BEL MOONEY: Why do I feel so sidelined by my friends? 

Dear Bel,

I am well aware that I can be over-sensitive at times but I find it difficult to shake off painful thoughts about two friends — let’s call them L and K.

When L joined our company, I introduced her to K and we all became friends. L and K are very sociable. I’m less so, but made every effort to keep up with outings.

This became harder when I had my two babies with a 15-month gap. I always had a genuine reason for turning down the outing invitations — usually to do with the babies. They didn’t always understand.

One day I was in town with the pram and bumped into K and L on their way to lunch.

I felt hurt that they hadn’t invited me but concluded that they had every right to meet up separately, and perhaps they had thought I would turn them down.

When my baby turned one, I heard nothing, despite me never forgetting their birthdays, or their children’s.

I arranged to meet up with them a while later because L had just had a second baby. We met at a kids’ play area. It was obvious the pair had often met without me because there was much I couldn’t keep up with.

I spent the rest of the play session chatting to another mum whose husband we work with, but L and K made no attempt to join in or include us. From then on, I went on the outings only occasionally as I felt like an afterthought.

At the time, my rationale was that K was often accused (by mutual friends and colleagues) of ‘liking to be in charge’ — leading conversations, planning trips etc. — and she would often be dismissive of things I’d say. L is easier to get on with.

I grew used to occasionally meeting up with them and feeling left out. Barbecues, spa dates and a housewarming party which I wasn’t invited to have all been mentioned.

A few days ago, K invited me to dinner with L and four other friends of theirs. I accepted, thinking nothing of the out-of-the-blue invitation. I was added to a WhatsApp group and the chat history showed that the event had been planned for months.

When one of the ladies asked to bring along another friend, K said: ‘I’ve already added a seventh person who the venue may not be able to accommodate so I’m not sure we can chance it with an eighth…’ I was that ‘seventh’, so yet again the old feelings of being an afterthought resurfaced.

Am I over-thinking the situation and being over-sensitive? Is it best to steer clear of L and K to avoid these tiresome thoughts every time a jaunt is planned?

JENNY

When sorting letters for this column, it often surprises me that I do not receive more letters about problems involving friendships.

After all, from the earliest years friends are very important, and as the years pass, many people are glad of those they chose as well as (or even instead of) the family they’re linked to genetically.

You won’t be the first person to be sad because two friends have ‘gone off together’, as my teenage daughter used to put it if she felt left out at school.

I’m sure you felt pleased when L clicked with K and you could all be friends. But the whole process of pregnancy and motherhood does tend to put a brake on one’s social life, doesn’t it?

Quite apart from time and babysitting constraints, it’s also true that some women become very absorbed and let friendships slip.

But there’s another element, which I had to edit for reasons of space but can precis. You lost your first baby, a daughter, at four days old — a bereavement you avoid discussing with friends.

You heard on the grapevine that L had asked questions about it at work, which you didn’t like, even though, having had a termination, the broad subject might have been very important to her. That story tells me you stepped back from social life and still feel remote.

Having experienced that terrible grief, you were bound to be more anxious than ever when expecting your next baby, and also the one after that. It would certainly have made the pregnancies much more intense.

So to me it is not at all surprising that you became absorbed in your family and pulled away from your friends, nor that they continued to develop their friendship. You did turn outings down and so they might well have reached the point when they thought it a waste of time asking.

This happens, Jenny, it really does — a natural development in relationships between equals. You felt hurt that they didn’t remember your child’s first birthday, but to be honest that sounds perfectly normal to me.

It’s good to read that you spent time in that play area chatting to another mother while K and L continued their conversation. Why not seek out that other mother next time and start making independent friends rather than feeling so reliant on those two?

As your children grow and go to school, you will meet plenty of other parents, increasingly led by the kids your children wish to be friends with. This is life.

We grow and change and often move on from friends who were once very important to us. That leaves room for new friendships which, I can assure you as a much older woman, you continue to make throughout your life.

I understand that you have felt like an ‘afterthought’ in recent arrangements. But that’s simply how such relationships evolve and you need to understand that.

You could certainly be more proactive with L and K, enjoying good times while accepting that the threesome may never be what it was.

But being needy, anxious and huffy will only hurt you and nobody else.

I wasn’t consulted over family move

Dear Bel,

I am 81 and my health and activity levels are very good — I regularly walk ten to 15 miles.

