Category: Advice

“Dear Dr. Kim,

Before we got married a year ago, my husband-to-be told me that after we got married, he would give up almost everything he did as a bachelor, except one thing: his Sunday morning fishing down at the lake near our house. He leaves before dawn (alone) without waking me up, and is back by about 11am before the weather gets too hot. Every Sunday. It’s starting to bug me; it’s like he wants to get away from me every week. He says it’s his chance to clear his head. I think he’s being selfish. I thought he would change after we got married, but he hasn’t. What should I do?”

—Fishing Widow, Northern Michigan

Dear Widow,
Let me be perfectly blunt, here. You said, “I thought he would change,” which is complete bullshit. What you’re really saying is, ”I thought I could change him,” and you couldn’t. He said he wanted his time alone to clear his head, and he does. More to the point, you agreed to let him have that time alone, and now you want to renege on the deal? Either you didn’t think it was going to be important, and that he’d quit eventually, or you were being dishonest and thought you could get him to stop. Well, he’s not going to stop, and you agreed to the arrangement.

My advice: suck it up, get up early with him, make him a flask of coffee to take along, and give him a loving good-bye kiss. If his time alone is that important to him – and quite frankly, I don’t think a couple hours’ solitude on a Sunday morning is excessive – then take him at his word. Which is what you should have done anyway, before you got married.

—Dr. Kim

“Dear Dr. Kim,

I live in a college dorm room which has two curtained-off “bedroom alcoves”, each with a desk, and a common area for the little kitchenette my roommate and I share. Here’s the problem: I’m not a particularly neat person, but I keep my untidiness strictly to my side of the room. I’m not a pig in the kitchen – I do my share of the washing up and such, and help keep the kitchen spotless – but my roommate has been on my case ever since the beginning of the semester, saying that my untidiness is affecting her. She is a neatness freak, by the way: her bed is made like in an Army barracks, and her desk is always clear. I use a duvet and seldom make my bed, and my desk is full of books and such (but not dirty dishes). How can I resolve my issue with her?”

– Untidy, Columbus

Dear Untidy,

Tell Roomie Dearest to fuck off. If your “mess” really is contained – i.e. it doesn’t encroach on her living space – and you keep the common area clean and tidy, that’s all she should expect. Frankly, your roommate is not only a pain in the ass, but I foresee a glowing future for her as a Democrat politician, because they too are full of good advice for other people and think they know best how everyone else should live their lives. And the earlier these tiresome control freaks can be contained by us normal people, the better for our society in the long run. If she persists in this nonsense, beat her over the head with a chair – something else we should do to budding Democrats and suchlike busybodies more often.

—Dr. Kim

“Dear Dr. Kim,
“The other night, my husband of four years wanted to have sex, but I was too tired, so for the first time ever, I turned him down. Since then, he’s been acting kind of distant. Should I be worried?”
—Naysayer, Tucson

Dear Naysayer,

Congratulations: you just put the first nail in your marriage’s coffin.

Let me get this straight: your life partner wants a little intimacy with you, a chance to show that he loves you still, some time to share your bodies with all the pleasure that this entails, and when you tell him to piss off, you’re surprised that he’s “acting kind of distant”?

Here’s a little clue for you (and all women). When you get married, sex with your husband is one of the things you sign on for. If you’re deathly ill, you’re entitled to ask him for a raincheck (and the chances are, he won’t even ask on those occasions unless he’s a total dickhead and in that case you have more serious issues to deal with). Other than that, you have no right to turn your husband down for sex, ever. You’re tired? Too bad. How much effort does sex take, anyway? He’s asking for intimacy, you’re telling him you don’t want any. How do you expect him to feel?

Here’s another little clue: men don’t like rejection. It’s bad enough during the dating scene, when a simple request for a dance or some conversation gets turned down – sometimes, crushingly – and after a while, rejection from a stranger somehow gets easier to handle. But rejection from your alleged soulmate? What were you thinking?

I know what some women are going to say: “It wasn’t about intimacy, he just wanted to get his rocks off.” Yeah, maybe. So what? How bad can that possibly be for you? At worst, it’ll be over quickly, and you can go to sleep. But it could also surprise you and be wonderful, spectacular and blow you away completely – sex between married couples often turns out that way, sometimes when you least expect it to.

Let me tell you one more thing: everyone always talks about the “sacrifices” that people have to make when they’re married. In case you missed it, here’s one of those sacrifices: sometimes, one of you is going to have to have sex when you don’t really feel like it. Big fat bummer. As much as women need romance in their lives, men need sex. Despite all the carping and wailing of feminists and other harpies, that is never going to change. Never.

Here’s another thought: reverse the roles. You just read a steamy romance novel, watched a romantic movie, or whatever floats your hormonal boat. Now you’ve got the hots. So when hubby comes home from work, you lead him off to bed dressed in your sexiest nightie… and he turns you down. Feels good, doesn’t it?

The biggest problem with all this is that people seem to have forgotten this simple rule: when you get married, your body doesn’t belong to you anymore: it belongs to your spouse. That’s why a man shouldn’t have affairs: his dick belongs to his wife – and that’s why a married women can’t say no to her husband: because her socket belongs to his coupling-pin.

And finally (brace yourself, lady), here’s something you may not know. Your husband is going to take rejection hard. Very hard. And don’t give me the jive about how he should just “deal with it.” Dealing with rejection is what you have to endure with strangers. There should never be rejection, of any kind, between married partners. He is opening himself up to you, letting himself be vulnerable to you – and you’re kicking him in the nuts.

After four years of always saying “yes,” you suddenly said “no.” What do you think his conclusion might be about that?
— Dr. Kim

“Dear Dr. Kim,
“I recently started dating a nice girl, and things were going well for a while. Then she invited me over to her place for the first time (for Saturday brunch), and I noticed that she had four cats. I’m not allergic to cats, and in fact I quite like them. But isn’t four cats a little excessive?”
—Worried, Scranton

Dear Worried,
Run, do not walk, to the Relationship Exit. Any single woman who owns more than one cat has issues so profound and so dangerous (for a relationship) that I dare not speak of them in polite company. But don’t take my word for it: ask any of your male friends for a second opinion. If anything, their advice will be stronger than mine.
—Dr. Kim