I got laid off from my job and ended up at a homeless center for young people. i lived there for about a year towards the end I made friends with a young man who was handsome and I moved out into an apartment we started a relationship and he ended up getting kicked out of there because they did not want us to date because i was older than him. earlier on in the relationship he was having trouble sending letters to a penitentiary , the staff was refusing, he said it was his "brother." He also talked about this guy and other people he called his "little brothers"and he said they were just close friends and someday he wanted to live with them all. I said ok he handed me the letter to send for him but i got a weird feeling, he told me it had his childhood pictures in it. I never thought about it again until later on when our relationship became deeper, months went by and we became sexual, i had a weird dream of the name on the letter. I looked it up on the internet to find the name of the "older brother" and it was the name of a guy who is in prison for molesting a 7 year old and 14 year old boy and putting the pics on the internet. I confronted hi about it he became a little emotional the first time i talked to him about it but reverted back to this weird persona where his face has no emotion and he won't talk about the "brother." he gave a little emotionally the first time i confronted him and i thought he was giving in so I llet him back in my life and we didnt talk about the guy anymore at first he said things like he loves him more than he loves me he doesnt really say that anymore but whenever i confront him he refuses to talk about him just saying things like "he loves me" "I t doesnt really concern you" and your""blinded by hate." He says that the little boys said they loved him too so it was ok that the guy had sex with them but the half the time he refuses to talk about the situation at all saying "it doesn't concern you." Now he says why can't i love you both? or why are you trying to drive away someone I care about, now he doesnt call him his brother or says hes in love with him he just calls him his best friend now, but he's still manipulative and still refuses to be honest with me and actually talk things through instead being manipulative abut it whenver italk about it. whenever it comes up i get really upset and end up raising my voice screaming but he stays cool with no emotion with his robot face on we are poorer than dirt and he repeatedly says he wont go to counseling and we couldnt afford it anyways because we are poor. His parents sent him to the mental ward and he hates them. He ran away fromthem and calls them his "enemies" and rufuses to admit he has parents. We fight about it he seems to go back to normal then it comes back again I feel like i have very little hold on him other than him admitting that he wants to be with me or that he loves me. I have 13 years until this guy gets out of prison but i don't know if its a losing battle I don't know what to do.

It sounds like both of these guys (your boyfriend and the one in prison) are trouble. And when you are poor, as you say you are, the last thing you can afford is trouble. It doesn't sound like anything good can come out of this situation, on the contrary it has a great deal of potential to drag you down even more.

My advice? Start thinking about yourself. What do you want to do? Where do you see yourself in a few years? What is standing in the way? You haven't said anything about kids so I assume you don't have any or not any by this man. But if you are in a sexual relationship there is a chance you could become pregnant. What then?

You may think I am harsh, but I have seen a lot of poverty and I have seen a lot of really bad relationships, and I am no fan of either. I especially don't like to see people choosing to stay in poverty or a bad relationship when they have a chance to do something better with their lives.

You can do better than this situation. I'd say leave those two to each other, it sounds like they deserve each other anyway. And do you really want to get mixed up in a pedophile situation? That can rub off on you. And--if you have kids, do you really want them around a pedophile?

I think you already know the answer to what to do, you just need to have the courage to do it.