I'm desperate to find love, so why have I spent nine

years alone?

Dear Bel

I am 32 and single for nearly nine years. At this time of the year my loneliness feels suffocating and I’m finding it extremely difficult to cope with the fact that there is no telling whether I will spend the next nine years or more alone.

Given my age, I am surrounded by married couples with and without children. I have many friends and not one of them is single.

It is difficult in that no one knows what it feels like to be alone for so long and I have no one I can really talk to who can understand how sad I am always feeling.

Bel Mooney gives advice to a woman who has been single for nine years

I have had dates and ‘flings’ over the years, but they have amounted to nothing. I am embarrassed to say that, with the help of a friend, I added up 25 encounters/dates/flings where I was the one rejected at the end.

My friends say that I’m attractive, great company and funny. I’m not sure if they’re just being kind, and I still don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

I have no idea how to meet someone and I am almost obsessed with how couples have met each other and how they fell in love.

I spend most days and weekends on my own because my friends are tied up with family things and I am not on a very high wage. I spend this time indulging in romantic films and books — the only way to have any enchantment in my life.

I do not want to get into internet dating, it just isn’t me at all. It is the opposite of romantic and I have read too many horror stories.

Also, it seems the free websites are where people mostly just want sex, and the more appropriate sites I have to pay and I just can’t afford it. This also goes for ‘trying new hobbies’ and ‘getting out there’. Everything costs money.

I just feel so sad all the time. There are things couples do together that I feel I have missed out on after this long time.

I’m also left off many invitation lists for dinner parties and group holidays because I don’t have a partner or family.

I’m faced with another year where I truly wish that things will get better. My friends promise me that this will be the year when I meet someone, but after nine years alone, why would 2014 be any different?

I understand this may seem a moaning email you may not wish to print, but I would really appreciate some advice or even some words of encouragement/wisdom from someone impartial.

CANDACE

Will it surprise you if I confess I did find your letter to be tediously self-pitying, yet at the same time I feel very sorry for your plight?



Two contradictory thoughts can be held at once; that’s what makes human beings so interesting!



The part of my brain that wears a halo wants to take time to stroke you and murmur comforting things in order to give you hope.



But the other part — the brisk side wearing devil’s horns — wants to give you a little shake and tell you (yes, that horrible, unfeeling cliche) to pull yourself together.



Loneliness is hard to bear, yet just look at your letter: almost every paragraph begins with ‘I’ and the word ‘alone’ chimes like a funeral bell.



Dare I suggest that maybe your flings don’t go any further because you are self-absorbed and needy to a fault and that can be quite boring? Is that why invitations are drying up, too?



Heavens, girl, did you really have to take up all that time with your friend carefully listing love failures? You’d have been more usefully employed picking up litter in the community.



It’s equally pointless to write to me, anticipate the usual (excellent) advice of ‘trying new hobbies’ and ‘getting out there’ and dismiss it in advance because ‘everything costs money’.



Does it? Volunteering doesn’t cost anything and nor does a walk in the park. Borrow a dog!



Local authority courses are not free but not necessarily expensive. Art galleries are free or cheap. There are also lots of choirs about (thanks to Gareth Malone). And so on.



But instead of thinking of things to do that will make your life better and teach you the magnificent and miraculous words ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘yes!’, you mope about at home reading slushy books or watching romantic movies.



Ican’t tell you how frustrated that makes me feel — because you must know that the more you retreat, the less likely you are to create any circumstances in which you can be happy.



That make-believe world is (in this context) as bad for you as gorging on doughnuts and fizzy drinks for comfort. Stop it.



It’s time to ditch the romantic dreams and face up to real life. Your relentless negativity is exhausting to read, so what effect might it have on a potential partner?



At what point, during a second or third date, do you find you’ve run out of conversation because he’s not that interested in Kate Hudson’s last rom-com or in the roller-coaster of your past love life — and, actually, you don’t have much else to talk about?



Do you jump into bed too quickly because you value yourself too little to say, ‘Let’s wait’?



Do you relentlessly cross-examine the men about past loves because you are so obsessed with that topic you have little interest in what else might make them tick — like vintage motorbikes, or cricket, or horses, or sci-fi, or politics, or gardening, or Northern soul?



Be honest with yourself: do you know how to reach out to other people (of both sexes) and treat them as real, fascinating human beings with stories to tell?



If you don’t (and it can be learned by being aware), then why should they be interested in you?



Those are serious questions so treat them as such. I know I sound mean, but that’s the nature of tough love. Things will never ‘get better’ unless you give them a helping hand.



Your friends are comforting you with bland reassurances that you’ll meet somebody in 2014, so it’s my job to warn you that it won’t happen unless



you change your attitudes and make a vow to renew your life.

