DEAR CHICO AND DELAMAR...

Several months ago, my little sister approached me in tears and told me that her boyfriend, having convinced himself that she was cheating on him, hacked her e-mail address and looked through her text messages to find “evidence”. Even when he found none, he waited for my sister after work and confronted her. Things got so heated that security guards had to get involved.

Of course, I had to do something.

I told my parents about the incident and effectively hid my sister from her boyfriend for a couple
of weeks. Things changed, however, when my sister got back with her boyfriend. Since they have gotten back together, she has refused to talk to me, and from what our mutual friends tell me, acts as if nothing happened between her and her boyfriend.

What hurt even more was that at a recent family gathering, my sister and her boyfriend were there and
my parents were also acting as if nothing happened. I couldn’t make myself stay for very long because I would always find myself getting angry and tearing up whenever the boyfriend was in the room.

I felt betrayed, not just by my sister but by my family as well. Are my feelings valid, or am I overreacting? Should I accept the fact that my sister and my family has chosen this guy over me? -Annie

CHICO SAYS…

Your feelings are your feelings, no need for validation from anyone. You were hurt, and that’s that.

As for your sister, you did your duty.

She went to you for help, and that’s exactly what you gave her, at least your version of it. Now that the tide has turned, and you’re on the outside looking in, is nothing that some time won’t address. Eventually your family will stop treating you as the “enemy”, and things will find its proper equilibrium.
As for your sister, whether or not she made the right decision to get back with her boyfriend is her problem, not yours. Even if it eventually proves that it was a mistake (again) to return to his arms, it’s her lesson to learn, not yours.

Sometimes, when you’ve done all you can for someone you love, and they still choose a path different from what you advised, all you can do is let the events unfold as they will. You can’t live your little sister’s life for her, or make her decisions; all you can do really, is watch in the sidelines and
hope she makes the right choices.

And if it turns out her choices were wrong, hopefully you still love her enough, despite her flawed judgments, to help out any which way you can.

My only advice is to not take it personally. She probably shut you out, not because she doesn’t love you, but because she feels ashamed that, there she is, crawling back into the arms of the man she was asking you to protect her from. She probably just doesn’t know how to explain to you
why she was so quick to put herself back in the situation you extricated her from, at her previous insistence.

It’s like you know her best, and she feels transparent and naked, as if you see through all her foolishness and she feels vulnerable from your imminent judgment.

Don’t take it too hard. Strike it up as the folly of youth and think of yourself as an unintended victim of a
crossfire. None of your family members meant to hurt you, they just did, unwittingly.

Personally, when put in positions like these by people I love, I just think that I had my moments too, when I was brash and reckless with my actions, hurting the people who love me the most. It didn’t mean I loved them less, I just didn’t know better. Then I switch the roles around, and I find
myself more understanding, more forgiving.

DELAMAR SAYS…

I think you might be taking things a little to the extreme. This situation is not about you versus the boyfriend. Was it ever?

Of course not.

Actually, the whole point of the problem is about trust and communication between the lovers namely
your sister and her boyfriend. Was he overly suspicious? Maybe. Did he have stalker-ish tendencies with your sister? Yes. Were his suspicions unfounded?

Well, as he later discovered, yes. BUT! Well, they patched things up and kissed and made up. If your
sister can forgive her boyfriend for all the stunts he’s pulled, I hardly think you are in a position to insist to protest your sister’s decision. After all, he is your sister’s boyfriend, it is she who will deal with his issues and it is she who will spend her time with him as a potential mate. You are nowhere
in the equation. This is between her and her boyfriend.

My advice? Lose the idea that this is about you. Lose the idea that your sister has to choose between you and her boyfriend. Lose the idea that the family is siding with the boyfriend and betraying you. This is not about you. This is about the two of them mainly.

I’m not asking you to pretend that nothing happened. I don’t think anyone is forgetting that small detail. If anything, everyone is just making sure that things go back to normal and make things a little bit easier to handle for everyone. After all, your parents trust your sister to make her own decisions. I’m sure they didn’t like it one bit either. But as a means of supporting your sister and letting her live her own life, they are living with her decision.

If everyone is letting this one go, including your sister who is most affected, I think you should take
her cue and support her. I know it’s hard. Of course, you don’t want your sister to be with a man who
doesn’t trust her and who seems overly suspicious of her. Of course you will want to protect your sister at all cost. But this is simply her call to make. And for now at least your sister has decided to give her boyfriend a second chance. So, be there to support her not because you trust or like her boyfriend but because you respect the fact that she has to make decisions on her own about every aspect of her life.

It is the same right that you have over your own life and more specifically over your own love life.