My girlfriend just announced her totally stupid life dream. I have to stop her.

Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.

Dear Prudence,

My girlfriend and I have spent the past two years together. We’re young (just 20 and 21, respectively), but I truly believed that we had a future and could make a life together. That is, until she announced that she’d dreamed of living in Europe her entire life and is planning to go through with it. She’s talked about her love of Europe for as long as I’ve known her, but I thought it was just a fantasy. Apparently not. She said she’s planning on applying to multiple PhD programs across the pond.

Prudence, I cannot stress enough how insane this would be of her. We live in the United States, the most developed country in the world. It is the country with the best scientific output, which is very relevant for her as someone who wants to become a scientist. She’ll probably have less funding, less opportunities, lower pay.

And I don’t quite know how to say this, but she’s not the type of person who would fit in well in Europe. She’s a bit on the uncultured side, and not polite enough for America, let alone Europe. She speaks only one language and shows no desire to learn more. (She says she’s tried but that a concussion years ago made it actually painful for her. I think this is a psychosomatic effect of actually having to work at something.) She’s a bit of a picky eater too—she doesn’t eat nearly as many vegetables as a grown woman is expected to. Europe would probably mock her all the way back home. The worst part of it, though, is the sheer lack of gratitude she’s showing by dreaming of leaving. Others risk their lives to come here and have the opportunities she has, and she wants to throw it away.

Even if she wants to follow through with this, I can’t go with her. Did I mention this move would utterly doom my career? My degree is extremely U.S.-centric and doesn’t carry much applicability anywhere else. And, even if I could, I don’t want to leave! My life is here, and I’m not uprooting myself just because my girlfriend wants to cosplay someone else, which is exactly what she’d be doing if she left everything she has. How can I get it through her thick skull just how stupid this would be on all fronts?

—Make Her See Sense

Dear See Sense,

You’re very young and you’ve had a significant but still pretty short relationship with someone who you think is rude, lazy, picky, ungrateful, unpatriotic, and has a thick skull. Why are you panicking about losing her? Her move is a perfect reason to split up and find someone who you actually like. I’m very serious about the “actually like” part. I want to strongly urge you to seek a relationship with a woman who you approve of and respect exactly the way she is, and who you think makes good choices. I promise you that’s so much easier than begging, debating, or bullying someone into being the female version of you.

Dear Prudence,

My wife and I live in Wisconsin, and our daughter and her family live a couple hours away in a neighboring state. We try to visit them at least once a month and being from Wisconsin, we pick up a package of fresh (squeaky!) cheese curds for them to enjoy, which they do, as the package is gone within an hour.

A couple of years ago, when she was 12, our granddaughter “Caylee” decided to become a vegetarian. We had no issue with that other than our concern that she was getting enough nutrients that meat provided; our daughter reassured us she did the research to make sure she is eating properly for a growing kid.

When we visited several weeks ago, we were told Caylee made a New Year’s resolution and is now vegan. We didn’t think much of it, as she is at the age (14) to make those decisions, and good for her to follow through on what she believes in.

Last weekend we visited again, and as we were leaving, our daughter pulled us aside and told us that Caylee was disappointed that we didn’t bring her a treat. Her brothers (also her mom and dad) got cheese curds, she didn’t get anything. On our way back home, we talked about it and half-jokingly said next time we would bring a bag of carrots for Caylee as her “treat.” But seriously, the cheese curds were for the whole family, not just the kids. And we weren’t trying to be mean, as though we brought candy bars for the boys while Caylee was diabetic. .

If the store we get the cheese curds from had vegan cheese curds, we would bring them for Caylee, but none (are there vegan cheese curds?) were available when we stopped and checked. My wife and I are honestly at a loss as to what to do about this. Should we stop getting the cheese curds to be fair to Caylee but “punish” the rest of the family?

—To Treat or Not to Treat

Dear Treat,

There are a couple of ways of thinking about this. One is that Caylee is the one who decided not to eat cheese, and she’s not entitled to a replacement treat. This is technically true and totally fair. But the cheese curds are more than just cheese curds. They’re a thing the family connects over and fodder for tradition and a little bit of joy, which you like to share with everyone in the house.

