Dear Bel,

I feel so alone and have no one else to turn to. My husband of ten years had an affair that lasted six months. At the time, our children were just two and four. The betrayal almost destroyed me.

Despite the devastation, we made the decision to try to rebuild our marriage. To be accurate, it was mainly my decision.

Most of my friends told me no way would they do that. But I do love him and I believe he loves me. He regrets what he did so much.

It’s been two years since I found out but I still feel broken. We’re having marriage counselling but it’s so hard. I love my children – and my husband – so much and I want to keep going for their sake.

But some days, I can’t shake the thought that they’d all be better off without me.

My rational brain knows this pain in my heart won’t last forever but, right now, it still feels overwhelming and I’m exhausted by the whole thing.

He is a brilliant father – calm, capable, loving. In contrast, I feel like a tearful wreck a lot of the time. I know he doesn’t want to be with the woman he had the affair with but I keep thinking that if I were gone, he’d quickly find someone new and better than me. Someone less damaged. And, if and when he did, the children would be happier.

I know the affair wasn’t my fault, yet I feel so deeply rejected. I don’t want to end my life but, at the same time, the idea of just not being here any more sometimes feels like it would be a relief.

I hate myself for having these thoughts and I’m frightened by them. Please don’t suggest therapy – I’ve had years of it – and I’ve tried calling the Samaritans but couldn’t get through.

I’m reaching out because I need to feel less alone. I need to know that, somehow, this kind of pain can be survived.

I have flickers of happiness – reminders of what life was and could be – but the dark is often overwhelming and I dread this mood becoming more frequent.

Do you have any thoughts to help me?

Natasha

There is no therapy in the world, no intuitive wisdom, that could have prepared you for the bomb detonated when you discovered your husband’s infidelity.

Such a betrayal destroys some (probably most) marriages outright, but

you refused to let your love for him end just because (frankly) he couldn’t keep his jeans zipped up.

How predictable that must have seemed, how common, how clichéd, how unfathomably disappointing. He fell off his pedestal and can never – though patched up and glued – be the same man again. Still you fought for the marriage and you have succeeded.

Have you any idea how strong that makes you seem in the eyes of others who have also been hurt but cried, said a quick goodbye, and then perhaps regretted that for the rest of their lives? In my eyes you are a veritable Amazonian queen who realised the noblest way to deal with the adulterer is to forgive him and show mercy by allowing him to remain in the life you created together.

Does he realise how lucky he is? Yet your letter is so sad, so weak, so lacking in an essential sense of who you are and what you have achieved. That’s disappointing, you know.

Strong women do not give in. Listen to me – any bloke can have an affair but it’s a rare woman who refuses point blank to let his ordinary weakness sully her extraordinary strength.

I know because I have been right there. So I beg you to stop all this right now.

By that I mean the defeatist talk which beckons the darkness in, rather than shining your spotlight to face it down. The light is your beautiful children, for whom you have already made the greatest sacrifice – that of forgiveness of a great wrong – and for whom you will go on living the life they deserve from you.

How can you think for one second that their life might be better without you – just because you’ve given in to this mood of sadness and felt compelled to share it?

I’m glad you did because now the negativity is right out there in the light, I hope you can see just how wrong it is. And quite frankly I don’t believe you think your children would be better off with some other woman looking after them. They would not.

You are their mum – and that you will stay.

I’m honoured that you felt writing would make you feel less alone. On the other hand, your uncut letter reveals you have loads of girlfriends, that you and your husband have a good social life, your kids are doing well at school, you have a supportive family and a good career. That being the case, I think I will view the sad mood that impelled this letter as a blip.

You will never forget what happened but think of it as putting you into training.

What for? Bringing up your beloved children and living your best life in strength and awareness, that’s what. I trust the marriage counselling will help your husband understand consequences must be lived with.

Now onwards and upwards. Again.

I resent my friends’ benefits-cheat son

Dear Bel,

I’ve been friends with a married couple for many years. But there is one ongoing area of friction, which concerns their eldest child.

He’s in his 30s now and has obtained sickness benefits almost continuously since he left school – despite suffering from NO actual health conditions, would you believe?

