The 52 Week Project I’d always wanted to get married

What about financial problems? According to finance expertmary Holm, Relationship Services has reported that differing views on finances is themost common reason for relationships ending. That makes sense. But was this a problem for Alan and me? No, not really. Apart from one dark day in which the need for a four-slice toaster was debated at length and with much vigour, we’d always been on much the same page with finances.

Four-slice-toaster-gate was no Hurt Locker. For us, separation was nothing like that – nothing so black and white. It was simple and complicated all at once, in that the thing thatmade Alan and me Alan and me was gone, and we didn’t know how to get it back.

Of course, the question of why it happened is one I’ve asked myself a lot. A chronic over-thinker at the best of times, this is something that literally kept me up at night.

After having children, Alan and I started socialising apart, because going out together was impossible without babysitters. Of course, if we had amagic time-machine and could go back, we would have used babysitters more. My aunt, mumand sisters have been fabulous babysitters over the years but, at that time, we’d used them so much for things that really mattered that it felt like taking the piss to ask them to sit so we could go to the pub for a burger. And we didn’t pay anyone to do it either, for a mixture of financial reasons and pure inertia.

I didn’t realise it at the time, though, so we did very little together. Alan and I had both made new friends, me through work and parenting groups, and him through his hobbies. We didn’t know each other’s friends any more. You can be different versions of yourselfwith different people, and the version of me I was with the friends I’d made in recent years was different from the person I was with Alan.

I think I liked my friendversion more than my Alanversion. Not because of Alan but because the version of me Alan saw had so much housework to do and slouched around the house in old, stained clothes. We had a party not long before our separation, a house-warming with so many guests you could hardly move. It was an amazing evening – I laughed and chatted and went into town afterward and danced the night away.

I didn’t notice anything amiss until someone pointed out to me later that it felt very much like my friends and Alan’s friends were in separate groups. Because my new friends didn’t really know Alan, as soon as we hit troubled waters and I started talking to the people around me about it, I was talking to people who weren’t what Shirley Glass calls ‘‘friends of the marriage’’. Not because they were a........ who wanted us to separate. It was simply that they didn’t know Alan so couldn’t call my bulls... if I lost perspective about the state of our relationship or who Alan and I were as people.

This compounded the other issue we had: the good, old-fashioned, parenting-killing-the-romance gig. When you’ve got kids, however hard you and your partner try to be on the same team, there are times when you’re running towards separate goals. Not only are the chores endless but you end up having to constantly negotiate with each other. Who gets to lie in? Who will get up to clean the urine-soaked sheets at 3am? Whose invitation to a Great Fun Event on a Saturday evening is more important, and who will have to stay at home?

Who will call in sick to look after a child when the vomiting bug of doom comes knocking? This last one is particularly difficult, because it requires a conversation with a hidden subtext. Who is busier at work? Whose job is more important? Who earns more? At this moment in time, whose career comes first?

In all my tossing and turning, though, I decided that our separation was about how we had changed as people, and how our 2017 versions weren’t as well-matched as our 2005 versions had been. The dynamic we shared when we were 20-somethings didn’t work as well in our late 30s.

We had both changed. Motherhood grounded me. I discovered writing – a hobby very solitary by nature and difficult to share.

Alan had always needed cave time but, whenever he stepped out of his cave, I’d be there, waiting. When I became more introverted, he’d step out of his cave but I wouldn’t be there like I used to be. I’d be in my own cave. And when I decided to come out of mine, he’d be back in his. We didn’t realise this was a problem until it was too late.

We didn’t realise that we needed some sort of phone line between our two caves until weekswould pass, and we hadn’t had a single conversation thatwasn’t about groceries, the children or chores.

We’d both changed individually, so the definition ofwho we were together had also changed. By simply growing up and flourishing as individuals, our railway tracks had started to veer in opposite directions.