My friend told me not to freeze my eggs and now I"m childless

The dilemma At the age of 35, I was single and childless, so I considered egg freezing. I found a clinic, sorted out transport and worked out costs. But before I went ahead I spoke to a close friend who strongly warned me against the idea. She stated removing eggs from your body and storing them in a freezer was silly. I respected my friend as she had been through many fertility treatments and so I cancelled my appointment.

I am now 40 and after meeting a very special man am struggling to conceive. My gynaecologist asked me why I had not frozen my eggs and I find myself furious with my friend. I am struggling to forgive her for her catastrophic advice.

I am sure she was not deliberately malicious, but I feel she has ruined my chances of ever being a parent. I have not said anything to her yet. How can I move on?

Mariella replies Stop the blame game. I appreciate that you are angry and frustrated. The vagaries of female fertility and its curtailment long before many of us are ready or in need of saying goodbye to the possibility of parenting is an evolutionary frustration.

Once upon a time we were unlikely to live much beyond 50. Today it’s double that and we are better prepared for parenting in our middle years. We mature more slowly, committed relationships start later, careers are rarely consolidated in our 20s – all of which knocks parenthood down the touchline.

Yet here you are suffering a similar fate to many women of our generation – finding the right relationship, but potentially too late to make it a family affair. Dumping responsibility for past choices on to someone else’s shoulders is not the way to solve your problem or your complex feelings around the baby-making issue. I’m startled that not freezing your eggs should be seen by your gynaecologist as a slip-up on your part. I suspect the majority of women, unless experiencing a relatable medical condition, would not have freezing their eggs high on their “to do” list in their mid-30s. Maybe we should. It’s one of a host of options we need to be discussing as our bodies struggle to keep pace with seismic shifts in society.

Your friend may not have displayed great foresight, but that’s easy to judge in hindsight

Blaming your friend for delivering an opinion, based on her own experience, is the last thing you should be focused on. Your anger would be better channelled in tackling your possibilities for conception. There’s a long and ever-increasing list to choose from – IVF, donor eggs, surrogate mothers – if having a baby is your priority. Getting your gynaecologist to show more imagination and make fewer unhelpful comments about choices long past would be a much more constructive occupation.

Then again, friction among friends seems a staple of long-held relationships. Some days I find myself longing for the innocent friendships of yore. In adulthood, refraining from manslaughter let alone maintaining civility with those you’ve “matured” alongside, gets ever harder. Over the decades, girlfriends develop opinions that are intractable, habits that are increasingly annoying and foibles, long suffered, become ever more insufferable. Where once all I asked for in a buddy was the potential for fun, a companion to share the late-night taxi fare with and an open phone line in times of emotional turmoil, now I demand sensitivity, compliance, flexibility, intuition, blind loyalty, political compatibility, back-up when required and free rein when not.

In short the older we get the less tolerant we become of anything less than perfection in those who’ve accompanied us through the years. The better we get to know ourselves the less flexible we are about stepping beyond established boundaries. It’s surely the reason so many of us get stuck in our ways, paused at a particular point, with no hunger to develop, seek new adventures or push ourselves. I’d go so far as to say it’s what makes us old!

I’m wondering how much credit your pal would have been given had she pushed you into egg freezing. Would your life have taken this same turn or a different swerve? It’s illogical to separate the choices we’re happy with from the ones we’d like to retake because they are intrinsically connected. Your imperative to have a baby may have pushed you faster into finding a relationship. The insurance of frozen eggs might have made you dawdle along the way and blinded you to the possibilities of the man you’ve met. That’s why gratitude for the things that turn out right is so much more important than raging against perceived losses.

Your friend may not have displayed great foresight, but that’s easy to judge in hindsight. Here in the present I suggest you take responsibility for your choices, channel anger into positive action and be grateful that you’ve met a great man.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1

My friend told me not to freeze my eggs and now I"m childless

Botox use is on the rise – but are some using it to freeze their feelings? | Anouchka Grose

Dannii Minogue has admitted to using Botox at difficult times in her life in a subconscious attempt to mask her feelings. Not only might she literally have been disabling her capacity to frown, she may also have been acting things out on her body in order to fend off her own emotions.

