, I'm nearing my mid-40s and I'm hitting my milestones.
Pretty much on mark bifocals, slower physical recovery, nocturnal bathroom visits and now gray hair.
Did I write this letter, Cheryl?
No, I did not write this letter.
This is not me.
I'm accepting most of this primarily because I have no choice.
There is one of these items that's a choice, though.
What to do about the gray hair?
I'm not a particularly vain person and the slippery slope of coloring doesn't appeal to me because of the cost, hassle and upkeep.
I don't like the telltale gray at the scalp and I think it's weird when people stop coloring suddenly and look completely gray.
The gradual, natural transition to gray seems much more appealing.
That said, I don't want to accelerate from young for my age or my age to getting asked for the senior discount.
My question is could you help me sort through the personal and societal aspects of gray hair and give some advice on how to be at peace with whatever route I go?
I know this isn't the heart-rending conundrum that you usually address, but it's my personal conundrum.
If I were gray in my 20s, the choice to color would be easy.
I'd do it.
But at what point do you accept the gray as something you've earned rather than something to hide?
Sincerely, counting down. from Brown.
And there is a P.S., Cheryl.
PS for what it's worth.
My husband says he's neutral on the subject, though maybe he's just saying that to walk the even line.
Make the call, Cheryl.
I make the call.
As she tassels her beautiful blonde hair.
That's right.
My blonde hair that is also full of all kinds of gray.
I don't know if you know that.
It's just because it's blonde, the gray actually just blends in.
Yeah, I'm looking and see, okay.
My hair's in a bun right now so you can't see, but when we get back to my house tonight I'm going to show you my hair.
The full gray, wow.
The full gray.
But I will say it's easier for me because of the blonde, and I get blonde highlights.
Hello.
Hello, highlights.
Paula Jones at Villa Villa Coola in Portland, Oregon.
Oh, my God.
She's going to be inundated.
She blondes my hair up.
Okay.
I know you meant jokingly but That I reject.
And I think that the highest peak we can reach as women and as feminists is to say I get to choose the way I look and define that at every age.
And so I think that your gray hair is making you feel uncomfortable right now.
And maybe that means you should go and talk to a hairstylist and say what can we do to make me feel good about the way my hair looks right now?
You say that this is a little question and yet it's also a pretty big one.
I think that so many people, men and women alike, struggle with this as we age.
Yep.
And I fully support you making whatever choice you want to make.
I think the sexiest, most beautiful thing emanates from within.
And it's that sense of you feeling secure and who you are, whether that be gray haired or like completely, you know dyed, whatever color of your choosing.
Right.
Counting down from Brown, I felt all of this.
I am in my late 40s and what's really corrosive is when people allow society and societal norms to really get internalized and to make you feel like the only two options on the menu are young and hot and old bag.
I think you should do what you want to do, but I also would counsel you to think really carefully about what Cheryl said.
If you are beautiful, it's because you love yourself, You love how you look and you have made peace with it.
And there's no product that's gonna undo a problem if you don't feel that way.
You're just gonna be chasing it forever.
Erin recently made the decision to allow her gray hair to come in.
And you know what?
I think she looks sexy.
You know when I think she looks sexy?
When she thinks she looks sexy.
When she thinks it looks good.
And that's not being a milquetoast.
It's really true.
People are hot because they own it.
And here's the thing too, that I just always want to remind anyone who thinks that hair dye is going to fool anyone.
You're still probably, counting down from Brown, are going to look like a woman in your mid-40s.
I don't think that anyone's going to be like, oh, you're 28, you know?
So I mean, I think it's a sort of false idea that, like our hair color is going to be what changes our look entirely.
So this is about how you feel about yourself, your body, your life, your look.
Right.
Okay, last letter, Steve.
All right.
Dear Sugars.
I have been very close friends with a man for a little over a decade and have shared a deep, non-romantic intimacy that has been a precious part of my life.
Recently, he announced out of the blue that he needed a break from our friendship because of something someone told him about me.
He said he needed time to come to terms with it.
After some time passed, he told me he was ready to reconnect, but he made it clear that, in order to continue our friendship, he could not disclose the nature of the information that prompted his need for a break.
This has been a relationship-changing juncture, not to mention heartbreaking.
I often find myself wondering about the ethical aspect of his proclamation, as well as my own reluctance to continue our friendship on those terms.
What do you think?
Puzzled.
This is bullshit.
I agree.
Okay.
Even criminals get to face their accusers and know the charges leveled against them in a court of law.
You are now deep in the court of friendship.
I mean, this is crazy.
And you are within your rights to get as far away from this toxic person as possible.
As painful as that is.
I get that.
He was a good friend, but he is acting something out here that is.
It's okay for him to hear something to unsettle you, but it is not okay for him to withhold that.
You have a right to face the accusations against you, the nature of them and to have a discussion about them.
What he's done is something that is really, to me, should never take place within a healthy, functioning friendship, which is to judge you as guilty, to set himself up as judge and jury and executioner.
And so my call is stay away.
I agree totally.
I just need to figure out.
It's so punishing.
When you will become non-despicable enough based on.
It's crazy.
And I want to say that this is a fine point, too.
We've all, I think, had the experience where we've heard sort of unflattering or maybe even disturbing information about a friend.
But I think that it would be a very different scenario if he'd heard these things, thought about them for a while and decided to disregard them and continue the friendship, and that you never knew that that was going on with him.
Like that's one thing, because he's sort of then he's grappling with his own feelings about something.
And he's not in any way involving you or manipulating you or punishing you, okay?
But that's not what happened here.
He told you everything except the one thing that you have the right to know.
Why is he disturbed?
Why is he saying, I can't see you for a while?
Why is he now saying we can be friends, but under one condition that you never ask me for this piece of information?
Pure bullshit, as Steve said, this person is not a healthy, loving friend.
And that's your business now, frankly, is to mourn that.
Yeah.
That's a bummer.
Puzzled.
It's not puzzling to us.
Right.
I'm so interested to hear how people feel about this, how listeners feel about this.
We tried to be less equivocal.
That's right.
How do you feel about that kind of answering questions?
I think it's good for us, because we have a tendency to be squishy, because life is complicated and we oftentimes don't have enough data.
And sometimes what our letter writers are looking for, as in these questions, what do I do?
Yes or no?
But one of the things I espouse all the time is this idea that, when we are evolved, we have the capacity to hold two contradictory truths in the same hand.
Negative capability.
Part of thinking in a complicated way about our problems is sometimes acknowledging that the answer is quite simple, that sometimes you just need to do what you need to do.
You need to send that email.
You need to confront that friend.
You just need to make the call.
All right, I'm making the call.
It is time to read the credits.
And Cheryl, you have to read the credits.
I've made that call.
Okay.
Dear Sugar Radio is produced by WBUR in Boston.
We're produced and edited by the fabulous brown-haired Lisa Tobin.
I would say it's trending towards black.
Yeah, it's very dark brown.
What we can say, definitely not gray.
We're recording here in Portland, Oregon, in my hometown, at Talkback Sound and Visual.
Josh Millman is our engineer.
Our theme music is by the Portland musicians known as Wonderly.
Vocals by Liz Weiss.
Listen and subscribe to us on iTunes.
Write to us at dearsugarradio at gmail.com.
That's right.
Make the call.
Write the letter.
