Weed Better Break Up Now

I'm a 28-year-old gay guy. I like to travel and go out and do stuff on the weekends. My boyfriend prefers to smoke pot and uhh...time travel on the couch. He's a good person, and I love him, but he's unwilling to cut back on his pot smoking. Friends tell me to dump him, but we've been together for three years, and bailing now would mean throwing that time away.

--Frustrated

The guy isn't without ambition. He tries really hard every day to give the cat a contact high. There's a point when love seems like "the answer" -- when you're 14 and practicing your make-out skills on your pillow. But then you grow up and get into a relationship with a man you love, and you find yourself packing for Bali while he's packing his bong. Presumably, you've tried to come to some compromise. It helps to be specific about what would work for you -- like by proposing he come down from Weed Mountain to spend Saturday afternoon and evening out on the town with you. If he's unwilling to be enough of a boyfriend to make you happy, well, you have a decision to make. In making it, don't let yourself get tripped up by "the sunk cost effect." This is decision researcher Hal Arkes' term for our (irrational) "tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made." But that initial investment -- for example, the three years you've already put into your relationship with James Bong -- is gone. What makes sense is looking at whether the "endeavor" will pay off in the future, say, in a willingness by your boyfriend to combine his favorite hobby and yours. As travel writer Rick Steves put it, "I have used cannabis all over the world." (Hmm...then again, so have other people, and they're still in jail in Turkey.)