Good Advice Interlude: How Do I Tell My Parents I’m in a Queer Relationship?

Readers sometimes send Bad Advisor their real-ass questions to answer, so the Bad Advisor is periodically going to try her hand at answering them. If you’d like to submit a question for a Good Advice Interlude, use the “ask” form!

A reader asks:

I’m not sure if you’re still doing the ‘Good Advice Interlude’, but if you are, I’d like some advice. I’m queer, and I’m currently in a relationship with my partner (whom I love very much). We’ve been dating for a while now, but I haven’t told my parents yet. My parents are both somewhat aware that I’m queer, but they haven’t really acknowledged my gender/sexuality since I came out. My partner is supportive of me telling them about our relationship, but I don’t know how. Any words of wisdom?

Hello, reader! Hooray for your happy and supportive relationship!

In the absence of any bright red flags that you didn’t mention here — such as your parents being actively hostile to you/your identity, or to queer folks in general — rather than “somewhat aware,” (perhaps also avoidantandawkwardabout your identity and sexuality? ask me how I know lolololol) I think you have a high likelihood of a good outcome here by just being matter-of-fact about your relationship’s existence, enthusiastic about your partner, and unavailable for debates or interrogations.

Is it possible this is one of the first serious relationships you’ve told your family about, in addition to being one of the first relationships that you think they’re going to read as queer? If so, we’re probably talking about a couple shifts happening at once in your family dynamic:

• Parents shifting from “aware my child is queer, mostly avoiding whatever I think that means” to “accepting my child is queer, and embracing what my child says that means.”
• Parents shifting from “child is fundamentally an extension of me, needs constant parenting” to “child is their own person, can do what they want” (please note that depending on your family dynamic and history, this transition can happen literally any time, not just to young adults and their parents. the bad advisor’s parents did not make this transition until she was a grown-ass woman many times over.)

And you’re navigating this too, right? So you might be tempted to (re?)occupy your child-role and over-explain and justify and contextualize and try to find the One Perfect Right Way to give them All The Information At Once to minimize conflict and awkwardness and maybe even minimize anticipated harm. But in the Bad Advisor’s experience, justifying-and-contextualizing is usually preemptive permission-seeking behavior; you do not need permission to be queer, or to love and appreciate your partner, or to be in a relationship with them. And besides, your parents are literally unable to give you permission for this! It is not possible! They do not hold this power, and they could not do so, even if you wanted them to or they wanted to.

Bring this big no-permission-needed energy into introducing your partner and your relationship to your parents. You are going to be the person you are, and have the relationships you have (or don’t!) irrespective of what they think about you or your partner or their own parenting or literally any of it. They can accept and embrace you, or they can get weird about it.

You can minimize opportunities for them to get weird, and give them a million thousand opportunities to be cool. This is more about attitude and approach, and less about literally what you say. If you’re confident, self-assured, and chill about this thing, it’s probably going to go fine. Imagine the best-case scenario (which might genuinely just be “I don’t get interrogated about my gender, my parents retain my partner’s name and pronouns from this conversation”) and assume that’s what you’re going to get, and have some escape hatches ready if shit gets weird.

But if you’re looking for scripts, I’m a big fan of saying the thing you feel awkward about in tandem with a big bright segue into talking about something else.

• “Can’t wait to see y'all at Grandma’s birthday Zoom this weekend. Just FYI, I’m planning to bring my partner Kerpuffin to the party — we’ve been seeing each other for a while now and they are really excited to meet you all. I’ve been telling them all about Dad’s epic pandemic beard.”
• “Y'all, I am so excited! I met somebody! I want you [get to know them/know about them]. Their name is [Kerpuffin] [plus whatever else Kerpuffin wants your parents to know] and we met [where?]. I think it would be nice if we [came over for dinner/treated y'all to an ice cream/joined together for family game night] sometime soon, what works for you?”
• Alternately, if your family is anything like mine, they might actually ask you first about your relationship; this is a curse and a gift. “Yes, Auntie, I actually amseeing someone! We met [wherever/doing what] and their name is [Kerpuffin]. I actually have a picture of us [in our beginners’ curling league, or whatever] — let me find it!”

