Will I always be single and unloved?

DEAR BEL I KNOW my problem is a common one — which you’ve heard time and time again, yet sometimes I feel like I’m the only one.

I’m 33, kind, attractive and fun to be with, but hopeless at finding love.

I’m at the point in my life where I’d love to get married, have children and live in domestic bliss, but the possibility of finding someone who feels a mutual attraction seems to be a mission impossible.

Over the years, I’ve been on plenty of dates, some set up by friends and others from dating sites. I’ve had a handful of boyfriends but nothing has materialised into that thing — a good relationship — which my family and friends have achieved.

I have been — in equal parts — the dumper and the dumpee. My last relationship ended in December and has left me feeling heartbroken, deflated and with a sense that there must be something awfully wrong with me.

Do you think that there are people that just aren’t meant to find love? I can’t help feeling that modern life has made everyone free of commitment.

Is it OK to just be single? I have wonderful friends and family, and generally enjoy a good life, but it’s that time of year where I’m fed up with feeling sorry for myself in the love department. Any help and advice you might offer would be most welcome.

SIMONE

OF COURSE you are right: this is a very common problem. But that doesn’t stop it being acutely painful for the men and women who see couples walking along arm in arm and wish they, too, could be in a relationship with The One.

Home alone on a Saturday with only the television for company, you inevitably imagine the world i s full of l overs for whom the ‘happy ever after’ of fairy tale has come true.

In real life the truth is different. You realise that countless people are left alone after the fairy tale has ended and The One has proved to be someone different.

Look, f or example, at t he complexity of today’s lead letter. There are as many f orms of relationship as there are varieties of (say) flowers, and a man who knows all about the varieties of human experience, Professor Oliver Sacks (see And Finally), is right to say: ‘There is no one like anyone else — ever . . . It is the fate. . . of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.’

That’s why I never look back on an answer given in the past. That would lump people together and that wouldn’t be fair.

Nevertheless, advice columnists do give similar answers to problems like this one. It can’t be helped. To suggest that somebody gets out and about, goes to classes i n anything f rom French to accounting, joins a Ramblers’ group or an art class, tries a singles holiday group or a line- dancing club — is all good advice.

There’s no guarantee t hat such activities will lead to love, which is why I always emphasise that they should be enjoyed for their own sake, and to make friends of both sexes.

Because a happy person having a good time is more likely to attract a mate than a needy soul gazing around the room in search of The One — so absorbed in that quest that they pay no attention to anything else.

YOU ask me if some people are meant to be alone — or rather, not to find love — and whether it is ‘OK to be just single’. Of course, logically, it must be the case that not everybody can possibly be happy in love because life is just not like that.

For all I know you might have impossibly high standards, like those men in their 60s looking at dating sites and picking only gorgeous women in their 40s.

Or women who say: ‘I could never fancy a man smaller than me,’ — or other generalisations which limit their ability to give love, and therefore to receive it.

I don’t know if you are like that, but you say you’ve done your share of dumping. So maybe you could look back and question whether there was a common thread to those stories.

It might be a good idea to convince yourself it’s not only ‘OK’ to be single, but it’s exciting — and there-fore you like your life as it is.

You see, I’m a great believer in willpower as a tool of self-persuasion, ‘for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says.

Tell yourself you’re enjoying the freedom and in the meantime start a brand new interest. (It’s so refreshing; I’ve just taken up tai- chi). Go out as much as you can, but not in the hope of finding a new chap.

So there we are again, with advice given before. What can be done?

You are a precious, unique person with much to offer the world and just as much, if not more, to offer the right man. But if he does not come along, what then?

You are still you and you still possess that one, marvellous life — so whatever else you may do, please look ahead with hope.