DEAR MEXICAN: I’m an American woman who has been living in Mexico for more than a year and a half. I found an excellent job teaching English at a university, and as luck or karma would have it, I met an amazing Mexican man who treats me with respect and kindness and a support I have never known from anyone. He is a doctor here at the university. We’re the same age, and although he is a chemist and I have spent the past decade of my life trying to be an artist, we get along sweetly, and I do love him a lot. I should mention we also live together, and in general, it runs smoothly.
Things are good. But there is still that, I don’t know, American ambition, that voice in my head that says to me constantly that you have to keep going, keep achieving, you aren’t making enough, doing enough, being enough. So here’s my situation: I want my boyfriend to come with me, should I be accepted into the doctoral programs I’m applying for in the United States. But he has such a good thing going for him here in Mexico. He’s a professor in a university; he is doing research and publishing. I feel like a jerk asking him to leave. I fear if he leaves Mexico, he would come to the USA and have to work some menial job at a restaurant even though he is a scientist. He was also born and raised in Mexico, and aside from study in Spain, he hasn’t really experienced a separation from his culture, his food, his home.
But then I think of my life, and I can’t just sit here in Mexico and be in his shadow. I do not want to be the woman of the household while my man is out having a marvelous professional career. I have to think about my career as well, but I also do want a family and the support and warmth that he provides for me.
How do I do this? How do I have a career and the man I love at the same time? How do I ask someone to sacrifice so much for me? Should I ask someone to sacrifice so much for me?
Sad in Satélite
DEAR GABACHA: There’s ambition, and then there’s selfishness, and you, ingrata, are the definition of the latter. You already have a job and a man, yet you want to upgrade the former while forcing your querido to become a peon in el Norte, just because you don’t want to be “the woman of the household”? Isn’t that the position you currently hold in Mexico, a position you said yourself is wonderful? And you realize you’d be in a subservient position up here anyways, since the only income the two of you would make during your college years is whatever he could cobble together while your apapachada ass buries the two of you in student debt? Just leave him: You deserve him less than Donald Trump deserves a Mazapan de la Rosa.
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