Devastated

Dear Devastated,

This is terribly cruel, monumentally cruel, and you simply must turn your back and walk away from it. The reason for such cruelty must be that your fiancé wants out of the script. You must, at the very least, postpone the marriage. That is minimal. To forge ahead now is to walk off a cliff. You've invested 10 years, but that's nothing compared to the misery of a misbegotten marriage. Break it off and tell him that if he wants to resume with you, he will need to court you again. You won't break in pieces. It'll be hard, but you won't break, and a little anger would be good right now. Tell the jerk to get lost.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Heroine

Dear Heroine,

It's a sweet adventure to make a life with someone real, whom you meet daily with a full heart and a sense of humor. It casts a glow on your day. You say witty things, you present countless little gifts of attention and care, you lavish sexual favors and you are there when the loved one really terribly needs you, in moments of ordinary despair and extraordinary too. The single life surely has its own dignity and rhythm, but there seems to be a general preference for couplehood. There is a continuum from friendship to love: The person you like to talk with and ride bikes with is the person you want to be with is the person you fall in love with is the person you want to have kids with. It all starts with conversation. Maybe you're trying to make a great imaginative leap forward, and you need to start with conversation and bike riding.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Minnesota Boy-Toy

Dear M.B.T.,

If the words "debauchery" and "hedonism" and the phrase "sleep with as many women as possible" spring easily to your lips, then you shouldn't be dating this wonderful woman. You should go and debauch, taking precautions so as not to spread or contract disease and letting the WSL woman know that you won't be seeing her for a few weeks. You're not a bastard -- not unless your mother felt this same urge back before you were born, which perhaps she did. Perhaps she thought, "I'd like to get laid about 60 or 70 times in the next two weeks before I go back to Good Old What's His Name, the man I want to father my children." Go have as big a time as you want to have. Your confidence is breathtaking.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Normal Husband

Dear Normal,

You don't say what shape you're in, and if you're overweight and sedentary, that might be what keeps fitness on her mind. I only offer that as a thought. Of course, degeneration is programmed into our DNA: Nature seems to want us to reproduce and then fall by the wayside. But your generation wants to hang onto its youth into its 90s, on the theory that if you stay around long enough maybe you can get your life together. My generation is already starting to fall apart, forgetting its own Social Security number, enjoying the sex drive of potted plants. You didn't ask for my advice, so I won't offer any.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Panic Annie

Dear Panic,

I don't know what to make of this, but maybe there's a medication for it. It could be chronic jumpiness, or youth, or the result of ingesting too much linguini. Or perhaps you've run into a language barrier. (I'm assuming you're American.) Is that the "estrangement" you mean? My best guess is that you have an edgy imagination, and that when the going is easy, you need to excite yourself with visions of misery. That's normal, so long as you don't brood and force these random nervous impulses to become full-fledged thoughts. As for the man being "too good to be true," surely four years is long enough to see through a man's PR. I advise you to talk to a doctor about one of the new happy drugs that alleviate the heebie-jeebies.

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