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Lighting round:

Do I stay in my relationship (he’s great but broke) or go for this man who is also really amazing and financially stable?

Break up with the broke guy. You can both do better.

I’m seeing someone who I’m pretty sure isn’t “the one,” but I’ve never been in a relationship before, have an easy time hanging out with them, and want to learn more about what I’m like in relationship with someone. At what point is it dishonest for me to continue seeing them if I can’t see it lasting?

You’ve never been in a relationship before? Not a crime. You want to learn something about yourself at the expense of someone else? Jail!

Break up with this person so they can date somebody who doesn’t treat them like an experiment.

I’m not sure if I’m just meant to be friends with my husband and should get divorced or put in the work into the relationship. Is there a good book that explores this?

Book recommendation? You need to be asking for lawyer recommendations.

If you insist on reading books, the Gottmans, Scaachi Koul, Haley Mlotek, Miranda July, Lyz Lenz all have you covered. I believe they would all agree with me that when you are asking a stranger about leaving your spouse, it’s basically a done deal. Congratulations on your divorce.

Who put me in charge of marriage policies? Me! I put me in charge!

And now finally a serious question:

I practice ENM (ethical non-monogamy) with my husband of 12+ years. He does not hook up with others but I have his consent to do so- but he doesn’t want to know anything. Nothing. He’s asked me to lie, essentially. This lack of communication is detrimental to our relationship but I don’t want to give up the freedom I have to explore my sexuality with other people. Should I stop and recommit to monogamy? Or keep hooking up outside of my marriage even though I can see it’s taking a toll?

Crème de la Crème has no qualms with non-monogamy. African+Muslim newsletter for real.

Over here we are bored with ONS but always GGG with our FWBs and not opposed to LTR.

I know all these acronyms because I live in a zip code that I’m convinced is the epicenter of NYC open relationships and also I am in good standing in the kink community but don’t ask about my poly allegations. I can’t talk about that for legal reasons.

You, my friend are practicing the DADT flavor of ENM.

You and I both know what these nosy readers are thinking: does this bitch really mean Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Clinton-era military policy that technically allowed queer service members to serve if they kept their sexual orientation private? That very bad policy that created a climate of fear and secrecy?? There has be another sexy and mysterious meaning for DADT.

Sorry there isn’t. This is how the non-monogamous people talk. You hate to see it.

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Hello! I want to start by acknowledging this might be a deranged thing to ask a stranger on the internet, however lovely that stranger is. But it is not an exaggeration to say I have been agonizing over this question for 3 years. Should I have a third child? I have two boys ages 5.5 and 4 years. They are sweet, demanding, and very high energy. I am finding motherhood EASIER year over year (fuck the haters who say, "It doesn't get easier") and excited about elementary school in the fall. Frankly, I want a third kid. My husband thinks I'm insane, and yet!, whenever I ask him to get a vasectomy, then HE waffles. The first time I mentioned this to my therapist she literally brought up Freud's concept of the Death Drive. (She apologized for this later.) I have anticipatory regret about my future with "only" two kids. I can financially afford a third child, so long as I do most of the childcare before age 3, as a SAHM, and I know how hard that is, having done it for my first 2. (Also: we moved to a small city with terrible restaurants where we can afford to live and own a house big enough for 3 kids.) I also have a life long dream to write a novel. I have a working manuscript which has been through revisions and I feel the closest I ever have to being published. (Though there's still a lot of work to be done and I do not yet have an agent.) So a part of me wonders if a third baby feels "easier" than the novel? Or, am I projecting unfulfilled hopes onto this child? Almost like the energy of a crush? The baby and toddler years were next to impossible for me with my first two (the 19 month age gap nearly killed me); do I view this hypothetical third as some type of revision? I don't know. Oh, and I am terrified of twins. I come from a family with four kids and feel four is too many, but do believe in abortion and live where it's legal. Any gentle suggestions greatly appreciated. I am clearly lost. Thank you.

Increasingly I feel that every couple of months, I read a big headline that says one of the keys to happiness lies in talking to strangers. I should probably read those articles but the problem is I am very confident that the key to my own happiness does NOT involve reading articles about happiness. Big Happiness is not for me.

But talking to strangers is a muscle I like to stretch almost everywhere except for in planes.