Your parents will probably want to know more! That’s great, as long as the conversation is a conversation or maybe even an enthusiastic ass-kissing press conference and not a debate/interrogation. There’s regular shit people ask when they first hear about a loved one’s new relationship (Where did you meet? What do you like to do together? Where do they work or go to school, or where are they from?). There’s maybe the shit you might need to explain more than you should or than you want to — “Mom, you know that Kerpuffin and I both use they/them pronouns, please don’t make me remind you again!” — which you might want to loop in some friendly family supporters to help out with, because that shit is exhausting. And then there’s the weird shit people ask queer folks — I bet I don’t need to list any of that out for you here — and any of the weird shit questions get polite deflections — “What a weird question, Mom! Let’s not go there! Anyway, I wanted to show you this funny cross-stitch that Kerpuffin did ….” — until, if they persist, they get “Well, that’s all the time we have for today, gotta go.”

And remember, this is just the first part of a journey. You don’t have to do everything all at once first thing to introduce and establish and solidify your relationship vis a vis your family. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the get-go; you have time to teach each other and learn from each other and figure out what it means for you to be who you are in your family, who you are as a queer person, and who you are as a queer family member in or out of relationships. In all likelihood, this is going to be a process that extends through of the rest of your lives as you all grow and change together.

GOOD ADVICE INTERLUDE: Help, My Friend is 15 and Pregnant!

Readers won’t stop sending the Bad Advisor their real-ass questions to answer, so the Bad Advisor is periodically going to try her hand at answering them. If you’d like to submit a question for a Good Advice Interlude, use the “ask” form!

A reader writes:

Hey uh if you’re still doing the good advice interlude, advice for helping a friend with a teen pregnancy? She’s 15, with a boyfriend two or three years older. They had sex and she clearly really enjoyed it. It’s resulted in her being pregnant. She wants to keep the child, and I’m obviously going to support her decisions, but I don’t know what’s best to do to support her. She’s in the hospital regularly (chronically ill), and I don’t know how to ask if she’s looked into the risks that giving birth might provide for her. I don’t want to come across like I don’t want her to do what she wants, because I do, but I’d like to be reassured she’s prepared for that, because I think mostly she’s thinking about how excited she is to be a mum. Which is great! I’m glad she’s excited! I’m excited! But yeah how do I ask if she’s prepared for health risks both in that and the fact that in general regular hospital visits with a small child aren’t ideal (I speak from experience there lol). I speak from experience because I’ve been visiting the hospital regularly since I was a small child because I have an array of health issues and always have done. Friend & I have bonded over this a little.

Hello! Thanks for writing in! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to write a Good Advice Interlude, so this is very exciting.

You sound like a lovely and concerned friend! However, and this probably is gonna land with a big-ass thud: your friend’s pregnancy isn’t about you and she doesn’t have to make you feel better about her decision to become a parent.

Right out of the gate, you say you’d like “advice for helping a friend with a teen pregnancy.” Okay! A good instinct! But when we get into the details, what you really seem to be asking for are some ways for youto feel okay about your friend’s decision to carry her pregnancy to term — you talk about what you need to be reassured about, and what questions you need to make sure your friend is grappling with so that you can help her. But it’s not clear whether your friend has asked for your help or your advice or your recommendations on how to do her pregnancy! So let’s back waaaaaay up, because the top way to not help a person going through some big life shit is to burden them with your own personal misgivings about it.

Reading between the lines, I sense that you want to be a kind, good friend who does the right thing, and you know that the right thing is to support your friend who has decided to become a parent at a younger age than most people do these days. I sense that in your heart, you know the right thing to do is to support young people’s reproductive autonomy and not to judge or shame people for making decisions that you wouldn’t make for yourself, or that are outside the norm in some way. I also suspect that in your heart, despite this, you also feel judgy and frustrated by your friend making a decision to become a parent at age 15 when she has all this other medical stuff going on, and you’re trying to overcompensate for that, because it probably doesn’t feel great, so you’re trying to cast your concerns for you friend as just! looking! for! how! to! be! enthusiastically! and! cheerfully! supportive!

