I Think My Sister Is Working Magic to Steal My Husband.
Slate · L · trust 46/100
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Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here .
I believe my sister is doing magic to try to take my husband. Before anyone dismisses this outright, understand that I come from a culture where magic is taken seriously. I am not asking whether it exists. What I am struggling with is whether that is what I’m seeing. The problem is that I don’t have proof.
What I do have is a sister who seems unusually interested in my husband. She asks about him constantly. She wants to know where he is, what he’s doing, whether we’re happy, whether we’re fighting, whether he’s stressed. When we’re all together, her attention seems fixed on him. She laughs at everything he says. She remembers tiny details about his life that even I have forgotten.
On its own, maybe that wouldn’t mean much. What troubles me is the way my husband has changed. He used to be polite toward my sister, but not especially close to her. Now he brings her up in conversation when nobody else has mentioned her. He goes out of his way to defend her. If I say something as harmless as “That was a strange thing for her to do,” he reacts as though I’ve insulted him personally.
A few times I’ve caught him staring off into space after talking with her. The most unsettling part is that he seems irritated with me in ways he never used to be. Small disagreements become arguments. Things that once rolled off his back now provoke a sharp response. Meanwhile, he has endless patience for my sister.
Maybe there is an ordinary explanation for all of this. But from where I’m sitting, it feels as though the closer she tries to get to him, the more distant he becomes from me. I can’t shake the feeling that she wants my marriage, or at least the attention she sees my husband giving me. And because I was raised with stories of what people can do when jealousy takes hold, I can’t ignore the possibility that magic is part of it. How do you handle a situation when you can’t prove what you suspect, but every instinct tells you that someone is working against your marriage?
Assuming you don’t have a history of being super suspicious of people in your life for no reason, you should trust your intuition here. All signs point to something going on between these two, even if that something is just mutual attraction and flirtation that has not crossed a line to become an actual affair.
But I do have to note that the way you’ve framed your letter is a little odd. Why is the central character and potential bad guy in it your sister, and not your husband? Why is your focus figuring out whether she is “working against your marriage” instead of figuring out whether the person who is actually in the marriage is stepping outside of it, failing to honor the vows he made, or wanting to get out of it? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that if she’s betraying you or lying to you, that’s really hurtful. But she wouldn’t be having any success if your relationship was solid and if your husband was operating with integrity.
The fact that he’s treating you as if you’re irritating and being more adversarial than ever before is bad. And we know that without having to do any detective work to figure out what your sister is trying to do or what’s in her head. I imagine it’s much easier to contemplate “Is my sister being diabolical because she’s jealous?” than “Is my husband over me?” but I promise you that even if you were somehow able to give her a lie detector test and prove that her first priority was being a homewrecker, and even if you confronted her and cut her off, you wouldn’t feel settled. You’d still be left with the person who stares off into space thinking about her and has become less and less warm to you.
I assume you aren’t going to end your marriage based on bad vibes alone, and that is totally understandable. If you plan to stay in it, you are going to have to do the very annoying work of taking the lead on repairing your connection with someone who doesn’t seem to care that much about it. This will mean going to your husband and telling him you’ve noticed that there’s more tension between the two of you, and that you feel he’s become more distant, so you want to work on your relationship. Obviously, a therapist would help a lot here. Hold off on accusing him of falling victim to your sister’s plan to steal him. He’ll only get defensive (and probably go straight to her to complain).
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My friend has gone through a lot in the past year—addiction; rehab; infidelity on the part of his spouse; and a lot of therapy to try to cope with all of this. I’m supportive of him and want to be a safe space for his journey. But one thing is driving me crazy—when he communicates, he seems to be running everything through AI. I get these long missives about family patterns and systems that are at least 75 percent ChatGPT. There are clear AI patterns; plus, I ran it through Claude, which confirmed what I was seeing. I would like to talk about these issues with my friend, not exchange emails with a robot.
It’s not just the irritation of communicating with a robot. It’s also that the AI seems to ramp everything up. My friend says he wants to be in communication with me and sends me texts, but the “big AI emails” are constantly threatening to cut off his family of origin and me, and go no-contact. It’s really hard to understand what is him and what is AI.
How do I get this to stop and have actual conversations instead of these weird mediated exchanges? I’ve said nothing so far because I don’t want to trigger him or spook him. But I am worried about him and can’t really tell what’s going on.
Call him! I’m as phone-adverse as the next elder…
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