I'm 27, married to a great guy, doing well except for one thing. Ten years ago my parents forced me to give up my first love. I still have friends who hang out with him, so I know what's going on in his life. I have a lot of anxiety wondering if I should've fought my parents to return to him. I seek closure and want to know if the passion that has grown mythic in my mind is indeed the reality. What the heck do I do?

After a series of lousy lovers, I took time off and forgot men for a while and it's been great. I've found out a lot about myself. But it's also been years since I've enjoyed so much as one good kiss.

There is a guy who's been pursuing me, sort of, who's very clear about what he wants -- an occasional pizza, maybe a movie and lots of sex. I want candlelight dinners, backpacking trips in the wilderness, long conversations about what "breaks the frozen sea within us." I want a relationship with someone who's smart and caring and laughs at my jokes. Mr. Pursuer tells me I'm naive.

Part of me knows he's wrong, another part of me is starved for physical affection and wonders if a brief interlude might tide me over until a more suitable gent comes along.

A friend of mine has asked me for advice on her unusual romantic situation. She is a smashing young woman with a good career, nice home, two small children, and she's being courted by a scrupulously religious young man who refuses to have sex with her unless she seduces him, and then he feels remorseful afterward. This has happened three times in a couple of months. Aside from this he appears to be an admirable fellow, attentive, career-minded, stable and hardworking, and good with her children.

I do not quite understand this young man. If he were banging her 19 to the dozen and feeling remorse, I'd say, "Marry him, and knock yourselves out." I don't see how a healthy man in his early 20s can put his religious scruples ahead of pleasing this young woman. I believe that if she marries him she will find herself disappointed in their sex life after marriage, and taking second place to his religious observance.

I'm 24, dating a 21-year-old girl who I think drinks too much. It's not that she drinks all that often, but when she does it means at least a four-beer session. It makes me feel alienated and sober. I've asked her why she was drinking so much and she blew up on me and told me it was my problem that I couldn't accept it. So what constitutes a drinking problem? And how does one go about asking his or her partner to cut down?

I recently finished writing my first short story, which gave me a thrill and a confidence in my ability. Then I read a New Yorker review of a young woman's very self-referential art exhibit, and the reviewer scared me when he wrote that her work had "the merits and flaws" of many first novels in its "woozy perspective of the first-person format, along with its sympathetic pull."

My work resembles this artist's only in that it's about the experience of a late-20s woman: me. There's no sympathy-seeking. Nonetheless, this guy has silenced me for a week! I had a great idea for another story in the first person; then I read his review and now I feel pre-chastised. I need advice on defending my voice from the specter of Lord God King Monster Critic. Please help!

I've a moral conundrum.

I've been very close friends with a young woman for seven years. She and I have a deep emotional attachment that has existed despite both of us being sexually unavailable. She's also very attractive.

Our relationship has developed over love of words -- good, meaningful conversation, swapping journals, sharing poetry. Recently, she's sending readings with an amorous bent, including some suggestive but unexplicit journal entries.

She's married, and I'm not in a serious relationship right now. Last week she called, expressed her love for me and wants me to become her lover.

She laid it on the line: Become lovers or the friendship ends now. I hate to lose her as my friend, but breaking up her marriage is something I'm not prepared to do, despite finding her sexually attractive.

But this situation has really stimulated my writing. The frustration this has engendered is helping out a novel I've been working on although I'm not describing the actual situation in the novel.

What to do?