Dear Prudence,

In my family, especially around the holidays, you have to be able to dish it out and take it. Good-natured ribbing about the things you’ve done, large and small, flies around the room, and the measure of how much we like you is how much we tease you. No matter how much I tell that to my current boyfriend, he doesn’t get it. He takes my family’s barbs as personal. They give him grief about his age (which really isn’t that old) or about how all his friends have children (and he doesn’t) or about how his favourite team never wins the Super Bowl (while theirs does). He’s a super straight arrow, and it’s even hard to come up with things to tease him about. If he dished it out in return, they’d respect him for it. Instead, he politely sits there, smiles uncomfortably, and waits for it…