I remember my siblings being weirdly embarrassed to ask strangers for directions if we were lost. Some of the kids in my life have this sickness still. I don’t care. If I’m lost for even 30 seconds, I will ask a stranger to reorient me. I will ask the useless police officer in the subway to open the emergency door if I am on the wrong platform. I will ask the station agent to let me go through the turnstile for free because I already gave the MTA $2.90 and I’m not doing that again. And right before exiting the train, I will tell the intriguingly good look person standing across from me that they look great. Sometimes I’ll even wink at them. What can I say? I enjoy flustering people sometimes.

It’s because I am an absolute lunatic.

The problem with lunatics is that you really don’t know what you’re going to get with them. This is unfortunately the risk you agreed to when you engaged me in such a personal matter.

Funny enough, Gentle Suggestions has addressed whether someone should have a second child but you are asking about a THIRD child! That feels slightly different and you’re asking it in an interesting way so I will allow it.

Hello.

Your anxiety is very LOUD. It’s not a problem for me at all but I hope you know how LOUD it is.

And wow the way you phrased this conundrum. There is something kind of manic in how you presented the whole thing. This is not a bad thing, just an observation. Mania doesn’t scare me. Remember that I am a lunatic. Is it really a surprise that I find elevated and excitable moods stimulating? Exactly.

Let’s get into it.

I agree that you are lost. I read your note so many times that I got sidetracked too but let’s get back on track.

What is the problem?

You want a third baby.

Why is this or is this not a problem?

Many reasons according to you but let’s break them down in the order you are presenting them. This is absolutely not the order of operations I would have used and I find your process fascinating. Brains are so different and I really like that.

Here are your reasons:

• You have two cute toddlers whose age gap barely help you beat Irish Twin allegations. They are “sweet, demanding, very high energy” in your words and I love that description a lot because it’s a classic compliment sandwich. “Demanding” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

• You “are finding motherhood EASIER year over year.” I am happy for you.

  However I don’t know how to feel about the fuck you to the other parents. It leads me to believe there is some resentment there about…I’m not sure exactly.

  Crème de la Crème thinks parents are very hard on each other and should probably compare parenting notes and expectations less than they do. Kids like their parents come with all kinds of factors settings and what works in one family doesn’t necessarily work in another. But I’m not a parent so take all of that with a big grain of salt.

• You say that you are “excited” to send your kids to school but actually to me, you sound relieved. That feeling is relief. Let it course through your body. Enjoy it. Respect it. Relief is very good.

  You have been juggling a very high-wire act in a country that refuses to offer parents any respite from the realities of parenthood.

  Janet Yellen, the first and so far only woman Treasury Secretary once said that childcare in the United States is “a textbook example of a broken market. It does not work for the caregivers. It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids . . . [therefore] it does not work for the country.” The Treasury is the cabinet-level agency that manages the country’s money. All that boring stuff like collecting taxes, managing government debt, producing currency, and enforcing financial laws. I don’t know about you but I was happy to know that the people at the very top of the financial arm responsible for ensuring the economic stability of the United States know that the lack of childcare is a problem and they acknowledge that the country is failing families and therefore failing itself. I am not sure that American mothers know this. They should know and understand this instead of feeling like personal failures. The scam is structural.

• Your husband says it’s “insane” to have this baby. It pains me to consider a man’s opinion on anything at all but I do think that when you are married to one, their opinion counts sometimes. Probably mostly on matters like these. I am annoyed that your husband is waffling on the vasectomy— Ejaculators! If you don’t want more children GET THE DAMN VASECTOMY!— but I will not join you in agreeing that this is him wanting a third.

  Let’s park the husband for now. But please tell him I am very annoyed with him.

• You say you can afford this third kid. Well actually here is precisely how you phrased it “I can financially afford a third child”

  Your use of first person jumped out at me. Are you the only one paying for this? I know couples handle finances in all sorts of ways but I have so many questions about how your family is doing it. Then there is the big caveat that financially the baby actually only makes sense if you do all of the childcare for the next 3 years. Which begs the question, can you emotionally afford this? And now we have to talk again about your husband. I am really am so annoyed with that man but does he agree that your family can financially afford this addition? What other financial goals does your family have that might be affected by a third child? Does your husband agree that you as the caretaker can emotionally afford this? Also my kids math is rusty but let’s say you have a baby. That’s what? Almost a decade of dealing with very small children back to back? I have no judgements about this. Maybe you have the stamina for it. I am simply trying to sort through the information you are presenting me with.

