I have just turned sixty five.  I look back on a difficult life, coming from a very dysfunctional home with a mother who I now believe to have had borderline personality disorder and a father who absented himself emotionally from his children and was hardly ever there.  My brother became suffered from schizophrenia and eventually committed suicide, my sister is emotionally flattened, shut off, aloof; she possibly has schizoid personality disorder or is undiagnosed aspirer’s.  My childhood was acutely lonely and alienating.  I had a stammer that served only to intensify my very low self esteem and extreme shyness.  I sought refuge from my unhappy home life and tyrannical mother in a very early marriage at the age of eighteen, and by the time I was 21 my husband had abandoned me with two small infants.  My early life reads like ‘Cathy come home’, but worse.  Eventually, at age 5, my elder son went to live with his father and new wife.  I lived with my younger son who has always been rejected by his father, even to the extent that his father denied parentage.  Absolutely no grounds, but I guess his father found that a way of denying his guilt as he’d left me when I was pregnant with the second child.  Anyway, I endured years of poverty, recurrent bouts of severe depression, and two violent relationships, which were of course damaging to my son, before getting myself on a path of personal growth.  I became a teacher, won awards for my poetry, and even had two novels published.  The thing is, that I am still making mistakes.  I married my third husband again, after eight years of divorce, as I believed that he had changed, was kinder, less angry than he had been, and could offer me a more financially secure life than I had on my own, living on a modest pension.  I didn’t really love him, but thought I could settle for friendship.  Plus he had frail health and needed someone to take care of him.  I thought it would be a fair exchange: I would have a more comfortable old age and he’d have someone to take care of him when his health was poor – he goes in and out of periodic bouts of bad health.  The thing is, his behaviour towards me has reverted to how it was like in the past, and I feel I have let myself down (again!).  I am lonely and have no affection in my ‘marriage’.  He spends his time sitting infant of the computer or the television and hardly talks to me or shows any interest in my life.  It is, naturally, a sexless marriage, and although I am 65 it still feels as if something is missing.  Should I just get on with what I have and build a life outside my marriage, which is what I try and do?