Your problems solved by The Midults

Q:Dear A&E, I’m single and increasingly frustrated as I keep making the same mistake. I’ve had three major relationships and each time I fell hard for the man very early on, eventually he caught up and shared my feelings – and as soon as he did, I became claustrophobic and pushed them away. Then they broke up with me. Every time, I regretted it and begged for another chance, but too late. It sounds a bit teenage, but I’m 38. Is there something wrong with me? — Single

Dear Single, in our experience, 38 is when it gets scary. ‘Where is he?’ shifts suddenly towards, ‘What is wrong with me?’ Add the rising volume of a biological tick-tock into the mix and what do you get? Panic! And panic is rarely productive.

So, recognising that there is an unhelpful pattern to your behaviour is a crucial step on the road to understanding. For this we congratulate you because there will, no doubt, be many friends telling you either that you are too picky (when you are single past 35, a man has to be married, gay or dead to quieten the ‘too picky’ chorus from married friends), or that each man is wildly wanting in some way.

We’re not going to dive in on either of those points of view; we’re going to turn this problem slightly on its head, Single. Because what worries us about your letter is not your tendency to push these men away, but rather your habit of going in so hard and fast at the start of all your relationships.

What are you falling so utterly for? A man? Or an idea? We all remember being a teenager, seeing a boy on the bus (in Annabel’s case the top deck of Number 9 from Hammersmith: he sat right at the back), and dashing home to practice your married signature. Since then, many of us have met men, created a fantasy life around them and then got spooked after three months when their armour began to creak and they slid off the white charger that we had placed them on.

‘You love me but you just don’t know it yet,’ we sometimes think with a kind of grim determination, and either they bolt or, as we train our focus on them, they slowly come round to our way of thinking. Marvellous – until we realise that we have manifested a relationship through hunger rather than compatibility. Hunger for love. Hunger for a solution. Hunger for and an end to the ‘What is wrong with me?’ tune that plays in our heads. And then every time we sabotage things, we feel the comfort of familiar pain.

Pia Mellody, in her book The Intimacy Factor, identifies what she calls a ‘system’ that is put in place during childhood. ‘At the core of this system,’

You embody that Groucho Marx quote, ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member’

she says, ‘I identified issues of selfesteem, boundaries, reality, self-care and moderation.’ With all these things off-balance, healthy intimacy becomes nigh on impossible.

So your boundaries are off at the start, which gets you into deep emotional water; prematurely turning both you and your paramour into holograms. Your self-esteem is wonky, so you find yourself living in love avoidance and embodying that Groucho Marx quote, ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.’ In other words: if a man falls in love with you then there must be something wrong with him. You struggle with the reality of a new romance being actually new (rather than The Solution), and then you can’t look after yourself as things start to play out.

So. What now? Well the good news is that you don’t seem heartbroken about having destroyed a connection with the love of your life, so it is possible that you just haven’t met him yet. But you do need to slow down. Date a few men casually. Get some therapy – obviously – because you may be at the mercy of an early family trauma that you will need help to unpick.

And remember also that there is something wrong with everyone. We are all a little bit broken. So stop panicking. Panic will only serve to isolate and calcify. Sit back, resist the urge to direct the emotional traffic, stop haemorrhaging love right off the starting block and get to know the next couple of men, keeping your hopes high but your expectations low. You may find that you are surprised...