• The aside that you live in a lower cost of living city with shitty restaurants did make me laugh. What are you telling me this? Your house is big …so you need to fill it? I am not sure this is pertinent.

Up until this point I was having a hard time following how your question was unfolding but then a very pertinent revelation emerged: you are an aspiring novelist! You should have said this much earlier because this is the kind of disclosure that flips the problem on its head.

Now we’re really cooking.

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But wow, have…

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Trying to survive in current circumstances feels hard. How do we find joy? How do we make this time one that feels good while feeling overall bad?

Hello.

This feels so vague and I struggle when things are vague. When you say the current circumstances….do you mean American politics? The economy on the brink of collapse? The overall very bad political vibe around the globe? Or some specific circumstance in your life I don’t know about?

I wrote a couple weeks ago about going through a depressive episode. I believe I have come out of it but it has kept me from writing and from feeling like myself. I guess I’m bringing depression into this because I personally don’t need the outside vibe to be this bad to keep me from being able to access joy. My broken brain can make any day of any year feel like hell. I’m also bringing depression into it because one of the unmissable signs of depression is “a loss of interest or pleasure in activities previously enjoyed.” I love medical terminology so much because it is very sparse and economic. Effective writing honestly.

Anyway, are you depressed? Because it’s possible you are. It’s not hard to figure out actually. You can look up the self-administered PHQ-9 (Patient Health Questionnaire-9) and take the test online. You can also talk to a doctor which is what I really recommend. I encounter a lot of people who are cripplingly depressed and refuse the possibility and realities of a diagnosis. Instead they rant about big P Politics and feel despondent about events happening in countries whose capitals they can’t spell. The current circumstances as you call them have these people feeling extra hopeless right now.

You asked two very big questions and I will start with the second one. I really do not know how to make this time feel good because I am not sure that it should feel good. I was listening to the UN Humanitarian Chief on the BBC and he made it very clear, in the most stark words he could use that 14,000 Palestinian babies could die in the next 48 hours because of the Israeli blockade. 14,000 babies. It’s all over the news now and I see people share that stat all over social media. 14,000 babies is a lot of babies. I do think of myself as someone who cannot and does not accept the death of just one baby. There are no reasons, political or not that could make me accept that but man, 14 000 is a number I cannot wrap my brain around.

I heard Tom Fletcher’s words loud and clear. Then later this morning, I walked into the gifting suite of a clothing brand I like. I saw people I love there. We shopped together—it’s all free by the way— and the women who work for the clothing brand sent me home with pastries and sandwiches. I confided in one of them that I am worried about money and she told me something equally vulnerable about her current situation. And yet here we were in this Old World cafe society vibe establishment eating canelés and deciding which color espadrille would be best for my summer wardrobe. It does not feel good to have champagne problems when babies are dying. It should not feel good.

Not all of my problems are champagne problems and I imagine that is the same for you.

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Should I get botox? I feel like every women I know my age (33) is getting it, and I am not blind nor above vanity. I like my wiry grey hairs, until I don't and I get my hair colored. I use benzoyl peroxide and clindamycin on my face twice a day to prevent acne. I know my face has visibly aged, and I can't help envy the smooth foreheads surrounding me. I fear that five/ten years from now, I will look way older than people my age who did get botox.

However, as someone who has survived major depressive episodes and (CW) suicidal ideation, part of me wears these wrinkles and furors as a badge of pride. Like, I made it through a global pandemic and the first Trump presidency and damn it if I don't make it through the second. Aging, especially with family and friends and loved ones around me, is such a gift, one I do not take for granted. Also, for what it’s worth botox is the same stuff that causes botulism, and putting that into my body feels questionable.

Or...is it just not that deep, and I am way overthinking a cosmetic enhancement?

Crème de la Crème really tries to stay in her lane and will readily admit when she doesn’t understand something.

I do not understand being in your early 30s and being afraid of looking old. You are young! Something about this preoccupation feels very caucasian and that is not my lane.

However, depression and suicidal ideation are absolutely my lane.

