Mr know it all: Of loners and the unwanted

From relationship blues to money woes, Mr Know It All has the answers!.

Q. Dear Mr Know It All,

I am a 16-year-old girl. I am a little fat and have a dark complexion while most of my cousins are skinny and have beautiful features. They get a lot of attention from boys while I don’t and it’s bothering me a great deal. I am unable to sleep and most of the time I feel depressed. I have stopped going out because whenever I meet my cousins and friends they make me feel as if I’m from another planet. Their Facebook walls are covered with messages from boys whereas mine simply displays my own status updates. Moreover, my cousins get lots of phone calls from boys and even hang out with them while I am all alone. I may be better than them in studies but my weight issue is ruining everything for me. I cannot discuss this with my mother as I don’t want her to worry and as a result I have started smoking to deal with this depression. I am literally crying as I write to you because I just want to live a normal life.

Loner

A. Here’s a little secret: 16-year-old boys are just as — if not more — scared of 16-year-old girls than they are of them. It’s a fact all the great philosophers forgot to write in their big fancy books of wisdom. Really, there’s no mystery about the opposite sex that should have you in shambles at such a young age. I mean sure, post-pubescent teenagers battling with hormonal overdrive can be a little hypercritical when it comes to physical appearances, but if you sincerely want to end up with a nice man one day and have an army of cute little children with him, you’ve got to learn to avoid such silly emotional triggers. You feel pain and loneliness because you’re not able to be what you want to be. You’ve got a problem with your weight? Why not muster the willpower to start jogging for 30 minutes every evening right after you’ve completed your daily homework? You don’t like your dark complexion? Why not focus your attention on the many successful dark-skinned singers, actors, activists, authors, politicians and scientists who never let such a trivial aspect of their appearance hold them back? You want to be confident and popular with the boys? How about learning to regard them as potential friends? Don’t wait for them to come to you, initiate friendships you want to have. You’d be surprised to know just how much a genuinely nice, pleasant personality is worth to most guys. So you see, only you have the power to make life’s unpleasant aspects a thing of the past. It’s these little changes that will lead you towards a happy, normal life, not the cigarettes. Those will come in handy only if you wish to stay wretched and want the misery to end 20 years too early.

Q. Dear Mr know It All,

I have, or had, a really good friend and we were like the best of friends, sharing everything and talking all the time. But then, out of the blue, he started avoiding me without any reason. Before, he would text me at midnight and now he doesn’t even reply to my text. When I ask him why, he goes like, “I didn’t get your message!” I know he’s lying, but whenever I ask him what’s wrong he just says, “I’m sorry” and leaves it at that. To make things worse, he’s making all these new friends — and girlfriends — and he has forgotten all about me. He is really important to me and I have a crush on him, but he doesn’t care about me anymore. It’s been two months since we actually talked, and I have really tried to keep in touch with a friendly, “Are u alive?”, to emotional blackmailing like, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” but nothing works. What should I do?

Feeling unwanted

A. Sigh, I’m sorry, I have to be the bad-news-bearer here, but it looks like the boy is simply not interested in maintaining a friendship with you. My guess is your little ‘crush’ caused him to freak out a bit. You can go on and torture yourself by trying to figure out what it is that you did wrong, or how things could have gone differently had you done it better, but it’ll all a futile exercise that’ll only make things fester for you. Just do your thing and eventually someone right will come along to sweep you off your feet — preferably after you’ve graduated from college, if there’s anything sane left in this world!

Q. Dear Mr Know It All,

Women are supposed to loathe their saas but my fiance can’t stop doting on my mother. We’ve been engaged for a year and though it was pretty much ‘arranged’, we knew each other before and used to hang out pretty often. Unfortunately, I feel the primary relationship is between my mother and my fiancée with me somewhere in the background. When the two get together, I feel like a stranger in the room; she forgets all about me and starts a never-ending conversation with my mother. I just need her to know that she is marrying me and not my mother and that the two of us have a future together.

Three’s a crowd

A. Ask 7 billion people what they want out of life and the answer will be quick and simple: to be happy. It’s funny, really, because 99% of those people are lucky enough to actually make the journey and reach their happy-place in this lifetime, only to find themselves burdened with the silliest of hang-ups known to man, virtually unable to enjoy the small pleasures of life… like watching onlookers burn with envy because you’ve got something they don’t, for instance. You, I’m afraid, easily make the majority, sure, but is it the ideal side to be on? Not really… So, unless you’re quick to realise that it’s the expectation, the constant yearning to be “happier” that keeps us from ever getting there, you’re well on your way to becoming just another run-of-the-mill husband who’ll grumble over everything his wife does. A healthy saas-bahu relationship is rare (so rare, in fact, that I think you can actually make some money by selling tickets here), so stop being paranoid and be glad the woman who raised you and the woman you’ll be spending the rest of your life with aren’t at each other’s throats already like Star Plus taught them!

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 29^th, 2012.