Leave work early one day a week

What a difficult situation. You’re not being cut a lot of slack.

It’s sounds to me like you’re right at the top of your game. You’re 44 and, professionally, I’d have thought that meant you’re going full pelt at work.

there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s important to be at your best and to give it 100 per cent.

I have to say, I do believe this chap is being unreasonable and not very accommodating to you at all.

this business with his friends — well, it doesn’t seem too much to ask for you to do this at weekends. You don’t mention having to work on Saturday or Sunday, but surely even if you do have to, then you could put an occasional dinner in the diary and mark it down as a day off?

If the problem is that this group of chums always meet on a Friday, and have done for the last 20 years, well, tough, they’ll simply have to change that when it comes to your turn.

You’ve been together for 18 months, quite long enough to know if you are going to be compatible long term.

It is rather crunch time at your age. this is the moment to decide whether or not things are going to get more serious. Paramount in that decision, of course, is how happy your current partner makes you. You really do need to question if this person is going to make you happy in the future.

Your boyfriend sees that your work is more important to you then he is, and he does not like it. Well, I say he’s wrong. It’s entirely appropriate that you set more store by the career you’ve spent decades building than by a chap you’ve been with for less than two years.

he is behaving badly. It is all very ‘me, me, me’. You are being chastised for not being available when he finishes work. It is his friends you are letting down.

But what about his responsibility to you? he’s not respecting you and your commitment to your job. I have friends who work long hours, and there is an understanding from their partner that they will not be home until 8pm or 9pm.

that is simply the way their lives work. I dare say if they were asked to waltz out of the office to attend a dinner party in the middle of a crisis, they’d think their partner had gone stark staring mad.

that said, if you are constantly working so hard, it does seem reasonable to ask your boss for a little give along with the take. Maybe you could ask if it was possible to leave early at 6pm one day a week.

It would then be up to you how you spent that extra time. Perhaps you would like to spend it with this chap.

Or perhaps not. It seems to me that he’s being selfish and selfindulgent and failing to see the bigger picture. You should focus on that now. Is this how you want the rest of your life to look?

Only you know the answer to that one. Good luck in working out what it is that will make you truly happy.

■ IF YOU have a question you’d like Steph and Dom to tackle, write to: stephanddom@ dailymail.co.uk