Since you liked that Hotel book, I can't recommend enough "Hotel Babylon". The two authors combined stuff that happened from 12 London hotels into 24 hour by hour period. Anyway it was a good book & similar to the one Dan Savage here recommends us.

Thoughts? Anyone?

#3 - I'm with you. Anger is really useful in the moment to get you fighting for what is right, or to get you out of a bad situation, but holding onto it just gives the bad situation power over you forever.

As for how to let go, how to forgive.... For me, what works is seeing the person who hurt you as a person, and understanding their motivation. So often, it's fear.
The second step to this is understanding that forgiveness is not the same as permission to do it again. It's not "get out of jail free". Forgiveness is for you, not for them.

So when you can see the person who harmed you as a fucked up mess who has to hurt to guard himself from all the things he fears, and when you know that you now know how to protect yourself better from him and his kind, you can stop carrying around that hot ball of anger that is giving you an upset stomach. You stop feeling like a victim, start feeling like a survivor. Anger is for quick and immediate strength, for action. Forgiveness is for long term strength, for moving forward.

I can't believe what I'm hearing - you are condemning someone who doesn't want their partner to fart in front of them as being dumpworthy just for that particular reason?
What kind of argument is that - "people fart, get over it". Do you fart in front of your parents? Your friends? At the Nobel Prize dinner? Of course it's no big deal if my partner toots accidentally - but doing it as if it were sneezing or coughing is simply disgusting! Smelling the inside of your partner's intestines is (at least for me) a surefire way to lose attraction, comparable only to prying out bogies in front of the other person.
Am I the only sane person here or is everyone here enveloped in their partner's gases and happy with it?

@spreadsheetguy
Like all things, farting in front of your partner should be done in moderation. Excessive farting is just rude and inconsiderate and the offender should at least make the attempt to excuse themselves to the bathroom when they feel one coming on. But at some point you or your partner will probably fart in one another's presence and your partner should be able to laugh it off, crack a window and not make a big deal about it.

Couple of things re passing gas--

Real Dolls don't fart. Get one of those.

Ben Franklin says to Fart Proudly. 'nuff said.

This reminds me of the line in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles: "Wow, it must be so great to be so perfect, *AND ODOR FREE*."

If you can't handle farting, what happens when your S.O. gets sick, god forbid?

Every time I fart, now I add, "I just broke up with that guy again."

This is for the 28-year old where the hook was that his boyfriend forced him to dump him because he wasn't hairy enough. I think Dan's guess that the boyfriend wasn't a true hair queen is probably right, but I don't think the boyfriend was necessarily a nut either. The caller was probably right when he said his boyfriend was too much of a pussy to do the breaking up so he forced the caller to do it.

For a long time I was in marriage that had the same dynamic of recurring forced conversations about "what was wrong," years of crappy sex that I doggedly rounded up to good and me being unable to imagine living without my partner. Years after having checked out of the marriage my partner finally squirmed free from my tenacious grip by presenting me with a girlfriend of one week with whom, he assured me, he had finally experienced the true, deep meaning of love. At our parting, I assured him in return "I'll always love you."

We'll just skip over my recovery period.

Caller, this is what you need to know to survive your misery and cope with the situation: this was not, as you claim, a perfect relationship. You and he were not the best of friends and your love was only mutual in the sense that you were both lying to yourselves about roughly the same things at roughly the same times. Study other couples or parents with children to see how people who love one another actually treat each other. Try to figure out how and why you lied yourself into thinking this one was your true love and then try to avoid lying to yourself like that in the future. It can be done.

Growth. It sucks.

PS Heads In Beds totally rocks.

I have a friend who gets turned on by farts, but that's at the other end of the spectrum.

#13, either he's a Republican member of the 1% or he's an edge case. Actually, that might explain a lot of our country's problems, now that I think about it.

Spreadsheet guy, first, welcome to the sandbox. If you're gonna play, you might not always hear what you want, so here goes. Farts are inconsequential in the adult world. You expect individuals to be considerate and you expect society to pretend they don't exist. In the absence of a real medical condition that disrupts someone's life, they are a non-issue. So when someone makes it an issue, like the caller's wacko boyfriend, or, sorry, you ("Smelling the inside of your partner's intestines is (at least for me) a surefire way to lose attraction, comparable only to prying out bogies in front of the other person.") it's a red flag for other arbitrary, irrational, capricious expectations in the relationship. Your comment, taken with the spreadsheet discussion from last week's show, sure makes me think that you are setting the bar far too high under the cover of "trying to find out what you want." I'm with alguna_rubia from last week's comments except I'll make it even simpler. Ask out someone you find interesting. If it goes well, ask her out again. Continue until there's a reason to stop. Attraction will follow if interest and regard is there. And if the girls are the ones losing interest, then the simplest place to look is "are you talking too much?" and "are you eating too much?"

I'm with Dan on the asexual situation. Sometimes you can put up with a mess if the sex is hot enough, right, that's where the term comes from, but that guy isn't relationship material. Dan always says you have a responsibility to your partners to be emotionally functional, if not necessarily perfect.

The fart-hater IS the spreadsheet guy. Lol! Minds blown.

Talking about the money - boner: I've never come across anything like it (btw I would have been interested to hear Dan's answer to the implied question, whether it was new to Dan) but I could instantly understand it. I'm not interested in money, not materialistic, but I don't' know, I totally got it. The rustling of the large stack of bills, the thought that here is something that is going to be yours, as a reward for your work, as a portal that opens doors (to owning things, to doing things, to fulfilling some dreams..) whatever it was, it clicks, and caller I hope you're not giving yourself a guilt complex over nothing. The human brain is awesome and crazy and complicated, don't even try to rationalise or find arbitrary reasons! If a girl from England can understand a money boner, you officially have a non-problem. Unless you make it one..

@6: You try not to fart in front of your parents and friends because you are only in their presence for only a few hours at a time. While I think farts are gross and try to minimize them, even in the presence of my partner, it's unreasonable to expect that person to never fart in front of you, and what's more, it's a dumping offense if you're an asshole about it. Everyone has experienced that moment when you honestly couldn't hold it in in public and farted at the worst possible time and were extremely embarrassed. With your partner, you're eventually going to fart in front of them because you can't hold it in all the time, and they shouldn't act like a douche in response to it. If they do, they should be dumped.

On top of that, any guy who's looking for a girl who will never fart in front of him in a relationship that lasts more than a year is an idiot. There is no such woman.

Is this the one where Dan rants about taboo-izing words like twink and tranny into "letter"-word? (Like f-word, n-word etc) If not does anyone know which episode it was? It was one of the more recent ones I know that...