Vera's personal life

It's covered in earlier seasons.

The first scene of the first episode is Vera and Joe (her former sidekick to whom she was close in the only way Vera knows how...barely) was tasked with putting Vera's dad's ashes into the water from a boat. Vera was so conflicted about her dead father, she just wanted his ashes gone. So Joe helped her out.

Vera's mother died when she was tiny. She was raised in that house she lives in in the show by an eccentric father who was obsessed with bird twitching and bird egg collecting (and stealing, apparently, ha).

By all accounts he was a real weirdo, antisocial to some degree and such an inadequate father that in a few scenes in one episode Vera runs into a nun who looked after her at school when Vera didn't have clean clothes and was hungry and things like that. That is when we found out just how awful Vera's childhood really was.

Different tidbits throughout the series let us see she was a much neglected child, with no mother and an indifferent father. That formed her rather gruff and matter of fact personality.

She did have a major love affair with a fellow copper--he appears in an early episode. I won't say more because it would spoil the plot of that episode. But she does seem to have had boyfriends when young.

But never married. No children.

She had a wonderful relationship with "Joe" her former sidekick. But the actor left the show and has been replaced by the current guy, with whom she has no appreciable relationship, the way she did with Joe (a kind of son figure).

Joe was a young family man who tried to look out for Vera, worrying over her health and so forth. He was kind. And he cared about her, even when she was being gruff and difficult.

He is missed in the show. Greatly.