After what might be a couple of weeks of us avoiding anything more controversial than “good morning” and “sleep tight”, my husband joined me in the garden. This was the day after the Eurovision final and after a week of flu. I wasn’t firing on all thrusters.

We were sat on the deck, I was feeling very tense, which I always do these days. He asked “Why do you feel lost?”

I was surprised by the question – that he had broken the silence, as much as the question itself. I had to roll the question around in my mind – to remember even saying it, and to reconnect with what I was feeling then (and, it turns out, still feel).

I’d assumed that we would grow old together and that it was he and me forever against the world. In my mind, we have been (although not always completely successfully) a partnership. I figured that we would eventually work our way around the problems we had, or maybe that we’d suddenly realise that they just weren’t that important any more.

I feel lost because everyone else I thought I could trust has gone from my life – friendships, family ties, even communities have thinned away. Only he remains: I coulda-woulda-shoulda trusted him most all along.

He was still holding onto that idea – ‘your body is your body, my body is mine’ – as though intimacy were a matter of property rights. I don’t have any kind of claim to exclusive rights to another’s body. Our arrangement, in my mind, was one of pragmatism and health. Still, I’ve always acted monogamously – the odd flirt, sure, but never anything that could be called unfaithful.”.

Despite buying into the social contract that says that relationships have to be monogamous, it wasn’t what I believed deep down. It wasn’t what I truly believed. I’ve never thought monogamy was the only way – but it was the basis of our marriage, and I never broke it.

He said, more than once, that there was ‘no point going over stuff.’ I nodded. I’ve promised to talk if he wants to – and I will – but I’m done opening doors just to be receive verbal beatings.

I’ve been avoiding the next step in buying him out of the mortgage. The deeds need correcting before the solicitors can proceed, and I’ve been pretending it isn’t urgent – because I don’t want us to separate. But it has to be done.