Dear Hera,<\/p>\n
After some dating disasters and heartbreak after her marriage ended, five years ago my sister finally met a very nice guy with a good job. He\u2019s also divorced and they both have kids and their kids get on too. They share values and hobbies. She moved in with him and all was going really well. The family all love him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last year I found out that he was using an Ashley Madison style app to meet and have sex with young women while my sister was away for work. Initially I refused to believe it, but unfortunately, there was clear evidence. So of course, I had to tell her. It was awful. She was devastated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cut to a few months later, and she told me she\u2019d forgiven him. When confronted, he\u2019d admitted everything, they have been going to counselling and he\u2019s been on his best behaviour and she says they\u2019re working things out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The problem for me is I\u2019m still so mad at him. I haven\u2019t seen him since as we live in different cities, but don\u2019t even want to look him in the eye. Not just for betraying someone I love so early in their relationship but also the whole seedy thing of an older, moneyed guy paying young women for sex.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No one else in the family knows, which is fair enough, I wish I didn\u2019t know either!\u00a0<\/p>\n
So my question is, what do I do at Christmas? This year for the first time in years, everyone will be there, and I just don\u2019t know how I can act normal and friendly around this guy. I also don\u2019t want to give away to the rest of the family that there\u2019s this big horrible thing that has happened.<\/p>\n
I want to be able to be myself, but I don\u2019t know how to handle the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n
Big Sister<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Dear Big Sister,<\/p>\n
How to endure a family celebration with someone you would prefer to see take a quick trip down an abandoned well shaft is one of those refreshingly ubiquitous problems I\u2019m sure everyone can relate to. Sadly, there aren\u2019t nearly enough abandoned well shafts to go around.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Uncontroversial opinion: this guy sucks. There\u2019s nothing more boring than someone living up to every stale and predictable stereotype leveraged at their demographic. But the world is full of such people, and many of them are married to beloved sisters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obviously, it would be better if your sister had simply broken up with him. But people\u2019s relationships are, sadly, their own business. Maybe couples therapy will crack him open like a priceless Faberge egg, and he will come out the other side, fully actualised and brimming with hitherto unforeseen empathy and self-control. Maybe he\u2019ll always be a philandering dirtbag who will continue to collect dust in the corner of every holiday function, like an unwanted piece of oversized travel luggage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While this guy obviously deserves a little coal in his stocking, the boring and mature advice is to try and ignore him. Not because he deserves it. But because the person hurting the most in this scenario is your sister. Your strategy should be entirely predicated on making sure she has a relaxing holiday, even if that means having to forcibly restrain yourself from putting rat poison in her boyfriend\u2019s eggnog.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s completely unfair that you have to carry the burden of his secret, like pocketfuls of wet cake. But if there\u2019s one thing that might take the edge off your desire to indulge in a little festive terrorism, it\u2019s your sister\u2019s pain. It sounds like she\u2019s already had the year from hell. Having her sister find out about her new partner\u2019s infidelities in such a public and humiliating way, and then having put on jolly paper hats and smile through Christmas dinner is miserable. <\/p>\n
My advice is to take every bit of disgust and anger you feel towards this guy, compress it down into a hard nugget of textural vegetable protein, and try your best to reconstitute it as love towards your sister. You can\u2019t do anything about her questionable taste in men. What you can do is put her at ease. Build her up. Read her Christmas Cracker jokes. Remind her, through your actions, that she has a group of people who care about her happiness and want the best for her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If I were you, I would also see if you can find an opportunity to have a private catch-up with her before Christmas Day. Having a quiet drink together might ease both of your nerves and give you an opportunity to say anything that needs to be said without your extended family within earshot. I\u2019m not suggesting you use this as an opportunity to rehash a painful conversation. But if you haven\u2019t seen her for a while, a low-stakes reunion might take some of the immediate pressure off.<\/p>\n
As to how to deal with the awkwardness of seeing him for the first time? My advice is to summon up your best Meryl Streep and do your best to ignore him. Try not to sit at the same end of the dinner table. I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll be eager to do the same, knowing what you know about him. Treat him like a vaguely sentient chest of drawers your sister is having trouble disposing of. You don\u2019t have to be kind to him, exactly. You only need to be polite. Stare through his lightly polished oak veneer with a glazed expression on your face.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It might be helpful to remember that, like spiders, woodlice and other invertebrates, he\u2019s probably a lot more scared of you than you are disgusted by him. If there\u2019s one silver lining to be had,\u00a0 he\u2019s probably dreading this Christmas just as much, if not more than you. There\u2019s nothing but a bit of ambient yuletide dread to put the fear of God into people. You are the one person who knows his humiliating secret and are therefore in a position of power here.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no getting around the fact that Christmas might be a little awkward. But I think you should try your best not to let this man\u2019s boring sexual indiscretions ruin an otherwise happy day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My sister says she\u2019s forgiven him, but I don\u2019t know if I can look him in the eye.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18399,492,18400,111,43,139,69,12458,2935],"class_list":["post-16365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-christmas","tag-comments-enabled","tag-help-me-hera","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-relationship-advice","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}