I yearn for my teenage sweetheart

DEAR BEL,

A FEW weeks ago, you published a letter from ‘Alan’ who was in torment thinking about a girl he knew 50 years ago. This resonated with my own experience.

I had a sheltered life and left home when I was 18. When I’d been in my job for a few weeks, a new chap started. After a while, he asked me out and then we enjoyed going to the cinema, theatre and concerts.

I think he liked me and I certainly liked him, but I was too shy to say. This went on for 18 months, but he wanted more than I (with no experience of men) was able to give.

Then I took a job abroad, even though my boyfriend begged me to stay.

I then found out he was seeing someone else, but I had made my plans, so what could I say?

Within a year of being abroad, I married. On my wedding day I knew it was a mistake, but went through with it. The marriage lasted six years and we had two sons. He was a bad husband and an even worse father.

I was now back in this country and we divorced. Life was hard, I raised our sons on my own, my ex wasn’t bothered. My best achievements are my sons, who are hardworking and good fathers.

I was a single parent for three years, then met my partner. We’ve been together a long time but have nothing in common and I don’t love him. Separate bedrooms for years. He hasn’t always treated me well and I’ve asked him to leave many times, but he won’t go.

I’m now getting old and can’t sleep thinking about the chap I once knew and wish I’d told him how I really felt. I hope he is happy. Is it normal to think of someone after 50-odd years? GLYNIS

NATurAlly, I looked back to that letter from ‘Alan’ — published on August 14 — and the first thing I notice is that your stories are far from similar. Both ‘first loves’ lasted 18 months, but the key difference is that Alan wrote: ‘I have been married for more than 50 years and have a wonderful wife...’ but you describe one failed marriage and now the feeling of being stuck in a long, unloving relationship you wish would end.

I suggested that Alan was mourning his lost youth, but with you I sense a desperate yearning for a ‘lost love’ who (in truth) barely figured at the time. young people in love want to be together all the time. But you yearned for travel and he found somebody else.

you ask if such feelings of loss are ‘normal’ and my broad-brush answer is surely ‘yes’. There’s nothing unusual about remembering, with deep nostalgia, a time when our dreams and loves and hopes seemed as lithe and tireless as our young limbs. A time when the world felt full of choices.

you make the point in your longer letter that having been brought up in a ‘sheltered’ way, you wanted ‘more’ and no boyfriend would be allowed to get in your way. This was determined and brave of a girl with little experience of life — and had your first marriage worked, I suspect you might never have thought about that boy again.

your whole letter has to be seen in the light of your unhappiness with the man you share your life with.

In the same postbag I had a letter from a woman called r, who says: ‘I’m trapped in a loveless relationship and don’t know what to do. We’ve been together 32 years but haven’t shared a bedroom for at least five or six years.

‘I don’t want to try counselling or anything like that, I don’t believe our “relationship” is worth saving and just want to move on with my life.’

Does that describe your situation, Glynis? I don’t know how old you are, but it’s never too late to make changes in life. It’s important that you and r realise that an organisation like relate does offer counselling to those who don’t necessarily wish to save their relationship, but need help to pick their way through possible actions towards some kind of resolution.

I’d advise trying that rather than stagnating. your thoughts about that old lost love should make you realise you need to take control of your life anew.