Boyfriend shocks partner with marriage proposal

Dr. Wallace: My boyfriend and I have been together for almost five months now. I really like him even though he’s seven years older than I am.

I’m a 21-year-old college student, and he’s a successful 28-year-old sales representative.

He’s told me that he’d like to get a promotion at his job, but to do so he’d have to travel out of state for a week or two each month, making sales calls and visits to existing clients. The mother of his child apparently had many problems in life, and she granted him custody of their child before she returned to her home country halfway around the world.

Lately, he has been telling me that it’s about time he obtained a mother for his very young daughter. He then asked me to marry him. He did not have a ring with him at that time; he just brought this topic up like he was discussing what we need to pick up from the grocery store on a shopping trip or something like that.

I felt really strange about this and even taken aback. I told him I’d have to think about it for a while. Now I’m nervous to even bring this up at all anymore since it makes me queasy to think about. My guess is that he wants to marry me so I can watch his daughter when he goes on business trips out of state when he gets his inevitable promotion. What do you think about this? Am I overreacting? — Pretty Stunned Over This, via email

Pretty Stunned Over This:

It does sound quite odd that he brought up a topic as serious as marriage as an adjunct proposition to his need for child care.

My advice to you is to discuss this matter with him immediately, and if you’re not ready to get married (which I take it you’re not), then you should say so directly to him. Don’t let him think you are mulling this over as if you’re about to say yes in a week or two if you know you’re not about to do so.

This development may also give you pause about your relationship overall. He obviously is a single parent, and he has a huge responsibility to his daughter. He even stated to you that he felt “it’s time” regarding his finding a wife to care for his daughter, but from your perspective as a college student, it may not be congruent with “your time” or what you’d like to plan for your life. So, take some time to think this relationship over carefully, and do your best to project where you’d see yourself and this relationship in a year, three and five years, if you actually did marry him somewhat soon.

The thought process you’ll go through may be enlightening.

Dr. Wallace: My father claims today’s teenagers are more “sedentary” or inactive as compared to teenagers back in the 1980s, when he was mainly a teenager.

He claims that since we have video games, smartphones, social media and streaming that we don’t move our bodies as much as his generation did back in his day. His conclusion is therefore that his generation of teenagers was vastly healthier than today’s teenagers.

Do you feel this could be true, or does he just like to attempt to rattle me with his unfounded, undocumented claims?

— His Doubtful Daughter, via email

I doubt his unsubstantiated claims are true. However, I won’t go so far as to definitively state that I feel today’s teenagers are definitely healthier as a group

His Doubtful Daughter:

than those back in his teen years.

I’m going to instead state that it’s my opinion that both generations that are being compared here had plusses and minuses to account for, and my best guess is that these factors roughly cancel each other out when compared against each other.

In your father’s day, it’s true that teenagers didn’t spend as much time in front of a cellphone or computer screen, but they did certainly watch more hours of television.

In his day, teenagers likely spent a lot of time outdoors and got a decent amount of physical exercise as a group.

Your current generation as a group does spend too much time online, streaming and paying attention to social media sites and so forth. That’s a definite strike against your “team.” However, to balance that, another factor is that today’s teenagers as a group are the best informed and attentive group as a whole when it comes to health, nutrition and exercise.

Your generation of teenagers uses the tools readily at your disposal to research, study and apply many beneficial activities and strategies to your lives when it comes to overall health awareness, personal fitness and well-being.

Those tradeoffs give me a gut feeling that the two generations in question here are roughly the same. My next question to you is, how will your present generation of teens compare with teenagers one generation into the future? It will be interesting to see when you and your classmates become the parents of teenagers yourselves some day.