First is the marked difference in the circumstances of our lives. I am a successful professional and businessman, and she is a financially struggling graduate student. (When we first met, she was still an undergraduate.) I have no problem paying for all our dates, our meals, traveling together, etc. It seems only natural, since I have the means to do so, and the financial impact for me is truly negligible. At times I have done even more for her financially, such as pay for many of her material needs, e.g. textbooks, school and living expenses, etc. She has never asked me to do this; I have always offered without prompting. On occasion, my girlfriend has expressed some discomfort about the things I have given her, saying that it feels like a sugar daddy-sugar baby relationship; but conversely, she has not turned my gifts down either, mainly because I insist. For both of us, there is definitely no sense of obligation or strings attached or quid pro quo. To me, it just seems like a natural thing for me to do, to help take care of someone I love. My family, however, is concerned that she is taking advantage of me, and I can certainly understand their perspective. They do not understand why a beautiful, young woman would want a relationship with someone old enough to be her father. Early in our relationship, I posed the same question to her. She told me that she has always been attracted to older men (she had earlier ended a relationship with a 35-year-old man) and found “boys” her own age to be immature and superficial. How can I convince my family — and I suppose to a certain extent myself — that she is not a gold digger?

The other problem we have encountered is the reaction of other people — strangers, acquaintances, friends and family — to our relationship. It ranges from, at best, surprise, to bemused cynicism, to being scandalized, to outright hostility. Noone we know reacts, at least initially, to our relationship favorably. This was of course predictable, and I thought I had prepared myself for the reactions of others when we first started dating. But I must confess that constantly battling the tide of negative opinion weighs on me. I am a very youthful, active 49, and have been told that I could easily pass for someone ten years younger. The problem is that my girlfriend is also extremely young-looking, which accentuates the age difference. Walking in public holding hands invariably engenders stares and second looks. Do we just have to resign ourselves to withhold all displays of public affection until she starts looking older (by then, hopefully, I will still maintain my own youthful appearance)? I know it shouldn’t matter, but the opinion of others matters to me. Especially problematic are the attitudes of business friends and colleagues who knew and liked my ex-wife, and who consider my current relationship at best highly unusual. How do we deal with them? At least my girlfriend and, for the most part, her circle of friends find our relationship much less problematic.

But perhaps biggest the issue I have with our relationship is that I am worried that as I continue to get older, she will be a vibrant, still-young woman saddled with an increasingly decrepit old man. I am still very fit, healthy and active, but I worry that in 10 or 20 years, my health will start failing, and she will be stuck with me. I love my girlfriend, and if not for the issues noted above, I would wish us to have a long, happy life together. As much as I can look after myself and stay young for her, I am worried that the inevitable discrepancy in our physical well-being will lead to guilt on my part and resentment on hers. I have discussed this with her, told her that in many ways she would do better to find someone nearer her own age, but she has always dismissed my reasoning out of hand, seemingly without giving it any thought. Is this a legitimate concern I have? How can I be certain that she knows what she may be getting herself into?

Mr. September

Dear Mr. September,

Your concerns sound reasonable. But what are you to do about them? You cannot change your age or hers. You cannot change how your friends and colleagues think and feel. You cannot change the reactions of strangers. So why not accept your situation exactly as it is?

As to what to say: It might help to memorize and agree upon certain phrases that politely define your relationship and clear up misconceptions. A little lighthearted humor might help; sometimes it’s refreshing to be disarmingly frank: “She’s my girlfriend.” But I leave it up to you. I intuitively sense that you are diplomatic and alert to social nuance.

Accepting the situation exactly as it is may require giving up the illusion of control. If you are a successful businessman and professional, you may be accustomed to feeling you are in control. It may be a habit to orchestrate events so that chance events are eliminated, when possible, and hedged against, when not.

But what if an undersea earthquake causes a tsunami and wipes out your town?

It is a mistake to assume that only visible dangers matter. Have you read “The Black Swan”? You might enjoy it. To greatly oversimplify, one lesson of that book is to prepare for the unknown. To assume that it will be the unforeseen that will surprise us is more or less tautological, yet we seem to have trouble with that.

