It’s a shame your friend has started making jokes like this, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith . But there’s a way to put a stop to this dynamic

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I confided in a friend that my husband doesn’t contribute much financially – barely at all given mental health issues. Now I think the friend disrespects my husband. He and my husband have had their own direct friendship for some time now, which is especially important for my husband as he moved to a new city and appreciates this friendship.

The financial imbalance between my husband and I has definitely been a sore point and cause of stress for us. We are working through it and we are hopeful to get things moving in a better direction.

Remember the good old days when you could get on a train or go to a party without wondering if it was worth the risk? It’s time for a revival

In a series of deft manoeuvres that remain fascinating to me, my 16-year-old son managed to barter me down from a four-day trip to Devon to 13 hours in Broadstairs on the Kent coast, during which every train, meeting and arrangement was a white-knuckle ride, as to miss one would render the entire thing, plus the weeks either side of it, some variation of pointless. But we caught every train, we made every meeting, and he watched Match of the Day with his friend while I went to an Afrobeats club night with mine. In the morning he ate vegan bacon in record time, while I studiously didn’t mention how incredibly tired I was, and then he had the brass neck to complain about sleep deprivation all the way home. But by then I wasn’t tired any more, because I’d had a huge, adrenalised revelation: this whole escapade had a pre-pandemic feel.

Long Covid aside, the coronavirus hangover has been subtle, in a bad way. In summer 2020, it looked as if it might bring about big changes: maybe we would come out of it recognising which jobs really mattered and stop equating people’s pay with their value to society, the last would be first and society would cohere again. Maybe we would come to understand what we preferred, between getting on a plane and hearing birdsong, between going to the office and making sourdough (I prefer the office, which is annoying, as I do not have an office job), and there would be no “back to normal”, but instead, a thoughtful rebuilding of life along different lines. All of that was bollocks.

We often wind up with feelings of obligation towards our work, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But ask yourself: would your employer think the same?

I work for a small company; there are just three of us . My boss, who is the owner of the company, hired me to manage it while she stepped back before having her first child. She’s since had a second child. At the start, I loved my job. It represented security after several rocky years . But as time has gone on, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with my job and the industry I work in. I desperately want to leave.

I’ve been working on a side gig for 12 months in my free time and it’s starting to take off. If I had extra time to spend on it, it would make a huge difference. My dream would be to take a part-time, mindless job to help pay the bills , but I feel trapped in my current position. My boss is stressed. She’s struggling to cope with parenthood and being the main breadwinner in her household. If I left, I would put her in a difficult position. While we’re not close friends , we have become friends of a sort over the years, and I am aware of how much she has to deal with at home. Of course, I could just wait and see how things pan out, but every day I get more fed up and depressed about having to do a job I resent and am bored by.

Hannah, 41, and Izzy, 42, met in a nightclub before starting the same college course in the 90s. They both live in Suffolk and remain friends and soulmates two decades later

When Hannah was 16, she loved going to her local under-18s nightclub to dance to alternative music. “In the summer of 1999, I was getting ready to start my BTec in media studies. I was living with my parents in Ipswich, working part-time and having lots of fun going out,” she says.

One night, she spotted Izzy at the club and mistook her for someone she knew. “I approached her and asked if she knew my brother,” she remembers. She said no, but they got chatting and realised they were both enrolled on the same college course. “I was living with my mum and working for a bakery,” says Izzy. “We didn’t have mobile phones at the time, so we never swapped numbers.”

It’s not easy to maintain the closeness of relationships of our youth but Abigail Dean will always make time for the friend she grew up with

In early 2006, when I was 17, I was admitted to a well-known psychiatric hospital in the UK, an institution most associated with models and footballers. I was neither. I was a schoolgirl who had suffered from either a chemical imbalance in the brain or a series of poor life decisions, depending on who you asked. For two months I was to live in a small pink room with immovable furniture, and attend every therapy on offer. I revised for my AS Levels in the communal lounge while people watched television or wept over the evening meal.

On my first day there, snow fell furiously across Derbyshire. My parents live on a big hill in a small village, and were snow-bound. Visiting hours inched around. I resigned myself to two hours of self-pity, listening to the hum of reunions from the surrounding rooms. But 30 minutes before the doors closed, in walked my friend, Ruth, who had got her driving licence just the month before. She was carrying a week’s supply of the worst gossip magazines of the late noughties and a craft kit for homemade cards. I would not spend the evening alone.

You are right to feel uncomfortable, rather than flattered, by such extreme imitation. Short of cutting her off completely, there are ways to gradually disentangle yourself

I met X about 10 years ago, at the gym. She’s not a very close friend, although I think she would like to be. For the first few years I thought we had so much in common – places we’d been on holidays as kids, our attitudes and our taste in music and clothes.

It has taken me a while to realise that I can’t believe anything she says . She copies everything I say or do . Every time I wear something new, she says: “I’ve been looking for a coat/dress/boots like that. Where did you get it?” She turns up a week later with almost exactly what I have. I simply don’t answer any more.

Being in the late evening of life we learn to reflect, to meditate on things lost and gained, to contemplate a society alien to the one we once knew. But ageing does not mean retreating from the world

A young male writer turned 60 recently and complained about getting old. Please, I thought , I’ve unwound nine-tenths of my mortal coil, don’t tell me about getting old, young whippersnapper.

One glaring difference in the two decades that stand between us is underlined by the fact a 60-year-old male probably hasn’t experienced ageism yet. A fit man at that age is not far off his social and cultural peak; dress him in a suit and he could be a minister of the crown or a hot-shot CEO. A woman – and in most cases, a man nearing his 80s – is more than likely just the furniture of the street; only her peer group really sees her as an equal.

John, 78, and Anna, 48, became friends on a travel website in 2008. When war broke out in Ukraine, John welcomed Anna to his home in Finland – and they’re still flatmates
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When John joined a website for travel tips back in 2008, he never imagined he would meet his future flatmate. “I was living in Finland and working as a translator,” he says. “I originally moved from the UK to be with my partner 50 years ago, but after we broke up I decided to stay.” He joined a site called VirtualTourist, which was an early social media network for people who were passionate about travel. “I was planning a trip to Egypt at the time and getting some really great advice from people who were there.”

John soon got chatting to Anna, who was from Kyiv and worked in recruitment. “We were in the same time zone and we were both insomniacs, so we would end up chatting late at night,” he recalls. Anna, too, remembers these exchanges fondly. “I really liked his travel pictures and whenever he posted a new one I’d ask about his experiences,” she says. When Facebook became popular, they exchanged details and began chatting over Messenger, but it wasn’t until 2017 that they finally arranged to meet up in person.

What would the world look like if we put our mates above all other relationships? Much better, says Rhaina Cohen

Rhaina Cohen was at a party one night when, on the other side of the room, she saw another woman she found magnetic. “In her pastel sleeveless blouse and snug pencil skirt, she had the posture of a dancer, if that dancer was also running a boardroom meeting,” she writes in her book, The Other Significant Others.

Soon after they parted that night, she and the woman she refers to only as M began exchanging messages. “Between us was a blizzard of ideas toggling easily between the interpersonal, emotional and intellectual. It took us little time to introduce each other to the people and spaces that mattered to us. We dropped by each other’s homes with the effortless frequency that before then had only seemed possible on sitcoms.”