But let’s be real: we live in a complicated cultural milieu wherein we internalize beliefs — whether we want to or not — about young people’s sexuality and pregnancy and parenting that have been shaped by literally the worst fucking people of all time.

Teen pregnancy and teen parenting are massively stigmatized — at least, they are where I live in the United States, and I bet they are where you live, too. This stigma is so prominent that there’s a whole repro justice-oriented, intersectional campaign around respecting young people’s reproductive autonomy called #NoTeenShame, and I strongly encourage you to check it out and share it with your friend if she’s open to it. (For more on the subject, I extremely recommend Natasha Vianna’s work for some contextual reading on parenting while teenaged, plus more hereandhereandhere on shame, stigma, and teen pregnancy and parenting.) We don’t have a lot of positive cultural narratives around teen parenting, and we have a whole fuckload of horror shit show stories about how becoming a teen parent ruins your life forever period the end full stop.

So how about … just owning that those narratives affect you, too? You could explore those feelings on your own, or try unpacking them with another friend who is not at all even a little bit involved with this situation. Examine where these pressure points come up for you — what parts of your friend’s decisions make you feel uncomfortable, angry, frustrated, judgmental, anxious, worried? What parts trigger a need to be kind of patronizing toward your friend? (Such as, for example, assuming that she doesn’t know how to navigate a medical establishment — when bonding over your shared experience with the medical establishment is already a big part of your friendship!) Sit with those feelings and acknowledge them and don’t try to cover them up with being friendly and helpful, because they will only fester, and eventually they’ll taint your actual experience with your friend, and you’ll really, really not be able to be there for her in a genuinely supportive way.

You don’t say how old you are, yourself, but maybe you know a thing or two about parenting at a young age, and maybe you’re hoping to save your friend from going through some of the same bullshit you’ve had to deal with in your life? That can definitely be a kind and loving instinct, but it can also be incredibly patronizing, and even infantilizing — especially if it’s coming from a place of you needing to feel better about something an entire other person is doing with their entire other body that has absolutely nothing to do with you in the most practical and literal sense. You’re not your friend’s parent, and you’re not your friend’s partner — your investment in your friend’s pregnancy is many degrees removed, which means you have a wonderful opportunity to be a cheerleader, and not yet another person in her life asking her “what about” questions as if her pregnancy has actually rendered her incapable of being both excited and nervous or scared or apprehensive at the same time, which is how folks often treat pregnant teens (and, frankly, pregnant adults, too, because misogyny is the fucking realest). You can certainly suggest: “Hey, I went through something similar, do you want my advice about this?” but only if you’re willing to take “Nope! I got this!” for an answer.

Anyone planning to become a mom at 15 years old is going to have plenty — P L E N T Y — of people in her life treating her like she doesn’t know her own mind or her own body. She is never going to lack people who are afraid at her all the time. She is going to mostly be surrounded by people telling her she’s making a dangerous and bad decision, and that she’s being irresponsible toward both herself and her future kiddo. The vast, vast majority of people — including her medical team, unless she has a radically progressive provider setup — who she encounters are going to be naysayers, and many of them are going to be concern trolls, and even the really well-meaning ones who love her a whole lot and only want the best for her are never going to stop asking her if she’s thought of this and that, if she’s read about the risks and the dangers, if she’s got a plan for A, B, and C, if she realizes that parenting and pregnancy are hard, if she wouldn’t rather do X, Y, Z so that she can do whatever it is people think you can’t do while parenting as a young person: go to school, have a career, enjoy your friends, have fun, etc.

And yes, raising a kid while you’re young is really hard. But it’s hard because many of our cultures mostly shame and stigmatize young people who choose to parent instead of offering them the support and resources they need to be happy and healthy. Teen parenting isn’t a scourge, but the way we treat teen parents certainly is. You can break that cycle right now!

Good luck to you both, and congrats to your friend! Sending all the great universe vibes for a safe and healthy pregnancy, and a long and happy friendship for y’all.