Tell Me About It: Lamenting parents' loveless lot

While I'm away, readers give the advice.

On seeing children as the victims when their parents have affairs:

Because of social stigma, social conditioning, and financial dependence, my mother's best option was to stick it out in a crazy marriage with my angry and childish and self-absorbed father, who is incapable of forming a relationship with any human being.

Since my early teens, it has been obvious to me how miserable my father made my mother, and also himself. Both of them spent the entirety of their youth without an emotional and physical connection with another human being. Even as a teen, out of empathy, I would hope that they would find someone to connect with, to share with, to love and to be loved by, if only in passing. More for my mother than my father, but I did wish he'd been less lonely and miserable and made the rest of us less miserable too.

My mother never had the option of finding comfort in another relationship, but I would not have resented her for it just so I can maintain some fictional idea of living a perfect life. Kids are smart and resilient and they can handle a reality check that things are more complicated than a Hollywood yarn.

I think it's too much of a sacrifice to wait until you're 50 to live your life. Children deal with the disruption of parents divorcing or with the stress of living with parents who hate each other, and they can also deal with the concept that infidelity is not always a black-and-white breach of contract.

On celebrating personal milestones at the office:

Birthdays, anniversaries, wedding showers, baby showers, and other personal achievements should not be celebrated at work!

Besides, parties thrown for these sorts of events obligate people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. Your coworkers are not your friends and family. Do you want people like me standing around grumbling for the fourth time that month about shelling out $5 for a person who just started and will probably quit next year, especially when that person makes five times what I do?

I like giving to my friends for the sake of giving. I do not enjoy shelling out $20 for a shower gift for a coworker I don't like and who has not invited me to her wedding unlike the dozen others she did invite out of our 15-person office.

Rant over.