It’s about time someone said it. As a working therapist I have occasionally noticed my female patients’ faces change quite noticeably from week to week, but no one has ever spoken to me about what was making this happen. Cosmetic treatments, and the difficult thoughts and feelings that might make someone undergo them, are apparently one of the hardest things to talk about.

On the one hand perhaps these treatments are so normalised that they do not seem worth discussing in therapy – a new study in the US shows that young women using Botox has risen by 41% since 2011 – but on the other you probably wouldn’t spend hundreds of pounds on something that carried serious health risks if you weren’t feeling pretty worried about your appearance. Doing stuff to your face is like the sunny side of self-harm; you might try it in order to short-circuit anxiety or sadness, but the end result is supposedly regeneration rather than damage. Still, nothing signals underlying unhappiness and self-loathing more than a pumped-up, frozen physiognomy. In that sense, it’s a socially acceptable form of wound.

It’s hardly surprising that people, especially women, are prone to feeling insecure about their looks. But Botox is perhaps a special kind of beauty treatment in that it inhibits the visible expression of emotion. It helps people hide the way they feel. That this should come as a bit of a surprise is interesting in itself – this has never been its explicit selling point. The idea has been more that youth is good and age is bad. By starting Botox in your 20s you can supposedly pre-empt the signs of passing time. But what is facial ageing if not physical proof that you have smiled, frowned and been surprised? In other words, that you have let the outside world in on some of your feelings.

In Jane Austen’s great philosophical masterpiece Sense and Sensibility, we see two sisters attempting a serious experiment in living. Marianne expresses emotion freely while Elinor buttons it up. Which of them will fare best in life and love? Austen’s ultra-humane answer is that both ways have their ups and downs. And anyhow, while you think you’ve made your choice about which is better, you may find yourself doing the other.

Women in particular have had to rely on their beauty and personal charm in order to secure economic stability

More than 200 years later we’re still struggling over the same question. From the misery memoir to Instabrag via Geordie Shore, we’re trying to work out what will make us more lovable: free expression or self-control. Loosely speaking, some therapies work more towards the former, some towards the latter. As Austen wisely noted, there’s no clear answer as to which is best, although extremes in either direction do seem to cause trouble.

For humans, ensuring lovability is closely linked with survival. Babies very quickly learn how to endear themselves to their carers, and this habit continues into most people’s adult lives. If it doesn’t, modern psychiatry would even be inclined to brand you with a personality disorder. To generalise, becoming lovable seems to involve not crying and fussing too much, and learning to put your feelings aside for the sake of other people while still being affected enough by the world to experience empathy. You need to be able to control the release and expression of emotion, but not to the point of cold-bloodedness.

Historically, women in particular have had to rely on their beauty and personal charm in order to secure economic stability. Keeping your face nice and your character sweet in order to hang on to your TV job is perhaps the contemporary equivalent of donning a corset and holding your tongue in the hope of keeping your husband. The problem is that everybody is pretty much aware of the painful tragicomedy of all this, and Botoxed women are a very visible enactment of it. It seems to be absolutely socially acceptable to blast an older woman for having a too-smooth face. Far more so than for having a baggy one. By trying so hard to hang on to our charms, we risk revealing how much we fear losing them. In hiding our feelings we give them away.

Although cynics might see Minogue’s admissions as yet another ruse by a celebrity who wants to reel us in, it’s probably time we started to speak more freely, and above all kindly, about facial injections and the different forms of pain they attempt to address.

Botox use is on the rise – but are some using it to freeze their feelings? | Anouchka Grose

Steve Bell on Jeremy Hunt"s selection to freeze well being workers" pay out – cartoon

35min ago

Asylum seekers: the essential to compassion lies in human stories

Sunili Govinnage: It was the energy of human connection, not rhetoric or info, that assisted my dad and mom comprehend the reality of the scenario for asylum seekers

Steve Bell on Jeremy Hunt"s selection to freeze well being workers" pay out – cartoon