SHOULD I PROPOSE TO FRIEND?

Dear Coleen

I’m a 63-year-old single man and there hasn’t been a woman in my life for five years. There is a lady I’ve known for 10 years and I’ve fallen in love with her, but she’s young enough to be my daughter.

She’s in her early 30s and has two children – a teenager and a seven-year-old.

We’re friends, but I’ve realised she’s everything I want in a woman – beautiful, sexy and we get on really well. Her kids seem to like me too. Should I ask her to marry me?

Coleen says

Um, hold your horses, Casanova! You’re not even in a relationship. Why would you ask her to marry you? I’m sure at this point she thinks of you as a friend, and a wedding proposal out of the blue would come as a pretty big shock, to say the least.

So don’t ask her to marry you. Even if she did like you in a romantic sense, doing this would scare her off for ever and make it really awkward for you to be friends going forwards.

If you genuinely think you’re in love with her, then it’ll probably be hard for you to carry on just being friends. If you don’t think you can live with it, then tell her you’ve developed stronger feelings for her and see how she reacts. And if she says she doesn’t feel the same, then you know where you stand.

But don’t jump from being friends to a marriage proposal.