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

Dear Prudence,

I was really excited to introduce my new boyfriend to my family this past Christmas. We had a wonderful celebration, everyone got on like a house on fire until, not for the first time, my sister got super drunk and threw herself at my guy and tried to stick her tongue down his throat. He was horrified and, according to my brother who witnessed the carnage (and hasn’t stopped laughing), gagged, pushed her away and said: “Urrrrggghhhh… no… yuck… no, no, no.” Well.

My sister has decided that she is deeply offended and that his response was humiliating and unnecessarily cruel. She’s throwing an incredible tantrum, demanding an apology, bombarding me and my family with messages calling my poor boyfriend “an abuser” and worse, threatening to never come to family events if he’s present, etc, etc, etc. He’s horrified by the fallout, and I’m exhausted by another one of her dramas. How do I put him at ease and close the cycle on this nonsense? If it was just me, I’d ignore her tantrum until she got bored, but he’s trying to fit in with my family and incredibly sad.

—Itching to Slap

Dear Itching,

I assume absolutely everyone in your family is on your boyfriend’s side, right? How could they not be! Tell him that, ignore her, and plan a gathering to which she is not invited so he can show how sweet and charming he is when he isn’t being sexually assaulted.

Dear Prudence,

My husband and I both have adult children, and this is a second marriage for us both. My kids are local so it’s easy for them to visit. His is a plane flight away, and so I am on friendly but not close terms with them. They are thoughtful guests, and I want to make them and the grandkids feel welcome, especially because my husband is their only living parent.

His daughter was overweight and has gained a significant amount of additional weight in the past three years with some medical issues. I know everyone has lots of thoughts about that but I want to sidestep them in favor of the basics: We want her to enjoy visits here. To be frank, our furniture is no longer sufficient for her and has caused embarrassing incidents on her past two visits. We can afford to buy a bigger guest bed and a few new higher-weight chairs if we plan ahead for it. Since it’s a delicate topic, I asked him to take the lead on asking her what’s appropriate (lots of items seem rated for specific weights and I’m not going to ask that!). It’s been three months and he says he’ll ask but never does. I don’t want to just guess and buy, because our budget isn’t big enough for expensive failures.

I get that it’s very uncomfortable but she’s his daughter! She deserves to feel as welcome here as my kids. He’s trying to get her and the grandkids to visit this summer and she’s being uncharacteristically evasive about plans. I suspect this is because she worries she can’t be comfortable in our home. He won’t say why he won’t ask her to recommend a bed or something, but then complains endlessly that she won’t commit to a visit. This is very unlike him, and I have no idea what to do. When I say this is our only major argument in years, I mean it. Do I butt out? Try to tactfully ask myself? Something else?

—Frustrated by Furniture

Dear Frustrated,

Go online and buy a bed for the bedroom she’ll use and at least one chair for every other room. Choose pieces that are designed for the very highest weight you think she could possibly be, plus 50 pounds. If you’re struggling to decide between two brands, dive into the online reviews. Since your original plan involved the somewhat old-school approach of looking for a personal recommendation from one individual, I imagine you may not be comfortable with shopping this way. Recruit a younger friend (someone who you don’t think will be sensitive about body image issues) and ask for an hour of help.

You’re being so thoughtful about accommodating your stepdaughter, so I know you care about her feelings. There is absolutely no reason to potentially humiliate her by dragging her into the conversation and asking her to place an order, which is probably why your husband is being so hesitant. But you can do this without consulting her, and remember: Most furniture brands are going to have some kind of 30-day (or more) return policy, even for beds. So if it really doesn’t work out, you can almost certainly get your money back.

Dear Prudence,

My fiancé has given me an engagement ring that has been in his family for four generations and … it happens to be incredibly ugly. Would it be rude to say something?

—Not My Dream Ring

Dear Dream Ring,

In marriages between two blunt, thick-skinned people, someone could say “This thing is atrocious! Please take it away and take me ring shopping,” and the other person might reply “If looks that bad, maybe we should keep it because it will match your raggedy leggings.” And they would both laugh, and for the next 15 years the husband would complain about the things they could afford if they hadn’t wasted money on a new ring instead of using the perfectly good hand me down, and the wife would say “Oh shut up!” The fact that you wrote this letter tells me you’re not in that marriage, and that is fine.

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In fact, it’s great. Because this situation is an opportunity to practice being married. In your life with your husband, you are going to have a million conversations in which your values about family and tradition and aesthetics and money collide, and you’ll need to know how to have them, while honoring your own feelings, while also being sensitive to his. He might want to spend two whole weeks with his parents over Christmas. You might want to get rid of the bedroom set his mother used as a child and passed on to him. Maybe you’ll bump heads over how much to spend on graduation gifts, or whether to redo the bathroom, or what to wear for family photos. And the question is never going to be “Is it rude to say what I think?” but, “How much do I care about this, what do I know about the intensity of his feelings about it, and with all that information, what are the outcomes that could work, assuming we both care about what we want individually and about each other?”

Keeping quiet because you’re scared of being impolite would set a horrible precedent. But so would saying “Get me a new ring. I’m the only person who has to wear it, so only my view counts, and unfortunately, I don’t have your great great-grandmother’s awful taste.” So, yes, you should bring this up, but start by contextualizing your complaint as one that is pretty minor in comparison to your level of excitement about marrying him. You should be transparent about feeling hesitant to speak up because (I assume) you hate the idea of hurting his feelings. And whatever you say should include openness to compromise (wearing the unsightly but free jewelry until the two of you can afford what you really want, or making some adjustments to it, for example) and—this goes without saying—should definitely not include the words “incredibly ugly.”

Catch up on this week’s Prudie.

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