Q: My boyfriend has just told me he has a daughter. I thought he was husband material, now I'm not sure ...

Esther Walker says...

Oh really? What about you? With your 18 failed relationships, and that little drinking problem in your early twenties and your catalogue of things that you will and won't eat? We've all got baggage. It might not be three feet tall, wearing purple Crocs and a High School Musical T-shirt — but everyone's got something.

And sometimes the things that seem huge — divorce, children, peanut allergies — aren't nearly as bad as the knots of neuroses the rest of us are lumbered with. All other things being equal, I'd take a man with a child over a man with some massive hang-up about his mother any day.

OK, I admit that if there is an ex-wife in the picture and the child is used as some kind of pawn in their divorced hate games, that's no fun. It's not much of a turn-on to picture yourself standing in some doorway, taking delivery of a fraught child who's not pleased to see you while your boyfriend screams “Don't be so f***ing late next time you evil cow,” at a departing car.

On the bright side, it's possible that your boyfriend's relationship with the mother of his daughter is, if not straightforward, at least civil. There are a lot of families that start out with just as much, if not more, baggage than your boyfriend has, and no one kills anyone else in the middle of the night or ends up working for Foxtons.

At the very least, you can take it as an encouraging sign that your boyfriend waited to tell you. It shows that he is at least a concerned father, as he managed to resist the temptation to shove you in front of his daughter as soon as you said “yes” to dinner.

You can also take his telling you as a sign that he is serious about the relationship. So, actually, if it's a husband you're looking for, then he's ticking an awful lot of boxes.

But you are absolutely entitled to want to start your married life with a child-free slate. After all, the stepmother/daughter relationship isn't always easy. If your heart's just not in it — and no one would blame you if it wasn't — do the decent thing by your boyfriend's daughter, if no one else, and step aside.

Nirpal Dhaliwal says...

Good luck finding someone with no baggage. The inevitable result of living a remotely interesting life is that by the time you reach your thirties you are shouldering an awful lot of it — children, ex-partners and the battle scars of various emotional and existential failures. Luckily, in the process, people generally acquire a worldliness, tolerance, sexual technique and sense of humour that more than compensates for it.

“Baggage” is just a trendy word that women picked up from Sex and the City. They regard it as a
psychobabble term that makes them look clever, but really it's just a catch-all phrase to legitimise their pathological nitpicking as they try to identify any possible flaw in an otherwise perfectly decent man.

If you want someone with no baggage, an emotional blank slate, date a teenager or a social incompetent who's spent his adulthood living with mum and addicted to video games.
It is strange that your boyfriend kept his child a secret from you, and you have every right to ask him why he did that. Openness and trust are obviously an issue between you, and you need to lay some cards out on the table.

But I find it hilarious that thirtysomething women are averse to men with baggage — as if time were on their side and men were the ones in danger of being left on the shelf. Equally ridiculous is the fact that these women hold a man's children against him. A man with kids is less likely to be daunted by the prospect of fatherhood than a childless man.

You can never know what kind of parent a man will make until he actually becomes one. If your boyfriend is a committed and loving dad, you can bet he will be the same to your kids.

And ex-wives are a great advert for a man, proving that he was lovable enough for at least one woman to want to marry him. There are many reasons why a man makes it into his mid-thirties without ever getting married — none of which are good.

A man's baggage reveals his appetite for life, while the lack of it shows how uptight, unapproachable or just plain weird he is. If you want a man with character who's worth being with, you'd better to learn to love every trunk and suitcase he brings with him.