As the first Monday of January unfolds, it marks a significant day in the calendar of many marital lawyers, often referred to as ‘Divorce Day.’ This is when partners, disillusioned by yet another cheerless holiday season, flock to legal offices, resolute in their decision to part ways.

Reflecting on this time, I realize it was my last Christmas as a married woman. It was a grand yet hollow celebration in our once vibrant home. Now, it feels like just an empty shell, stripped of the love and dreams that once filled it.

Last June, I broke the news to my husband of 15 years that our marriage had reached its end. We needed to have the difficult conversation with our ten-year-old daughter and prepare to sell our home in Devon, embarking on separate journeys.

While it might be tempting to simplify the situation by focusing on the fact that two years ago, he confessed to an affair with an old acquaintance, the reality is far more intricate and sorrowful than that.

Our marriage was one that never truly healed after a traumatic birth experience. At 42, I faced severe physical and mental challenges. Complications from my caesarean section led to a battle with post-natal depression, from which our relationship never fully recovered.

At the time I felt unsupported by him. He is a very shy and taciturn man, and I interpreted his silences as lack of love, and I felt that I had failed us. After our daughter was born our romantic – that is, sexual – life was essentially over. We did try. We had family therapy, and I would half reach for him in the darkness then stop myself – I still don’t know why I couldn’t reach him – but we never managed to bridge the abyss between us that opened that day.

The shared fantasy of our love died so slowly it was almost imperceptible, and one day it was gone.

Staying together because of being unable to sell a house allows no one to properly move on

Eventually, we began to live parallel lives in the same house, both lonely, both disappointed, both lost. The only things we did together were chores, and trying to parent our bewildered daughter, who knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what.

After my husband’s adultery she asked me if I was OK every day for a year, and I lied and said yes, and I think she knew I lied.

My husband and I watched TV shows – always detective shows about people killing each other, that noble British coping mechanism. We ate sweets and biscuits and cakes. Lots of them. In the final years we got fat together – I put on two stone – and that is almost the only thing we did together.

Six months ago, I started seeing a man I knew before I was married. We are in the unreal, ecstatic affair stage. A few months after that, my husband started seeing a former friend of mine. He confessed first, then I did, almost to comfort him. To say: I don’t feel betrayed.

I didn’t think he would be angry that I am seeing someone else, but he was. How do I feel that he is seeing a former friend of mine? A faint sickness, that I try my best to suppress.

In October, we put the house on the market and told our daughter we are separating. Predictably, she sobbed. I can’t bear to write much about it, but all parents know the day that, for the first time, you cannot dry your child’s tears – the day that, for the first time, they are on their own with their pain, and you cannot soothe it away with platitudes.

I told her I still love her father – that he’s the best friend I’ve ever had, which I sometimes think is true – but I can’t take it any more. I can’t take the sadness and the drudgery and the poverty (I have always been the main wage earner).

We said all the things you are supposed to say: We still love you; we are both here for you, the essential things about our lives won’t change. None of us completely believed it. None of us are fools.

But you know the housing market. Nothing is shifting, particularly in the country. Even so, I thought stupidly, this final Christmas together would be simple, joyful even: We could be friends and look forward to a happier future with the people we are, perhaps, better suited to. Because at heart I think we are just too sad for each other.

I was wrong. It was a heartbreaking Christmas. I cried on Christmas Day and on many days in between.

We were always going to spend Christmas together: Anything else would devastate our daughter, who is already asking if we will always spend Christmas together, even when we are divorced.

And everything we did – all the Christmas rituals – were suffused with a terrible nostalgia and sense that everything we do, we do for the last time.

At least we were almost beyond the fighting. There is no longer much to fight about. The nadir fight – all couples have a stupidest ever fight – was in the summer. Should tomato ketchup be kept in the fridge? (I am yes; he is no).

There was almost none of that this holiday season, just an agonised resignation. Even the negotiations on what to have for Christmas dinner were civilised.

We settled on rib of beef and chocolate log, and I thought, bitterly, of how proud our family therapist would be. We couldn’t save our marriage, but we could save a lunch.

We went through the motions as if we were on wheels. Our daughter made a huge attempt to be happy. She is such a trier, and this makes my heart expand with pity and love. This will be the best Christmas ever, she says, and I weep.

They visited the Christmas tree farm to choose a tree, and we went mad with the tinsel and the baubles, because I wanted our house to look like a Netflix Christmas film, like the dawn before the dark. I said yes to everything: A small Christmas tree for her bedroom; Christmas music and films, the cheesier the better, though predictably I couldn’t bear them after 24 hours.

I bought her everything she wanted, because I can’t let her keep the whole of her father or mother – our life together, the only one she has ever known – and she is losing more than any of us.

