Dear Bear, I don’t mean to sound like a Tumblr post but all of this info is relevant to my question so I’m 26, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, and asexual. For a long time I really thought something was horribly wrong with me. I…

Dear Bear, About 2 months ago my ex ended our 4 year relationship with me because “something didn’t feel right.” We shared many firsts from the first kiss right up to the first break up. This deeply saddened me and I am still struggling with…

Dear Bear, I can’t imagine you have an answer to this question. But you seem willing to try tackling hard questions and I (a cis white queer in a mid-size city) am at a loss. Everything is awful. Every day there’s a new atrocity in…

Dear Bear, My joyfriend is smart and interesting and funny and great and also sometimes when they see something they want they just go barreling forward toward it and start acting like a jerk if I ask for pause or process or consideration. Some of…

Dear Bear, In therapy I am learning some new things. One of them is that a lot of times I give people too many chances and let them treat me badly over and over without any consequences. When I ask for an apology I am…

Dear Bear, My partner and I have been struggling for a while. We are each other’s best friends and confidantes, and so these current struggles are especially hard. I feel like I have no one to talk to — I would normally consult my partner!…

Dear Bear, I’m a grad student attending a university on the east coast, and I am… struggling with my faith in social justice and liberalism in general, just because the things I see people doing don’t line up with what they say they’re about. I…

Dear Bear, I am in the middle of planning my very queer and very Jewish wedding, our parents are splitting the cost for some context. It is bringing up everything I’ve avoided addressing with my parents, namely the fact that I’m a person with my…

Content note: this question contains short but intense descriptions of emotional abuse by parents. Dear Bear, A year and a half ago everything seemed to click into place, and I realized how much I hated she/her pronouns and words associated with femininity directed at me….

Dear Bear, Is there a way to deal with a friend break-up if the friend just slowly but completely excludes you from their life instead of acknowledging something hurt them and discussing it? I don’t know what’s going on. This person has not responded to…

Hi Bear! I’ve known I was bi since I was 16 and fell in love with a girl who was strictly straight and conservative which did not end well, but hey it was life experience despite how hard it was. But because of that, I’ve…

Dear Bear, When we first met, my close friend (we’ll call her Enid for privacy) had recently been cheated on and dumped by her boyfriend of four years. She was going through a lot of heartbreak and self esteem issues at that time, so she…

Dear Bear, My uncle has just died and that’s very sad for me. We liked each other a lot and often spent the hard parts of family gatherings doing chores and escaping from our other relatives which neither of us ever liked very much. I…

Dear Bear, It’s about to be New Year’s Eve, and everyone is posting their #instagrambest9 and making resolutions and so forth and I mostly want to hide under my bed. The world is a shit fire, I’ve had a really hard year personally, and also…

Dear Bear, I’m part of a friend group that’s pretty close and does a lot of things together even though we don’t all live in the same city anymore (we call ourselves The Breakfast Club though we’re really now more like The Big Chill without…

Dear Bear, As of a couple months ago, I am a college graduate (yay!). I went to a good school, worked my ass off, and got a good job doing something like doing and am steadily getting better at. The problem is that most of…

Dear Bear, My situation is simple but awful. My mother really really hates my husband, Mike*. She says he’s lazy and stupid and selfish and all kinds of other things that just aren’t true. He’s not perfect but no one is. She certainly isn’t. But…

The allure of the forbidden is real, and we should probably usually resist it, but human beings are human. Dear Bear, I had sex with someone I probably should not have had sex with. Specifically, I had sex with the husband of my PhD advisor….

Dear Bear, What the fuck are we supposed to do now? • • • Dear Brave Correspondent, I think this is a very reasonable question. What’s more, I think that it pretty well echoes what a lot of people are thinking right now. In this…

Dear Bear, I have started a great new-ish relationship. It’s sweet and hot and exciting and all the good things and I feel really good about it. However, I am resisting telling people about it and/or reluctant to discuss it even though I’m happy because…