It was supposed to be a diversion.

When COVID-19 rewrote everything this spring, I was settled comfortably into a full life as a single dad, busy with parenting, writing, and two jobs. My dating app use was sporadic and it had been months since I’d logged on. Whenever I did, seeing an appealing guy was like any other kind of online window shopping — I’d also checked out a few sexy air fryers in my time, and had never pulled the trigger on one of those either.

Social distancing ramped up the unlikelihood of me actually taking dating seriously. I’m very social in an un-distanced way, so if I was going to see people — outside and six feet apart, naturally — it needed to be my nearest and dearest. When every person you meet feels like an ambulatory pathogen, you damn well better find them worth it. …

Each week in “Your Other Dad Says,” I answer questions from young people about navigating life in a very modern world.

Friendships can be amazing and amazingly tricky all at once. And, like everything else, they tend to evolve over time: what might feel like a safety net at one moment in your life feels more like a tightrope at another point. The younger you are, the harder it is to accept that most friendships don’t actually last a lifetime — and that that’s ok.

This week, I look at two seemingly opposing situations (one writer can’t keep friends and one wants to let them go) based on the same core question: Am I the problem? …

Welcome to Your Other Dad Says. Each week, I answer questions from young people about navigating life in a very modern world.

Dear Other Dad —
I attend a predominantly white institution, which is also a school for fine arts. I am a theater major and we have voice and speech classes. Sometimes while trying accents and dialects, it is very clear that “proper speech” sounds nothing like how I speak at all and I get self-conscious when trying to adjust how I speak. My tone has been called harsh/hostile when I am just passionate or confident. I don’t know how to adjust that all the time. I occasionally feel like I’m internally rejecting my authenticity/assimilating. Nevertheless, I take it in as a skill to learn and pull from whenever it is needed. When do I turn this on and off? Is this my audition voice? …

Welcome to Your Other Dad Says, advice from a gay dad you don’t live with. I answer questions from young people about navigating life in a very modern world.

With The Prom airing on Netflix and gay dads filling Insta with adorable baby pics, some people think that coming out is not a big deal anymore. But the stakes can be extremely high: it can impact where you live, whether you can pay your bills, and how safe you are. Whoever you tell might respond beautifully or horribly and your relationship with them may change as a result. The only part you have control over is your own truth. …

The reindeer is always first.

Or, at least, that has been true since my daughter was three, when she was old enough to have a favorite ornament, one she picked herself from among hundreds crowding a holiday market. Back home, I lifted her up to stand on the arm of the sofa, so her little arms could place the glittery jewel-toned prancer high enough on the tree to catch the eye.

That year, the tree was real, a fat Balsam fir that her other dad and I had picked out from a local nursery, tied to the top of the car, and driven home while singing. …

My 15-year-old daughter sits on her bed, going to high school inside our house as the pandemic slowly churns its way through American life. Being her dad is the greatest joy of my life, which doesn’t keep me from slipping into her room to drop a stack of dirty dishes on her desk as a reminder that they should have gone in the dishwasher. Our small neurotic dog sleeps next to her, having forgotten there was ever a time we weren’t home all day.

By the standards of life in America circa 2020, this is bucolic. …

Maybe you’ve already heard this story:

On August 23, a caller alerted police to a domestic incident involving a man perceived as dangerous. When police arrived on the scene, they discovered the man’s child also present. The man was not compliant with orders, so police, fearful for their safety, did what they needed to do to control the situation.

You couldn’t miss it, right? So let’s have a pop quiz. Should be easy.

Name the city.

Name the suspect.

Explain how the incident ends.

If you answered Kenosha, Jacob Blake, and “he was shot 7 times in the back” — you get zero points. …

Most of the people who tell me they don’t believe in systemic racism are white. They’re not bad people. They (think) they haven’t seen it firsthand, so it’s hard to convince them it’s true. They (think they) don’t know a lot of white people who harbor ill will toward other races and, in their experience, people get treated pretty equally.

But systemic racism isn’t about whether people are nice (or, for that matter, not nice). Systemic racism is about patterns of behavior which continually advantage white people, often effortlessly so, by making whiteness the norm, the default, the thing you see so much that your mind immediately links whiteness to whatever the subject. What that means is when many white people are dealing with nonwhite people — in hiring, housing, banking, medicine, classrooms — they don’t even realize how much their own physical or emotional reactions are determined by seeing someone who is the exception to their internalized baseline for what the “norm” is. …