I woke the other night and reached for my lover’s hand before I realised I was alone. I am still a married woman, but my husband is due to move out in six weeks, the next step in our unravelling 15 year marriage. 

My marriage came crashing down when I began to have an affair early last year - a catalyst, to be sure, but hardly the cause. Despite having long lived with some intractable differences, I was used to these. I was, truthfully, happy. 

Simply stated, I married a particularly stubborn man, whose limited capacity for flexibility and sharing caused a lot of problems. Differences that I could not resolve by stretching myself any further stood out there as resentments to swallow or grow. The most injurious was our separate bedrooms. My husband has a bad snoring problem; despite my pleading, he steadfastly refused to see a doctor about it. Anytime I raised the subject, he launched into a diatribe about how he wasn’t going to have his “soft pallet burned” so that we could share a bed. After a few years, it was hard not to conclude that he didn’t want to share a bedroom with me or go to sleep and wake at the same time as his wife. Over time, it made less and less sense to me that he wanted to have sex without the intimacy that comes with sharing a bed. 

Beyond this, there were subtle and overt control issues that made it hard for me to occupy a place in our intimate relationship which was truly my own; this stifled passion. It was not that he was uncaring, but his constant refrain said: 'I know you better than you know yourself'. I was repeatedly cast into the role of a child who is being told what she feels.  

I know what kept us going despite this gaping hole in our married life. We had a strong intellectual compatibility. We enjoyed many of the same things (gardening, music, for example) though his inflexibility precluded our doing these things together. He could not share a kitchen counter, a piano keyboard or flowerbed. So we did these activities in parallel, admiring each other’s accomplishments from afar. Most suggestions I made to do things together were frustrated by his control. When he didn’t want to do something with me (most of the time), he would make it such a miserable experience I stopped asking. When we decided we would try to have a baby, I could not get pregnant: the frequency and timing of lovemaking that had to be on his terms would never result in a baby. So we adopted. This was a buffer against my loneliness for a long time.  

Despite some real companionship at the level of intellect and family life, the rest of our life looked increasingly disjointed. By the time I marched into my 40s last year I could not remember the last time we’d made love. My best estimate was a miserable six years. I was starved for physical love. This wasn’t a void that I was consciously looking to fill. But as is often the case, someone came along who brought desire to the fore. Over a period of several months, I considered the idea of an affair. And while I managed to slam the lid shut on the possibility several times, in the end it is what I wanted. I made a conscious choice.    

Until then, acceptable marital behaviour did not include infidelity. I’d never been unfaithful to my husband, nor he to me. I believed that this affair would fill the hole in my otherwise decent marriage. This was something that was going to be mine – something that my husband could not control or dictate to me. I told myself many times that this was something he couldn’t take from me.    

Perhaps I was in love before we even became involved. I certainly knew my soon-to-be-lover well enough to know that this wasn’t going to be an entirely casual liaison. What I didn’t predict was the torrent of feeling that would accompany having a physically intimate relationship with another man. As we became involved, I went into a tailspin as I tried to live with having two men in my life. I felt overwhelmed as I tried to sort out my loyalties. If I felt guilt, it was not at a conscious level; what I was doing seemed too necessary for myself. However, I was incapable moving back and forth between the two relationships without a great deal of stress and anxiety in the early months.      

I was a wreck and I asked my husband for some time to sort myself out. Thought he knew I was not myself, he knew nothing about the affair. I told him I needed two or three months and at first he seemed to be okay with that. In truth, I’d been through many difficult periods when I had to bear the brunt of his misdirected anger and emotion. I’d never asked him to give me space or time to deal with anything. Despite his initial reaction, he began to lose patience after a couple of weeks and it became clear that I was running out of time. He could not accept my distraction. He pressed me to express my doubts about the marriage and then having done that, he pre-empted my ending the marriage (I was not actually at that point) by declaring the marriage over himself. Though this reaction was impulsive and he later retracted it, he would very quickly come back to his initial position that it was over. All this and he remained oblivious to the affair. And so our marriage has slowly unwound. 

At times during the last year, I have felt like a bystander, watching myself from afar. My wilful act of infidelity unleashed a series of unanticipated feelings and consequences. I either cannot or I have lost the will to exercise control over both of these. Everything simply is what it is. I let it be.   

If moving forward is painful, moving back is impossible. It is a slow process, but step by step, I am reconciling myself to this reality. A thousand times I have asked myself whether I would have had the affair had I known then what I do now. The fact is, I was happy in my limited understanding of an intimate relationship. I did not know sexual pleasure and physical closeness. To make love to a person whom you love and trust is every bit as beautiful as anything I have ever experienced. To wake and reach for a hand is a comfort I have not known. To imagine a life without these things was no longer an option.