Each week, Prudence asks readers for their thoughts on the letters she’s received. Her reply will be available every Friday.

New from Slate’s advice family: Unhinged, a monthly dating column. Part advice, part investigation. Read the first edition now.

Hey Prudence,

I’d like to give another perspective to the young woman who was upset that her boyfriend of five months hadn’t brought her to meet his parents yet. My parents are, put nicely, extremely difficult people.

My father can’t be left alone in a room with a woman without making sexually inappropriate comments or a man without doing some sort of grotesque masculine posturing. My stepmom is always in a pyramid scheme. My stepdad is nice, but always drunk. And my mom is just a mean person. Not bigoted, really, just interpersonally really mean. I forget this sometimes because I’m used to her, but once when we were in high school, my brother brought a girl home, and it was 15 minutes before she was crying on the patio because of something my mother said. We never saw the girl again.

So we don’t bring people home. My brother and I have only ever introduced partners to family when convinced we had a long-term future together. Some of those relationships ended, one of them in part because my mom refused to cook anything for my brother’s partner, who had food allergies, that she could actually eat. If he’s bringing his fiancée to our dad’s, he always warns one of us so we can be there, so they’re never left alone together. If my sister has ever had a romantic partner, I don’t know, despite us being very close, because she keeps her family life and personal life extremely separate.

I don’t know what she tells her partners, but it must be some version of what I tell mine: I like you, and I don’t want you to have to deal with these awful people that I feel obligated to. I know that is a dealbreaker for people, but if you are ever in this situation, know you are likely being spared a mother-in-law from hell. This might not help that letter writer, but I hope it helps people in similar positions, because sometimes it is not as clean as just cutting family members off when they’re like this. Sometimes you have to do harm reduction in other ways. It does not mean you are less loved. It means you are loved enough to be protected.

—Meet the Parents? Maybe No.

Oh my God. Not that you asked, but I give you permission to leave the country for the holidays this year if you want to. These people sound terrible!

Hey Prudence,

Re Guess I’ll Have to Take My Parents’ Car Keys One Day Too: Please, please get her doctor involved. When my very independent mother fell on the stairs in her home and broke her collarbone and wrist, her doctor stepped up. He was the one who told her it wasn’t safe for her to live alone anymore. She was sad, but she accepted his directions without argument. While she was in the hospital, we started looking for a safe place for her to live. We’re so grateful to her doctor for using his position of authority to tell her the truth.

—Caterpillar

I hadn’t thought about the possibility that the doctor might be the one to convince her. If she has a good relationship with her provider, this is definitely something they should try.

Hey Prudence,

Re Dead Head: I feel like Prudie missed the mark on this one. Obviously, Dead Head is going to be a bit biased here, so I don’t think it’s fair to say the wife is controlling based on the limited (and mostly second or even third-hand) information provided. We don’t know the circumstances that led the friend’s wife to say that he’d seen enough Grateful Dead shows (the current iteration does something like 50 a year). Perhaps they were in financial trouble and needed to cut back on frivolous expenses. Maybe the friend was neglecting his obligations to the marriage, his home, or his family.

It’s also possible that the friend has been exaggerating his wife’s reaction to the situation to save face. It’s clear that the LW and their friend were both aware of the wife’s feelings on the matter, and they both willingly participated in the deception. I would argue that this is a valid reason for the wife to feel betrayed by both men. I wonder if the LW has a history of aiding and abetting his friend’s less-than-honorable behavior. The fact that the LW states he has no “obligation to her” because she’s not his wife, but he’s been, in his estimation, “nothing but nice” to her, really leads me to question whether this is in fact an accurate assessment of his actions and character.

—Brown Eyed Woman

Re-reading the letter, I do think I may have missed something, but it’s something slightly different from what you’ve suggested. I maintain that the couple should have had a conversation about her opposition to the concert—and that’s where an explanation about her reasoning could have come out. When I said she was controlling, it was a response to her not allowing her husband to see the letter writer. But just now, I realized that’s an assumption on his part (“It seems we’re not allowed …”) and not a confirmed fact. So I take it back, unless and until that’s clarified. But the “violated a sacred trust” allegation still suggests a level of drama and blame that I don’t like, so I’ve got my eye on her!

Hey Prudence,

Re Ashamed: Try to disentangle your feelings about the loss of the childhood and hometown you knew from your feelings about the migrants. It’s OK to feel a sense of loss when the place you grew up radically changes such that your childhood home no longer exists. You can allow yourself to feel that sense of loss.

But continue to be conscious of when you blame that sense of loss on the people who moved there, and replace any thoughts of hostility or stereotyping with something that recognizes their humanity and understands they are trying to make better lives for themselves—they are not trying to do this to you or anyone else. Be grateful that you grew up in a place that is one that people from other places want to escape to, rather than being from a place that you’d want to escape from. The practice of gratitude is very helpful in maintaining a peaceful mind and positive attitude.

—Rachel

That’s a great addition to the advice. Gratitude really does improve almost every situation.

Hey Prudence,

Re Conflicted: My answer is: It depends. You didn’t give much information, so I don’t know what you’re really dealing with here. Sounds like either option is going to be “emotionally taxing” for you. So it’s up to you to decide which is the better of two bad options.

Some couples might opt not to invite the crappy parent and instead deal with disappointment from other relatives. Others might opt to invite the crappy parent (perhaps with some guardrails in place) because they feel it’s easier than managing a bunch of disappointed, nosy extended family members.

Or some people (like my husband and me) might opt to simply avoid all that drama by NOT having a wedding at all and instead getting married in a simple legal ceremony with a couple of witnesses, followed by a nice dinner (no regrets!).

—TomTom

And you saved a lot of money, too!

Classic Prudie

I’m in college living in a double dorm room with a close friend. Her birthday was last week and I organized a surprise party for her that went about as badly as humanly possible and I don’t know what to do about it now. I knew that she was going out to dinner with her parents and she told me she expected to be back around 9 p.m. I pretended I might be out with friends and told her to text on her way in case she wanted to join us. A group of about 10 of us gathered at a friend’s room down the hall to get everything ready. She texted she was going to stop at our room but then might come out. Perfect, we all went into our room, hid under the beds and the desks, and basically just crammed wherever and turned the lights out…

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