DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My husband had developed a suspicious pattern of being missing in action during work hours — and finally I figured it out. He had another woman.

I insisted on counselling and he reluctantly went, “for the kids’ sake,” he said. The counselling seemed to have worked, especially when the other woman transferred to Ontario. Little did I realize, however, she would still be flying back here regularly to keep up her sales in Manitoba, and my husband would continue seeing her.

There is no love left between him and me now.

Worse than the cheating, he’s not an attentive father to his children, when he even bothers to hang out with them. Frankly, it was me who always wanted to have a family, and my husband just wanted to have a lot of sex. Now he’s out a lot after work, no doubt getting what he needs.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My husband lost a bet and came home from a sports trip with his moustache shaved off. He looked like somebody else. He’s always had a moustache since I met him and I liked it a lot. He thought I would beg him to grow it back, but I was turned on by seeing his younger face appear.

It was kind of like suddenly having a younger lover. I told him that. I said I’d be fine if he kept shaving. He said he didn’t want to. Why would he not want to turn me on?

So, to even things up, I asked him how he might like to see my hair change. He said he wanted to sleep on it. The next morning he said, “How about red hair? I’ve always loved red hair the best.”

Wrong answer. His girlfriend before he met me had long red hair. Mine is golden brown. I thought he liked my hair. His red hair suggestion just felt like a strike back. Where do we go from here?

B.C. author Sasha Colby has won the 2026 Kobzar Book Award for her work of non-fiction The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Urkainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory and Nazi Resistance.

The $25,000 prize, presented by the Shevchenko Foundation at a gala at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on March 26, is awarded every two years to a work that highlights the Ukrainian-Canadian experience and the issues faced by Ukrainians in Canada.

Colby’s book, published in 2023 by ECW Press, chronicles the plight of her grandmother, Irina Nikifortchuk, who was abducted by the Nazis and made to labour at the Leica camera factory, and the factory heiress who helped rescue Nikifortchuk, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo.

The other two finalists were Bohdan S. Kordan for the non-fiction book No Place Like Home: Enemy Alien Internment in Canada during the Great War, and Michael Cherkas for Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in 1930s Soviet Ukraine.