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

Colds feel worse to lonely people, study suggests

Having a cold can be a miserable experience, but it turns out that the symptoms may seem worse if you feel lonely.

A study by a team of US researchers has found while loneliness does not appear to have any impact on an individual’s chance of falling ill with a cold, or the actual severity of the symptoms, it does seem to be linked to feeling more under the weather.

But results show that feeling worse was not linked to the size of a person’s social network.

“When it comes to our health it seems that it is the quality of our social relationships that may be more important than just the quantity,” said Angie LeRoy, a co-author of the study from Rice University.

Writing in the journal Health Psychology, LeRoy and colleagues from a clutch of US universities describe how they probed the link between cold symptoms and loneliness by asking 213 healthy adults to complete questionnaires related to loneliness, their social networks and their mood before being infected with the common cold through nasal drops.

The participants were quarantined for five days, during which time they were asked to record their symptoms, such as sneezing, a runny nose or sore throat, and log the severity of their symptoms on a five point scale. In total, 159 of the participants developed a cold and had complete data.

After taking into account factors including age, sex, the season, education, income and mood markers, analysis of results from these participants revealed that those who scored higher on loneliness were no more likely to get a cold than those with low scores, but they did report symptoms of greater severity.

Delving deeper, the team found that the link was not down to the size of individuals’ social networks. “It doesn’t matter if they had a large social network,” said LeRoy. “It mattered about how they felt about their social network.”

However, when the researchers looked at the weight of mucus produced by each participant in the study, they found that there was no link to loneliness, suggesting that while loneliness was linked to how rotten participants felt, lonelier individuals were not more physically sick.

“Loneliness wasn’t necessary associated to how biologically ill they were in terms of the severity of their cold but it was associated with how severe they perceive their symptoms to be,” LeRoy told the Guardian. The authors say that helping those who are lonely build ties to others could help to reduce how bad they feel when they catch a cold.

LeRoys admits that the study does not show that loneliness is causing the perception of worse symptoms – indeed the authors note that, for example, those who are lonely often have poorer sleep. But, she says: “We measured loneliness before we exposed them to the cold and then we measured their symptoms, which infers that the loneliness came first.”

LeRoy adds that, combined with previous studies highlighting the link between loneliness and negative impacts on health, doctors and other medical professionals should take note of their patients’ mental state both when patients register and when they are unwell.

“How [patients] feel before [they are unwell] obviously could influence how they feel when they are sick, even with something as simple as a cold,” she said.

Colds feel worse to lonely people, study suggests

Three-quarters of older people in the UK are lonely, survey finds

Almost three-quarters of older people in the UK are lonely and more than half of those have never spoken to anyone about how they feel, according to a survey carried out for the Jo Cox commision on loneliness.

The poll by Gransnet, the over-50s social networking site, also found that about seven in 10 (71%) respondents – average age 63 – said their close friends and family would be surprised or astonished to hear that they felt lonely.

Gransnet is one of nine organisations – including Age UK, the Alzheimer’s Society and the Silver Line helpline for older people – working to address the issue of loneliness in older people, which is the current focus of the commission, set up by Cox before her murder last June.

They are urging individuals and businesses to look for signs of loneliness and refer people to organisations that can help. But they also want people to take time to speak to neighbours, family, old friends or those they encounter randomly.

The chairs of the cross-party commission, the Labour MP Rachel Reeves and Conservative MP Seema Kennedy, said there was a stigma around loneliness that must be tackled.

“We all need to act and encourage older people to freely talk about their loneliness,” they said. “Everyone can play a part in ending loneliness among older people in their communities by simply starting a conversation with those around you.

“How we care and act for those around us could mean the difference between an older person just coping, to them loving and enjoying later life.”

Almost half (49%) of the 73% who described themselves as lonely in the online poll said they had been so for years, 11% said they had always felt lonely and 56% said they had never spoken about their loneliness to anyone.

Laura Alcock-Ferguson, the executive director of the Campaign to End Loneliness – another organisation working with the commission – said the percentage of lonely older people had stayed the same for five decades, but an ageing population meant the number was increasing in absolute terms.

“Loneliness is a serious public health issue and dealing with it will take the strain off the NHS and social care services,” she said.

Common trigger events said to have contributed to feelings of loneliness were bereavement, retirement and children leaving home. Being shy, living alone or far from family and low income were other commonly cited contributory factors.

The rise of social networking to the detriment of face-to-face interaction has been blamed for contributing to an “epidemic” of loneliness, but the survey of just over 1,000 people found it could also offer solace.

Almost three in five respondents (59%) said social media helped people feel less lonely and about eight in 10 (82%) said talking about loneliness was much easier when anonymous and online.

While the results indicate the potential benefits of online interaction, the older people are the less likely they are to have access to the internet, particularly women.

The commission is encouraging supporters and followers to post #happytochat on social media to create discussion around loneliness and for people to wear badges with the same slogan. Ultimately, they hope some customer-facing organisations will encourage their staff to wear the badges.

Respondents highlighted greater public awareness – a key goal of the commission – as the best way to combat loneliness.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: “There are reasons to believe that we can all do something to change things for the better: a simple thing like saying hello and having a chat can brighten up an older person’s day and do more good than most of us would ever guess.”

In coming months the commission will focus on loneliness in other groups, including men, people with disabilities, carers, refugees, children and parents.

Three-quarters of older people in the UK are lonely, survey finds