DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I’ve just seen my ex again and I feel strange — like I went hurtling through a time warp. When he and I were together, he graduated college and joined his family business, getting right into management. Then, over a couple of years of poorly done work and partying until after bar after hours, his dad kicked him out of his cushy job.

He told him to “get a real job somewhere else and grow up.” It actually worked! Now he’s got a great new job, lost the big beer gut he had gained and looks like the athlete I fell in love with, back in university.

I spotted him sitting in a restaurant with his new girlfriend, and she was hanging all over him. He was just loving her attention, and I felt oddly sick to my stomach.

Do I sound bitter? Maybe I am! Now that I’ve seen he’s transformed back into the guy I fell for as a young woman, I really want to call him up. Should I? I don’t totally understand my thoughts or feelings. What is my problem?

MOON ALERT: After 2 a.m. today there are no restrictions to shopping or important decisions. The moon moves from Leo into Virgo.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

Your confidence is strong and you’re ready to take action at work. You might take over a project or you might initiate something. You’ll have no trouble expressing your ideas to others because you see someone has to take the lead.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My oldest sister — a real piece of work — has arrived back in Winnipeg for the summer on a work assignment. She’s telling my family she wants to see me again. Ha! Fat chance.

I don’t live at home anymore and will never be coming to visit her, as my sister has always taken what was mine, as if it’s her right.

One time, she pretended to be my sympathetic confidante to trick me into telling her private information about my sex life with my new boyfriend. Then she went after him! Luckily, he called me to squeal on her. He’s a great guy, and I’m still with him, and I really don’t trust her around him and maybe never will.

Should I forgive her and give her a new chance, just because we’re part of the same family? That’s what my mother is asking me to do.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: After my ugly divorce, I couldn’t stay far enough away from men. But suddenly with spring here, that repugnance is over! I feel happy and alive again — and attractive. In fact, I’ve found myself looking at men shopping alone in stores and wondering what they’d be like in sexual situations.

I’m just looking, or at least I thought I was. But recently I was shopping with a girlfriend in a garden centre and spotted a guy I used to date back in university. I left my pal standing there with our cart overflowing and rushed over to him.

We chatted, I got his new number and phoned him when I got home. Now we have a date to go to a concert. I’m excited for the first time in months, but my girlfriend tells me I’m making myself look desperate. Ouch! That hurts. But then I thought, “What’s the matter with taking things into my own hands?”

— Hardly Desperate, Just Excited, downtown

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: Mother’s Day was confusing as usual since my birth mother was so mean to me as a young child that my dad got custody. Then there was his second wife, my stepmother — another bad choice by him, and violent too.

So he and I both ended up living with his mom. She was nice and worked hard to undo the hurt I had suffered.

My dad always loved me, but he was weak, with bad taste in people.

My question is now that I’m finally a happily married woman (a big miracle) and have my own kids, can I just forget about humouring people on Mother’s Day, except my grandmother, who has been my biggest supporter?

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My husband is in his early 60s and was having an affair with a flirtatious woman who used to be a friend of mine.

She was hanging around at our place a lot after her divorce and my husband started doing errands for her because she was alone. He soon started going over to her place on all kinds of excuses and then she stopped coming by to see me anymore, as my friend.

I knew why, but It didn’t bother me so much because I’d found my own special man “friend.” This odd situation worked out fine — at first.

Then, just after Valentine’s Day, my husband and my friend stopped seeing each other. I wish they would get back together.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I’m divorced and am enjoying being single again, but I have a problem arising with the spring weather. Aside from women, lake life is what I really love, and any lasting girlfriend needs to love it, too.

Remotely, I work very productively at the lake and I choose to do that from late spring until the fall.

This spring, my new girlfriend is not willing to go to the lake and do her work from there, although she could. So where does that leave us?

I’m not alone out there. I always take my trusted assistant with me — and she stays over Monday to Friday. We are not at all attracted to each other or romantically involved, nor near the same age.