My husband felt very low yesterday. He said “can we talk?” I’m not keen on these impromptu conversations because unless I’ve had time to get head into order, they can tend to become overwhelming.

He talked about before options that I gave him last year, after the flood while he was in a refuge to look after his bipolar.

It was hard to hear these unadorned truths that I had written, and I think it was hard for him to read them back to me. We know that we moving to a new town together cannot fix things because we would simply take our problems with us: been there, done that!

Other options involve splitting up or staying together, each of those options have sub-options such as selling the house, or him moving out and me buying him out of the house. There is no option for him to stay in the house and I move out because he has no income.

I reminded him that he’d forced me to say the two little words (“it’s over”). He apologised for that, but I’m not sure whether that apology was for making me say them, or for not taking it as the decision and splitting up.

It is feeling like we’re so nearly done and we are both in denial of the truth of the end of our marriage.

Yet, I still hope that we can find a way through it.

This was an exceptionally difficult conversation and I had to work hard to fight the brain-glue. I’m afraid that I was occasionally sarcastic – he’d said that none of his sexual advances had gone anywhere, I said that the rest things are between us that sex just didn’t feel like a comfortable proposition. He pushed the issue, so I said “shall we go and have sex now?”

After the conversation dried up, I said that I was going for a lie down. This was actually a self-protection thing: a shutdown was nearly upon me. I was close to just curling up into the foetal position on the wooden floor.

I went upstairs and dropped my clothes on the floor on the way to the bedroom. I climbed under the duvet so that it was over my head. When I am in shutdown, I need to be completely encased in a blanket or the duvet in order to feel safe and come through it.

He came up after a while and put his arm on me. I managed to move a little closer to him, but I was only semi-conscious. I was aware of it enough to feel comforted by his presence.

Some time later, I was able to emerge from under the duvet; I rolled onto my back and pulled him in. I held him close.

We were in bed for a couple of hours.

We had to get up though – it was already getting late and we need to sort out tea. I really struggled to get out of bed. Shutdowns zap me completely and leave me brain-fogged and sluggish.

We still reach for each other in the dark, still find solace in touch. But it seems that isn’t enough.