Dear Geraldine,

I’m forty-three, newly out of a marriage that took the better part of two years to leave, and I have finally, cautiously, started dating again. Enter Sam. Kind, funny, ridiculously good-looking for a man who spends his weekends restoring an old Triumph motorbike and—best of all—we like the same films, enjoy the same walks and share the same work ethic. For the first time since my divorce, I’ve thought: oh, this might actually work.

Except Sam is lactose intolerant. And he will not stop eating dairy.

Not by accident, Geraldine. Deliberately. He orders the creamy carbonara. He has the cheese board “for two” and eats most of it himself. Last week he had a pint of stout and a slice of tiramisu in the same sitting, which even I know is asking for trouble. Sometimes it’s just uncomfortable, a lot of shifting in his seat and a rueful smile. Other times, our date ends with him bolting for home looking faintly grey and me driving back alone.

When I’ve asked him why, gently, he says he refuses to be “a slave to his condition.” He was married for twenty years, ate what he liked the whole time, and dealt with the consequences as they came. I understand that. I really do. I don’t want to be the woman who turns up on a date with a laminated list of foods he’s not allowed to order. Heaven knows I’ve had enough of being managed myself!

But I’m starting to enjoy our evenings less, not more, because half of me is quietly monitoring the dairy content of whatever’s on his plate. That’s not what I’d call romantic.

Can you do something? A spell, a charm, anything to nudge his stomach into behaving so I can stop dreading dairy on every date?

Yours,

Jenny (not my real name)

Dear Jenny,

No, I cannot Work on Sam’s digestion, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. A man’s relationship with cheese is entirely his own business, and frankly, if I started rearranging people’s insides every time their choices inconvenienced someone else, I’d never rest.

But then I don’t think this letter is about lactose.

Here’s what I suspect is happening. Sam spent twenty years in a marriage where, presumably, nobody scrutinised his eating habits. His condition was simply part of him: mildly annoying and occasionally regrettable. Nobody managed it, because nobody needed to. His family, I’d wager, managed it without turning it into an event.

Now he’s dating again, I think Sam wants the same thing from you. Not indifference to his health, but the absence of scrutiny. To him, being fully accepted means nobody is quietly auditing his choices. You said yourself you don’t want to be the woman with the laminated list. I’d guess Sam doesn’t want to be the man handed one.

The trouble is, acceptance and consequence are not the same thing, and you’re allowed to want both. You can accept Sam entirely as he is — cheese board and all — while still telling him, honestly, that when a date ends with him grey-faced and bolting for the door, it doesn’t feel like intimacy to you. That isn’t asking him to change. That’s telling him the truth about what you’re experiencing, which he deserves to hear.

So don’t monitor his plate. Monitor your own voice instead. Tell him, once, without a list and without a lecture, exactly what you told me: that you love how easy this feels, and that the sprinting-home part isn’t easy at all. Then let him decide what to do with that. A man capable of loving you properly will hear the difference between being managed and being loved by someone with something honest to say. If he can’t, you’ll have learned something useful before the tiramisu does any lasting damage, if not to Sam, to the romance.

Yours,

Geraldine