I don’t know where to start. My mother-in-law doesn’t like me all too well. I’ve changed my clothes, covered up my tattoos, took out my piercings. I had a rough upbringing, but I graduated from college with honors in English.

I’ve done all right for myself. We have a house, which is great, but my husband’s family dislikes me. I am a photographer, a little strange in taste, but I like me, my family likes me and my friends like me.

When we first started dating, his mother made comments about my clothes, so I thought okay, I can dress nicer. Sure. But she never visits us, even though we don’t live far away. We always go over there.

Two weeks ago my husband and I are having some drinks, he gets chatty so I decide to ask him, “Why don’t they like me? What is wrong with me?” And he says, “If you want respect in my family and the freedom to do what you want, you must have a good job and make good money.”

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First off, I feel silly writing to someone out there in cyberspace, but I need a neutral person’s opinion on my current situation. About two years ago my boyfriend of three years decided he wanted to move across the country. I didn’t go with him.

To this day the entire time he’s been there he told me he loves me and I am the only person for him. Recently he said he could marry me if I moved out there.

He lives with my best friend’s brother. Last month she went out to visit her brother and came back with some fun facts about what this guy has been doing behind my back. Once he moved out there, he became obsessed with a girl and saw her for a little under a year.

They decided to have an “open relationship” and sleep with whomever they wanted. He never told me he was seeing or dating anyone else. He told me he slept with someone once a year ago, but she moved to Los Angeles. In case you were wondering, though, she’s still living in his townhouse.

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Semper Fidelis

I was caught with explicit text messages and photos on my phone from another woman. I have been with my wife three years and I love her. After seeing how bad I hurt her, I understand I don’t deserve her love ever again.

She says she still loves me but doesn’t know how we can make it work. At the time, I didn’t think the text messages were all that bad, but when I look at it from her point of view, it is the same as cheating.

I never imagined I would be in this situation. We have been through two arduous military deployments. In both of them I had multiple opportunities to cheat, but at the first hint of anything, I rejected them because I knew how much she meant to me.

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Over the past 15 months, I became close to two girls, “Abby” and “Jenna.” We were like the Three Musketeers, e-mailing each other every single day, writing letters, exchanging phone numbers, always encouraging each other.

About a month ago Abby started to grow distant and then suddenly started to ignore both me and Jenna with absolutely no explanation at all. Jenna and I tried repeatedly to ask for an explanation but received nothing. It seems Abby replaced the two of us with a group of cooler and more popular girls.

That’s not my big problem. It hurts, but it’s happened to me before and I’m trying to move on with relative success. However, Jenna is having a much worse time.

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My mother-in-law is an alcoholic. She drove me, my husband and our baby of five weeks in the car while drunk, unbeknownst to us. That baby is now eight, and we’re still dealing with her drinking issues.

We live five hours away so we only see her two or three times a year. Last Christmas we went to visit her, as we do every year. My husband’s sister and her children were staying with my mother-in-law. One of the children was vomiting everywhere, so we decided to limit our time there.

On our last night we announced we were leaving first thing in the morning so we would be saying our goodbyes. My mother-in-law replied, “Well, you have to come here tomorrow morning because I didn’t give you your presents yet.”

When my husband asked if she could get them now, she blurted out she couldn’t get them because she hadn’t wrapped them, and she hadn’t wrapped them because she was still suffering from a week-long stomach flu and had lost six pounds.

I was shocked. And very, very angry. She put her grandchildren in a germ-infested house, and our three kids ultimately spent their Christmas vacation sick with stomach flu. It was the worst illness my children have had, and I felt bad I could not protect them.

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