Maybe we translate uneasiness about the unknown into concern about the known. For instance, your concern about what may happen in the future may be a way of dealing with your concern about the present.

The future is uncertain for everyone. It was uncertain for you and your wife. You probably planned to stay married but something changed. You could not have planned for that. Age can shift the balance of a marriage. But so can other things.

Youth is no protection against disease or accident. Your wife could get sick. You might end up being her caregiver. You must be ready to take care of her just as she must be ready to take care of you.

She is young and may not care to think about what might happen later. One day she might find she’s no longer in love with you. She may leave you. But if you and she were the same age, she might leave you as well. You can’t know. Neither can she. She doesn’t have to be a gold-digger to wreak havoc on your life. She may just be a person who wants to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. If her feelings should change, then she might leave you. Would that make her a bad person? Would it make her a bad person if she promised to always love you and then stopped loving you? If she follows her heart, and her heart changes, and she is not able to see that coming, does that make her a bad person?

This is love. This is life. Nothing is certain. Accept it.

My sister believes she is doing what my mother wants, but my mother is unconscious.

The doctors keep telling us that my mother’s organs are failing; they need machines to keep her “alive.”

I am worried that my sister is freaking out, is terrified of losing our mother and is not dealing with the situation rationally.

How can I keep her from losing her sanity?

Thank you for considering my question.

Trying to Stay Calm

Dear Trying to Stay Calm,

While your sister struggles to absorb the facts, she will do everything in her power to preserve life. Only as she accepts that her mother is soon going to pass out of this world will she begin to let go of the emergency measures to which she is desperately clinging.

While it would not be right to take actions or make decisions behind your sister’s back or contrary to her wishes, I think it would be OK for you to contact a hospice organization just to talk with them.

The hospital may help you contact hospice, or you may contact them on your own. Explain what is going on and how you view it, and seek to understand what the options are. Hospice workers are experienced in helping anxious family members cope with the inevitable.

Tell them that your sister has the decision-making power. No one should pressure anyone to do anything.

As the end-of-life drama unfolds, it is a good time to sit and wait and contemplate. It’s a good time to look back over your mother’s life and honor her accomplishments and her spirit.

In the words of Dame Cicely Mary Saunders, who did much to establish the modern hospice movement, “As the body becomes weaker, so the spirit becomes stronger.” You can rest assured that as your mother approaches death, she is prepared. She has had time.

It is your sister who now needs time.

At one point things became so bad that she went to the police to file a report. She told me that the police were very unhelpful, reluctantly took the information, and seemed very unlikely to do anything unless/until he threatened her with physical harm. She says that she feels powerless to escape. At least that’s what she claims. I say this because she is by her own admission “not 100 percent certain” that she never wants to see him again. She is certain that there is no romantic future for them, but she claims she still has enough of an emotional tie to him that she is not entirely sure she wants him entirely out of her life.

Because they both live in a small college town, she cannot avoid him. He has no problem causing scenes in public which, to avoid, causes my sister to yield to his demands to talk, which often lead to screaming, crying fights, including threats on his part to commit suicide if she does not maintain contact with him.

She has told my parents and me about his abusive behavior, but because she attends school across the country, none of us have seen or can physically confront her “ex.” We are also hindered by the fact that she seems unwilling to do whatever it takes to get this psycho out of her life. It seems like during the time they lived together, he almost brainwashed her into thinking that she will never be able to fully escape his hold over her. We cannot be entirely sure that she is doing her utmost to escape his clutches.

What can I do to convince her that she needs to do whatever it takes to get him completely out of her life? And, assuming I can get her to see the light, what practical things can she do, without jeopardizing her safety, and, as much as possible, avoiding public humiliation and drama, which he has been all too willing to turn to in his efforts to control her?

A Concerned Older Brother

Dear Older Brother,

One thing that will help is to impress upon her how dangerous her situation is.

