After Stephen returned from the Lake District, we finally had the weekend at Claridge’s that we had been looking forward to for months.
It had been extraordinary.
We had dressed up, stayed in one of London’s finest hotels, eaten wonderful food, laughed, smoked far too many cigarettes and experienced something neither of us was likely to forget.
There had been the incident with the young woman whose hand I had seen Stephen holding, and that had unsettled me.
But I had no idea there was something much bigger happening in the background.
A few days later, Stephen dropped a bombshell.
He told me he wouldn’t be returning to work after his holiday.
He had been suspended.
Not that morning.
Not even the day before.
The suspension had happened around two weeks earlier, before the Lake District holiday.
While Stephen had been away with his father and sons, while we had celebrated his birthday, while we had been at Claridge’s, this had been sitting silently in the background.
I had known nothing about it.
He knew only that there had been complaints about his behaviour involving two female colleagues.
I was floored.
How could something so serious have been happening without me knowing?
I had spent weeks watching Stephen become increasingly unsettled at work. I had worried about his smoking, his agitation, his disengagement from the training and his preoccupation with other women.
I had even asked him one evening, when he seemed distracted and remained online without answering me:
“Are you talking to someone else?”
Now women were at the centre of the reason he had been suspended.
My first instinct was not simply to condemn him.
I needed to know what had happened.
But the fact that there were two women troubled me immediately.
How could two separate female colleagues have independently raised concerns about Stephen’s behaviour at roughly the same time?
I couldn’t dismiss that.
One of the women was J, the colleague Stephen had told me was his type.
The other was a much younger colleague called H.
He said the messages with H were a misunderstanding. He said J had exaggerated things to make him look bad.
A few days later, I asked Stephen if I could read the WhatsApp conversation between him and H.
I wanted to know what had happened between them.
Stephen allowed me to read it.
It began innocently enough.
On 6 July, Stephen contacted her because he was having trouble with Microsoft Teams and wanted to know whether his profile photograph was visible.
She helped him.
They chatted.
But the conversation moved away from work remarkably quickly.
Stephen became interested in her religion. H was Muslim and wore a hijab, and he asked her questions about Islam, relationships and the boundaries she observed.
At first, I could understand his curiosity. Stephen was naturally inquisitive and loved learning about people.
But there was a difference between curiosity and what I was reading.
Within that first day, he was commenting on the fact that she was a “Young Attractive Woman.”
They discussed their ages.
H was twenty-two.
Stephen was about to turn forty-four.
He explicitly acknowledged that he was roughly twice her age.
And still the conversation became increasingly personal.
He told her that theirs was one of the most interesting conversations he had had for a while.
The following day, he told her she was fascinating.
He asked about her anxiety and sleeping problems. They began talking about personal experiences and emotional difficulties.
I could recognise Stephen in the conversation.
This was the same intensity I knew.
The same curiosity.
The same desire to get underneath somebody’s surface very quickly.
And then it became impossible for me to interpret what I was reading as merely friendly conversation between colleagues.
Stephen told H that he couldn’t seem to get her out of his mind and that he was having trouble concentrating.
That hurt.
There is something very different about noticing that another woman is attractive and telling her that you cannot get her out of your mind.
This was no longer the harmless appreciation of attractive people I had always been comfortable with.
This was emotional attention.
Personal attention.
Attention I believed belonged inside our relationship.
And it continued.
At one point Stephen himself referred to their interaction as “casual flirting.”
He told her that even without the flirting, he wanted to know much more about her.
H repeatedly talked about lines and boundaries.
Eventually, when she reminded him that he wasn’t even single, Stephen indicated that if he were single and available, there would be no line from his side.
By then, I couldn’t accept that this was simply a misunderstanding.
The messages showed that boundaries were something they had actually discussed.
H had talked about them.
Stephen had talked about them.
He had described their interaction as flirting.
And when H told him that some of his comments had made her uncomfortable, Stephen acknowledged that he needed to check his own emotions and behaviour.
He admitted that he should have been more aware of boundaries.
He told her that he had got carried away.
That did not tell me exactly what Stephen had intended.
But it made it impossible for me to believe that the problem was simply that nobody had made the boundary clear.
There was something else in the dates that disturbed me too.
I recognised one of them.
On one of the evenings when these conversations were taking place, I had sensed something was wrong with Stephen. He had seemed distracted and remained online without answering me.
Without knowing why, I had asked:
“Are you talking to someone else?”
Reading the conversation with H, I discovered that he had been.
I remember how unsettling that was.
I hadn’t known what was happening.
I had simply sensed that something was.
When I finished reading the conversation, I told Stephen what I thought.
I did not think it was innocent.
I did not think it was simply two colleagues having an interesting conversation.
I thought he had shown a romantic interest in her and made himself emotionally available to another woman in a way that was inappropriate within our relationship.
Stephen didn’t really argue.
He became quieter.
