Strawberry Letter

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m a 29 year old female and I’m an only child and a daddy’s girl. I met a man that is also an only child and we hit it off instantly. He was raised by a single mom and they are the best of friends. The way he treats her lets me know that he is a good man. He has a lot of characteristics of my father and even though he is 5 years younger, he’s got a great career and his own...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m a 46 year old divorced female and my new boyfriend is not a bad guy, but he has bad habits. I believe in standing by my man and believing in him so I’m hanging on to him in hopes he can get his life together. We’ve dated for five months and I see he lives paycheck to paycheck and he admitted that he pays his bills on alternate months so he can have money to kick it and...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my husband I moved to a new townhome community and we are in the middle of turmoil. My husband met the family next door and started hanging out with the man after he found out they have mutual friends. The woman isn’t friendly at all so I ignored her whenever I saw her. My husband has been out to have drinks with the guy and he came home a month ago and told me a bunch of g...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’ve been with my girlfriend for 10 years and we’re having our first major issue. When I met my girlfriend, she was new in town, so I introduced her to my group of friends and their wives. There are 4 couples that hang out and we’ve all known each other since college. The wives were all nice enough to my girlfriend but they’ve never included her in “girls night out” or invi...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am a 43-year-old woman and I have a small group of friends who have all known each other since high school. We’ve all been strict about quarantining, so we agreed to meet once a week for drinks and dinner. It’s really helped us feel better and maintain a sense of normalcy with the craziness going on in the world. About a month ago another girl we went to high school with...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m a 42 year old woman and I’ve been in a relationship with a 45 year old man for 3 years. For the past two years, he’s been living with me because he needed some house repairs done. Around Christmas time last year, I caught him at his own house one Saturday when he was supposed to be visiting his parents in South Carolina. I pulled up in his driveway and he met me at the...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m a 48 year old single woman and I’ve raised a handsome and productive young man with the help of my ex-husband. My ex-husband was a very hands-on dad, but we did not see eye-to-eye in our marriage. His father always spoiled him, but lately his dad has been busy with a new woman and now he’s become distant from our son. If I call his dad, it takes him days to call me back...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am a 42 year old single mother and I have two teenage children that live with me. At my age, I wanted to become a homeowner and stop renting, so I started looking for an affordable place to buy. My mom recently received a financial blessing, so she offered to buy me a house. Hesitantly, I agreed. I found a small, affordable home and my mother bought it. I pay the mortgage...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am a 39 year old married woman and I have been friends with a nutcase for over 20 years. We fall out all of the time because she’s a drama queen and she creates conflict where there should be none. I’m a professor and she’s in financial aid at the college we attended. I got a job there first and she came later. She is in a management role, but she has no...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’ve been dating a great man for almost 6 months. It was a long-distance relationship at first, but I moved to his city three weeks ago. I have an aunt that lives in this same city and I’m living with her temporarily. My boyfriend gave me a key to his apartment and told me to make myself at home, so I stay with him most of the time. His mother has a key to his a...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my husband and I have been together for 5 years and married for 3 years. I have a son by my ex-husband and my husband has a son by an ex-girlfriend. Our blended family works perfectly because the boys are very close in age, so they’re best friends. My stepson’s mom is cool but I’ve made it a point to keep her at a distance because my mother-in-law told me...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my husband and I have been together 14 years. He’s 60 and I’m 57 years old. We don’t have any children so we do a lot of activities together and we travel a lot. We’re in a vacation club and there’s one other couple that we enjoy meeting up with at different destinations. Mother’s Day weekend, we met the couple in Barcelona and we stayed...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my boyfriend and I are 44 years old and we have been together for years. I lost count on how long we’ve actually been a couple because we were roommates first, then we started fooling around, then we stopped seeing other people since we were living together. We became a couple after our family and friends considered us a couple....................................... S...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m 32 years old and I’ve been dating this guy for almost 8 months and we’ve had fun getting to know each other. He was honest in the beginning and told me he had some loose ends to tie up before we got serious and I appreciated that honesty. The fact that he didn’t hide his phone or turn his ringer off made me feel that he was ready to be in a relat...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my husband and I are both in the military and he’s still active duty and I’m retired. I’m raising our two sons and I do personal training for 3 clients to earn extra money. I’m in shape and I want my husband to stay in shape too. He works out but he doesn’t take care of his body internally. His diet has made him pre-diabetic and he’s on m...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I was living with my brother and his wife for a while after they had a baby and it was time for her to return to work. They didn’t want the baby going to a babysitter yet, so I agreed to move in and help out. I’m retired and my daughter is in college so I have a lot of time on my hands. This is not what I signed up for though........................................

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’ve been married for 12 years and I have had a lot of ups and downs with my husband. He loves the ladies and I had to crack down on the time he spent in the streets so he wouldn’t slip up and cheat on me again. He’s cheated before and he swore that was behind him. We went to counseling and he told the therapist that I would never catch him cheating again....

Dear Steve and Shirley, my uncle is 64 years old and he’s still got a lot of life in him. He recently got engaged and the family didn’t know he was that serious about this woman. She’s cute but she’s clueless. She’s 57 years old and she got divorced about 4 years ago and doesn’t know how to do anything for herself. She’s never paid bills, bought groceries...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I have been dating a man for almost two years and he has a lot of female friends.  I hung out with all of them and at first I tried to act like a team player, but, I see has no respect for boundaries in this relationship.  He has a lot of house parties or his friends will come over and do impromptu cookouts no matter what we have planned.  He drops everything...

Dear Steve and Shirley, my husband and I are 34 and we’ve been together for 9 years and married for 3 years. The only reason we are married is because I gave him an ultimatum. After six years of dating, we needed to move this thing forward or I was gone. He’s always been very full of himself and the women in his family made him think he was God’s gift to the earth because he has...

Holly Frey, host of Stuff You Missed in History Cass , sits down with Dana Territo, one of the ten winners of Seneca Women to Hear: Search for the Next Great Female Podcasters   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dear Steve and Shirley, I’m a 59 year old mother of 2 grown sons and I pride myself on how well I raised them by myself. They both are educated with great jobs. My oldest son is married and he has a baby on the way with his wife. My youngest son is 29 and he is trying to send me to an early grave. When I was raising my boys, I had a village of strong women to help me............................

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am a 27 year old woman and I just moved in with my boyfriend. We’ve been dating for one year and we have a great relationship, but of course there’s an issue, or I wouldn’t be writing you. Our love making is very good, but we are never alone when we are intimate. There’s always four extra eyes very close by, staring at us. It’s his dogs. He h...

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am a divorced, 44 year old single mom.  As an attractive, curvy, and educated woman, I have no problems meeting men, it’s keeping them that’s the issue. The last man that I dated, we were together for almost 3 months before we had sex. I made him wait for a reason, and here’s why… When we had sex for the first time, he passed out afterwards....

Dear Steve and Shirley, I am in desperate need of advice. I was engaged to be married, but my fiancé and I recently split up after my ex-wife caused a whole lot of problems in our relationship. When my ex heard I was engaged, she called me. I told her that I was extremely happy and excited to get remarried. My ex said that she was happy for me and wished me well, which was a big lie. A few...