As the group AWARE points out, “Stalking is a serious, potentially life-threatening crime. Even in its less severe forms, it permanently changes the lives of the people who are victimized by this crime, as well as affecting their friends, families, and co-workers. Law enforcement is only beginning to understand how to deal with this relatively new crime.”

Send her to the website for AWARE — “Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment” and talk with her about what she finds there.

Also, womenslaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, has a good explanation of the state-by-state variations in restraining-order law.

The fact that the police were initially unhelpful should not deter her. She will need to be persistent and thorough, and follow the often maddening and apparently senseless procedures outlined by the courts.

An understanding of how women have been historically denied their rights and mistreated by the courts will also motivate her. Perhaps it will make her angry. Anger may be what she needs. The consciousness-raising that women did in order to gain rights and public understanding took time and involved much conflict.

Perhaps I can also provide a little personal history to show how difficult it can be to disentangle the personal from the political.

When women first started talking to men about our abuses of women, many found it hard to accept that the behavior we had been taught by our older role models was in fact harmful and hateful.

It was hard to change.

Many of us men did change. Some resisted loudly. It was not easy for us to give up behaviors that we had worked hard to master in the first place. What I mean is, when you’re an adolescent boy, you turn to your dad and other older males to find out how to treat women. You ask them what women want, how to treat girls, and in my case, my elder male role models were all sexists.  So they taught us, their sons and nephews, to be sexists also. They didn’t call it learning how to be sexists. They called it “becoming a man.”

And then, after practicing what they had taught us during the sexual revolution in which sexual mores were loose and women were often compliant, we suddenly had to change. Women were suddenly demanding not only equality in the workplace but in the intimate spheres of romance and social life. Suddenly we were supposed to do the dishes and cook.We had not been taught even these elementary tasks of domestic maintenance! We were taught that there would always be women to do it! How crazy is that? And yet it’s true. There were degrees, of course. Some families were less sexist and more sensible than others. But for many, many men, this much was true:

We had to throw out what our fathers and uncles had taught us about how to treat women. We had to defy our fathers and uncles in this very intimate and emotional arena. It wasn’t easy.

Nor was it easy to give up our male privilege. It was not easy to give up our power. But many of us did. We saw that the assumptions we had been taught to make about women were wrong. We saw that how women were portrayed in movies and on television was wrong. We saw how this connected to women’s real unhappiness. I saw this in my own mother and in other women of her generation. I saw it and it hit home emotionally. I saw that how husbands and fathers treated women led to lasting harm. But it was not easy to give up what my father had taught me.

It was not easy and it was painful.

For there were bonding moments between men and boys that, though injurious to women, were emotionally satisfying. Sharing in the snicker and the leer, the knowing comment about a woman’s legs or breasts — these were our initiation into our fathers’ world, and with them came longed-for gestures of acceptance. These pitiful moments served as rites of passage: I whistled at a woman. I guess I’m a man now.

The courageous work of women over the past century has enshrined many rights in law and custom. Because much seems now settled, it may be hard for younger women to grasp the ways men still use the conventions of romance to oppress them. That’s what this man did. He used the conventions of romantic love to oppress your sister. Now he is using the vestiges of romantic love to render her vulnerable to further attacks. And he has turned to tormenting her in ways that could probably be prosecuted. Yet when she goes to the police she finds herself rebuffed. Here, too, she is confronting the vestiges of a centuries-old center of male power. When a young woman approaches an older policeman to complain of emotional torment arising out of a romantic relationship, vestiges of the old patriarchal order are  reenacted.

So naturally she feels rebuffed. She feels as if her complaint was meager and unimportant. She has been patronized. She has been stripped of her dignity and power. It may sound hyperbolic to say this, but it is commonplace.

Knowing the larger picture can give one courage.

If your sister will educate herself about her history as a woman, she may make connections that motivate her psychologically and emotionally. That is what pioneering feminists did. That is why they met in consciousness-raising circles: They understood that if they were to succeed, they had to motivate each other. It was not only knowledge that they were transmitting, but courage.

This courage is what your sister needs. Women’s groups in her area will gladly provide some of that courage.

