Dear Amy: My husband, “Bart,” and I have been together for eight years.
He has several tattoos on this left arm.
Two days ago, Bart told me that he was going to get some touch-ups done on his existing tattoos.
When he arrived back home, he not only had the touch-ups done, but a brand-new tattoo.
This new tattoo is approximately 8 inches long — starting at his neck and going to the middle of his chest. The placement of it shocked me. I cried for hours the first night.
Bart asked if we could talk about it, but I just said, “I can’t talk about it yet.” I am now on day three, and my feelings about this have not changed.
I know this is permanent. I am just going to have to get over it, but I don’t know how to explain my feelings to my husband, because I am struggling to understand them.
Right now, I do not want him touching me and we are barely speaking to each other. My husband is a very vain man. I know I have wounded his pride/ego with my reaction to this.
What should I do?
– Teary
Dear Teary: You say you don’t want to wound your husband’s ego, but days of silence punctuated by crying will be worse for him, his ego, and your relationship, than the truth.
This is his body. He has the right to adorn it.
So, tell him: “I’m not really sure why this has upset me so much, but it is the placement of it that is triggering my emotions.”
It’s time to be honest about that.
Dear Amy: In a supermarket, If the checkout lane has two positions across an aisle from each other, and only one position is manned, the line forms for that position.
If the second position subsequently opens up, should all customers remain in the one original line — or is it OK if some customers to filter across and form a second line for the newly opened position?
– Wondering
Dear Wondering: Forgive my presumption, but I’m assuming that you might be one of my extra-polite Canadian readers, because, well, it’s hard to imagine any American standing in a full queue when there was an adjacent available cashier.
To answer your question (and this exact scenario happened to me, yesterday), many times a cashier opening up will say, “I’ll take the next customer over here…” and the next person in the original line will shift over and start a new queue.
Sometimes the last person in the original line will race forward to take the first slot in the new queue, but this is bad form.
Dear Amy: “Grieving” wrote to you, saying their daughter had become estranged, due to a mix-up of the timing of a funeral, which the daughter had missed.
Has it come to this? Family members will initiate a total estrangement over a relatively minor issue?
– Disappointed
Dear Disappointed: My theory is that — like many other dynamics relating to families — estrangement is actually quite complicated.
