Dear Bel,
I am 58 years old, slim and attractive (so I’m told) with a bubbly personality, married to the same man for 36 years.
I’ve always known he’s rather odd and unlike other people, but in recent years I’ve read a lot about Asperger’s and everything points to him having it.
There have been a lot of problems over the years (for me — he seems oblivious), but probably the worst thing is that we haven’t had sex in any shape or form since the second year of our marriage.
At first we did, but I always felt he wasn’t really interested, and eventually I lost interest, too, so it stopped. We have never discussed it. We never, ever talk about sex. Now I wouldn’t fancy him if he was the last man on earth!
We get on OK, although he drives me nuts most of the time. We have nice holidays and a nice crowd of friends, so life is OK. I am not actually unhappy, just unfulfilled.
In my 20s and 30s I had two affairs, both times I’d have left him, but they didn’t work out. I stayed because I never earned much money and had nowhere to go.
The last one ended over 20 years ago and I’ve not had sex since then. It has never particularly bothered me, I think I just accepted it, but I have missed a close relationship with a man. I do sometimes feel I am wasting a large part of my life.
Recently, I re-met someone from the past I’d always liked. He’s now single and lives alone.
We have become close friends and we talk about sex a lot, but haven’t done anything about it for two reasons — one, we really have no opportunity, and two, he had an affair with a married woman where people got hurt and doesn’t want to go down that road again.
I enjoy his company (a couple of hours a week — a walk or coffee) and we email most days.
He’s very attractive and I’d love to take it further, but I’m not sure where it would lead.
I’m sure he’ll eventually find a girlfriend and I will be terribly upset. Nothing is ever going to change with my husband, so please don’t suggest I talk to him. Have you any advice?
BEA
Right at the end you pre-empt the first piece of advice I would certainly have given — which is to try to talk to your husband.
You have been married for a long time — after a fashion — which is why I have to accept your confident assessment that ‘nothing is ever going to change with my husband’.
You also think he may be on the Asperger’s spectrum because what you have read resonates with how he behaves, but it is not for me to express a view about that.
After all, there are lots of ‘odd’ personalities who escape amateur diagnosis. Reading your email several times, I am left with this overwhelming feeling of sadness that a marriage can have lasted so long with such emptiness at its heart.
I feel very sorry for you in your longing for a loving relationship (sex or no sex), but also for him, in that he presumably has no idea that his wife is unfulfilled.
Your honesty is interesting, because you are clear about the good things in your life and the fact you are ‘not actually unhappy.’ The holidays and friends clearly make up for a lot, and you do not hate your husband, which (given some of the letters I read) is a blessing.
Yet the truth is this: if this new man summoned you, you would leave — as you would have left all those years ago.
Given that, your comment ‘I do sometimes feel I am wasting a large part of my life’ is quite an understatement.
You remain in a sexless, mundane but ‘OK’ marriage because you have nowhere else to go — and surely at the age of 58 you have to decide whether you want to go on in this way, whether or not you find a new man to run off with.
Any decisions you make should take into consideration how fond you still are of the man with whom you’ve spent all these years, and then just how you visualise the future for yourself.
You see, while I understand the restless need that would pack a bag and leave an unfulfilling marriage if the new man snapped his fingers, it might result in terrible guilt on your part — and guilt generally guarantees a certain level of unhappiness.
You make no mention of children, although you might well have adult ones, therefore that is not a factor here.
But you do have to weigh the life you have against the unknown — and you can only make that assessment if you think very carefully about who you are and what you want.
You say you never ‘talk about sex’ with your husband, but the really important question is whether you ever talk about anything else. Since you have firmly brought the shutters down on talking, I must doubt it.
It’s obvious that nobody else can decide whether the devil you know (the odd, sexless man who ‘drives you nuts most of the time’) is better than the devil you don’t — which is breaking free of this marriage, whatever awaits you the other side of divorce.
You have no idea whether a real relationship with the new guy is on the cards, so your thought processes cannot depend on that fantasy.
You either settle for what you have — or decide that at 58 you do not want to spend the next 20 years feeling so ‘unfulfilled’.
I’d remind you that you can seek Relate counselling on your own and that might help you sort out your thoughts.
But sort them out you must — and I’m afraid you do need to start by trying to talk to your husband, even if you don’t want to and believe it to be impossible.
Don’t you owe him that effort after 36 years?