I am in the middle of a medium to severe depressive episode. Nowadays I like to think of these episodes like they’re a bad cold. I do what I can to make myself comfortable and ease the symptoms but I know that you cannot really cure a cold. Colds need to run their course and they generally resolve within 7-10 days. Reminder: I am not a doctor and this is not sound medical advice. Just the musings of a woman who when her brain is sick sometimes daydreams about walking into traffic or jumping out of a window. I don’t love that for any of us.

Don’t worry. I really am taking care of myself. I’m going on walks, I’m touching grass, I’m not isolating, I’m trying but definitely failing to eat or sleep well. None of this has been pleasant and doing pretty much everything has been a tough slog especially thinking clearly. I really hate it when I cannot think clearly because when I can’t think, I can’t write.

But I know this depressive episode is resolving because today I had a very clear thought about you and this Botox business. Invoking Trump to justify or not injecting cosmetic neurotoxins in your face? This is too much. You’re doing too much.

Where to even start?

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, north of 7 million people in the United States received Botox injections in 2022. This makes Botox the most popular non-surgical cosmetic procedure in the country. It’s cheaper than plastic surgery and makes total sense in the little treat economy.

Botox is also just a brand name like Wite-Out or Kleenex. It’s now become the colloquial term for all botulinum toxin type A injections but there are actually 4 brands of these injections. They all contain the same active ingredient and in 2002 they were FDA approved for the temporary improvement of the frown lines between the eyebrows. They’ve since been cleared to treat forehead lines and crow’s feet, too in addition to all "off label" uses like for sweating or TMJ. I know this because I asked my dermatologist about it and he kindly humored me as I painstakingly took notes. I highly recommend going to the dermatologist in the middle of a depressive episode. It’s very enlightening. Anyway, my dermatologist, he feels very strongly that anyone interested in wrinkle smoothing neurotoxins should discuss it with a board certified dermatologist or plastic surgeon. I know a lot of the girlies do not do this and go to all kinds of clinics and spas instead. I get really stressed whenever a woman I love mentions her “injector” but we listen and we do not judge at Crème de la Crème.

You mentioned something about how it might be “questionable” to put something related to botulism in your body and I did laugh a little because it came so late into your question that we both know that is not really the real concern you have. Like I said, talk a board certified dermatologist about this.

I also said earlier that the framing of your question and your fear really felt very caucasian. I am sorry for saying it so flippantly. I do that sometimes. My sweet friend Curtis Sittenfeld reminded me that I once told her that only white women are afraid of getting old. It left such an impression on her that she included it in her delightful short story collection. I don’t remember telling her this but it sounds like something I would say. Not because it’s profound or true. Quite the opposite. It’s the kind of half baked thought that rattles through my brain in between depressive episodes. In fact, I was in the middle of a milder depressive episode when I read Curtis’ story for the first time way back when. Then the depression left my body and I forgot to reconsider my dumb observation for a more thoughtful one.

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I hope this is not too much. I had a binge drinking problem about 5-6 years ago that culminated in a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and losing the trust of my best friends and family. Anywho, I've worked hard over the years to control my drinking and have regained the trust of those people. But, I feel myself slipping. I don't drink at home, apart from an occasional beer during a movie, and can go out to dinner or a happy hour and have one or two drinks and go home. But, when I want to "have fun" it's over for these hoes. Now that the sun is out and the temperature is rising, I'm finding that I want to "have fun" more often. Lots of questions for you: Do you drink? Have you ever had an issue/problem with controlling yourself with any vice? How do you decouple that vice with the "fun" you have while doing it?

I was going to answer some suburban neighbor drama this week—they have so many weird problems over there— but you’ve been on my mind a lot. A lot. So much so that it caused me to track my drinks all week. And because of that I am going to take your questions one at a time.

Do you drink?

Where to even start? Nobody ever knew when I was a drunk as a teenager and at the time, I really thought I was getting away with the crime of the century. The Christian missionaries that ran my boarding school really surveilled us a lot and they created a culture where the kids surveilled each other so I was kind of proud of myself for operating under Jesus’ radar. But honestly I wasn’t running a sophisticated scam at all.

