A long dry spell around November 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

First of all, please allow me pay homage to your site. It rocks, really.

Okay… where to start? Well, I am a 19 year-old male college freshman and I have a problem — I don’t drink. Doesn’t sound like a problem yet? Ah, but read on… I go to a school where it would be the understatement of the year (perhaps of the decade) to say, “lots of people drink.” EVERYBODY here drinks (except me, it seems). There are huge parties every weekend, beer flows in the streets, people sleep on the lawns, etc… Typical college campus.

This isn’t normally a problem for me. I study a lot, I juggle, I play ping-pong, I do lots of stuff that doesn’t require drinking. The problem arises in my relations with the opposite sex. Now, I hope it’s not too weird not to “want” a girl who smells like beer and/or who just threw up on herself from drinking way too much.

This is why it’s been difficult for me to do anything relationship-wise, because I am afraid that anybody I ask out will be a drinker, and everything we do will end up being based on that activity, which I abhor. I also fear that when/if I start dating a girl and I tell her that I don’t drink, she will drop me like yesterday’s Bud and go find herself a brand new Jack Daniels to party with.

(more…)

Motherly advice on August 17, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I have a son that has been dumped after a 3 1/2 year relationship. He is a total basket case, almost suicidal and drinking HEAVILY. If he continues trying to drown his sorrow, he’ll turn into an alcoholic. How, as a mother, can I help him????

— Polly

Dear Polly,

Go, Mom! Excellent question. Over to you, Belleruth: “What you should do depends on whether he lives at home or not and how long this is going on and how bad the drinking really is. If he’s at home and it’s been going on for a long time, then it’s definitely your business, cause if he’s with you, his moods, habits and behavior affect you directly. It might even be useful to him for you to tell him to shape up and get a grip, cause he’s driving you nuts and you’re tired of tripping over beer cans and trying to keep your mood up in the face of such perpetual, unmitigated anguish. If the drinking is out of control and he lives at home you can tell him to stop, get help or get out. If it’s only been a few weeks, you can listen, make encouraging little noises, occasionally suggest something helpful, like “Why not go out and make believe you’re not miserable for a coupla hours… maybe you’ll even wind up having a halfway decent time…” etc etc., and when his friends call, you could even occasionally intervene, as in: ‘Yo, Bob, take him out, will ya? He’s turning into eggplant parmesan on that sofa.’ And if it’s been a really long time and nothing is changing, you might want to suggest AA, therapy, a support group, etc. for him, or try Al-Anon for yourself — or at least see a drug/alcohol counselor and get a professional evaluation on how bad it is and what you can do. Otherwise the best — and most difficult — thing a mom can do is take deep breaths and try not to die a thousand deaths while watching the kid suffer, wish him well, and know that this too will pass.”

Love,
BG/BR

I have a confession to make. I am a text-holic. And now that I have unlimited  messaging on my iPhone, I have made it my mission to get my money’s worth. I use it to send quick messages to people I don’t really want to talk to. I use it to convey important information when talking on the phone isn’t practical. (i.e. “Movie starts @ 7:15. See u there,” from staff meeting) And I use it to flirt.

Clearly I’m not alone. At least, you know, not in one sense. Text-flirting is sufficiently popular — and landmine-laden — to have spawned not only the unseemly neologism “flirtexting,” but also the book Flirtexting: How to Text Your Way to His Heart and more Web sites than you can shake a rotary phone at.

But of all the tips available — including these new ones from Your Tango — the most important is this: Do not text while under the influence. I have sent out more mortifying texts than I care to remember.

Fortunately, friends don’t let friends text tipsy. My roommate has actually taken to giving me her phone at the start of a girl’s night out with the admonishment, “No matter how hard I beg for this back. DO NOT GIVE IT TO ME!” It’s the same category of bad as drunk dialing, only somehow so much worse as it’s down in the written word, memorialized for all the world to see, and undeniable in the sober light of morning. And likely full of typos.

Here, your weekly installment of Ask Lynn, the advice column penned by BG’s alter ego at MSN.com (powered byMatch.com). This week, we meet Not Sure, who, during a sloppy three-way (him, her, Johnnie Walker) blurted to her boyfriend that his “stamina” was “terrible.”

This did not go well.

What now? Can they bounce back … into bed and otherwise? Find out what Lynn has to say, and then come back here to comment!