When she cried, I told her it will be OK, and I hate myself.

I bought my husband lovely Christmas presents too, partly because I knew our daughter wanted me to – she needed to know I still care about him – and partly from guilt.

Couples can end up living parallel lives, putting strain on everyone

Together we went mad at Barbour: A scarf; a travel washbag (is this telling, like buying him a suitcase?); a navy jumper in which he looked incredibly handsome. Our daughter, too, chivvied him to buy me lovely presents. On the day I opened a box filled with the face cream of dreams.

We only had one fight, and it wasn’t a noisy one. The day before Christmas Eve, he gives me a hard stare – a real Paddington Bear stare – in the kitchen. I wonder what it is about, and I realise I am wearing the beanie hat my new boyfriend has given me, with the name of his company on it.

My husband says – how can you wear that in front of me? I feel furious, and then I feel guilty, and I remember not to fight, because what is the point? I apologise, and I promise I won’t wear the hat again.

On Christmas Eve, he visited his new girlfriend for the day. Part of me was relieved – I want him to be happy; I want someone to care for him – and part of me was slightly angry. If he is seeing someone else, why do I feel so guilty about the stupid hat and other things?

When he came back late on Christmas Eve I played a trick on him. When he opened the door I said, faux innocently: Did you pick up the meat from the butchers? He went white with anguish – he is very serious about Christmas – and I cackle, like I would in the early years when I teased him: Of course I picked up the meat. And he laughs too.

In fact, all the accoutrements of our big, fake Christmas worked this year and I felt as if fate was taunting us. Our daughter said her presents were the best she’d ever had. The Christmas dinner, which my husband cooked – he is a wonderful cook – was also the best we have ever had.

When I spent the afternoon groaning on the sofa – I kept taking small slices of chocolate log and adding cream to each one until I felt sick – it was probably for the best. If you eat enough, you can’t feel anything. Because this Christmas, our last Christmas as husband and wife, I couldn’t stop thinking about the things I have loved about him, and the things we have lost.

Sometimes I found myself holding his hand as we watched television. Sometimes I cried for what we built together, which we have now broken.

It rushed up on me when I saw an object – the first Christmas bauble we bought together; the too-large Christmas stocking I panic bought for him in John Lewis 12 years ago and inexplicably stuffed with a bathrobe.

He found me crying in the study he painted for me, and I told him that it was not true that I never loved him, and that I am as sad as he is. He put his arms around me and comforted me.

I know I am making the right decision. But, among the golden lights and our daughter’s tears, it didn’t always feel that way.

Then he would do something that always drove me mad – leave the food to rot, forget to take the bins out, leave his clothes for me to pick up, make the kitchen floor look like a slurry pit – and I felt a rage so intense I wanted to slap him.

And then, in a terrible metaphor, two days after Christmas, the chickens ran away. It felt vaguely like a Chekhov play. They are part of our rural fantasy, and they live in a run in the garden that we bought as one of our many attempts to fix our marriage. But – and I am ashamed to tell you this – recently we have not looked after them properly.

We have stopped caring. Or maybe we have just stopped communicating. On Boxing Day night neither of us shut the chicken run and when I went into the garden the following morning, they didn’t run towards me clucking for food.

I searched the garden, and they were nowhere to be seen. I sobbed. Maybe I hadn’t realised I love them or maybe I was devastated that they were the first to leave, and soon we must leave too, and it was all my fault.

I wake my husband, and he finds them in the alley at the end of the garden. And he catches them. He grabs them one by one, and I open the run and he throws them in and I feel an incredible relief. I can’t believe I cried so much, but I wasn’t crying for the stupid chickens. I was crying for myself.

On New Year’s Eve he visited his girlfriend. Our daughter thinks they are just good friends or pretends she does. Typically, his car broke down on the way, and I had to lend him the money to pay the mechanic because everything changes and everything stays the same.

Later, he wished me a happy new year – by text – and said that he hoped 2026 would be a new beginning for us both.

Me, I reverted to teenager. I invited my best friend from school to see in the new year with our daughter, and we did what we have done since we were children. We ate cake and watched terrible films starring handsome oafs and talking rubbish about them, and when we got bored with that, we wondered what, if anything, the dog was thinking.

I was in bed by 11pm because I did not need to see out one of the most painful years I have known. And that is that.

In my better moments I desperately want to hold on to the things we loved about each other because they have not changed: his idiosyncrasies; his gentleness; his half-spoken discomfort in this world.

Surely, I tell myself, no love is wasted love, and, in the beginning of our romance, I had not felt loved before. That is my prayer for 2026. That we hold on to that. And sell the bloody house.

Amy Lucas is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed