My wife walked out on me mid IVF treatment... leaving my dreams of motherhood in tatters

One author’s harrowing tale of a very modern divorce

the hospital for the transfer. It’s very much like having a smear — instead of taking cells out of your body, they put them in — but I decided I didn’t feel like sharing that experience with a friend.

Instead, I made up an elaborate story in my head in case anyone asked why I was there alone: how I’d always wanted to be a single parent, my dream of raising a child alone. Of course, no one asked.

It was weirdly underwhelming in the end. A sterile process, over in a few minutes. I went for dinner with friends that night and tried to avoid questions about how I was doing, what I was doing. I wasn’t telling many people my plan. I wanted to hold my secret close. I dared to think ahead to announcing the good news further down the line.

Until then I just had to get through a two-week wait until a blood test at the hospital would confirm whether or not the transfer had been a success.

I knew before they told me that it hadn’t worked. Like my marriage, it was never meant to be.

So, yes, my divorce story is pretty grim. I’ve described it in broad strokes to others who have been left, or done the leaving, and felt rewarded by their openmouthed, slack-jawed disbelief. I’ve lapped up the sympathy, relished the condemnation. But I know that, in reality, it’s not that straightforward.

We were just on different paths. I wanted a child and, evidently, she did not. We stopped being able to talk, and we became entrenched, shut down. Me as well as her. And in that gradual erosion of communication, divorce set in.

That’s how it starts, and that’s how it ended: two people unable to say what they wanted, too scared to face the truth. My ex-wife understood the legal ramifications of our marriage contract, and she wanted out.

In stark contrast, I believed our marriage would somehow hold us together. We were both trapped. She found us a way out of the entrapment.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that someone who once sat at the very centre of your life, upon whom you relied for happiness, validation, stability, can suddenly be the person you want to be farthest away from?

I have always been surprised by the brutality of break-ups that end abruptly: the returning of keys, the swapping back of belongings, the deletion of phone numbers. Final farewells and then… nothing more.

Walking away from pain is perhaps easier than staying on, trying to rebuild. ‘Being friends’ is hard work and often ugly in the early stages, as new rules are worked out and new boundaries are negotiated.

While I’ve witnessed some brutal break- ups, gay and straight. I’ve more often seen my friends rescue something from the ending of their relationships, sustaining love and loyalty and morphing their shared history into a new form of commitment — the cliche of the lesbian trailing a line of her exes behind her exists for a reason! — and that’s always made sense to me.

Among my friendship group there are overlapping histories and complicated timelines of women — and men — who were once together, but who now socialise as friends. So I wanted to write about a very different kind of ending. A hard stop.

The process of doing so made me realise there is rarely just a baddie and a victim.

In most divorces — and I suspect all family lawyers would agree — there is bad behaviour on both sides. The characters in my novel take that to extremes, but there is something about the formal process of divorce — engaging lawyers, citing ‘unreasonable behaviours’, listing the belongings you want to keep and those you’re willing to share — that brings out the worst in everyone who goes through it.

That’s why people say you ‘go through’ a divorce. It is a trauma and, like any trauma, it provokes extreme reactions — and leaves permanent scars.

So although I say my divorce story is ‘worse’ than the one in my book, in reality it’s the same. Both are about losing the person you loved so much that you committed publicly to spending the rest of your life with them. Both are stories of betrayal, and of being hurt in unimaginable ways. And both are also stories of shared culpability, of mutual blame. All divorces are.

The good news is that scars heal. Pain recedes. On the night before that pregnancy test, I went for dinner with an old friend. Slowly, very slowly, she and I rekindled something that had once sparked between us. In time, we began to make plans for a family and I hope one day we’ll get there — together.

Not all lesbian exes can end up friends, but things you thought you could never get over stop mattering, and life starts again.

■ Is THIs Love? by C.E. Riley (£14.99, serpent’s Tail) is published on August 4.

They weren’t sure who ‘owned’ my foetus