Dec 15, 2015 3 min read

Q. My wife’s niece has a 3-year-old child whom we love dearly. We help take care of this child and pay for a great deal of the baby’s care.

The problem is, my wife frequently offers advice to her niece. The niece cusses her out, and my wife ends up in tears. But my wife insists she has to keep doing this in order to help the baby.

I disagree with her logic. I told her she is simply repeating the same pattern over and over, setting herself up for misery. This niece is not a nice person. She treats her own mother (my wife’s sister) poorly. Her crying is disturbing to me. My wife is a social worker and says that she helps strangers, so why can’t she help her own family? – Stop Already

A. She can’t help her own family because she is not objective enough. She also believes her background will somehow give her more authority over her niece, when it obviously does not. Unless your wife enjoys being a martyr (and she may), she should back off from giving advice and simply transfer her professional skills toward the care of the baby, who will benefit from being loved by someone who obviously has a great deal to give.

Dear Annie: I keep reading letters from women who are concerned that their husbands of many years look at porn, go to strip clubs or have affairs. That sounds awful. But guess what can happen after 25 years of marriage? Husbands look forward to the last 25 years of their lives with their loving wives, and all of a sudden, the wives act as though they don’t like their husbands anymore. All affection stops and some wives even announce that there will be no more sex ever.

We men wonder what is going on and then realize that this is menopause. So now, the last 25 years are not going to be nearly as good as we had anticipated.

More than half of my male friends got divorced when their wives were in their late 50s, and sometimes the wife initiated the divorce. I have not had sex with my wife in years. Please don’t advise counseling or hormones. The women don’t believe anything is wrong, and they are justifiably reluctant to take drugs that have serious side effects.

So, ladies, decide which is better: Men viewing porn and masturbating or getting a divorce because the husbands are starved for affection and sex. There are two sides to every story. – S.

Dear S.: You have made a valid point that a lot of women will not like. But women who have lost their libido often don’t understand why their husbands aren’t equally uninterested, and sometimes, they don’t care enough to make any effort to maintain this part of their relationship. This risks the marriage. Most men need the affection and comfort that intimacy provides and are not only bewildered by this turn of events, but also hurt and sometimes resentful. Those who turn to masturbation via porn are excoriated. This should not be a zero-sum game. Both husbands and wives need to be educated about these changes and understand how to best handle them within their own marriages.

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