CAROLYN HAX

ADVICE WITH ATTITUDE & A GROUNDED SET OF VALUES

I’ve been in a committed and monogamous relationship with a woman for about a year.

Dear Carolyn:

She has been in three significant relationships (one marriage and two long-term boyfriends), and each one ended because of the man’s sexual infidelity.

She gets really upset when I hug other women. She believes the hugs are inappropriate because I am in a relationship with her, and that I should stop the hugs if I care about her feelings. Of course I care about her feelings, but this feels like control to me, so I am resistant. I am totally confident in my ability to be monogamous and sexually faithful. Please help unravel this issue for us.

— C.

Dear C.: Wish I could.

But the work that needs doing is within her. I say this with great sympathy; she has been through enough pain to make anyone flinch.

But that doesn’t give her license to control you or make her pain someone else’s problem. She can ask you to do X or Y because she feels Z — we’re all entitled to ask — and, sure, you can agree to that willingly if that feels right to you and you want to. But you are likewise entitled to say no to her request. It’s your body, your behavior, your call.

And if you say no, she is not entitled to manipulate or guilt you or otherwise chip away at your peace of mind till you change your answer.

When you decided you would not change your behavior for her, her only valid, appropriate, healthy choices were to accept you on those terms or end the relationship. Just as you can do now with her.

The choice she made is not valid: to keep getting “really upset” and blackmailing you emotionally . Threatening you but not making changes herself. You are exactly right to identify that as control.

This has nothing to do with whether hugging other women is “appropriate.” That’s an eye-of-the-beholder standard for each of you to have and, as needed, reconcile. It is strictly a matter of who has a say in whose behavior.

Every relationship is a matter of trust. We tend to think of it as trusting another person, but really it’s about trusting ourselves. Trusting our ability to judge someone’s character. Trusting that what we think is good for us really is, and will last. Trusting we will be able to tell how it’s going and to read things accurately. Trusting we will be able to handle it and eventually be OK if something goes (even terribly) wrong.

By your description, your girlfriend is 0-fer. And that is the fundamental problem. Someone unable to trust herself is unable to sustain her part of an equal partnership, because the very foundation of intimacy is for both of you to let each other be yourselves.

Instead, she is doing the opposite, reaching into your business to try to change who you are and what you do in a joyless — and, always, self-defeating — act of protection. It is on her to establish for herself some sense of control over her feelings, judgment and circumstances through her own choices, not yours.

For this entire column’s worth of reasons, you can’t make her do that. But you can ask her to, as well as suggest warmly, for her own peace of mind, that she talk to a therapist about it.