The missionaries were too focused on breaking up interracial couples and making sure there were no copies of Harry Potter on campus (witchcraft allegations) to pay attention to my drinking. And I was smart enough to mostly drink alone. Can’t get caught if you don’t drink with the other amateur drinkers. Especially if they’re spies for Jesus. Those kids were always doing questionable things and then throwing each other under the bus during morning devotional. I wasn’t going to get caught up in someone’s Dear Lord, I want to lift up Aminatou who is struggling a lot right now. Praying out loud as a form of gossip. We don’t talk about that enough and we should. But that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

The first week on my college campus, I saw a girl get a Minor in Possession charge in front of a frat house. A few hours later, she got ticketed AGAIN by another cop on the same block and her dumb moves solidified my resolve to not drink until I turned 21. Who comes to a consistently ranked top party school to dry out? Me, baby. I was not going to jeopardize my visa and more importantly, I was not going to look foolish.

Reader, I ended up looking very foolish halfway through Sophomore year. My mom died and I acted a fool big time. There are pictures of me from that time that if they were released, they would tank my Supreme Court nomination. Unless I was a Republican and they would name an amateur drinking holiday after me. A keg stand used to hate seeing me come. You really wanted me on your team for a drinking game but wow, how stupid were those? All beer pong and shotgunning beers do is lend a thin veneer of grandeur to the otherwise lackluster pastime of drinking mass quantities of lite beer. Competition, plus some sharp, shiny objects and suddenly that 24-pack of shitty beer seems a lot more exciting, and your afternoon far less depressing. The problem though is that even if you win a drinking game, you’re a loser. I won all the drinking games.

I feel bad for university administrators because they really do warn you about the dangers of drinking and nobody pays attention. At my school, they would also give you this card that had the exact number of calories for each drink and a diagram that would tell you how many burgers or whatever each drink corresponded to. So it would be something like a margarita=2.5 burgers or a piña colada= one bag of french fries. They were trying to swap out alcoholism for eating disorders but my frontal cortex was not done cooking yet so honestly it all sounded like a good deal to me. I was here for a good time, not a long time. My junior year of college, I would black out a few days a week at least. But I’m not going to lie to you. I had a lot of fun. And there was no hangover the Juan in a million migas plate could not fix.

Describing all this drinking is so boring to me now so let’s fast forward. After college I drank too much still. And worse, I went back to my habit of drinking alone. But it was classy. Very Olivia Pope with the big glass of wine vibes. It was cute until I started paying attention to my neighbors’ recycling. There were 4 of them in that row house and only one of me in mine but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the wine bottle recycling operation I was running in our backyard. I didn’t stop drinking and in fact, I had many alcohol fueled meltdowns over the years after the recycling revelation.

The thing that sticks out to me the most is how much I didn’t understand the role alcohol was playing in my life. Now it’s very clear to me that when I was crying on my friend’s air mattress about a man who I should not have been in love with, alcohol was doing the incoherent talking and the crying. Or that when I decided to introduce romantic intrigue to my living situation, the alcohol was fueling the makeouts with my roommate. Or that when I’m singing (Woop, woop) That's the sound of da police on the sidewalk instead of going back inside of the bar like the police officer said I should, that is definitely the alcohol singing.

I cannot believe I survived all that drinking.

Have you ever had an issue/problem with controlling yourself with any vice?

My relationship with alcohol today is pretty straightforward. I try not to keep any alcohol in the house and when there is a surplus of it—holiday gifts, dinner party offerings— I give it all away. I am blessed with genetics that did not predispose me to alcoholism, I do not have an addictive personality type and I am lucky enough to have good enough impulse control around substances. It really is all dumb genetic luck.

I still drink but I also can go months at a time without a drink. I don’t really need it is what I tell myself. And honestly, my body has changed and now it lets me know very loudly when I do dumb shit. For example, I had a glass of champagne and then an espresso martini the other night over the course of many hours. I am still a relatively new coffee drinker. Do I have any business mixing vodka and coffee? After the bubbles? After 10PM? This was absolutely an own goal and I did it to myself.

As I type this, I am nursing a coconut water that cost me too much money from the happier grocery and also a Nalgene full of water mixed with this Mexican effervescent antacid I swear by, sal de uvas from the good people at Picot laboratories. It’s basically sodium bicarbonate with citric acid and I know I said I don’t have an addictive personality but it’s possible I’m addicted to this. Headache? Sal de uvas. Nausea? Sal de uvas. Hot girl tummy ache? Sal de uvas. Diarrhea? Sal de uvas. Hangover? Sal de uvas! The translation means grape salt and I have no clue what that is and if it’s even prescribed for all the things I use it for, but it makes me feel better. Oh and now I am remembering that I also had a tequila soda before that dinner. This is the problem with that drinks tracking business. You think you only had 2 drinks in one evening but really you had 3 of them because the first two made you forget the third. This was such an amateur hour night for me and I am paying the price big time. They say that more than 3 drinks a day is “heavy drinking” for women but it falls in the range of “moderate drinking” for men. I’m a big girl so this is one place where I go with the boys. It’s not a good thing.

