She has tangled view of life, love

Dear Carolyn: It is my general dating philosophy to just follow my heart. If I’m interested in someone and they’re interested in me, we’ll go out. If our dates go well, we’ll become a couple.

Here’s the problem: My last boyfriend was a penniless musician who had no interest in pursuing any other career and is therefore likely to spend his life moving from menial job to menial job and playing in bands on the weekend. Which is a perfectly valid life choice, but I want to travel the world, go to graduate school, have a really cool career and raise a family. I could never spend my life with him. If we’d ever had children, I know I would have had to provide for them financially; I wouldn’t be able to count on him to help. So, although I loved him, when I realized he was thinking marriage, I broke up with him.

Now it’s happening again. I’m falling in love with a penniless musician in a dead-end job. I wonder if I’m obligated to tell him how I feel, before he gets in too deep. – The Queen of, “It’s Not You, It’s Me”

He does deserve to know. Nevertheless, I think it would be more productive for each of your halves to tell the other how you feel about relationships, preferably before you drag someone else into one.

Your philosophy on life roles is as rigid as your dating philosophy is loose. You can’t travel the world, go to graduate school, have a really cool career and raise a family without reaching into a man’s pocket? How retro. How self-limiting. How baffling to anyone who reads (or writes) this who has ever supported a family on one paycheck from a fulfilling career.

And, how morally at odds with your view of dating. It’s still not unusual for a man to be sole breadwinner and vacation-provider – for himself, a “penniless” wife and family – nor is it unusual for a man to be roundly excoriated for indulging in years of sweetness and sex with women he’d never consider marrying. Heart follower, locate thy heart.

Dear Carolyn: So I have a mother-in-law who is very sweet but also very “country.” What do you tell a child when you are correcting their poor English, learned from her? I don’t want to denigrate her in their eyes. – D.C.

Do your correcting without mentioning Grandma. If your child brings her up, just explain that her way of saying things isn’t unusual but it also isn’t correct. A person’s grammar may deliver all kinds of complex social messages, but kids figure that out when they’re ready. Now, all they need to know are the certainties: that it tells nothing about her character and everything about the way she was taught to speak.