I’m childless and lonely. I feel moving would help, but my husband isn’t keen

I’m coming to terms with a life that I wasn’t expecting after 20 years of marriage and am struggling to find a route to a new life. My wish is to live by the coast, about 70 miles from our current home.

My husband and I have come through infertility and eight rounds of IVF without children (adoptions and alternatives have been explored). He is nearly 20 years older than me; I am in my mid-40s, and scared of the menopause robbing me of more of my identity. I don’t necessarily consider myself to be over our loss, but I try to be accepting. Yet it has changed our lives in an unbalanced way. He says that children would have been a bonus, which does relieve the pressure but makes me feel lonely in my recovery. To me, it meant more: the validation of being female, and a space in my heart is missing.

I feel that I’m living a life haunted by what might have been. Our house, bought before we started treatment, has many bedrooms, and my job doesn’t have any career prospects although it is in a field I enjoy. I know that it is time to move on and I could work freelance. My husband thinks that I should stay for the security and the benefits, and his worries are contagious, but I don’t know to whom I would leave my worldly goods if I should die after him.

I yearn for peace and quiet, having also been diagnosed with mild autism. When we go on holiday with our dogs, I find the peaceful places so much better for my state of mind. Walking on beaches is accessible and a rare pleasure for me. I struggle at home in mud and frost.

My husband wishes to stay where we are: he enjoys the city, has friends here and goes to sporting events every weekend. I feel resentful often. While my husband has said he will move, it is said grudgingly. I think life is too short and wish I could make him see that we do have more choices than for me to sit at home on antidepressants.

Yet each time we go away, I ruin the holiday with panic attacks about going home to a life in which I feel lost.

I’m sorry about your failed rounds of IVF: in your longer letter, you called it a trauma but you reduced all of it, pretty much, to a single sentence. Yet its impact, not surprisingly, colours the whole of your letter. The other thing that permeated your letter was identity; you talk of it a few times, once directly. I wonder if you feel that, without the children you planned to have, you don’t know who are.

Barbara Levick, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist (bpc.org.uk), feels that you have had “repeated disappointments” and that “perhaps [not surprisingly], you have real difficulty overcoming the loss. How important is the lack of children to you? It seems a major disappointment, but the catastrophic nature of it is not shared by your husband.”

Or perhaps it is, but there didn’t seem to be a sense of you both having really talked about how you feel. Certainly, I felt you hadn’t told your husband about how you feel. I got the impression of two people, living together in this big house, but locked away in their own worlds.

I kept feeling there were little screams of, “What about me, what about me?” all through your letter. What about you? When do you get to do what you want, say how you really feel? I’m a big fan of good therapy, and I would urge you to hunt some out just for yourself (start with your GP). You need a place where you can talk about how you really feel, and discuss what you really want. “People who are mildly autistic,” says Levick, “can really benefit from some one-to-one work.”

Levick also has the feeling that you have difficulty getting what you want, and wonder why that might be. “I think you need to get yourself doing more of what you like,” she says.

Even without what you have been through, what you want doesn’t seem so very much – a move 70 miles away, to live by the sea, to be able to take good walks. You are not asking for something impossible.

Levick explains that sometimes we don’t do things because guilt or fear hold us back in unconscious ways. I would add that we make excuses for what we can’t do and then we can become so used to those excuses that we start to believe them. Levick feels you are “stuck in concrete”.

I wonder if you could rent a little property by the sea? I wonder how close you could come to making things more into what you need/want? And instead of coming up with reasons why not, think “how could I make this happen?”

Your panic attacks are interesting – talking very generally (and not specifically about you), Levick says that “panic attacks are about [suppressed] aggression. We all have to manage our aggression somehow and it’s a positive thing, it keeps us going. But some children growing up maybe aren’t allowed to express their aggression and then, later, if there are circumstances where the person feels very, very angry that can come out as a panic attack.”

I wonder if any of that resonates with you?

Your problems solved

Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.

Follow Annalisa on Twitter @AnnalisaB

I’m childless and lonely. I feel moving would help, but my husband isn’t keen

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

Ladies who postpone getting babies may possibly stay childless, warns medical chief

Sally Davies explained she was not always advising girls to have children earlier: ‘It’s not for me to tell them what to do.’ Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Females who postpone possessing babies might finish up remaining childless since they have left it also late, the government’s chief health care officer has warned in remarks that reopen the debate about the rise of older motherhood.

“The steady shift to have children later on, there are issues with that. We all assume we can have children later on but truly we could not be capable to,” Prof Dame Sally Davies told a debate organised by the Wellbeing of Women charity on Thursday.

Her remarks follow warnings from medical bodies this kind of as the Royal University of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) that girls who delay looking for to turn into mothers until their late 30s and 40s may possibly fail to realise their ambition.

The RCOG on Friday reiterated its guidance that girls ought to consider to have their youngsters throughout their “period of optimum fertility” – by the age of 35.

“Biologically, the optimum time period for childbearing is amongst twenty and 35 years of age. Most women will get pregnant. Within a year, 75% of girls aged thirty and 66% of ladies aged 35 will conceive naturally and have a infant. After this, it is more and more difficult to fall pregnant, and the opportunity of miscarriage rises,” the college explained in a statement.

Although girls may possibly turn to IVF after 35, it could not lead to them obtaining a successful pregnancy, even if they have several embryo implantations, the RCOG added.

“Figures demonstrate that the dwell birthrate for ladies aged much less than 35 undergoing IVF is 31%. This price falls beneath five% for ladies in excess of 42 years of age. In some situations, older females have travelled abroad to countries with lax laws for IVF treatment method, to enhance their odds of getting to be pregnant by obtaining donor eggs from younger females,” it added.

Official figures display that the variety of females having a baby over the age of 40 has much more than quadrupled in the previous thirty many years, whilst the quantity of these above 35 undertaking so has also risen sharply.

Davies stated she was not always advising girls to have kids earlier. “It really is not for me to tell them what to do,” she explained. Even so, she said it was nicely-acknowledged that fertility declined as women aged and “as couples we have to encounter that”.

The pronounced shift in direction of women leaving it later than before to have a youngster, typically for occupation or personal factors, has prompted concern that this kind of ladies, particularly these over forty, are at higher risk of unfavorable outcomes, this kind of as having a miscarriage or stillbirth.

“Most pregnancies will outcome in a healthful infant. Nonetheless, adverse pregnancy outcomes also rise with age, and women over forty are regarded to be at a greater chance of pregnancy issues. For these factors, the RCOG and physicians would motivate females to take into account possessing families in the course of the period of optimum fertility,” the university explained.

Davies also referred to the growing quantity of girls who are remaining childless, which is now about one in 5. “A lot of far more females” are now “selecting not to have any kids”, said Davies, who stated she had been fortunate to have two kids in her 40s.

Nevertheless, Siobhan Freegard of the mothers’ social networking web site Netmums said that many women had kids in their 40s without complications. And Nakita Halil of the Family Preparing Association said that females not conceiving was not always merely a outcome of their age. About one particular in seven couples encounter fertility problems.

A Department of Overall health spokesperson explained: “It is a properly-identified truth that fertility declines as females get older. The chief health care officer was commenting on this situation and that ladies need to have to be mindful of these details.”

Ladies who postpone getting babies may possibly stay childless, warns medical chief