This is what I was thinking too. In a dating relationship there should be nothing to "work out." I've seen too many women who were afraid to be without a boyfriend knock themselves out to "work things out" with someone with whom they were ultimately incompatible. (Not saying the young woman in the OP is doing that.) This also applies to marrying within one's faith (though I don't know if Anne intended it to). My general advice is to marry someone who shares your faith. Not your faith while dating? Break up. Faith changes while married? Work it out. This has nothing to do with Anne's post but something I saw earlier. But re: a Christian marrying outside the faith. "Keep the Bible out of it" was the advice. Really? If a person is a Christian who professes to believe the Bible, then... they aren't going to "keep the Bible out of it." Of course I have no idea how important faith is to the young woman in question. But if it is important to her, it's bad advice to suggest keeping the Bible out of the discussion. (I assume the same could be said of a devout Muslim and the Koran, or any other person of faith, though of course I'm always ready to be told I'm wrong.) ETA: I'm getting a general sense that many people think making a point of marrying someone who shares their faith is ultimately a fool's errand, because that can change. But so can many things. So then why bother to set any standards at all?

The OP said that the problem is fit.

They said t-shirts, get t-shirts, not polos. What is the difference with regard to fit? I don't see them as any different. Thicker, high quality t-shirts will look better. It's a weird requirement, and maybe should have been mentioned before the offer. Though I can't imagine they would see any problem with requiring people to wear t-shirts. But anyway, it is a requirement and not one that is hard to meet.

Ah. So they disregard the host telling them not to clean up, and clean up anyway? That to me is not a courteous guest. A courteous guest does as the host requests. Getting up and automatically starting to help, great. Asking what to do, very good. But once the host says "no, you go on and [whatever]; I/we will take care of this" it's time to stop. I have a strong preference not to have guests working in my house. Unless it's necessary (like, I need to wash some forks for dessert), I want to do the dishes after people have gone. Partly because I want to enjoy my guests while they are there. But also - I have had dirty dishes placed in a dishwasher that had some clean dishes left in it (no time to finish emptying before guests came) so clean dishes got rewashed unnecessarily. I have had things put down the disposal that should have gone in the trash or compost. Wine glasses have been broken because people put them in the dishwasher, then shut it, snapping the stem. I know which glasses are too tall and/or fragile. Etc. Thanking the host(s), of course, is always the right thing to do. (Not related to this, but remembering past threads - I cringe when I read that a good houseguest strips their bed before leaving. No! Ask the host what to do. Many times I have not wanted to deal with dirty sheets right away, and have preferred people leave them.)

Even if the adults told them to go off, and not worry about cleaning up?

That is interesting to me. I have a completely different perspective, though that's probably because I don't go to a job. But I'm not sure it would still apply even if I was working. I don't think we (husband and I) thought this way before kids when I was also working full time. I would love to have my husband feel he can sit down and read after dinner while I do the dishes. He has a hard job and gets very little downtime. On the other hand, sometimes I have days full of running around, errands, homeschooling (not this last anymore!) and I feel no shame in sitting down to read while he mows the lawn or whatever. Maybe you don't mean this in as strict a sense as I'm reading into it.

One of the things we are talking to our kids about are marketable skills, but also doing things that show they can learn new skills and can work. One of my kids took an adult-ed introductory welding class because he has an interest in metalwork. He is also a volunteer firefighter (at our very small, "neighborhood" fire station that gets very few calls). He worked with a friend doing construction for a month one summer, learning some skills - not enough to get a job as a carpenter or anything like that, but learning. He got a summer job based on those things on his resume, at a welding shop - not actually doing any welding, but doing general helper work. He's learning new skills from that job too. He's one planning a history major and is thinking of historic preservation. All the skills he's picking up may be helpful in that area too. Or maybe not... we'll have to see. At least we know he can learn, and work hard.

This is us, mostly (well, not the self-sufficient part, lol). In our house, my husband is A and I am the closest to B. I don't really work part-time - well, a whopping 2-3 hours a week - but I pretty much run the house, and I am still involved somewhat with the kids. I would generally do the cleaning up simply because overall I work less. Plus, I am very fast and efficient at getting it done. However in the scenario in the OP, my husband would probably help out unless/until I told him to stop. Because most likely he would have other tasks to do. I have to say I was a little put off - not in an offended way, more in a perplexed way - by "negotiation" in the poll. I'm probably picturing something far more complicated and business-like than was meant. :-)

I agree though this puzzles me a little. Everyone should be taught how to live frugally, how to shop, how to cook with staples, etc., regardless of their career path. A person can train for the most lucrative field ever and something can happen such that they need to be able to live on little money (even if only temporarily).

Yeah, most people don't listen to their parents anyway. And sometimes parents don't know best. Mine didn't... My dad was paying for my college, so he called the shots. I started off as a business major, per his instructions, even though I knew I was not suited to it. I hated it; got the first D of my life (finite math) and only got through my first two years because of my humanities programs. After those ended, I dropped out, got married stupidly, and ended up working in office jobs and then divorced 3 years later. I went back to school as an English major - and a working adult, going at night - and graduated the year my dad died. (of course by that time I was paying my own tuition, which was cheap.) But that was in a time when people could get decent jobs without a degree, and even a generic English degree wasn't scoffed at as useless. I had pretty good jobs till I quit to have kids. My father meant well, but he gave me lousy advice. I should never have gone into business. An English degree, with a concentration in technical writing, would have been a much better fit from the start.

