Please can you help me ease my lonely heart?
I’M SINGLE and live on my own, so I guess January is not the best time for me.
I’m working, solvent, nice house and car — but even with all these things in place, as the years have passed, I still find myself alone — no woman in sight.
I look OK, keep fairly active with a small but good group of friends, most in relationships. But then there’s always been me — on my own.
The last and only serious relationship I had was about 40 years ago — YES, that long!
I’m ashamed and embarrassed to admit I’ve never had a full and ‘meaningful experience’ with a woman. The only time I told anyone, she decided she didn’t want anything more to do with me.
Opportunities or ‘dalliances’ with the opposite sex have come and gone. I’m not the most charismatic of personalities, a little too shy and quiet at times. But, then again, I don’t think I have an off-putting manner either.
My mother used to say: ‘There’s someone out there for everyone.’ But as the years have passed, I have just tried to accept that if it’s going to happen, then it will; if it doesn’t — so be it. But I crave female attention.
At work my line manager was someone I immediately took a liking to. A few years younger than me, she is extremely attractive, intelligent, funny, full of life — and way out of my league.
She was married once, has two adult children and is currently in a long-standing relationship.
I know she and her current partner are very close; almost a married couple without the formal piece of paper.
Recently, I felt I had to express my admiration to her, which I did. She was kind and gracious, but on reflection it was a ludicrous thing to do. I think she probably felt sorry for me, although we have a good work relationship.
She accepted what I said about her and my feelings for her and we have just left it at that. So again, yet another failure, leaving me feeling foolish and wondering: ‘Where I am going wrong?’
What is wrong with me? Will I ever find the comfort of love and companionship that others seem to fall in and out of so easily?
ADRIAN
FROM time to time I choose a letter for which I have no answer. So it is this week. That may seem a negative beginning, but bear with me.
I have nothing but sympathy for the lonely disappointment which prompted you to write,
Adrian. It’s just that all of us have to, at some stage, come to terms with the fact that there can’t always be solutions to the problems that keep us awake at night.
Confronting that bitter truth was the toughest (and that feels like an understatement) thing I personally had to deal with in 2023. For that reason, I won’t write the usual things about extending your range of acquaintances and interests, nor patronise you with glib ‘answers’. I think you should realise that ‘the comfort of love and companionship that others seem to fall in and out of so easily’ is not nearly as easily won as you appear to think.
Millions of people are as hurt by finding love as by not finding it. Partners prove dishonest and cruel, relationships shatter, disappointment turns into despair, and loss can take many forms, including (of course) death itself.
I assure you, there are those savagely wounded by love who might look at the life you describe and actually envy you. Maybe you are doing nothing at all ‘wrong’.
You have just been unlucky, and never in the right place at the right time. You’ve probably been hurt by thoughtless women.
Don’t make it your fault. With the greatest respect to your mother, I don’t believe it is true that ‘there’s someone out there for everyone’.
The sheer mathematics of it makes me dizzy.
You’re prompted to write because of the recent painful experience of declaring admiration and affection to the work colleague who can never be ‘yours’. Why did you do that when you knew she was in a steady relationship?
It’s as if you unconsciously selfsabotaged in order to gain her attention — even if that showed itself as pity. Such behaviour is associated with low self-esteem; as if you bowed your head before somebody who’d have no choice but to turn away, confirming your negativity about your own value.
Now there is no choice but to carry on as normal, cease dwelling on the episode, and trust in her good nature and kindness. Have you ever thought of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? It might be interesting to investigate, on the grounds that there is always something to be done to ‘tweak’ our lives. After that . . . well, we live every day in gentle hope.