As for what else you can do, it might help to actually go there and talk with her. Go to the police station with her. Help her contact a lawyer who can talk to the police and frame the situation in such a way as to get a legal stay-away order.

There was a column a while back in which I was widely viewed to have given a too-lenient view of a domestic situation in which the man displayed traits that to many indicated that he was dangerous. So perhaps I can make up for it this time by insisting that this man’s behavior be treated as dangerous.

You can help by regularly checking in with her on the situation. You can also help by aiding her in changing her passwords. I don’t know the technical situation but it’s possible he knows not only her passwords but her supposedly safe “hints” — you know, the supposedly personal information only she would have. So please consult with someone about computer security and help her change her passwords in a more foolproof way.

In general, commit to giving her regular calls and pep talks to keep her motivated and confident. Visit her if at all possible. Impress upon her the seriousness of this man’s behavior. Be there in any way you can. Help her find a lawyer who can advocate for her in the courts. Don’t be discouraged. Be there. It’s what an older brother is for.

Now, if she were as kind and selfless as he, I would give them my blessing. However, she has a devious, controlling side that she has used, in combination with his naive kindness, to secure him as her lifelong mate. On a day-to-day basis, he is constantly made to apologize to her, as she finds fault with the most harmless guffaw or, heaven forbid, a difference in opinion. Recently, she forbade him from going on his own bachelor party because she suspected he would cheat on her, costing him thousands in plane and hotel fees in the process. She has used her cunning to manipulate him over the years, to the point where he feels like he has no choice but to marry her.

How can I save my friend? I have stopped confronting him on this because his wife-to-be is so shrewd and smart that she has altered his fundamental thought process: He BELIEVES she is a great partner now, a real catch, because she has told him so time and time again. Deep down, somewhere, I know he knows that he’s settling and that he could do better; he’s made this much clear by putting off her very public and repetitive pleas to get married. Is there any hope for him? There are other close friends of his who feel the same way — what can we do?

I predict that the marriage will go one of two ways. Either he’ll snap out of it, get sick of being mistreated and break it off in a nasty divorce. Or, much more likely, his wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly benevolence will get the best of him, and his fear of hurting her will force him to spend the rest of his days with someone he does not love. He’ll swallow his romantic ambitions, as he has all of his life with her, and force himself to believe that they’re meant to be together … all simply because she told him to.

Help Me Cary!

Dear Help Me!,

What if your friend had a need to be controlled and manipulated? What if his fiancée were meeting that need? Would it be wrong of her to meet that need?

If a person locks himself in a cell because he feels safe there, is that wrong?

Do we allow our friend to lock himself in his cell? Do we blame the cell? What if the keys are right there but he prefers the cell? Do we keep running over there and opening the door? Do we insist he can’t stay in the cell, that he has to come out and walk around like the rest of us good American souls, making his own decisions, standing on his own two feet? What if he doesn’t want to stand on his own two feet?

What if a man wants a woman to run his life for him? What if he wants her to tell him what he really wants so that he doesn’t have to think about what he really wants because thinking about what he really wants would mean having to ask for what he really wants. And who the hell wants to do that? That’s scary!

What if he has a strong need to not make decisions and a strong need to avoid conflict?

Basically, relationships meet needs. That’s why we have them. There are needs for love and companionship and sex that seem pretty normal. We get that. But what about other needs?

We’re not always meeting the needs people think we should be meeting. We’re not always meeting our most admirable needs. That doesn’t mean they’re not needs. They’re just not the needs other people think we should be meeting. And, well, duh: That’s what makes them our needs and not somebody else’s. They might be perverse and pathological needs, but they’re our needs. I know it’s sad. Doesn’t it help a little bit to look at it like this?

I hope this doesn’t make it worse. I’m just trying to help.

Why not leave him alone and wish him well? Why not just say to him that if there ever comes a time when he’s ready to bust out, you’ll be there for him.

That’s one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it is that she has put him under her spell. This happens too. People become hypnotized and lost. They become dependent on others to run their lives. They get addicted to drugs. They retreat into fantasy and it’s not entirely choice; there is a malevolent force at work.

