'I’m scared to find out if fiance is my child’s real father'

Agony aunt Coleen Nolan has advice for a reader who's unsure whether her fiance is the father of their five-year-old daughter, or whether it was a 'friend with benefits'

Dear Coleen

I’m engaged to my boyfriend and we’re expecting a baby next year, and also have a daughter who is five.

I should be happy, as life is good and we’re in love, but I’m still not sure whether my fiance is the father of our daughter.

When we first got together, things were very casual between us, as we were living at opposite ends of the country, and I was sleeping with someone else occasionally (I suppose you’d call him a friend with benefits).

When I realised I was ­pregnant, I was honest with my fiance that there was a small chance the baby wasn’t his, but he accepted the situation because we were in love by that point. He was also over the moon about becoming a dad.

Since then, we’ve pretty much ignored the elephant in the room and I’ve taken every opportunity to emphasise how alike my fiance and our daughter are in personality but, honestly, I don’t know if she’s his. She looks exactly like me, so it’s impossible to tell from looking at her who her father is.

It’s started to bother me that I don’t know, especially as I feel a responsibility to her, but I’m worried if we do a paternity test now it will be bad for our ­relationship and possibly the relationship between my fiance and our daughter.

I just feel I have to know for sure. Any advice?

Coleen says

OK, you might have chosen to ignore it, but your fiance is in the loop. He knows you can’t be sure without a paternity test and he accepted the situation.

But I think if it’s something you’re going to wonder about for the rest of your life, you need to have the discussion and ask him how he will feel if it turns out that he’s not your ­daughter’s biological father.

I don’t think it would change how he feels about your daughter at all. There’s a lot more to being a dad than DNA and he’s her dad.

If it’s playing on your mind and you feel you’re just pushing the issue away, then address it now. What you don’t want to happen is for it to come out later in life, for example, if your daughter had a medical issue and you haven’t prepared for it. There’s also your “friend with benefits” to consider in all this.

If I were you, I would want to know for sure – I wouldn’t want to carry it around with me for the rest of my life and feel that I’d kept something from my daughter too.

I think your fiance just needs reassurance that it won’t change things. And, of course, if you find out he is the dad, you’ll finally have peace of mind and never have to worry about it again.

I’m sure you ­probably wish you’d done the test when she was born, but I think when you’re in love it’s easy to ignore issues that can resurface years down the line. Good luck.