Dear Abby Letter From Fed Up in Ohio Likely Describes a Beard Situation

Advice columnists no doubt get many more inquiries dealing with consanguinamory situations then are printed. I’m thinking this one sailed in under the radar. FED UP IN OHIO wrote to Dear Abby...

My boyfriend is 31 and still goes to his mother's house and spends the night, even though we live less than 15 minutes away. He knows it upsets me, yet every time she asks him to spend the night, he goes...His relationship with his mother is a large part of why we aren't married, and the fact that he continues to spend the night there is leading to huge fights. 

If he was doing this with another man, what would you think?

If he was doing this with another woman, what would you think?

Readers of this blog are not blind to what is really going on here, if he is, indeed, going to his mother’s instead of somewhere else. Many people commenting on the column at its website indicate they see the same thing when looking at this.



He’s willing to do it even if it upsets his live-in girlfriend. The girlfriend doesn’t mention his mother making requests, like that he be there for security or to help her with something. She doesn’t mention him having any emotional or mental health issues; only that he goes and spends the night with his mother and his relationship with her.

I pulled out this from the middle of the letter...

He left our children home alone while I worked overnight because it was her birthday.

Given that she didn’t make a bigger deal of this, it is likely that at least one of the “children” is an older teen or a young adult, fully capable of babysitting a sleeping younger child. This would imply the woman writing the letter is older than the boyfriend she's writing about (no surprise, if he has a thing for mom) and already had a child or children before him. The younger child or children could be from both of them, or he could have had them with someone else. Ohio has no age requirement for a child being home alone, but of course it could be considered neglect or endangerment for a very young child to be left for hours. Not so much if we’re taking about, for example, a 17-year-old or older being there to watch over a 6-year-old. Latchkey kids also used to be a thing, and probably still are.

Dear Abby didn’t get it...

That your boyfriend would leave minor children alone and without supervision while he spends the night with his mother -- birthday or not -- is unusual. It would have been more logical for him to have invited his mother to your house to celebrate the occasion.

Not if they’re having sex, though.

There’s the possibility that they are not consanguinamorous. But that would be far more odd than the simple explanation that he goes there and has sex with her. Men in his position know that upsetting their live-in girlfriend is probably going to mean less sex with that girlfriend. So, unless he isn’t interested in sex in general, why would he be willing to upset her just to talk with mom? Because he’s getting sex he wants even more (with mom) when he does the thing that upsets his girlfriend.

Making someone an unwitting beard isn’t a good thing. But is more likely to happen when people can't be honest about who they love.

If consanguinamory was decriminalized and destigmatized, there would be far fewer situations like this.

We don't recommend cheating. We support ethical nonmonogamy. Cheating in a situation like this is especially risky because of prejudices, often inserted in law, against consanguinamory.