Dear Bel,
I have been with my partner for 18 months — half of which has been long distance.
During the long-distance period he met someone else and started seeing her for three months, with my knowledge, but not hers about me. (Due to the distance we agreed to an open relationship, which I found extremely difficult and drove me to antidepressants).
The other woman was local and child-free; I lived 12,000 miles away with a three-year-old, but was willing to relocate. In the end, he chose her.
I was devastated. A few weeks later I found out I was pregnant. I wanted to keep it, he didn’t. In the end, we decided to get back together. I would move to his country, but not have the child.
He ended things with this other woman, who was upset and angry. Since then, he’s guilty about her and angry at me for getting pregnant.
Still reeling from the termination, I have no emotional support. He’s withdrawn, focusing on his own negative feelings. I had the termination for him — but don’t feel I have him.
I haven’t told anyone else about the termination, so have no one to talk to. He’s offered to pay for counselling, but I need his support. I want him to comfort me and act loving towards me. How do we proceed? I feel so alone.
MAGGIE
Having made a firm resolution to put empathy at the forefront of my responses at all costs and at all times, I confess I’m struggling here.
It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for you, because I do. I must. But I wonder how any woman could be quite so foolish as to get herself into such a terrible situation — and call it love.
Oh, you don’t use the word, but what else would drive you to think this fling (which is all it can be described as, given the circumstances) with a distant (geographically and emotionally) male is any sort of partnership?
He has coerced you into accepting unacceptable terms from him, making you agree to the ‘open relationship’ at great cost to you.
He left you, then forced you to abort the baby he fathered.
You went along with it because you were too weak, and probably too lacking in self-esteem, to see that the man is entirely unworthy of the affection of any woman with an ounce of self-respect.
I hate to think of you suffering because of the termination, but have to admit that a part of me is glad you did not bring an innocent child into the world, to be at the mercy of a unfeeling man and a mother who has no idea what she truly wants, or what a man must do to be called a ‘partner’ in any meaningful sense of the term.
Tell me, do you think this horrible person you’re obsessed with is fit to perform the role of father in your three-year-old’s life? Isn’t it time you put your child’s welfare first?
You have uprooted your little boy or girl from family and friends to follow a selfish, narcissistic cheat across the globe, and now tell me you ‘feel alone’. Ask yourself whose fault that is — and then vow to put things right.
It must be clear to you — as it is to everyone reading your letter — that wishing for ‘support’ and ‘loving’ from a selfish apology for a man is deluded.
You can ‘proceed’ by taking control, moving back and telling him you never want to hear from him again.
And finally, who would want to be a teenager?
Clearing a cupboard (as you do post New Year), I came across old diaries. How hilarious and horrible it is to come face to face with yourself at 16 and 17.
First came the little notebook I kept in 1963 at the Movement for Colonial Freedom summer school.
Can you believe that at 16 I went to lectures on ‘colonialism, socialism and war’ given by dour Left-wingers? How tediously serious I was.
Then the diary for 1964 is all about boys I fancied and my friends at grammar school in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and rows with my father. In other words nothing remotely interesting, still less original!
Christmas is recorded thus: ‘I can say, quite truthfully, that this has been the most empty, tragic Christmas of my relatively short life.’
Oh please! That mood was only because of various boys called Fred and Terry and Bob — none of whom I can recall. Oh, and a certain Mike . . . who he? New Year’s Eve was, it seems, one long flirtation with somebody called Ian, who was my friend’s boyfriend. Nice.
Jump forward a year and I’ve met my first great love, Philip, won the Inter-Schools debate, been awarded a place at University College London then rejected by St Hilda’s, Oxford, which made me miserable.
Yes, more teen gloom! Quotes from Bob Dylan litter the pages, not to mention Einstein, Anne Frank, James Joyce, Navajo Indians and Bertrand Russell. Pretentious, moi?
Christmas was fun (phew!), but New Year’s Eve a disaster because I was horrible to Philip, as a result of which he put his arm around a girl called Alison. Catastrophe! ‘I got quite violently hysterical’ wails the diary, ‘Christ it hurt. But it was all my fault.’
Who would want to go back to that time of angst about appearance (‘He could get a better-looking girlfriend’) and exams (‘I just can’t work’)? But it did make me reflect how much nastier it is now for kids tormented by social media. Reading the maunderings of youth makes you rejoice in age.
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