His explanation was that he had been struggling with the training, that he had been bored and unhappy with what he was doing and that talking to H had provided something stimulating.
He was also genuinely interested in her religion.
I could believe that.
But it didn’t answer the important question.
Why had boredom or unhappiness led him there?
Why, when he was struggling, had he sought emotional stimulation from another woman rather than finding some other way of managing those feelings?
For perhaps the first time, I described what had happened in language that felt painfully accurate to me.
I told Stephen that I felt emotionally cheated on.
The following morning, I wrote:
“I feel I’ve been emotionally cheated on and that until now, I haven’t been enough to prevent you from showing emotional and romantic interests in other women.”
But I also told him something else.
I knew what I wanted for myself now, and I was willing to see whether he still wanted to be part of it.
Stephen replied that he did.
“I only want you.”
Later that day, he acknowledged more.
“I think that I do sometimes look for interesting chat and fun with other people.”
He said there was nothing inherently wrong with enjoying conversation, but admitted that the way he had done it had been inappropriate and disrespectful to me and to our relationship.
He also recognised something I had already begun to notice.
“Most of the time when I behave like that (flirty or seeking attention) it is when I am bored or unhappy.”
He insisted that he wasn’t bored or unhappy with me.
He said that when the conversations with H happened, he had been bored and unhappy with what he was doing at the time.
“This is not an excuse,” he added.
I agreed.
“You will be bored and unhappy again,” I told him, “but our life will only improve if you find other ways to deal with it.”
When I was bored, I told him, I learned Danish or played Overcooked.
I didn’t seek fun, flirtatious conversations with men.
“The solution to this is to make yourself happy and regain control of your life, not escape the lack of them in ways that could make your life worse.”
I was not blindly accepting an explanation.
I was identifying the problem remarkably clearly.
And I told Stephen that our relationship was now on thin ice.
“This has changed how I feel about you and how I feel about us, but not that it can’t be reclaimed again. It will just take time.”
And then I told him something that feels important to me now:
“Beautiful, sincere words aren’t enough anymore.”
I needed actions.
I needed to feel that I was enough.
I needed to feel exclusive.
Stephen apologised.
He told me he knew what he needed to do.
I told him it wasn’t really a question of forgiveness.
I was giving him an opportunity to show me that he genuinely believed I was enough for him and that I was the only one.
I even gave him an alternative.
If part of him felt that he had missed out on sexual freedom and wanted a year to “sow his wild oats”, I told him to take it.
Perhaps we would find our way back to one another afterwards.
Stephen rejected the idea.
“I know in my heart that I do not want any other woman.”
He told me he wanted everything with me for the rest of our lives.
So I asked him directly whether he was choosing a monogamous, devoted, loyal, long-term relationship with me over sexual and relationship freedom.
“Yes,” he replied.
“I do.”
I asked him to take his foot out of the other door he seemed to be keeping slightly ajar.
He denied seeing other women as potential partners.
He said he enjoyed conversation and company without intending anything more.
I told him:
“You like emotional and flirty intimacy with others.”
Stephen then said something revealing.
Having spent so much of his life believing he was unattractive and unlikeable, attention from other people felt good.
“I guess it is nice when it happens.”
He said he needed not to let it go to his head.
I told him that relying on validation from other people could go on forever.
He needed to believe in his own attractiveness and worth without constantly requiring somebody else to reflect it back to him.
And I knew my own worth too.
“I know I deserve integrity, truth and respect.”
Stephen agreed that he needed to behave differently.
“I need to show you the respect you deserve.”
“I promise to be more considerate.”
For the moment, I chose to give him the opportunity to do that.
The weekend after the revelation, we spent time with my oldest and best friend, her partner, her sisters and one of their partners.
After everything that had happened, there was something almost surreal about sitting together in the warm summer weather, drinking, smoking, laughing and catching up.
I was finally introducing Stephen to some of my favourite people in the world.
And despite everything going on behind the scenes, I was still proud to have him beside me.
My friend, however, was nobody’s fool.
She knew some of what had happened between us and asked Stephen what it was he loved about me.
I was fascinated to hear his answer.
He didn’t hesitate.
“She’s really cool, but she doesn’t know it.”
I adored his answer.
It felt as though he saw something in me that I sometimes struggled to see in myself.
We had a wonderful time.
Stephen was funny, intelligent, attentive and engaging. At one point he even treated us to an impromptu tap dance, one of the many unexpected talents he possessed.
This was part of what made everything so confusing.
There wasn’t one Stephen who hurt me and another who loved me.
The man capable of making me feel profoundly uncertain could also be the man who fitted beautifully amongst the people I loved, made everybody laugh and looked at me as though I was the most important person in the room.
Both experiences felt real.
But underneath that weekend, the suspension remained unresolved.
Stephen had still been given very little information by his employers.
On 25 August I had written to him that it was wrong they had left him for around two weeks without a proper explanation.
