SAVAGE LOVE BY DAN SAVAGE
Happy Thanksgiving and
Happy Holidays!
Tantric Sacred Sexuality Exploration & Education I’m taking the week off. Please enjoy these Thanksgiving-themed questions from the Savage Love archives. Gobble, gobble. — Dan
DEAR DAN: I’ve been dating
my boyfriend for almost a year. He’s 25, I’m 27. I asked him to have Thanksgiving dinner with me and my mother at my house. He said no. I also invited him to have dinner with my father, my brother, my stepmom and me the day after Thanksgiving. He said no again. His reasoning: “It would be too awkward.” He has met both sides of my family, and I have met his parents. His parents are having Thanksgiving dinner with family friends, and he doesn’t have other Thanksgiving plans. This is not the first time he has turned down invitations to spend time with my family. I’ve told him the only way for us to feel less awkward with each other’s families is to spend more time with them. He just said “I know” via text. I believe he loves me, and he is a wonderful partner in many areas of my life, but this is bothering me. What should I do? I’m fighting the urge to tell him that maybe our relationship is “too awkward” and we should part ways before Christmas. What do you think? — Single On Thanksgiving
DEAR SOT: I’d like to speak to your boyfriend, SOT, so I could ask him the obvious followup question (OFUQ): Why does it feel awkward? Assuming your boyfriend is into you and wants to keep seeing you, his answer to the OFUQ could go something like this: “We’ve been seeing each other for less than a year, and to me it feels like it’s too soon to be spending the holidays with each other’s families — it’s also too soon for us to be calling each other ‘partner.’ So let’s take a deep breath, stay calm and keep being wonderful to each other. If we’re still together this time next year then, yeah, we’ll do Thanksgiving with your folks or mine.” It’s also a possibility — possibility ≠ certainty — that your boyfriend doesn’t want to keep seeing you and is operating/dating under the mistaken-but-alltoo-common belief that it’s kinder to string someone along through the holidays. He may not want to spend Thanksgiving/Xmess/NYE with your folks because doing so will be held up as evidence of his lying jerkiness after he dumps you on Nov. 27 or Dec. 26 or Jan. 2. My advice: Take “it’s awkward” for an answer, tell him you’d like to have dinner on Saturday, and don’t make a big deal out of his reluctance to spend Thursday at your mom’s and Friday at your dad’s. It could mean nothing at all, SOT, or it could mean something dire. You’ll just have to wait and see. This question originally appeared on Nov. 24, 2015.
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