The dilemma I have recently started going out with a man who I am very happy with but who is also my best friend's ex-boyfriend from five years ago, when she was 17. They were only together for a few months and have remained friends but, despite her now having a boyfriend of four years with whom she is extremely happy, she has taken this news very badly. She has told me she finds the situation so difficult she doesn't know if we can remain friends. I don't see the problem as their break-up wasn't bad, it was so long ago and they have remained friends. She has completely cut contact with both of us. I lived with her for four years before we left university and we have been through a lot together. I am not sure if this new relationship is worth the destruction of an old one.

The dilemma I will turn 40 in a few weeks and have spent the past decade battling with infertility. After two miscarriages and infertility treatment from the age of 30 to 35, at 36 I was fortunate enough to bring a wonderful boy into the world. For the past four years, I have been struggling to have a second. Despite IVF attempts, my doctor now tells me my age is an additional negative factor. There are medical problems which have been overcome but, for the most part, the IVF failure is unexplained. I feel anguish when, every month, I realise my efforts have failed and that I may not ever be able to have a second child. My world centres around this overwhelming problem. IVF is taking a toll on my job, our finances, my health and my relationship. The need and desire to be pregnant is so deep, I don't know how to cope.

Mariella replies A big deep breath would be my first suggestion. You are hurtling towards your 40th birthday and, as with all landmarks, it can play havoc with your mind and increase anxiety. I'm not being dismissive of your dilemma. Having given birth to my first child at 42 I know all too well the anguish of trying for a baby, the corrosive effect it can have on your relationship and the ease with which monthly disappointment can tip into depression. My gynaecologist, a lovely man in every other respect, was equally negative about my chances of conceiving and actually laughed when, at your age, I announced my husband and I were trying for a baby.

The Dilemma I've been with my girlfriend for a year and we've become mutually dependent on each other. We talk more than any other couple I know, we do everything together and we are planning to do the same job from next year. Now I've got three months free and I want to go volunteering in Nepal. She has to stay here and finish her degree, so can't come. I don't want to abandon her to face something alone for the first time in a year, but I also don't want to abandon my own long-held ambition to volunteer overseas. If I sacrifice my own wishes is it possible the resentment could sow the seeds of the end of our relationship? Is it cold-hearted of me to go? Or would I be a spineless girlfriend-pleasing automaton if I stayed?

The dilemma I am 68 and my daughter is 45. Our relationship has broken down. My daughter's daughter has developed an eating problem and other mental-health issues and this seems to have triggered our problems. My daughter has been under enormous pressure with a demanding job and two other children. We recently fell out as she felt the fact I'd gone on holiday with my husband was rubbing her father's nose in the fact that we are no longer together. I tried to resolve matters over the telephone, but she told me our relationship is over and that she had issues with me dating back to her adolescence. I have always supported my daughter looking after her children and helping out even though we don't live nearby. I am incredibly shocked by her attitude to me. I do realise she is suffering and hope time will heal. I have written a short note to her, but haven't sent it yet. Should I?

Mariella replies It rather depends on what you've said in your note, but we'll return to that later. I'm sorry to hear about your granddaughter. The escalating epidemic of eating disorders among girls and young women in the UK is a problem we are failing to combat. Not that it is a surprise with mainstream media from TV to the top shelf regularly serving up Barbie-doll figures with bloated lips and gravity defying bosoms as the norm.

The dilemma My husband died, after a long illness, when I was 40, leaving me with four young children. I left work for nine months to look after him at home and returned to my full-time job two weeks after he died. This may seem very soon, but I needed to provide for my children and I have always enjoyed my job, which also gave me something positive to focus on. It is now seven years since his death. I feel tired. I would like to take some time out, but am too anxious about finances and am also scared that if I stop for a minute I'll go under my duvet and not come out.

Mariella replies Don't I know that feeling! Your situation is quite specific, but the fear you express about slowing down is a pretty universal condition. Keeping busy has become the mantra of our age, and the belief in perpetual activity as the way to stay afloat has proved to be a pervasive one. How often do you see a person loitering unless they're unfortunate enough to be living in a shop doorway? How come it's not the scary creatures charging up pavements, bellowing into phones without a care for fellow pedestrians, that we view as weird, but the small minority hanging around minding their own business? These days sitting on a park bench makes you appear less a budding Proust than a candidate for care in the community.