As far as I can see, self-diagnosis, a supportive doctor and an ability to play the system are all that’s needed. The father admits this openly.

We tend to avoid the subject. As you can imagine, conversations about it can become heated. The mother (my friend) is particularly protective of her first-born ‘child’. I can’t imagine anything changing but it bugs me more and more.

As a taxpayer, providing a pretty decent income to somebody like that, who still lives with their parents and therefore has no outgoings to speak of, really grates on me.

I’m afraid my emotions will get the better of me one day and I’ll say something explosive. If I attempt to do something about the situation I could also be sacrificing an important relationship with the parents. Should I let sleeping dogs lie?

Theo

You ask, rhetorically, ‘Would you believe?’ and, with anger and sadness, I reply: ‘Of course I do.’

This scam is one small part of the rot afflicting our country. The kind of people who want something for nothing have always existed.

What seems to be different nowadays is that they are aided and abetted by the very people who should be hauling them over the coals for their laziness and entirely unacceptable exploitation of the rest of us. In this case, the man’s parents.

Worse, they are enabled to lie and cheat by the wider society – here represented by the ‘supportive doctor’ – which has grown permissive and dishonest to its core.

I read in Tuesday’s Daily Mail that workers are taking two weeks off sick per year. It’s a record high. ‘Mental health’ problems are, it seems, very likely to be made worse by working from home, surprise, surprise. Some of us wrote at the time that the Covid lockdown was a disaster to be resisted.

It seems the worst offenders are in the (cushier?) public sector, too. All of this is taking the proverbial – and I don’t care if it makes me seem hard-hearted to say so. When you get older, and remember the extraordinary grit of war time parents, you watch the deterioration of the country you love with a sick heart. It’s not just the young at fault: I know of a man of 62 who has drawn benefits since he left art school, yet another ‘creative’ scammer.

Do I sound bad-tempered? Yes, Theo, because I’ve been paying tax since 1970 and am with you all the way. A succession of useless politicians have made it not worth working when you can loll about at home and get paid for it. This is a rank insult to those in genuine need – and, what’s more, saps the morale of those supposedly being helped by being given money for nothing.

No wonder they have ‘mental health’ problems. It cannot make you feel good about yourself to wake up each day knowing you are uselessly living off the rest of us.

But what can you do? Be a whistleblower? Would an anonymous tip-off do any good in a culture colluding with cheats? You don’t want to end the friendship with the parents. So, like many of us, you’ll grit your teeth and say nothing.

But when it comes to the next election, I trust you will vote for whichever party says it intends to get tough on benefits. Whether you can believe them or not is another matter.

And finally… Fete gave me pride in my homeland 

Last Saturday the sun shone (between rainy days) on the church fete we’ve attended for the 15 years we’ve lived in our village.

It’s always the same, which is the point, isn’t it? So many volunteers putting in so much work – all to guarantee a timeless afternoon.

Tombola, coconut shy, skittles, cake and white elephant stalls, second-hand books, archery, beer tent, Morris men, local brass band, barbecue, ice creams, dog show, crafts… and so on.

The field was crowded, children ran about, the elderly walked slowly with sticks on the uneven ground; there were all types of people and all ages.

My husband judged the photography competition and presented prizes; I glugged a plastic beaker of Pimm’s and felt happy.

What is the source of such deep contentment? A reassuring sense of continuity and of community. The realisation that the most important pronoun of all is ‘we’. The happy thought that those who slept in the churchyard beyond would recognise what was happening.

A feeling of belonging to something indescribably good which was being enacted in one field in the West Country – and also in many others up and down this green and pleasant land. People were generous – and we learnt at Evensong the next day that the whole shebang made nearly £14,000 for the church.

A year or so ago, a local lady called Dawn started a choir called The Dawn Chorus – nice, eh? They sang a lovely programme of good old standards, while people gathered round to listen, children sat on the grass, and behind them the flag of

St George fluttered proudly on top of the ancient church tower, against a blue sky.

One of their songs was Edelweiss, with that lovely line, ‘Bless my homeland forever’.

Indeed – oh yes.