Dear Bel,

I am 37. I’ve never married and have no children. I had major surgery two years ago, from which I am now recovered (although the surgery may have affected my chances of conceiving naturally). I split up with my boyfriend of four years after my surgery because it was clear that he was not sure he really wanted to be with me. I have not seen him since and I expect that he has another girlfriend. I have a professional qualification and changed jobs a few months ago, which I find stressful because I must bring in new business. I know that I will never be as professionally successful as many of my contemporaries.

I find my situation unbearably lonely. I am close to my family and have some good friends. Yet I go home to an empty house and often wish there was someone to share my life. I hoped one day to marry and have children, but now I don’t think it will happen. I don’t know or meet any single men.

I think that you may suggest I try internet dating, but I loathe the thought of meeting strangers. There are millions of women who have met men through friends or work. I wish I could be one of them and I feel a failure because I am not.

I’ve taken antidepressants and I had counselling for a few months, which I found helpful but which has not fundamentally brought about any significant change. I don’t want my life to continue as it is because I am struggling to find any purpose to it. Catherine

In most people’s lives there are times when they feel utterly stuck, as if the stickiest, darkest mud from the world’s most lethal quicksand was sucking them down and threatening soon to engulf them. Again and again you can call into the night, begging for a rescuer with a ladder and strong arms – but nobody comes. So what is to be done? Droop your head and arms down, the more readily to help the mud to do its work?

Or try to find a way out all by yourself? I can hear you riposte that you become tired of doing things by yourself. The last thing loneliness needs is for some complacent soul to say that solitude has to be borne, and that surely it’s not so bad. Yet we have to start from the position you are in, with just your longing for a partner for company, as well as the struggle to find a purpose to life. Your letter makes it clear that a purposeful life is enlightened and enlivened by two things: love and professional success. You have no belief in your ability to find either. We must begin with that lack of faith.

I’d like you to take yourself back in your mind to the last time you felt happy and fulfilled. Where were you, what were you doing, what was it that made you happy? If your first answer is negative (“I’ve never felt like that”), try somewhat harder. It can be a useful exercise, this looking-back, even if only as a springboard for visualising how you would like your life to be. You need to start explaining your present situation in terms of your background, your schooling, your friends, your hopes, your disappointments – and I am sure that the counselling you began took you down some of these roads. Yet it sounds to me as if you didn’t want to help yourself enough to give that therapy a chance. In “a few months” you cannot hope to bring about “fundamental” or “significant” change. I would urge you to go back to the counsellor, or to find a new one, and approach your time with that qualified person as a long-term “relationship”. But you have to be prepared to work and to give. Try to view it as (to be optimistic) the means that will take you towards that other significant relationship you long for, which will also require work and giving.

Don’t you think you are being less than kind to that woman whose sad face you see in the mirror every morning? The language of your letter is couched in self-punitive negatives, and it would do you some good to counter each one with another question. So to “I’ve never been married”, ask yourself whether you think that is a permanent situation. Almost certainly, you’ll reply mournfully, “Yes”. But then you have to counter that with the question, “But do I know for sure that it is a permanent situation?’ In truth, you cannot say “Yes” to that – none of us knows what the future may hold.

Two years ago you had major surgery, from which you say you are fully recovered. I suggest that perhaps you are not and that you have not been gentle enough with yourself, understanding that postoperative trauma can last a long time, especially if you are worrying about its permanent effects. Then, I would like to know about this split with the boyfriend.

It sounds as though it was you who broke it off: for some reason he did not respond to you after surgery in a way you expected. Yet “it was clear that he was not sure” sounds so hesitant; still, he disappointed you, and that’s a huge pity. But are you somebody who expects too much and is therefore easily disappointed? Hospitals and illness terrify many people: not knowing what to say, they say the wrong thing. After four years together, you cut yourself off even from news of him. Why? He might not be in a relationship now, and might love to hear from you. Even if he is engaged, would it not be a positive thing to remember the good times you shared and get in touch?

Let us look at the job situation. You say you “know” you will “never be as professionally successful” as your contemporaries. How do you know that? You are repeating mantras of failure, and it has to stop.

Try to make it easy on yourself, as the song goes. In the past two years you’ve been very ill, had surgery, ended a love affair, become depressed and changed jobs. Wouldn’t all that poleaxe the most ebullient person? You aren’t going to rebuild your life unless you stop smashing yourself down. I forbid you to call yourself a failure any more. You are not a failure. You are a woman for whom things have gone a bit wrong, and will now start going right.

Your priority is to concentrate on the job, telling yourself you are going to make it work, bring in that business, knock them dead. Yes, you are. In the words of Ibsen: “Live, work, act. Don’t sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas.” You are going to think very hard about returning to therapy to keep this depression at bay.

Then you are going to seek out that old boyfriend in a spirit of curiosity, telling him you want to catch up over a drink. You are also going to make a point of doubling the activities in which you take part with family and friends, because (a) you will have fun and keep busy and (b) you don’t know who you will meet along the way. No – I wouldn’t advise internet dating, although it does work for some people. But so do all the old-fashioned actions like getting out, joining societies, taking part in life, looking up old chums. A woman I’m very fond of was terribly low after the break-up of a long relationship in her late fifties, but bought herself some new clothes (oh, that red dress!) went to visit friends in a different part of the country and met a lovely guy who was divorced many years ago. You see? You never, ever know what’s going to happen. Not ever.

So be brave, lift your head up and spread out your arms to stop yourself from sinking into that mud. That action will also welcome in the rest of your life.

THANKS TO ALL MY READERS

All things change, life rolls onwards and some good things have to come to an end. I have written this column for two years and now I am moving on.

It is impossible to convey how much I have learnt from all those who wrote – from the problems you aired and also from the comments (and the generous praise) that came back to me. I am just so sorry that it was impossible for all of you to read a personal reply on the page, but I know that many people were helped by a reply to somebody else that dealt with, or touched tangentially on, their own problem.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely or isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Advice columns can be helpful, too, in the same way, and I am glad to have been useful.

Bel

belmooney.co.uk

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