We air both sides of a domestic disagreement – and ask you to deliver a verdict
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Jay hates fish because of a distressing childhood experience, but it means I can’t have it either

The question I’m a 24-year-old guy studying for my masters while working part-time for a management consultancy and I’m also a qualified associate accountant. I recently met a woman on a dating app after being single for a year since the start of the pandemic. She’s a similar age to myself and we’ve been dating for two months. She’s very attractive and nice, and we have a good time together – she can make me laugh.

There is a red flag, though. Although she is in her mid-20s she still lives at home and seems to have no plans or ambitions to move to living independently. Plus, despite having a part-time job, she doesn’t contribute to the household bills. Now I understand that rent is high and people are staying with their parents for longer, but she isn’t even planning on going to college or progressing further in her career. She spends most of her money on going out with friends, holidays and hobbies.

The dilemma I have kept secrets for my mother for many years. She has had several extramarital affairs and I am the only one who knows about these. She has never held back in telling me about her feelings for the people she has been involved with. She despises my father and tells me whenever we meet of his failings and of her disappointments in life. She discusses – and has discussed since I was 10 – leaving him, but she has never gone through with this.

I am now in my 50s. To her friends and the rest of the family, she is considered kind and compassionate. She is, though, a troubled woman. However, my daughter considers her to be the perfect grandmother and has invited her to her graduation ceremony. There are not enough tickets so I will not be able to attend. I am crushed by this. I wonder if I have reached the point where I should cut her out of my life.

Rebecca, 36, researcher, meets James, 28, primary school teacher

Rebecca on James

What were you hoping for?
A fun night out with someone lovely, and a heap of good wine.

When Randy Sue first saw a picture of Courtney on a friend’s wall, she jokingly called him her future husband. They finally met three years later, married and now live in Houston, Texas

Randy Sue was studying at college in Texas in the spring of 1966 when she went to visit a friend in Raymondville, near the Mexican border. “I spotted a picture of a handsome man on the wall and asked who it was. My friend told me it was her brother, Courtney, who was in Germany with the army,” she says. Randy Sue joked to her friend’s mother that she was going to be her daughter-in-law. “She hugged me and said she’d been praying for me,” she laughs.

But when Courtney received a letter from his sister telling him she had met “his future wife”, he was less than impressed. “I was 5,000 miles away and definitely didn’t want my sister telling me what to do,” he says. In 1968, he returned to Texas and found a job at a company that made office equipment. His sister continued her matchmaking attempts. “She kept telling each of us that the other one really wanted to meet up,” says Randy Sue. “But I’d just seen it as a joke.”

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