Dear Amy: I feel so alone. My relationship with my fiance is at the brink of disaster. She no longer wants to be with me. She doesn’t feel the spark and says that no matter what I do, it cannot be reclaimed.
I love this woman more than life itself. I have a great relationship with her mom, family and her friends. My own family hasn’t been supportive, and I have let their lack of support infect our relationship. But it’s more than that.
I am not neat and have habits that have caused her to go crazy to the point of wanting to be alone.
I have made many changes during our relationship to be a better man for her. She refuses to go to counseling with me.
I believe we should be together and will do anything to make that happen. What more can I do?
— Tracy
Dear Tracy: We live in a society in which the prevailing message is that if we just try hard enough, we can get what we want in life.
That’s what makes romantic breakups so hard. Romantic relationships often defy all of our better instincts about self-determination. Your fiance has decided that she doesn’t even want a new-and-improved you, and that hurts.
The problem is that no one knows how to make love stay. Sometimes the harder you try, the faster things seem to fall apart.
I hope that you take your desire to try counseling seriously. Go to see a counselor yourself — not necessarily to try to breathe life into this relationship but to process and understand what happened, what you’re going through now and what you can do next. You may be anxious and depressed; a counselor should be able to assess your state and offer recommendations for treatment, if necessary.
The fact that you don’t have a supportive family makes me think that you are clinging to your fiance and her family for all you are worth. You are going to have to do the very hard work of trying to develop new relationships.
Dear Amy: “Fleeting” asked about potential cans of worms discovered when going through a relative’s personal effects after his or her death.
My grandmother left a little mystery when she died. When we found her birth certificate, it had a different first name on it. Initially, we suspected she had a secret twin who didn’t survive. Then we found her father’s obituary, which revealed that all but one of her siblings had changed their first names after his death.
Grandma was about 12 when she and her sisters changed their names. No one knows why, though we have theories.
To add to the strangeness, none of this came to light until I was grown up — long after my 12th birthday, when I happened also to have changed my first name to something less common for a girl.
Now, when folks ask about my name, I say, “My name is Sammy. It’s short for Jessica. I was named after my Grandmother Irma.”
It is always a conversation starter.
— Sammy
Dear Sammy: What strikes me is the coincidence that you basically repeated your grandmother’s history without knowing it. I’m amazed at how often people discover these hidden parallels in their families.
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Ask Amy appears Mondays through Fridays in Tempo, Saturdays in the Weekend section and Sundays in Q. Readers may send questions via e-mail to ask amy@tribune.com or by mail to Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Previous Ask Amy columns are available at chicagotribune.com/amy.
