Dear Prudence,
A few weeks ago, I came to LA for work. It was a long work trip and during my time here, I met a celebrity. We definitely hit it off and he has expressed interest in me. We talked about what it would be like to date, which would be secret in the beginning. That is fine with me and I feel like I have a decent grasp of what it’s going to be like to date him. I’m fine with the secrecy because I prefer that in my personal life, but I feel really paralyzed by all the decisions in front of me.
If I do date him, even in secret, and the word gets out, there’s nothing I can do to change that. Even if the relationship doesn’t work out, I will forever be the person who dated the celebrity and if anybody Googles my name, that will probably be the first several pages that come up. If the relationship does last, I can expect very little privacy in public for however long we have a public relationship. That could be a problem for my career, as I do need some privacy for my job and I do know of some people who decided to quit their job at our LA office because of this. I worked my butt off for this career and I love what I do, but my career is not turning out like I thought and I’m not sure it ever will. On top of all that, I would need to move to LA, which would be easy as my company has an office there, but I know very few people and would be uprooting my life for who knows what. My time in LA ends in about two weeks and I’m feeling really anxious about trying to make these decisions in such a short time. Do you have any advice on how to sort through all of these issues and come to a final decision?
—Indecisive Dater