I don't think the idea of well-paying 'day jobs' and time to pursue passions during off-hours gets short shrift. I think it's great if it can work, but I do think it is unrealistic for many people. Jobs that people don't enjoy can take a toll and don't always leave enough time for hobbies. And, as Poppy says, it's not always about a hobby.

:grouphug: :grouphug:

My daughter surprised me recently with the idea of going to aesthetician school instead of pursing an an art degree, which is what she'd been planning on for years. The snob in me recoiled at first, but realistically she would probably be better able to support herself in that field. Funny that I had that initial reaction, because I have no trouble in general with a kid pursuing a trade. She is starting community college full time in the fall and will continue to ponder, while she saves money and works toward a transferable AA in fine arts.

I don't see anyone encouraging their child to pursue their passion without regard to any income, nor is anyone advocating for careers as welfare collectors.

We've had that discussion here many times, with both our kids. Neither of them seem to be headed toward lucrative careers, though one never really knows what can happen. I think our (US) culture of pushing kids toward STEM careers as they only way to be successful is giving kids a lot of angst. Mine, anyway. It basically came down to this for us with our oldest, who had to drop pre-calc, which was required for a degree program he thought he was going to pursue (half-heartedly, it turns out): if it's important to you to make a lot of money, push through the math and get the technology degree. If it's not important, study what you really love. So, a history degree it is. I could have predicted this when the kid was 5 years old. ETA: Actual career is as yet undefined, but "working in a museum" is the desire. I've long said that his ideal career is village blacksmith in a living history museum.

Is that really a personal detail though? I don't really care who knows I was born in Buffalo, NY, and it can be a bit of a conversation starter because it seems most everyone either knows someone from Buffalo or has something to say, good or bad, about Buffalo. Are people being detained by strangers pestering them about personal details?

From my perspective (an outsider who has not dealt with that particular problem), I think what your daughter does is great. It's a good lesson for the waiter not to make assumptions. But I can also see why it would get old, having to deal with it. I kind of get it, as an older mom who has been mistaken for granny many times.

This makes me wonder where this sort of thing happens to people. I've lived all my life in diverse metropolitan areas on either east or west coast. I can't comprehend the notion that there are people who think someone who is not white must come from another country. (Please note that I said "can't comprehend" not "I disagree with.") It makes no sense to me, but I wonder if that's because of where I've lived.

I know this is such a trivial question in this thread, but I am fascinated by this. What does that mean? Like, there's a big football rivalry? Or your school had some scandal attached to it? Hard to imagine having to brace myself for such a question. And I did not to to an impressive school.

When I was a kid (before age 10), we camped for 2 weeks every summer. We didn't travel to visit family; everyone lived in the same area, no more than an hour away. When I was 10 we moved from NY to CA, and vacations changed. We didn't camp so much, and didn't go as often. Since marriage and kids, we have had periods when we took a real vacation every year, and periods where we have not. Many vacations were tacked on to my husband's business trips. Mostly now we go to stay a few days in PA State Park cabins, with the occasional 2-3 day trips someplace else. Couple of thing have things curtailed our travel: lower income, dog that had to be kenneled and didn't like it, kids with diverging schedules. I think our "big" vacation days might be over, but... I might be wrong. :-)

Sure, it's always fine to turn down a job offer. But according to the OP, he has accepted the offer which is making things more complicated. From the first post in the thread:

Not necessarily. My sister loves parties, loves being the center of attention. If my mom, or dad, or I had said we didn't want a party, she would have assumed we didn't mean it and would have thrown us a party over our objections. Because, who doesn't love a party? She does, so everyone else must, right? :glare: OP, glad you got it worked out!

And if someone said to me "tell me a little about yourself" I would have no clue what to say. No idea what aspects of my life might be interesting to them. Sorry, I get your intent, but for me that would be a terrible question. I'd want to answer with "what would you like to know?" Or I'd turn it around to them. Seems awkward.

I think this is one of those things that can be quite innocent and well-intended as a way to get to know people, but because some people are clumsy, or jerks, a general bias against it has developed in certain circles. Actually, I'd never heard of any issues with it except here on this board and via links people have posted in the past. I remember one which depicted a person very rudely insisting that a person "couldn't be from here" or some such - the details are gone but I remember that it was very over-the-top, extreme to the point of caricature. Not that that means no one ever is like that - of course there are rude, clueless people around. My church has a lot of graduate students attending - people who come from all over the US and the world. It would be very odd for me to meet a new student and not ask "where are you from?" whether they have an accent or not, because most people are from elsewhere. But it's part of a conversation. I've never had anyone ask me where I'm from that wasn't part of a conversation. Do people routinely walk up to strangers and randomly ask where they are from? That would be weird.

I don't know anything about him as an adult. I didn't say he wasn't a victim as a child. Of course he was!