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I like kids. But I don’t have kids. I don’t want to have kids. I want to have a lot of fragile things three feet off the ground and uncovered electric outlets and household poisons in my house and not, you know, kids. I am that age (34!) where nearly everybody has kids. I have a lot of parties — big, casual brunches and bbqs and so forth — kids are almost always welcome. My friends “June” and “Mary” have a very sweet three-year-old. He’s polite and cute as a bug and smart as anything. I dig him. And I’m happy to accommodate him and everyone else’s children at parties. I have a basket…

It’s time again for Shortcuts. For every question I’ll give my advice in just a few sentences because sometimes the answer to a person’s question is so obvious and the need to hear it so great that being as clear and frank as possible is simply the best way to go.

From the forums: I have been with my husband for about four years, and we’ve been married for about a year now. It was apparent very early in our dating that his father is quite a character. He is able to make a good living at his job, but he wastes all of his money on prescription drugs, alcohol, and God knows what else. My husband claims to not approve of this behavior, but I know he has lent his dad sums of money here and there, maybe $100-200 at a time. My husband claims that his father has always paid him back and that, until he fails to pay him back,…

I met a guy online over the summer. We had three PG dates and had a really great time together. We went away for a weekend on our fourth date, and he asked me to be his girlfriend that weekend. Four weeks later, after lots of relationship talk and his being super keen, he called to say a friend had declared her love for him. He felt confused and so ended it with me. Three weeks later we started talking again; he told me nothing happened with the friend and he wanted to rekindle our relationship, so, after telling him how much of an idiot he was, I agreed. Three months later,…

Advice for a woman whose boyfriend won’t let her travel without him.

I went to my aunt’s funeral last week and ran into a guy I hadn’t seen since high school, 26 years ago. We talked for a minute, and he asked me to lunch so we could catch up on everything. When I passed my phone number over to him through my mom, he immediately gave me his number as well. After the funeral that day he began texting me. Long story short, he sent me a pic of me out of his yearbook where he had written: “We had crushes on each other.” I couldn’t believe it, but I also wondered if he had just written it that day to impress me?…

My husband and I have been married six years. We are happy and have fun together. However, off and on over the course of our relationship he has chatted with women online behind my back on various hookup sites. He has even texted a friend of mine flirtatiously, and she immediately told me. Now he dislikes her and thinks she blew it out of proportion. It has escalated from chatting (which I still think is wrong but not as egregious as real life cheating) to attempting to meet up in real life. He sees nothing wrong with his behavior and has dismissed it as “just looking around,” which he didn’t think I’d…