For 25 years I’ve lived in my apartment above the extended ground floor of my daughter and her partner, as well as my granddaughter and her partner and their toddler.

My partner of 20 years, off and on, is seven years younger than me but now has cancer, so the future is uncertain. We have never lived together (we’re too independent) but we see each other every weekend and holiday together.

Now, with no discussion, my daughter tells me that we are selling up and relocating to a small-holding 130 miles away.

She’s searching for a property which will enable all three family units to have their own living space. The move would not be financially possible without my consent.

But I have a good life here. I’m only ten miles from a large town, and I have good friends, a walking companion and a church I’ve attended for 50 years. I am not a joiner of clubs and feel it would be very difficult to start a new social life at my age.

Should I refuse to sell my lovely flat and move away from dear friends and my partner, and spoil my family’s dream?

Or should I just accept that, at 81, I’ve had my innings, and embrace the joy of keeping my family around me and watching my gorgeous great-granddaughter grow up for as long as I have left?

HILARY

You say there has been no discussion, which shocks me. That surprising fact serves to underline why so many older people feel sidelined.

Does there come an age when, as if by magic, we lose the right to have opinions and decide what we want to do with the life we have left?

I remember a wonderful older woman I knew well, an adored and adoring matriarch with four children and ten great-grandchildren, confiding to me (slightly shamefacedly) that everybody always assumes you want to be with your family, but sometimes you do not.

Those readers who are lonely and long for family contact will read your letter and maybe think you ungrateful — because your situation, with four generations living under one roof, sounds ideal and enviable. And I’m sure it’s made you very happy.

But that doesn’t mean you are not allowed to lead your own, independent life, doing the things you want, when and how you wish.

Your long membership of the church community is likely to increase in importance as you get older — and many people have no idea how vital that can be. There is so much in your life at the moment, activities and people you would miss quite desperately were you to give it all up. That is why it worries me so much that you are being swept along by the family which certainly loves you, yet is selfishly not considering your needs.

I don’t believe that, at 81, you have ‘had your innings’. Who says so? This decision about moving must be a truly democratic one, so I hope that by now you have stated your feelings calmly but firmly. Why can’t your daughter and her partner recognise your rights and seek a compromise?

They could search for a suitable property (say) six to ten miles away, which would enable you to continue with the life you enjoy.

Or let them work out the horrendous cost of moving house, with stamp duty and likely alterations, and reflect that, with cost of living being what it is, such a move would be unwise at the moment.

Whatever happens, I think it wrong that you should be dragooned. Serious discussions need to be had.

Try not to think of it as spoiling ‘your family’s dream’ but as insisting that your wishes are respected.

And finally… Giggs’s love poem awoke a memory… 

It was hard not to feel a tiny bit sorry for randy Ryan Giggs when that ‘love poem’ to his ex-girlfriend became public knowledge.

He’ll never live it down, and will probably be sent images of Native American totem poles (beautiful, interesting things they are too) for the rest of his life.

That Giggs masterpiece left me with giggles, triggering a memory the years had mercifully wiped away. But Ryan brought it up!

At the end of October 1967, I’d only just met the second-year philosophy student at UCL whom I was to marry in a whirlwind just four months later.

But a hapless chemistry student with a massive crush had been following me about for days, begging me to go out with him. I didn’t fancy him or his test tubes one molecule but (being a kind sort of girl … occasionally) finally, feeling so sorry for him, I agreed to go for a drink. Big mistake. Huge.

Off we went (with me yearning for the new man, Jonathan) to the pub and he told me at length all about the synthesis of inorganic solids and made clear how much he wanted our substances to bond.

Then, as he walked me to Tottenham Court Road Tube, he tried damply to hold my hand, only to have it snatched away. Poor man, whose name I quickly forgot. What became of him? Did he win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? Perhaps he became something large in polymers. I’ll never know.

But the following day something truly terrible lurked in my college pigeonhole. It was a screed of deep-feeling doggerel addressed to this literature student with a passion for poetry.

How hard he’d tried! The full, elemental horror has gone, but, after 55 years, the last two lines remain seared on my brain:

‘I see you as a lovely witch

And I can feel my penis twitch.’

Forgive me, dear readers — I know this page deals with sad subjects. But can you blame me for wanting to raise a smile?