When that happens, we can say things. We can say, you’re ruining your life. We can book a hotel room and get all his friends and family to sit on chairs and couches waiting for his arrival, and then tell him, Oh, listen, I just have to drop by here at this hotel to pick up my sister, won’t you come up there with me, and then Boom! Surprise! It’s an Intervention!

Interventions are great. When else do family and friends say what they really want and what they really feel? Interventions are terrific. The tears, the choices, the driving off to rehab!

But a pre-wedding intervention would be kinda weird. Hey, dude, we really hate your fiancée. We think she’s ruining your life. We think you should dump her.

You see the problem with that?

So here’s a thought: We act as if we have repressed our desire for happiness and that’s the problem, and if we only let it out, we would be happy. But what if we actually have the reverse situation? What if what’s actually repressed in our society is not the pursuit of happiness but true tragic consciousness? What if our overwhelming social insistence on happiness has actually driven the tragic underground, so that it is the tragic that threatens to arise out of repression, so that that it is the tragic that we seek in our intimate moments, in our private moments? And what if that is why we have these problems with drugs and suicide and depression — not because we’re not happy enough, but because we have repressed the tragic?

What if not everybody wants to visit San Diego at least once in their lives?

If that were the case, if grief were the thing most repressed in society, then we would find ways to express our melancholia, our sense of the tragic, in our intimate relations.

Another way to look at your friend’s situation is to consider the possibility that he is getting ready for something but is not ready yet. Maybe his soul is getting ready. Say a fierce battle awaits the soul. We can be in a holding pattern. There is not much to do while waiting for the soul’s great challenge. So we amuse ourselves with pastimes.

Maybe she is a pastime. Maybe he is waiting.

One thing I know: We can’t change people.

I hope this helps you accept what he’s doing so it won’t be so painful to watch. Maybe if you think about it in terms of his needs, strange as they may be, you won’t feel you’re letting him down by not interfering.

Promise to be there for him if he ever decides to leave the cage.

Dear Bewildered,

Your friend’s problem is that he is a racist.

It’s not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.

But he’s still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What’s worse, it can spread. It’s each person’s job to not be a racist.

He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.

Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.

Don’t punch him. That won’t help.

Well, it might help a little. It might temporarily curb his outward expressions of racism. But I’m against hitting people even as a gift of enlightenment.

Just tell him that being a racist is not cool anywhere in the United States of America or in Europe or Asia or Africa or North America or South America or Australia or Antarctica. which pretty much means the whole world, all the continents, plus the open oceans and in outer space also. Racism is not cool even in outer space or on other planets. It’s not cool, period. It’s not cool anywhere, not in public or in private. It’s one of those things that you just want to get rid of completely and be done with.

Tell your friend that the next time he says some kind of racist remark like that, that you’re terminating all contact with him.

Now, everyone has a shadow self that embodies the repressed. We all have our share of unvoiced hatred and fear, irrational beliefs, strange, criminal impulses. Thoughts come into our heads that we must censor because to voice them would disturb others.

We may have sexual fantasies about our friends’ wives or husbands, or their sisters or brothers or their children; we might have taboo curiosities. We may find ourselves imagining elaborate ways to connect physically that involve hydraulics, servo motors, pulleys and latex.

Some of us have so many of these thoughts that we move to San Francisco.

But let’s not complicate the issue.

Also, there are rumored to exist tiny protected intellectual zones where people have advanced degrees in things you never heard of and special vocabularies come into use in a specialized context, where you can say things that have several layers and degrees of irony and are understood in sophisticated ways that you couldn’t explain to your friend even if you understood them yourself, which you’re not going to.

That’s different.

There is also weird humor which unless you’re Sarah Silverman, don’t try that either. It’s too advanced for you.

And don’t get on your high horse and pretend there are degrees, that racism exists on a continuum. There are no degrees. There is no continuum.

Racism is bad. It’s evil. Nobody should be voicing racist thoughts.

If your friend keeps it up, just totally, radically de-friend him. Become his special not-friend.

Be done with it. It’s that simple.