Evening settles over our farmhouse as I sit down to dinner with my husband and teenage daughter. As he usually does, he has made the meal: shepherd’s pie followed by apple crumble with custard. Afterwards, I’ll stack the dishwasher while our daughter clears and wipes the table.
To anyone looking in, it could be an ordinary Sunday evening. But my husband and I finalised our divorce three months ago. Our daughter is seeing a doctor about anxiety. And I have been in another relationship for more than a year — one that leaves me feeling cherished, joyful and understood, yet burdened by overwhelming guilt.
The tension is so intense that, during dinner, I feel like fleeing the kitchen. On my way out I would pass the photographs of our family on the wall, including our wedding portrait, its glass fractured after I hurled it at him. Sometimes, the emotional strain makes me want to turn that anger on myself.
For now, we have no choice but to remain under the same roof as we attempt to sell the house in a slow property market.
Living in separate rentals is beyond our means, so we continue to move through the well-worn routines of the life we once shared — while both of us ache for the moment we can finally move on.
I sleep in the former marital bedroom, which looks out across the garden. Inside the wardrobe, my wedding dress remains in pieces after I ripped it apart. Even so, I am not ready to get rid of it.
He retreats to the small pink bedroom at the rear of the house, sleeping in a single bed dressed in the childish bedding that once belonged to our daughter. She has since moved into a larger bedroom with more adult-looking sheets, but he has stayed where he is.
I suggested he take the bigger guest room, but he refused. I cannot help reading that as something personal: proof, in my mind, that he has no interest in being happy and perhaps never has — that he denies himself anything good, and does the same to everyone around him.
Unable to afford separate rentals, the former couple remain living together, writes Pippa Richmond (picture posed by models)
At night, I switch off the lamp and scroll or read on my phone in the darkness. I do not want him to come into the room and start a conversation on his way to bed, as he did in the earliest days of our separation. I try not to revisit the excitement we felt when we bought this home 10 years ago — the optimism, the dreams, the plans. Or the way our marriage unravelled: gradually at first, then all at once.
We had known each other at university, when I was wild, and he was shy. But we didn’t marry until we were in our mid-30s.
I was in a disastrous love affair with a married man – to be fair, I did not know he was married when we began – who I could not give up. Then one day I realised the yearning for a baby would not go away and I had no future with him. I think now I wanted to prove I could have a real relationship with someone who could be there for me.
I bumped into my soon-to-be husband again while shopping in central London after not seeing him for more than a decade. The first year was glorious. He was constant. He was loving. He was funny. It didn’t matter that he smoked – despite a heart condition – and had almost no income as a freelance writer. I had a good job and he would get one.
With what seemed like the luck of the gods, I got pregnant very quickly. That’s when it all began to fall apart in earnest.
I had a terrible labour, and instead of pulling together we shouted at each other on the ward – the nurses were appalled – and I came home shell-shocked.
In the first few years of our daughter’s life, I would scream at him, looking for a reaction, for anything – but he retreated into himself. He left the house looking like a bomb site every day, earned almost no money and spent compulsively. When I lost my good job in marketing, we were broke.
There were happy times with our daughter, of course, but that happy, functional life you dream of when you think of marriage – the thing you build together – never happened. We had lived on hope, and that had gone.
I retreated from him physically after the birth. I would lie beside him willing myself to reach out to him. But I couldn’t, and our marriage began to die.
We almost never had sex, because I felt he was a stranger. It was as if something was removed from me when I had our daughter.
Perhaps trying to paper over the cracks, we moved to the ‘dream house’ in the country. I took all the work I could find, and he didn’t work at all, though he looked for admin jobs.
I felt helpless and trapped but I swallowed those feelings. After all, where could I go, what could I do? I was in deep denial.
‘We have a great love,’ I told him, hugging him. I told myself that we had a beautiful house and a perfect child. Isn’t this love? So what if we don’t sleep together – ever? So what if I work all the time and you never? (He did have a job as an administrative assistant for a bit. But then he got into £15,000 of debt that year, as if to punish us for having something.) So, what if on quiet Sundays I want to scream that this cannot be my life?
I think we did a reasonable job of pretending in front of our daughter. She never noticed, or she pretended she never noticed, our unhappiness. We tried to keep our fights away from her, waiting until she went to school. So, when we broke up, it was much more of a shock for her.
He broke before I did. Three years ago, he came home, burst into tears and said he was in love with someone else. Why, I asked stupidly. ‘Because she wants me,’ he replied. He then told me they had been sleeping together.
My response was sequential: utter shock that he would do this to us all; terrible grief that it was over; then furious rage at his behaviour; then nothing much at all.
That kicked off two years of hell. He wanted us to stay together and said that we should ‘try’.
I was broken and agreed from shock. I couldn’t imagine having the gumption to do anything as powerful as leave. But he was always on the phone to her – even on my 50th birthday. He would tell me about it and call it honesty.
Pippa says there were happy times with their daughter, of course, but that happy, functional life you dream of when you think of marriage never happened
I cried every day as soon as our daughter left for school – for her, for myself and my broken dream of a perfect marriage, and for him. I wonder now if I had ever really loved him as he wanted or deserved to be loved.
We never talked about our feelings; it was too painful.
After a few months, his affair petered out. He said he wanted us to stay together and it didn’t matter that we had no romantic life. I tried to reignite us by kissing him one night when he came home from the pub.
‘You’re taking advantage of me,’ he said, and pushed me away.
I was mortified, and felt gaslit: he was always saying my lack of lust killed our marriage.
