To tactfully mention that my friend may appear desperate?

[IcouldstillbeJoseph]

This is not a question from smug married woman here but I have a friend, a few years younger than me who I've just had to listen to sobbing about having been dumped by yet another bloke.

I have known her a good few years now and it is always the same. Meets man (either dating websites or fixed up through friends normally as we work in predominately female job), goes on few dates, has sex quickly (I'm not judging!), is ALWAYS very keen on man. Texts him lots.

The next bit is hard to articulate - but she has already picked out where she would ideally like to get married. Has firm ideas in her head about how many children she would like, including their names etc. She will happily mention this on dates. She told me she had been for a walk with latest man and said "thats where I want to get married".

Few weeks in, man goes cold, she texts even more and then he calls the whole thing off. She has just been dumped again and has already text him asking if he wants to go to her house and chat things through.

It is making me cringe. I feel like I should say something now. I have said before "don't text him, just let him do some leg work etc" but she always ignores it. It breaks my heart to see her upset so much but I can sort of see it from man's pov. I think I'd be perturbed by similar behaviour.....

My friend is 24 btw

Men do this too: ie: a strict timetable of what he intends to happen - and when. A mention of his time constraints re getting a girlfriend/wife 'in place' may also be made. All of the above makes you think that as an individual you aren't relevant - he could be going out with anyone. This induces feelings of panic and the urge to run like Kelly Holmes... Which is doubtless the case with OP's friend's dates. Unfortunately as others say she'll only learn by experience but at least she does have a good friend in the OP.

LRD - That's a deal

NurseRatched- my friend recently went on a (blind) date with a bloke and the first thing he said was 'I've had my sperm tested and I'm fertile'. He then went on about his 5 bedroomed house and how he is REALLY keen on getting married and having children.

Sort of cute perhaps- but does make one think that next he'll be kidnapping some ovulating woman and keeping her locked up for the next ten years

Thank you!

Mardy - your friend's blind date wins just about. I'm only half joking in hoping that the five-bedroomed house doesn't have a cellar ..

I have a good friend (we are both in our 50s) who has never, sadly, grasped that being overly keen, overly quickly is off-putting, regardless of age or gender.

She's not had many relationships and is caught in an awful vicious circle where her keenness to settle down with someone makes her ever less capable of taking things at a sensible pace. When her (inevitably) brief relationships end, things are not helped by her habit of stalking (and I don't use the word lightly) the dumper.

I still recall a mutual, male, friend of ours being invited over to hers for a meal. He'd reasonably assumed, from the way the invitation was couched, that he was going to dinner with a group of friends (including me). To his absolute horror he turned up to discover he was having a candlelit dinner for two. Being a thoroughly nice chap he didn't make his excuses and leave. But he didn't look backwards once this increasingly excruciating evening ended. Afterwards he kept asking me how he could possibly have given her wrong impression of his intentions. I had to tell him that there wasn't anything he could have said. Because she cannot, or will not, take even quite brutal advice.

At only 24, your friend might well be able to listen to reason, OP. My friend simply can't or won't.

Only 24, plenty of time to learn. Maybe "lend" her "your" copy of He's Just Not That Into You.

Mind you the keenness worked for DH. After a while anyway, at first I was taken aback by his declaration of undying love. I had thought he just wanted to get in my knickers.

MarysBeard : > Excellent . No disrespect was intended towards genuine 'love at first sight' jobs. Ime the problem arises when the 'keen' one is looking to fill the vacancy of gf/wife and doesn't know or care who you are! The experience referred to didn't want to out myself was more like being handed over to Sir Alan Sugar's interviewers in the semi-final of the apprentice -and/or- Torquemada.

I have a friend who is nearly 40, and exactly the same. But her required man can't be divorced, or have any kids, or have any sort of "commitment issues". Or be in the army. Or have had too many relationships. seriously, who is left?!

I'm unmarried (although I am a mother) and I guess I'd find it hard to take advice from a married friend because to me it seems like there's such an amount of chance to it all. None of my married friends 'deserve' it more than I do!! If I have one observation though it's that they valued decency before I did! I picked a few wronguns.

Interesting what you say about the terrible relationship early on Adversecamber. I wish I'd had that horrible relationship younger, I would have knnown what I wanted in a man then. By the time I left my x I was in my late 30s with two kids.

Could you enlist a nice mature man, who you trust, to have a heart to heart with her about why and how her behaviour could be putting of potential suitors. It might help her to hear it from the male point of view.