How do you decouple that vice with the "fun" you have while doing it?

I am going to level with you, when you’re asking a stranger about their drinking habits but really it’s about your drinking habits, you definitely have a problem.

And when you’re drinking to “have fun?” Big, big wahala as my people say.

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Ok so wtf do I do in this political moment? I already loudly support Not the Bad Guys in elections. What else is there to do? I can’t convince my problematic relatives to not be problematic (I tried) and am disenchanted with non profits

LOL

I am not laughing at you. I am just laughing with all the Black people who understand exactly how a question like this makes me feel. I get it, we had a 920+page heads up about this situation but you are not happy with the politics of the moment. Get in line, sister.

Crème de la Crème is not in the political handholding business but maybe I will address this question another time just not in my ::Trump voice:: beautiful, beautiful advice column.

In the mean time, here we go!

i just turned 38 and my divorce is going to be finalized next month. i was married at 24 (too, too young) and got divorced at 37. no children. the divorce was a good thing and i finally feel free and relaxed. but i also feel lost. i should have spent my 20s learning about myself and figuring out who i am. instead i was married to someone i shouldn't have married. now i'm almost 40, and if someone asked me what my favorite movie is, i would have no idea. my marriage swallowed me whole and spat me out. i'm trying to figure myself out but i think this is the hardest thing i've ever done. and then dating? wading through all these men again? i don't know what to do. i have a huge 3 week solo trip planned. i have a therapist. i have a good job, and friends, and i work out and take walks, and i have pets and i live alone. but i just feel like a generic boring "person" without any real personality. how do i figure myself out?

Hmmm maybe the graphologists are right about lower case denoting a lack of confidence. I don’t want it to be true.

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS on your divorce. That should be the standard reaction to divorce. Congrats, babe.

You know what’s funny is that last night, I saw a friend I hadn’t caught up with in a while and told her that I had no big headlines. “Life is very boring” were the exact words I used but she instinctively knew I meant this as a good thing. Her headline is that she is pregnant but she also reported that she is contentedly bored. She believed me and I believed her.

When I say my life is very boring, I mean that I am very stable right now. For me that is a relatively new gift and honestly, who knows how long it will last? Life, much like a marriage, can lure us into a comfortable state of parasympathetic bliss but I’m no fool. I know that the bumps are right around the corner so I will enjoy this cruising speed devoid of disturbances for as long as it lasts.

What you’re calling “generic boring person” is what I call content, emotionally well regulated person. It’s giving peaceful existence. It’s giving there’s no drama at all. You said yourself that you have a therapist, a good job, friends, pets, no roommates and that you work out and take walks. And 3 week solo trip?? Girl, the tariffs! But yeah that is bragging. You are bragging. Please check your priv.

Allow me to burst your bubble a bit: There is absolutely nothing wrong with “generic boring person” but that’s not you, babe. Divorce is a genuinely interesting situation for a woman.

You are a divorcée and that is so chic!

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My sister married a multibillionaire last year. Wedding was amazing, her husband and his family are all wonderful people. I’m so happy for her. My sister and I have always been close but in recent years it’s been tough to keep up with her, her travel schedule and glamorous lifestyle. I also had a baby who’s now a thriving and busy toddler, so our lives are very different. Our family doesn’t come from money and my husband and I do okay financially, but we both work full time, and paying for rent, for childcare etc has us absolutely at max capacity. We’re happy and content, but I’m going into debt monthly just to keep up with the cost of living. Shouldn’t my sister help us out now that she has access to this new found wealth? It’s hard for me to understand why she won’t offer it, and I don’t feel comfortable asking. They’ve helped in the past and gave us some money while I was on maternity leave, and they paid for us to join them on a few weekend trips (pre-baby) so I should just be grateful, right?

My first, immediate thought is do you mean an actual multibillionaire? There aren’t even 3000 of those criminals total in circulation on the planet so that’s kind of exciting.

