Dear Alice,

Hi, I'm a trumpeter with an emotional problem. I fall in love very fast -- and out very fast. As soon as I move in with some girl -- or she moves in with me -- as far as I'm concerned, I can't escape quick enough. Yet I'd like to have at least one kid, and I'm not getting any younger. (I am forty five.) I only got married once, but I've lived with ten to eleven women since. (I don't know if I should count the eleventh as it was less than a week.)

What can I do to improve my chances?


A trumpeter

Dear trumpeter,

Whaddya mean, improve your chances? Seems to me you've taken every chance you've got!!!!!! What you need, kiddo, is advice on how to un-improve your chances. I'll bet you're one of those warm, cuddly, seemingly caring trumpeters with deceptively sweet eyes who convinces all ten (sorry, eleven) women you really like that you've been waiting, just for each and every one of them for all your life, and you're desperate to make a nest and raise baby bassoonists together (though the last part of this -- barring the bassoonists -- does appear to be at least partly true).

Suspect you don't really really really want said kids, however, or you'd stop panicking. (One week is panicking, you must admit.) What you want is the thrill of the chase, not the slog of dividing up the household chores. Unless you get real, your best chance of ensuring the survival of your gene pool -- though whether the world would benefit therefrom appears to be a fairly moot point -- is to recognise that you're still behaving like the high school stud you probably were once and stop it.

This is my advice:

1. Date your next girlfriend six times before having sex,
2. and six months before moving in/asking her to move in.
   (This will give you a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out if this has long-term potential for both of you.)
3. And stop eyeing up the brunette in the second violins, even if it cramps your style and ruins your street cred with other trumpet players. (Don't tell me with that innocent look that you aren't doing this. I'm slightly older than you and -- on current evidence -- about twice as smart.)

And don't worry about your age: men, at least, have all the time in the world to make babies, lucky bastards.

Good luck, bud: you're going to need it.

Yours, a bit dubious on the whole,
Alice