Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.
Dear Prudence,
I am 25 and gay. I was dating a 30-year-old woman with a 12-year-old son. They both frequently spent time in my open-air loft. I have a curtain that acts as a privacy barrier in the bedroom/office area. There is a full bath upstairs but the previous owner put a half bath downstairs. There is no reason why my girlfriend’s son should ever have needed to go upstairs. If he needed something, he could shout for it. He was constantly breaking the rule about coming upstairs.
He claimed he either wanted his mom or made up some lie like he couldn’t find the remote. We never had adult time when he was here, but the constant barrage into my personal space set my teeth on edge. His mom just continued to make excuses and didn’t enforce any basic manners on him over this. Then one afternoon after we went out hiking, my girlfriend had a work emergency and left her son watching movies at my place.
I went up to take a shower and drew the curtain. I yelled at her son not to come up. As I was running the shower, I stepped out in a bathrobe and went behind the decorative screen to get some lotion. When I popped out, I saw her son creeping into the bathroom with his phone out. I screamed at him and he ran and locked himself in the downstairs bathroom. When his mom got home, we ended up fighting because I “mistakenly” saw him trying to take naked pictures of me. There was nothing on the phone so I overreacted. We ended up breaking up. My dilemma is that I know my ex is currently dating a woman with daughters around the same age and younger than her son. I am worried that it might come across as vindictive and paranoid if I tell her something, but I would never forgive myself if I saw these girls end up on the nightly news. Help!
—Little Creep
Dear Little Creep,
I don’t think you have enough to go on to accuse this kid of being a pervert. It sounds like he’s pretty open and non-sneaky about his lack of regard for personal space and always wanting to be around an adult. And he behaved similarly when you were there without your ex as when she was around: making his way throughout the house to where the grown-ups were.
I’m sure the shower incident was jarring and even disturbing, and it was totally reasonable for you to want assurances that no photos were taken. But the fact that his phone was out, to me, doesn’t say much. Everyone’s phone is out all the time. At least some of your disgust seems to be coming from the fact that you just found this kid really annoying. It’s good you’re not dating his mom anymore and don’t have to navigate this dynamic. But he’s just a child and the evidence against him is super spotty. You should trust that your ex’s new partner will take appropriate precautions when it comes to the way she supervises her daughters around other kids, including their clingy new potential stepbrother.
Classic Prudie
Every time I see my mother-in-law, she tells me I look tired. Every. Time. We’ve known each other for a decade, so I would think she’d understand by now that this is just, you know, how I look. I’ve tried everything: laughing it off, ignoring it, attempting elaborate under-eye concealer hacks gleaned from YouTube beauty influencers, talking to my husband about how it makes me feel—that is, terrible…
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