I am in my 20s and, for eight months, have been seeing a girl who might very well be “the one.” The problem is she wants to meet my mother, who is beyond controlling. She plays a game with girls I date, which I call “the 20 questions of doom.” Her questions start out normal, but by question 10, she’ll ask stuff like “Have you ever seen my son in the nude, and if not, do you have plans to?” She’ll also say very negative things about me. Also, I’m a dark-skinned black person, and my girlfriend is biracial, and my mother doesn’t want me dating a light-skinned girl because she wants grandkids who resemble her. I want to keep this girl, but she is growing impatient with my not letting her meet my mom, and is beginning to think I’m ashamed of her.

— Stuck

Moms say the darndest things: “So, dear … how much do you owe in student loans and have you seen my son’s winkie?”

Any girl meeting her boyfriend’s mother for the first time expects a few uncomfortable questions -- but on her politics and reproductive plans. People who don’t have saboteurs for parents can find it hard to understand that somebody’s mother could be their relationship’s worst enemy. You, on the other hand, are already dreading your mother’s hospitality: “Son, shall we have coffee and dessert now and push your little friend into the woodchipper later?”

Talk to your girlfriend, but not about meeting the middle-aged mean girl also known as your mother. Open up to her about the painful relationship you have with your mother and how hurtful it’s been that she has tried to drive away every woman in your life. (Some animals eat their young. Some eat their young’s girlfriends.) Evoking your girlfriend’s sympathy is the first step in shrinking her hurt feelings. (For best results, avoid mentioning that Mom’ll think she’s from the wrong side of the Crayola box.)

You can’t control your mother’s behavior, but you can control who she gets to meet. This would be a good time to reconsider the definition of family. Maybe family means people who act like family whether they’re blood relatives or not, and maybe you should bring your girlfriend around to meet those people — your dearest friends and maybe an aunt and uncle who are fond of you. Chances are, what ultimately matters to her is not meeting your mother but believing you think she’s important enough to introduce. Show her (and keep showing her) that you’re proud of her and that she’s loved and appreciated, and she should stop sulking. In fact, she might even start joking about what it would be like, being invited over for a nice quiet dinner of sacrificial lamb -- or, as your mother might put it to her: “Let me just show my son to his chair, dear, and then I’ll show you to your spit.”

Catty girlfriend driving woman over the edge

After I got a new boyfriend, a friend started making frequent passive-aggressive jabs at me. Lamenting her datelessness, she sniffed, “At least I’m not one of those people who need to jump from relationship to relationship,” knowing full well that I got into my current relationship a month after ending my previous one. There are reasons I can’t just boot her from my life, so is there a way to get her to stop? If I called her out, she’d just deny it.

— Dissed

Close friends tend to leave stuff lying around in each other’s life — but stuff leading to questions like “Hey, did you forget your phone on my coffee table?” not “Hey, did you leave your knife between my T4 and T5 vertabrae?” You probably can’t change her way of seeing all you have through the prism of all she doesn’t. (Really, she couldn’t be happier for you -- that is, unless you fell down the stairs.) Where you went wrong is in letting that first nasty comment wriggle past you, which was like making it a little bed out of shredded newspaper so it could give birth to a whole litter of them. Since the direct approach would likely lead to snarly denials and ill will, shut her down by consistently jabbing back, but in a jokey tone — “Oh, you mean like my relationship…” — and she should get all sputtery…no, that’s not…no…she didn’t, blah, blah, blah. By calling her out indirectly, you two can maintain the polite fiction that she hasn’t been going all mean drunk on you and maybe get back to some semblance of friendship as it’s supposed to be: that when a friend alerts you that you have something in your teeth, it’s because she wants you to look good, not because her shoelace is caught.

Thrilla In vanilla: man’s infatuation irks woman

My best friend is a guy. We have tons in common and have conversations that are lively, honest, and deep. He’s basically everything I’ve ever wanted in my future husband, but he has an infatuation for Filipina women half his age. I’m 37, his age, and Caucasian. His plan is to find and marry a girl from the Philippines. In fact, he is so stuck on marrying a Filipina that he is learning to speak Tagalog and travels to the Philippines twice a year but has yet to have anything work out. I maintain hope that he’ll eventually develop the attraction to me that I have for him and that compatibility will trump looks, because he often tells me how much he appreciates me. Am I fooling myself, or could he outgrow his Filipina fetish?

— Boring American Woman

If people could override their physical attractions, strip clubs could hire homely but very kind women to bare only their souls. For the price of a lap dance, they’d tell a man all about their work easing the suffering of cancer patients or nursing stray dogs back to health. Afterward, he’d go home to his hot but mean wife and do his marital duty -- while fantasizing about Martha getting little Buster to a really good home. 

Whenever you start looking at your friend through future-husband-colored glasses, remind yourself that the guy’s learning Tagalog, and not because he calls the cable company and they say, “Press one for Tagalog.” Lust is a powerful and automatic biochemical reaction driven by sex hormones in the brain. One study by Dr. Ingrid R. Olson suggests that we appraise whom we find hot in 13 milliseconds or less -- approximately 25 to 30 times faster than an eye blink. And unfortunately, we can’t rejigger whom we lust after — any more than we can convince ourselves that something that smells like Dumpster really smells like lily of the valley.  

You need to stop focusing on how you click with this guy. I also really click with my friend Debbie, but when I look at her and feel longing, it’s to ask her where she got her barrette. This means we’re well-matched as friends and hair accessory shoppers but nothing more. What you need is a guy with a you fetish -- one who thinks you’re the hottest thing since he leaned back, trying to look cool for you, and burned his hand on the party host’s stove. To find that man, banish your Filipina-phile from your mind as anything more than a friend with a thing for women who aren’t you. If that’s hard to do, stop hanging out with him so much until it stops being hard. Save for meeting a fairy godmother in the supermarket and having her transform you into a 4-foot-11, 18-year-old hottie from Manila, there’s only one way you’ll ever make this guy fall for you, and that’s by installing a tripwire.

Getting into your genes

I’m 27 and passionately in love with a 24-year-old woman I just started dating. I said something in passing about not knowing whether I want kids, and she said, “If I’m not pregnant within two years by you, I’ll get pregnant by somebody else.” Shocked, I asked who. Her answer: “Preferably a friend, but it doesn’t really matter.” My jaw dropped. I wonder whether I even matter or I am just being used. 

— Disturbed

You were probably picturing yourself as more of a sex machine than a sperm dispenser. (If there’s a movie of your relationship in your mind, it’s the kind that gets blocked by Net Nanny software. In hers, Julie Andrews and the von Trapp children are bounding through the meadows in their clothes made out of curtains.) 

The fact that her romantic role model seems to be the speeding bullet doesn’t mean that she isn’t into you or that she’s using you. In fact, her honesty suggests otherwise. (She didn’t let you get all attached only to tell you to either dad up or get out.) But, numerous studies splashed across the media show that single parenting disadvantages kids economically, emotionally, in school performance, and in their later relationships, and troublingly, all she can think about is the tumbleweed blowing around her empty womb. 

If you know you don’t want kids, now’s the time to leave. If you aren’t sure, you can stick around and try to figure it out, but the giant ticking uterus hanging over your head may warp the course of getting to know her. After all, it’s kind of a romance-killer to be hearing “It had to be you…” while you know she’s thinking, “Then again, the UPS guy looks like he has a healthy sperm count.”

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Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA  90405, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (www.advicegoddess.com)

Amy Alkon’s just-published book: “I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite society” (McGraw-Hill, $16.95).