Start by working on how to value yourself by adding value to yourself. That means — yes, yes, yes — doing fresh things and forgetting yourself in order to meet new people, old and young, male and female.



You will not find love by actively looking for it. You will be surprised by joy when it taps you on the shoulder while you are absorbed in something else.

My bitter parents snub my boyfriend

Dear Bel,

I am 30 and have been with my wonderful boyfriend for more than a year. I really think he’s the one and we have plans for a life together — although limited (for now) to dreams because we can’t afford to marry, buy or rent a house. We each live with our parents.



All is well, apart from one thing: my parents refuse to meet him.

Once, we went to the theatre to see a show in which my brother was acting and they didn’t exchange one word with my boyfriend.



You see, this is my third serious relationship and they are ‘tired of meeting and growing fond of guys destined to be dumped anyway’.

I ended two previous long relationships because they brought lots of problems. Why would a parent blame a daughter instead of being pleased she ended an unhappy relationship?



They told me they never wanted to meet any future partners — neither mine nor my brother’s — but I found out that my mother invited my brother’s last girlfriend home. I guess the difference is that my brother was always dumped by his former GFs (so he is a ‘victim’), while I am the shameless man-eater!



My boyfriend is very good-hearted and says that my parents have the right to take their time. He regularly gives me vegetables from his garden to pass on to them.



Meanwhile, his parents love me to bits and I love them. They’re a very close, affectionate family and welcome me like a daughter.

My family has a history of conflict and my mother and father are estranged, although still living under the same roof. Is this why my parents can’t be affectionate?



Sometimes I wonder if they’d rather I stayed in an unhappy relationship just for the ‘image’ — only to end up like them, full of anger.

If I had a daughter, all I would wish for her was happiness.



What do you think?

CARLA

This makes me very cross, because I must take what you say at face value and, therefore, I cannot help disliking your parents.



At the ripe old age of 30, you have had three boyfriends in your young life. So what? That hardly makes you a flighty bed-hopper.



You were obviously right to end relationships that were making you unhappy. It is the job of a parent to offer support, advice (if asked for) and constant encouragement when things go wrong.



I say that so emphatically because I have been in the situation of becoming very attached to a child’s partners. My own son had two very long relationships which he was the one to finish, causing much heartbreak all round.



His father and I felt we had one job only — to give comfort and affection to the girls concerned (actually, that was me) and to show our son unconditional love, praising the courage it takes to face up to the fact that a love has waned and, therefore, it would be dishonest to continue.



For my son (and hopefully for you) it was third time lucky, and we are utterly delighted that he met his wonderful wife.



Your kind boyfriend actually sends your parents vegetables he has grown. Good Lord! Most people would be welcoming him with open arms and (if possible) helping you financially to find somewhere to rent. I know I would.



But it sounds as if their personal story has blinded them to anything else, and I fear you are right when you guess that, deep down, they might even resent your current happiness.



What can be done? I guess you’ve tried talking, but they are no good at that. So I think you must live your life without caring what they think. They were unspeakably rude to ignore your boyfriend at the theatre so don’t deserve much consideration.



Live, love and enjoy life — and do all you can (even taking two jobs, maybe) to move out as soon as possible.

And finally... Wonders on your doorstep

It was astonishing to read that one in five young Britons say they have never visited the seaside.



Twenty per cent of the 2,000 questioned reveal they have seen more landmarks abroad than at home and 16 per cent said they’d never taken even a short holiday in the UK.



What a colossal deprivation! I was brought up in Liverpool, and each weekend we would go for days out to Delamere Forest and Helsby Hill in



Cheshire or to the glorious dunes north of Merseyside.

How lucky I was to be so happy with buckets and spades, even on those chilly days when penny slot machines on the pier offered extra fun. Not for us smart hotels, but jaunts in the car my father skilfully maintained — and going to sleep at night with the feeling of sand between the toes.



It seems modern kids recognise pictures of places abroad but are ignorant of their own land.



How expectations change. The foreign package holiday is now expected (and can be very cheap) whereas I did not leave these shores until I was 17 or 18, and then it was only a hop to Paris.



The term ‘gap year’ was unknown and young people going on holiday with friends chose the seaside (maybe a holiday camp) and had a mighty fine time.



I’m not writing this as an exercise in nostalgia, but because reading about the survey made me reflect that if you never explore the country in which you live, then you can’t feel that involved with its future.



Yet we have such riches here. I’m just reading a marvellous book called Strands by the poet Jean Sprackland, which describes a whole year of walking and discovery on Ainsdale Beach — the Mecca of my childhood.



Sprackland examines the smallest things on the shoreline; in all weathers, for every minute, she is fully there — meeting people, looking, learning and loving. Yet it costs her nothing.

