Thieving neighbour needs to be confronted

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2019 (2500 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My neighbour steals stuff out of my garage when I’m at the lake. I knew he was doing it, so I hinted around about it in July. He didn’t deny it, his face went red, but he kept stealing. He must be nuts. Things kept going missing every weekend from my locked garage. I think he must have seen the key hanging there before the summer and had a copy made.

I put a new heavy-duty lock on the door three weekends ago and nothing more has gone missing. It’s too late to pour grass killer all over his yard, but I’d sure like to. What can I do instead?

— Disgruntled Garage Guy

Dear Disgruntled Garage Guy: Next time you see him in his yard, call him over and say, “Next time you try to monkey with my garage door or lock, I will have you on camera, and press charges. Don’t come anywhere near my garage.”

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: I think I like my best friend’s husband better than she does. He reverts to his old former, teasing self when he’s around me, and I think he’s a hoot. My friend, on the other hand, finds him unamusing and tedious since he had an affair and then stupidly confessed. It destroyed her happiness, yet she doesn’t want to give him up to the other woman — a person we all know from sharing a certain sport.

The other woman is still in love with him and wants him to marry her, but he got tired of her and her neediness, and it seems he just wants his wife and family back, the way it was. He mistakenly thought his best bet was to clear his conscience and make a clean breast of things — so he confessed to his wife. She’s a mess now! If only she didn’t love the guy so much. She is just so hurt. Even when she walks, it looks like she’s carrying heavy weight around.

He feels terrible, but it’s too late to take the confession back. I’m just a friendly outsider, looking in. Do you think they can work it out?

— Sorry For Them Both, Winnipeg

Dear Sorry For Them Both: You’re not that sorry for them. You say it seems you like the husband better than his wife does. They don’t need you over, joking and being a friendly, flirty lady. Instead, they need an experienced marriage counsellor or psychologist who deals with couples in trouble. The couple themselves have no answers. Suggest they go, as a decent move, and then you vamoose for good. The wife can find better friends.

They need to sort through the painful “emotional material” this has opened up, and which now sits between them. They need to talk about their happy years, and when the happy union started sliding off the tracks. Or maybe it didn’t. It may be the husband just got sick of himself and felt old, and the new woman gave him an ego boost and provided adventure and novelty sex. He may have felt young again.

It’s interesting he dumped his affair partner. She wasn’t the answer, either. He wanted his old mate back. But you can’t put your marriage partner into a world of pain and expect the marriage to start all over again, and be happy — without a lot of work, and luck.

It’s an old wives’ tale that a person who is truly sorry and wants to make amends will immediately (or ever) be forgiven. Some things people just can’t forgive. There’s also a whole school of thought that it’s “the secret itself” that causes the rift between the married couple when there’s an affair going on. But then that brings up the question: who really deserves to carry the burden of the “secret affair”?

Once this man decided he wanted to end the affair and make things right with the wife, he might have been better to invest his deep remorse — if that’s what he felt — into making her happier than she’s ever been for the rest of their lives. And keep this in mind: sometimes a married person (like this woman) is steadfastly looking past what might be a temporary affair, and doesn’t want or need the other person to cut out her heart with the details of it, particularly when it’s finished…

And maybe this betrayed woman isn’t ready to joke around and act like everything’s going to be all right, because she’s thinking of leaving him now, even though she has loved him until now.

Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6.

Maureen Scurfield
Advice columnist

Maureen Scurfield writes the Miss Lonelyhearts advice column.

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