Dear Dr. Lovemonkey,

I’ve been living with a man for almost a year. He occasionally sees other women and one who he slept with recently sent him a lovely pair of cufflinks for his birthday. I called and thanked her for them and invited her out for a drink with us. This precipitated her complaining to my boyfriend, who then got pissed at me and we ended up not talking for about a week.

Everything is okay now, but I just wanted to check with you on my belief that there was nothing wrong with my calling her up, thanking her, and inviting her for a drink. What do you think?

— A Perfect Gentlewoman

Dear Perfect Gentlewoman,

Actually, the way you dealt with the situation was excellent. What is not excellent, I fear, is your relationship, unless you find it acceptable for your boyfriend to be out freelancing. Perhaps you have what is called "an open relationship." I am uncertain from your letter. Undoubtedly, there are some interesting agendas percolating beneath the surface here. If this is "your boyfriend" and you are "his girlfriend," that generally connotes an exclusive relationship, so I’m not entirely getting this. Nonetheless, your response seems absolutely pitch perfect to me.

Dear Dr. Lovemonkey,

I have sort of a delicate situation that I’d like to ask you about. My girlfriend has a rather large family and it has come to their attention that I’m really good at household repairs, carpentry, etc. I’m afraid they’ve been taking advantage of the situation. I’m constantly receiving calls from them, asking me to come over and help them with something, and it’s getting to be a bit much. I’m talking here about a couple of brothers and a sister and my girlfriend’s parents. She’s not particularly close with her siblings, but she is with her parents.

What I’d like to do is lose the brothers and sister, but I’m perfectly willing to help out the parents, who are older and actually need the help since they are on a fixed income. Actually, I’d be willing to work for the siblings if they paid me for it. Right now, it’s way too much. Is there some way I can do this without causing a great deal of bad feeling in the family? By the way, my girlfriend happens to agree with me on this.

— Bob

Dear Bob,

My advice would be to tell the siblings, when they call, that you’re absolutely jammed up and you won’t have the time to help them out. You can also tell the siblings that you’ve started to do home repairs professionally (indicating that you get paid), if you think that such an explanation will fly.

Dear Dr. Lovemonkey,

I can’t believe all the boneheaded letters that you get on a regular basis. Don’t these people have any sense at all? For instance, all these people who are going out with someone who seems to be directly from central casting of a horror movie. Are there really that many stupid people out there or am I just living in some sort of alternative universe where people actually have reasonable common sense?

— A Loyal Reader

Dear Loyal Reader,

We live in a very different world than what it was like 100 or even 50 years ago. In those days, communities, neighborhoods, and families were closer. There is good and bad with change, but the fact is that life is not as simple these days and the basic lessons that many people once learned, almost by osmosis, are no longer quite so apparent. We’re not all fortunate enough to live with the sort of stability and security that was once the norm in most communities. Advice columnists (like yours truly) exist for the same reasons that gyms do. Back in the 1950s, when Dr. Lovemonkey was growing up, gyms were mostly for true physical fitness enthusiasts. That’s because physical activity was unavoidable in daily life. More people had physically demanding jobs, walked more; kids had fewer distractions (cable TV, Internet, video games, etc.) and went out to the field to play ball.

If you’re picking up on the analogy, people have lost a lot of constant daily examples of how to behave in certain situations. I don’t feel that they are boneheads, just largely devoid of those experiences.

Send boneheaded letters and romantic quandaries to rcheeks[a]phx.com.