So I’m not sure that the “take it or leave it” approach achieves your goals. After all, you wouldn’t invite an adult over for dinner, knowing about they don’t eat carbs, and then serve them a big bowl of pasta, saying “You’re the one who decided to reject the spaghetti, it’s not my fault.” There can be a place for accommodating preferences just to be nice and show care. I don’t know where you stop to buy the cheese curds, but if adding on a bunch of grapes and a package of fancy vegan crackers wouldn’t inconvenience you or break your budget, a slight tweak to the family tradition might be a win for everyone.

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Dear Prudence,

I have been married 15 years, and my husband was divorced a decade before that. His three kids were in college when we met. Unfortunately, the year we got married, his ex got diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and died roughly four months after we got married.

My stepdaughter, “Heather,” didn’t take it well, to put it mildly. She took all her stress and grief and threw it at my husband and me, including making a scene at our wedding brunch, where she openly accused her father of “abandoning” her and us of having an affair (we didn’t even live in the same state at the time of my husband’s first marriage and he never cheated to my knowledge). It was so bizarre and out of left field that her other brother and sister tried to take her to the ER. Heather refused to go. This was just one of a long line of incidents.

At the funeral, I stayed in the hotel and avoided being around Heather and hoped that she would eventually get some help. That hasn’t happened. I learned not to host Heather in my house; I am lucky to get a civil conversation on a good day and there are rarely good days. Heather has fixated on me as being her personal devil and has even blamed me for her strained relationships with her siblings. I genuinely have a good relationship with them both and am grandma to my other stepdaughter’s children. This drives Heather crazy and she has openly told my 4-year-old grandson that I am not grandma, despite her sister telling her to stop.

This became the final straw over Christmas, when my husband and I were visiting other family but had a brief Zoom call with our grandson. Heather was visiting but not on the call. Apparently, after it ended, she terrorized her nephew about how he was making his real grandma cry in heaven and said that I was a “bad” person. She and her sister had a huge fight and Heather was asked to leave early. Both my stepson and stepdaughter have told their father that they are sick of their sister’s antics and don’t want anything to do with her until she changes.

This is breaking my husband’s heart and I don’t know what to do. He has asked me to play peacemaker, and I told him I am not getting into it. Heather has some kind of mental illness going on, considering how nearly every job and relationship ends up crashing and burning. She will not seek treatment.

Heather was an adult when I met her and whatever sympathy I had for the loss of her mother has long since worn away. I love my husband and have built positive relationships with his other children, but every overture I’ve made to Heather has gotten thrown in my face along with whatever bizarre story she has made up in her head. How do I support my husband in this?

—Tired in Tennessee

Dear Tired,

You’ve framed this as a letter about your stepdaughter’s intolerable behavior and how to support your husband through it, but it feels to me like it’s really a story centered on Heather’s obvious mental health issues and what should be a family effort to get her help. Her siblings seemed to grasp this when their first thought after her wedding brunch freak-out it was to take her to the E.R., indicating that they saw her actions as having a medical cause. But I wonder how your husband is thinking about it and if he’s taking her situation seriously. I know it’s not as easy as saying “Heather, you need to be evaluated by a psychiatrist and take whatever medication they prescribe,” because she’s an adult and doesn’t have to take orders from anyone. But simply having your spouse on board with the idea that you’re dealing with a person who is unwell, not just a person who is a jerk, might help both of you to approach this more productively.

Instead of “Heather is extremely mean and I’m out of sympathy for her,” you could be thinking “Heather is sick and even though her behavior isn’t personal, it’s taking a toll on our family and we need support.” Check out the National Alliance for Mental Health’s Family Groups to hear from people who are in similar situations (which alone will be a huge comfort) and seek out some strategies to ensure that the symptoms of her apparent illness don’t hurt you so much that you pull away from the healthy members of your family.

Classic Prudie

My daughter is 9 and wonderfully smart and creative. One of her favorite creative outlets is cooking. However, she has been somewhat brainwashed by cooking shows, which give the impression that everything is prepared off the cuff. So she now believes that cooking is wantonly combining ingredients to create culinary masterpieces. I have explained that all those celebrity chefs develop and follow recipes based on carefully measured ingredients and food science, and that I am happy to teach her how to cook so she develops the skills to eventually create her own recipes. She, however, wastes huge amounts of food creating inedible dishes based solely on her creative whims.