We had separate rooms by then: I had moved into the box room days after he admitted the affair, and we swapped a few weeks later. When my daughter asked why, I put it down to my snoring.
The following year, my old boyfriend – the one who was married – got in touch. He begged me to meet him in London.
In a coffee shop, he told me he was separated. I felt a vague longing, but I walked away. I was no longer the sort of woman who was loved or made love to. So, I went back to my usual dead life. One day in spring 2025, besieged by emptiness, I followed my husband’s ex on Instagram. He went quiet for a few days. Then, on a Sunday – it’s always a Sunday, my day off – I could sense he was seething.
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‘Go on. Out with it,’ I said.
‘She wants to know,’ he snapped. Then he shouted at me, sneering, ‘“Why is your f****** wife following me on Instagram?”’
All my remaining loyalty to our marriage drained away in that one moment. I was done: I knew he didn’t love me any more, if he ever did. Walking to the park, I telephoned my ex-boyfriend and told him that my husband had slept in the spare room for two years.
‘Your marriage is over,’ he said, before adding: ‘I don’t want to die without holding you in my arms again. And I promised myself that if you ever rang me again I would tell you that.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I stuttered, to which he simply replied: ‘It’s always been you.’
‘I wanted you so much it frightened me,’ I said.
He shot back: ‘What makes you think I don’t feel the same?’
Two weeks later, we met in London. I don’t really have words to describe my feelings, but I can say that, if true love lives anywhere, it lives in cheap hotels near Paddington Station. I laughed a lot and I cried a lot, and love songs made sense to me at last.
Last year was, as Dickens wrote, the best of times, the worst of times. I have never felt such an incredible combination of erotic charge and deep trust.
Pippa says she tells herself that all living under one roof is best for their daughter – meals and games and Saturday night television is bearable
I looked so happy the facial recognition software on my phone didn’t work and, on my monthly trips to London, we had so much sex I put my back out. With my husband, I had always felt like a woman doing penance: like I was being punished for some non-specific sin. Here I was known and forgiven.
But, of course, I would always have to go back, catching the train home like Persephone returning to the Underworld.
My boyfriend tried to cheer me up and keep me safe, as much as he could: he bought me pillows and a duvet to keep me warm at home. The guilt was terrible though. My husband has always made me feel like I am the cause of all his pain, and I have always struggled to disagree; and I have hurt our daughter.
Before I was reunited with my ex-boyfriend, I had told my husband that I didn’t want ‘to try’ any more. ‘I believe you when you say our romantic life is over,’ I said. ‘You can see other women. I don’t mind.’
A few months later, I told him I had someone else. ‘Is it him?’ he asked me. (He knew I left a married man to marry him.) Yes, I confirmed simply, to which he sighed.
My husband had two ways of being with me. The first is patient martyrdom. The second is silent rage. The first makes me feel like the worst person in the world; the second frightens me.
He was furious I had a boyfriend, which I didn’t really understand. I would scream at him: ‘What do you care what I do?’
I thought we could tell our daughter the usual story: it’s a mutual decision to separate, but we love you, and that will never change. But he wouldn’t give us that, instead making me take responsibility. When I was away, he told her I wanted to end the marriage, but he didn’t, yet he accepted my decision.
She rang me in tears, begging me to change my mind. ‘We’ve always been so happy,’ she sobbed, ‘Daddy wants you to stay.’ I told her, ‘I can’t’ – also in tears.
She is studying for her GCSEs, her grades have got worse and she has put on weight. I held her and told her I was sorry. But I cannot give her childhood back.
Mostly, she doesn’t talk about it, though she asked to see a therapist a few months ago, and I found her one. She goes once a week, but she doesn’t talk about that either. She has gone into herself, and I fear for her.
The day our divorce came through, I cried in my husband’s arms. I will always be grateful to him for letting me. Part of me cannot stop loving the part of him that is vulnerable and sweet and very young. But I also need someone who can take care of me, and that is not him. He cannot take care of himself.
I eventually told my daughter I have a ‘friend’ – I couldn’t say ‘boyfriend’ – because I don’t believe in secret lives. Now I wish I hadn’t. She doesn’t want details, and she doesn’t want to meet him. So my secret life goes on. It feels like part of my punishment.
To sell the house, we have lowered the price repeatedly, eventually cutting it by £150,000. Still we have few viewings.
Meanwhile, I slowly demolish the material structure of our marriage, as if by stealth.
I take pictures off the wall – the oils he bought on our honeymoon; the still life his godmother painted – and hide them. I throw out travel guidebooks for journeys we will never take now. I put the boardgames in a cupboard: we spent lockdown playing them, when I thought we would be together for ever.
I feel him watching me, noting it all down in some invisible ledger of my crimes against him.
We almost never fight now. There is nothing left to fight over… or for.
Sometimes I feel OK. I tell myself that all living under one roof is best for our daughter – meals and games and Saturday night television is bearable.
He says that if we sell, he will move away to find work, and leave me with sole custody as it is ‘less confusing’ for her. This made me weep with anger, because she needs him.
Sometimes I want to clutch my head and scream. I tell myself I am trapped here, that I will die here, he will never let me go.
I fear I will never have my new life, that the path before me – a pretty cottage in the West Country, visits from my boyfriend and his children – has disappeared.
My boyfriend tells me to be calm, that I can bear this. He is not going anywhere, he soothes, and I must be patient. There is no other option.
It is the start of autumn now: three years since my ex-husband’s affair, and a year since mine. I told myself I couldn’t do another winter in a rural farmhouse with him, but it seems I must. I will stack up the woodpile and wait for another spring.
Pippa Richmond is a pseudonym. Names and identifying details have been changed.