The dilemma Five years ago I gave in to the urging of my daughters and husband and acquired two dogs. I am not a dog person but felt that feelings might develop. They did negative ones, which have worsened over time, and now I cannot stand the animals. As well as the usual care and attention walks, feeding etc they are intermittently incontinent and frequently wake me in the night by scratching the floors. No amount of training has cracked the problem. My husband takes responsibility for them when he is around, but my daughters no longer pull their weight. I am starting to dislike my life intensely. Like a lot of working mothers, I feel underappreciated. I have suffered from depression throughout my life and am on antidepressants. I feel the dogs really are the final straw. My husband dotes on them so much he simply cannot believe it when I tell him how I feel. If I asked him to choose between the dogs and me, he would choose me. But he would never forgive me for making him get rid of them.

The dilemma I am a happy, rational and evidently completely normal woman in her mid-20s. In the past year I've started a great career which is fulfilling and fun, fallen in love with a wonderful man and started living the life I wanted when I was younger and directionless. But I have become more and more prone to stress, and my problem is that I'm not very good at handling it. Aggravating (but by no means catastrophic) situations leave me in a puddle of tears, from missing a flight to not being able to do my taxes properly; even one incident when my boyfriend suddenly couldn't stay the night left me a snivelling wreck. I am living in a foreign country. I like it here and I am making friends, although I miss my family and home country.

I lost my mother at the age of 16 and the grief was never fully addressed, but pegging everything on my mother's death will get me nowhere. Oddly, before getting together with my man, I would seldom cry, usually only when alone. Since I fell for him, I can't hold it in. What can I do to stop crying and face a challenge without a tantrum?

The dilemma I am in my late 50s. I've never travelled, been to university or known how to love. I was abused mentally and sexually as a child and my mother would threaten to kill herself if I suggested leaving home to see the world. Eventually I met someone supportive and loving  who has made me as happy as I can be. We have three amazing children. Life should be good, but I have this overwhelming feeling of hate towards his brother and his family. They seem to live under a golden glow: they are incredibly wealthy and smug. Whenever we see them, they boast of everything they have and it serves as a reminder of what I don't have. My husband says to count our blessings, which I do. But I feel there is a badness in me that will always be there.

Mariella replies No badness that's your unresolved past talking. You're just flawed, like the rest of us. Counting your blessings is great advice, but it can be a struggle to identify your own good fortune when what's in front of you is the immensity of other people's. Smug in-laws are two a penny, but if it wasn't your relations I'm sure there would be friends, acquaintances or colleagues you would envy and be enraged by. You'd have to be hewn of stone not to feel the occasional twinge of jealousy when confronted with the apparent ease of other people's achievements. On such occasions it's important to try and remember that nothing, even money, comes free.

The dilemma I'm a 16-year-old girl. I recently realised I'm suffering from depression: I always feel tired, unhappy, dejected and lonely. I'm not popular and when I do go out with friends and compare my life to theirs I feel more depressed. They all have boyfriends, even the ugly ones! I am not attractive and have never dated anyone. My social abilities are weak. I feel like a nobody. When younger, I used to watch a cartoon where one of the characters attracted every girl in the village. To get rid of my loneliness I started to imagine myself as that person and still do that. Is that normal? I just don't know what to do. I don't trust anyone and can't talk about my feelings to anyone, not even my mum. Please help!

The dilemma I am furious with my mother and I don't think she deserves it. My father left home for another woman when I was seven. It was an awful time and I responded to it very badly. I spent most of the rest of my childhood in a state of anxiety. My mother, in her early 30s when he left, retrained at university to get a good job so she could provide for me, my brother and sister. 

I am now 34 and, on the whole, our relationship has improved, but I still have feelings of uncontrollable anger towards her and my thoughts about her can become quite dark. Though I hardly ever see him, it's my father whose approval I crave even though, if anyone, he should be the focus of my anger. I find it very difficult visiting my mother at her home, and when she tries to speak to me, my responses can be monosyllabic and passive-aggressive.

The dilemma I am married and in my late 30s. My husband and I are happy in all aspects of our lives. We have both (individually and together) chosen not to have children. I have never felt "maternal" and while I love children I have never been tempted to have my own. I believe that if I had been a decade younger when I got married, or if my husband had been very eager to be a father, I might have acted differently, but I have felt this way pretty consistently my whole life. I don't see this as a problem, but people around us do. Family and friends tell us of the regret that will inevitably set in a decade from now, especially when I realise that I cannot have children biologically. Others tell us that our relationship will become weaker with no children to hold it together. I understand all of this intellectually, but my gut tells me that my decision is correct for me and my husband. Am I missing something? Is it so unnatural for a woman not to want her own child?

Mariella replies Unusual but not unnatural. Centuries of propaganda tell us we're created in order to procreate, but the great thing about being human is that you get to make your own choices. To have or not to have children is one of the burning questions. It's a decision further complicated by the fact that it's one of the few areas of our physical lives where time actually does run out. You can run a marathon at 60, learn to scuba dive as a septuagenarian, but once your cachet of eggs runs out your procreating days are over (though, happily, that situation is improving).

The dilemma My husband and I have fallen out with our best friends and it's causing a nightmare. It started when my friend and I decided to set up a business. She was initially very keen, and as we had some disposable income I invested money in setting up the company, paying for web design and so on. After letting me spend a few thousand pounds she suddenly decided to take a great job offer elsewhere and not to continue the business partnership with me. I know I can't do it alone and so my money is wasted and I feel badly betrayed. We had a major row, both said some pretty nasty things and then our husbands got involved and now no one is speaking. The worst thing is our kids have grown up together and our daughters are best friends and we're part of a close-knit social group, so it's making everyone's lives a misery. What to do?

Mariella replies Oh my, that's a conundrum. Like all arguments, it's ever so easy to make a judgment from the outside and really difficult to see the wood from the trees when you're in the thick of it. How sad, would be my first observation, that not two but four grown adults can't muster the communication skills to resolve this dilemma.

The dilemma I am in my late 20s and struggling whether to tell my boyfriend that I have been raped twice. We've been together for six months and I'm happy and hopeful for our future, but I am torn between feeling there is a wall between us if I don't tell him, and anxious that if I do, he'll see me differently and nothing will be the same. The rapes have shaped how I am in the world the first made me grow up too fast and after the second I developed PTSD. I was lucky and got that under control with the help of therapists.

Sometimes I'm on the brink of telling him when issues around misogyny crop up in current affairs. Occasionally quirks surface like my hypervigilance at night in unfamiliar streets that I would explain, but I don't want him thinking I'm damaged. My boyfriend is one of the kindest-hearted, generous, most thoughtful people and is committed politically to feminism. However, I'm terrified he won't cope with this knowledge that he'll pity me as a victim, see me as broken, won't be able to have sex with me any more.

The dilemma For the past three months I have been seeing the father of my daughter's fiancé. We have known each other for a couple of years, but recently acknowledged that we like each other romantically. We told our respective children about this a month ago, and brought it into the open, but they have made no secret of the fact that they disapprove. All our other family and friends do not see what the issue is and are very supportive.

However, our children say the situation is "weird and unusual", they will not "ever accept it" etc. They are doing everything possible to end our relationship. They are getting married this year and I think a lot of it is based on what other people will think. We have reassured them that we will not embarrass them in any way.  It's so difficult we like each other so very much, and get on so well and at our ages (50s) probably will not find another opportunity to be happy.  Are we so wrong?  I just don't know any more, but I object to being blackmailed by my own daughter!

The dilemma I am a 27-year-old female: good looking, likeable, financially independent, socially confident, educated and a talented musician. However, I long to be in a relationship, but it just isn't happening. Since I was 11 or so, I've wanted a romantic relationship but I didn't kiss a guy until I was 17. Since then it's been mostly intense crushes leading nowhere and short-lived flings. I had a relationship for three years with a guy more than twice my age, but eventually broke up with him in the hope of finding someone younger, even though we had a deep connection. That was a couple of years ago now.

I feel that finding the One is the main purpose of my life, even though I have other interests. I am terrified of being 40, childless and alone. I can't take my mind off my "main goal" and feel lonely and intensely jealous of couples. I am very much into sex but am totally unable to engage in casual sex, due to getting too attached to the guy in question. Therefore I find myself regularly distracted and distressed by sexual thoughts. When I see someone who seems to go effortlessly from relationship to relationship, I feel so incredibly miserable and full of self-hate, even excluded from society. I just can't work out what I'm doing wrong and am convinced that I am not worthy of love.

The dilemma My husband and I married in January. The first six months have been so rocky and utterly different from our two years of courtship that I feel I must have become a terrible version of myself. I'm constantly nitpicking my husband who is patient, loving, intelligent, generous and kind about things like body odour, not being ambitious and being on time, to the point where he's admitted he feels like a complete loser who will never live up to my expectations of the perfect man. 

I've always been the go-getter in our relationship, the organiser who's climbed high in her career, but I've begun to chafe at his lack of confidence and inability to "take the reins" in our relationship. I feel like I've fallen out of love with him, but I desperately want to get that back. I want to build this relationship again but I can't seem to keep my mouth shut because these things prompt huge visceral reactions in me that fester in my mind when I don't say them, and come out eventually. I have anxiety and depression-related issues, and see a psychologist and psychiatrist regularly for therapy and medication. What should I do?

The dilemma Im worried about my mum and dad. They are getting on a bit (about to turn 50) and still behaving like teenagers. I dont know how I can enjoy myself while they are the ones who are still rebelling. I am off to college in September and I cant wait to get away. This year I got a job at Glastonbury and my parents were delighted, but said they fancied coming to keep an eye on me. I hardly saw them, though on Saturday when I was getting up for my day shift I bumped into them stumbling back from the Dance Field. It was so embarrassing as I was with a boy I quite like and it was obvious my parents had taken E or something and been up all night. He said I was like Saffy in Ab Fab, but I dont want to have to grow up fast just because my parents refuse to.

The Dilemma Our 39-year-old daughter and her husband had a much- hoped-and-tried-for child last year. They live 150 miles from us, so we have only limited contact with our granddaughter. Our son is 29, in a relationship and lives not far from us. He says they dont want children. My other daughter is 32, lives locally, and has been single all her adult life, but would like to find a partner and start a family. We see both these children regularly. Our fourth child is married, lives in Australia and will stay there. Recently, our eldest daughter asked us to move near them so that we could play an active role in our grandchilds life. We are in our early 60s, retired, and could easily move financially. We would love to play a big part in our grandchilds life, but it would take us away from the others, who might give us grandchildren one day. Should we live our lives in the here and now or wait for what might or might never be?

The dilemma For the past few weeks my colleague and I have been having sex at his home and mine. We are both in long-term relationships, but mine is long distance. Weve worked together for seven years and have been the best of friends. A month ago he invited me to his place to watch movies. We kissed and had sex the same night and the next morning we went to work as if nothing had happened. From then on weve had sex on a regular basis. It feels more like a relationship, yet we have not discussed it. Im so scared of asking him what we are doing could this be a relationship or just friends with benefits?

Mariella replies If you dont know, how am I supposed to? Its always surprising how much of ourselves were willing to give away before were even at first base in the communication stakes. Maybe were not so evolved after all, as we seem far more comfortable sharing our bodies than the thoughts produced by the sparking synapses between our ears.

You say youve been the best of friends for seven years and still, even with sex added to the mix, you cant bring yourself to ask him for his thoughts on where the relationship is headed. Two grown adults having consensual sex, and yet the prospect of frank disclosure about whether whats going on between you is more than a convenient layover is too scary? That doesnt bode well for your present friendship, let alone prospects for a future relationship.

The dilemmaI am 67, retired and have a loving husband but little enthusiasm for anything. I went to art school in the 1960s, which were the best years of my life. I tried to qualify but two attempts at degrees failed due to problems with grants. I ended up working in the NHS for over 20 years. I could join an art group, but so many paint kittens and harbour scenes not for me! I have good art knowledge. I volunteer at a nationally recognised gallery as a room steward once a week. I also have fibromyalgia and wear hearing aids which make me feel quite isolated.

Mariella replies Well thats just not good enough, is it? Im delighted youve written and I suspect youve chosen me precisely because you know that the judgmental tone you employ when dismissing art you feel is inferior will infuriate me.