I woke with a migraine. Like an idiot, I went for a run lunchtime. “Kill or cure” as me mum used to say. It nearly killed me, and my head was terrible all afternoon. Then I had to cycle home. Pills and some quiet time didn’t help.

And tonight we had couples counselling.

The theme of this session started with the discussion we’d had on the weekend about “would I find it easier to let him go if we could still be friends?” and my husband taking it as “I would let him go if we could still be friends?”

He said that I seemed happy after the conversation, which he felt was extremely strange since he’d been talking about just walking away from everything if we split.

I explained that I felt relief that the conversation had never got overwhelming and that there’d been a flow in the conversation. This contrasted with how’s he’d been feeling: desperately low.

This led the conversion in the session to how I was not able to meet him emotionally. That was a very difficult thing to hear and a painful thing to accept: it really makes me feel broken and inadequate.

I said that I was very unhappy with what he was saying and that I had said often, in order to reassure him, that everything we have we own together: I would not let him be destitute. I might be shit at managing my emotions, however I care very, get deeply for him.

The question for my husband is: can he accept that limitation on my abilities? That is a very big and serious question. If the answer is “no”, then we genuinely have no future.

I owned that I had always felt frustrated by this inability and behaved rather badly, punishing him for making me feel inadequate. Not the action of a loving partner.

I think that this is something that I’ll need to return to. I did feel inadequate by not being able to meet his needs, however my husband also contributed to those feelings.

We talked about expectations. Not what they actually were, just that relationships need them and recognised that we had never discussed them with each other! There was one expectation that I did name: in my view, relationships should be healing places – ours was not.

Then I said “I’m here good at pattern recognition. In the last eighteen months since all this started, you have had three episodes (if I may use that word).” Episodes are incidents where my husband has his own meltdowns; these sometimes involve him making real suicide attempts, or him being verbally or even physically abusive towards me. They are bipolar or PTSD in nature. “Leading up to my coming out,” I said, “there would be one a month and they could last weeks. Therefore, looking at the pattern, it’s clear that before I came out as wanting surgery and as non-binary, that I was making you worse.”

“Wow!” Said Roxy, “that’s a powerful thing to say; what do you feel about that?” She asked husband.

He replied “I came into this relationship already badly damaged, I don’t think you can be responsible for everything.”

Roxy wasn’t happy with that reply and said “I want you to accept this, it’s a very important statement.”

He seemed to absorb it, then said “that’s all I’ve ever really wanted, for you to own your side of things.”

It was nearing the end of the session, so Roxy let us know. We didn’t say any more until we were outside.

It felt different this time. I feel that I’d taken some important steps.

We had some cheesy chips and sat on a bench and chatted for about ten or twenty minutes about the session.

We talked about Roxy and whether we both liked her (we do). I want to hug her: she feels very warm and huggable to me.

He’s expressed concern for the increasing frequency of my migraines. I think they are just down to emotional stress.

He suggested that our next chat be on Friday. I thanked him and said yes, thinking that he was suggesting a date because of asked him if we could plan our talks in so that I could get myself into the right state. He was asking because he wanted to feel that he was doing it for him, which also felt like a great reason.

I might not know if we have a future, but the present feels a little more manageable.