Crème de la Crème is anti-billionaire and really frowns upon a system where a couple thousand people have basically everything and the rest of us have to vaguely hope that those people keep pushing humanity in the right direction and if they chose not to, we will not do anything about the system. I don’t like it at all. Billionaires are a threat to democracy and it is obscene that we allow people to have that much money. Late capitalism blah blah blah but you should know I’m kind of a hypocrite because I also absolutely love being in rich people’s business.

I know these two sisters who are both married to billionaires—yeah you’re not the only one with billionaires in your rolodex—and I often think about what their parents did right (or wrong?) because when I’m not being my highest self, it does feel very calculated. But isn’t all marriage a calculation anyway? And rich people marriages are the most calculated of the bunch.

I definitely was not my highest self when I first read your question because I also really wanted to know about the wedding and how much money was lit on fire for what I imagine was an extravagant affair. I love going to weddings of people with good taste and/or too much money but that is neither here nor there.

It’s very complicated this sister thing. A sister is the first woman of your generation you meet. Your first friend or your first enemy. Sometimes she is both and it’s hard. Sometimes she is neither and that’s hard too.

What we owe our siblings is very nebulous but I am not sure that we owe them financial help. In my culture they make you feel like you do but I am not sure that’s right. Consider a world in which you do not have a sibling at all. What would you do then?

I don’t know your sister so let me tell you about my sister.

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Let’s answer some of your questions because I want to pull back the curtain a bit and show you that over here, sometimes it’s very fun and sometimes it’s bleak and weird. Very weird honestly but don’t feel bad for me. These are the lamentations of someone lucky enough to have an audience to lament to.

Are you still friends with [redacted]

I choose to exist on the internet and I have found a way to make it work for me. I didn’t like it for many years and as a result, I pulled back from a lot of things I loved doing including this newsletter and a podcast I made for almost a decade with my friends. I had to pull back in part because my brain is not built to hear what more than one person (me included!) thinks about me and I really cannot receive feedback from more than just a select few people. I really can’t handle too many inputs and the internet has endless input. It’s not good for me and I start short circuiting. Brain fully on fire.

I want to have the kind of brain that remembers birthdays and to call my sister back and what year I met someone and the coffee orders of the people I love and how to get home without a phone and a common point of reference when I am introducing two people to each other and the perfect place to have lunch on Uno Island when you’re waiting for the ferry to Naoshima Island. Instead, modern life dictates that my poor brain contend with a torrential downpour of useless information like the comings and goings of complete strangers. And don’t forget, there is also all the information I’m supposed to ingest about the real people in my life who I love dearly. I think it’s important to know their happenings and big headlines but I don’t need to know that every single day some of them are posting pictures of their lunches, or the minutiae of how they got dressed in the morning or sharing a little bit too much about their spouse to convince themselves that it’s going great all the time. This is too much information for me to possess and process. We know too much of the wrong information about each other in modern life. It’s the damn phones unfortunately and being online too much. This is not good for my poor brain.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my brain and how to protect it because it is not always well. I don’t know why —faulty mood regulation? genetic vulnerability? stressful life events? Probably all of those things— but I have stopped caring why. All of my energy is now spent trying to stay sane. Tremendous energy. Really, you would not believe how much energy and money I expend in service of not losing my mind. It consumes me.

And it must be said that your question had a real ‘am I losing my mind?’ quality to it.

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I am from Southern California, Episcopalian. Growing up the LA Times would do a big feature on Ramadan every year, and I found it really fascinating and also slightly confusing. Protestants don’t really do lunar festivals so I found the dating unclear and grew up with the sneaking suspicion that there was Ramadan two or even three times a year but nobody would admit it. I don’t know why I thought people would do this. It might have been related to the sensation of “Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year”

The most shocking thing to me about Islam, which you so beautifully highlighted (made me tear up), is how many Muslims there are! I grew up in Baltimore and, infamously in Catholic school 5th grade, wondered out loud who country clubs let in if both Blacks and Catholics were banned? All this to say, I was sheltered enough to believe those were the only people to exist. When we eventually moved to central Pennsylvania, I found out there were Protestants. Still not so sure about them. JK! It took me to college (and actually studying abroad in Australia?) to realize there were a number of Jewish people. As a Philly resident for the past 15 years, I finally figured out there are Muslims. You'll be happy to hear my 1.5 and 3.5 year old both celebrate Ramadan at their "school" (fancy liberal daycare).