He received formal confirmation of his suspension, but the investigation continued.
Days became weeks.
We waited.
Stephen chased HR.
A union representative became involved.
There were arguments about procedure and delays in receiving information.
Meanwhile, I was trying to work out what all of this meant for our relationship.
One night, unable to settle, I told Stephen:
“I miss us.”
He replied:
“I miss us too. The way we were.”
“It’s like a shattered illusion,” I said.
Stephen disagreed.
“Not an illusion…”
“Can we just start again?”
I wanted to.
Or at least, I wanted to try.
But I was scared.
I told him I had no certainty and no security.
Stephen promised that when he came home he would give me both.
“Security, comfort, certainty….”
“All of Me.”
And once again I allowed myself to hope that perhaps this crisis might become the thing that finally changed something.
Then, in early October, the full written grievances finally arrived.
By then the suspension had dragged on for weeks.
Stephen allowed me to read them.
H’s account broadly corresponded with the conversation I had already seen.
That mattered.
Whatever arguments might be made about interpretation, I had read Stephen’s own words.
I knew the central complaint had substance.
J’s grievance was different.
It contained a series of allegations about behaviour she considered inappropriate: trying to take her hand while crossing the road, telling her that she was his type, making comments about what he might do if he did not have a girlfriend, touching himself during conversation, drinking alcohol while working, appearing in online meetings without a shirt and behaving inappropriately during meetings generally.
Some of those allegations involved things I had either witnessed myself or already knew something about.
That made it impossible for me simply to dismiss J as a woman trying to cause trouble.
But one allegation hurt me more than the others.
According to J, Stephen had told her that she was his type and indicated that he would go for her, but he had a girlfriend.
The wording mattered enormously to me.
If the message was, I might find you attractive, but I choose my girlfriend, then the emphasis was on commitment.
What I heard instead was:
I would, but I can’t.
And suddenly I felt less like the woman Stephen was actively choosing and more like the obstacle preventing him from pursuing somebody else.
I was furious.
Stephen struggled to understand why the distinction mattered so much to me.
But it did.
Because months earlier, when I had questioned him about temptation and fidelity, he had told me that when he found the right woman he wouldn’t need to fight temptation.
“You are all I will ever need.”
Now I was reading allegations that suggested a very different relationship with temptation, attention and possibility.
By this point, I was no longer prepared simply to take Stephen’s version of events because he was my partner.
He had the right to respond to the allegations.
He had the right to explain context, dispute anything he believed was inaccurate and receive a fair process from his employer.
But I had the right to make my own judgement about what his behaviour meant for me.
On 7 October, after reading the grievances, I wrote Stephen an email.
He asked me:
“Are we splitting up?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
That was the truth.
I loved him.
But everything I had feared seemed to be materialising.
I told him I was reaching a place of acceptance.
“Now I have to make my life secure.”
The following day, Stephen returned to his father’s house.
The separation was not intended as the end of our relationship.
In fact, we both talked about it as something we were doing to give the relationship its best chance.
It would hurt to be apart.
But I needed space.
Stephen needed to deal with the investigation, think about his behaviour and take responsibility for what had happened.
And I needed to stop trying to hold everything together around him.
I wrote him a letter to take with him.
Stephen later described parts of it as hard truths he needed to hear.
He also called it the most beautiful letter he had ever received.
I still wanted us to succeed.
That is important.
I wasn’t throwing him out because I no longer loved him.
I was asking him to leave because I did love him, and because I could no longer see how allowing everything to continue unchanged could possibly help either of us.
I wanted him to use the separation to think about the kind of man he wanted to be and, more importantly, how he wanted to treat me.
I wanted him to find other ways of dealing with boredom, unhappiness, insecurity and his need for attention.
I wanted his behaviour to begin matching the beautiful things he continually told me.
And I still believed that perhaps consequences would make that happen.
Somewhere deep inside me, I had been expecting something like this.
There had already been enough cracks.
Enough moments that made me question what I was seeing.
Enough occasions when I had wondered whether my instincts were warning me about something real.
But anticipating that something might happen does not make discovering it hurt any less.
Perhaps the most disturbing part was realising that, while it had been happening, I had sensed something without understanding what I was sensing.
I had watched Stephen become distracted.
I had sensed a change.
And on one particular evening, without knowing why, I had looked at my phone and asked:
“Are you talking to someone else?”
He had been.
I hadn’t known what was happening.
I had simply been missing the information that would have allowed me to understand it.
Now some of that information was finally in front of me.
I still loved Stephen.
I still hoped we could survive this.
I still believed he might learn from it, change and come back to me having understood something important about himself.
But something had shifted.
Beautiful words were no longer enough.
I needed actions.
Because the things I had been quietly questioning were beginning to acquire a shape.
And once you can see the shape of something, it becomes much harder to convince yourself that it isn’t there.