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It goes without saying that this column brings me great pleasure. Thank you for trusting me with your dilemmas.

The last Gentle Suggestions was so juicy, no? I’ve heard from a few of you but consider this your last call to tell me about any inappropriate crushes you’ve had. I want to hear all about it and I bet you do too. It’s 100% anonymous.

On to today’s pressing matters.

I know you posed this question when asking for questions but it is genuinely something I've been thinking about a lot lately... How do I have casual sex and not get murdered?

Wow. Another question about sex? During the holy month of Ramadan? While my father is still alive?? Have some respect for my poor family please.

Your question is not a hard one to answer and it really helped me understand some of the specific ways in which I frustrate my family so thank you for asking it. This is why I love questions honestly. Can’t get anywhere productive as a human being if questions aren’t being asked of you. And yes, my sweet family. I really do feel for them and I hope they will forgive me.

You see, we come from this semi-nomadic tribe called the Fulani. Our tribe are some of the most modest people the good lord has ever put on this earth. The Fulani language translation for modesty is interchangeable with shyness and discretion. This is enshrined into our unwritten code of conduct and it’s a very big deal to us. It’s etiquette on steroids. We all grow up learning about “pulakuu” which quite literally means the essence of being a Fulani. Along with modesty, our code of conduct has some very good moral values like self-control, discipline, wisdom, kindness, respect for others especially your elders and bravery which is my absolute favorite one. The Fulani are indeed a very brave people. If you read about our history and even the current ways in which we are being persecuted and discriminated against in parts of West Africa, I think you would agree too.

Because I was lucky to be born curious, I noticed that bravery was only ever really ascribed to the boys. Curiosity for a child is a very good thing because it will end up protecting you from a lot of bullshit and scams later in life. Tribal etiquette is all good until you start seeing the contours of a scam that tells you that only boys need to worry about being brave. What about a Fulani girl like me? They really beat the modesty and the shyness into me. The Fulani girl does not make direct eye contact. She is self-effacing. She is coy and demure. She is reserved and timid. Her vibe is extremely nervous around others.

People who know me today cannot believe how unbelievably shy I used to be. I’ve come a long way but some of the conditioning is still there and I fight it all the time. My sweet, sweet family. Are you starting to understand why I am a frustrating family member to have?

You know how those cheesy Christians always say “god made you and he don’t make no junk?” I really love that messaging because it is two of my favorite things: absolutely hilarious and also very true. The way god made me, I came out of the box with an innate need to understand why things had to be the way I was told they were. Those are my factory settings and I just cannot help it. I need to know things. So you can imagine that for much of my young life, I was constantly living at that tense intersection between the modesty expected of me and the bravery I thought I might be capable of. The tension finally became unbearable later in life and I made a choice. I was going to be a courageous young woman.

Casual sex is not an activity for shy people.

Oh and there is absolutely nothing casual about letting a stranger rearrange your guts.

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Because I love feminist lore, and because the name drives me insa…

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I was deeply moved when I experienced this light and shadows installation by the Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha…

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What do would you do if you are wildly in love with your friend (the secretly consuming Pride and Prejudice kind) but this friend is married to your other friend and you have no intention on acting on it (because that’s nuts) but the feeling won’t go away and maybe they know? But you don’t know.

I laughed a very nervous African kind of laugh when I read your question. Africans will know what I mean.

Let me introduce you to the concept of “wahala.” It is a Hausa word for trouble or problem. A lot of Nigerians will tell you that it’s Yoruba but no, it’s a Hausa word. That is neither here nor there but this is my newsletter and I can settle West African scores and answer your question at the same time.

I try to live a life of no wahala but of course, there is always small and big wahala to be had. This felt like a big wahala kind of problem so of course, all week, I’ve been buzzing thinking about your note. It was electric to receive because well, other people’s wahala can be thrilling. I immediately wanted to know the gender breakdown and sexual orientation of everyone involved, if you were single yourself or attached and if this was white wahala or not. These thoughts really did travel at the speed of light because as they were rattling through my brain, it was also dawning on me how ungenerous and unkind my thinking was. This kind of thinking used to get me in trouble a lot. The truth is none of those things matter at all and I am sorry. We listen and we don’t judge at Crème de la Crème.

It is not a crime to have a crush.

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