By August, I had begun to settle into my new job, although it was still challenging and I was nowhere near the point where it felt easy.
There were other things to look forward to, though. We had a festival coming up, and my cousin R was travelling over to England and would be joining us.
While R was staying with us, I tried talking to him about what had happened in Denmark with his sister. I suppose part of me still hoped someone might be able to shed some light on something I had never really understood.
R couldn’t.
None of it had been his fault, and it certainly wasn’t the reason he had come to England, so I didn’t push it.
He and Stephen still got on extremely well. They spent a great day together in the town centre, with Stephen taking him around some of his favourite places. It was nice seeing them together and knowing that, despite everything that had happened in Denmark, Stephen’s relationship with the rest of my family hadn’t necessarily been damaged by it.
We had a brilliant day at the festival.
Getting home afterwards was considerably less enjoyable.
It took more than an hour just to make our way out with the crowds, and by the time we reached the taxi queue in the town centre, there was a long line of people waiting and virtually no taxis arriving. We stood there for what felt like forever before eventually reaching the front and climbing into one.
Even then, our journey wasn’t straightforward. The taxi broke down on the way home.
By the time we finally arrived back in the small hours of the morning, we were exhausted and enormously relieved to see the house.
Then we discovered that neither Stephen nor I had brought a key.
Our hearts sank.
It was the middle of the night, R was staying with us, and I had work in only a few hours. We went through every possible solution before I finally admitted defeat and called my eldest son, who fortunately still had a key.
Kindly, he got out of bed, made the twenty-minute drive over and let us in.
I was incredibly grateful.
We collapsed into bed, and what seemed like only moments later my alarm was waking me to face another day at work.
R returned to Denmark and overall it had been a successful and enjoyable visit.
Meanwhile, Stephen’s working life was beginning to gather some momentum.
One of the tradesmen we knew from my old job had started giving him occasional opportunities to work alongside him, mostly on jobs in London. He was a stone specialist, and I thought it was a fantastic skill for Stephen to have the opportunity to learn. Stephen enjoyed it and was good at it too.
At around the same time, Stephen’s work coach learned that he had become self-employed and encouraged him to become involved with an organisation offering free courses, support and advice to people trying to build their own businesses.
Stephen threw himself into it.
For a while, he even did some work for the organisation itself. He learned a great deal and, perhaps just as importantly, was introduced to lots of other people trying to establish businesses of their own.
It seemed exactly the kind of environment he needed.
Through the programme, he met a woman I will call P.
P offered him some work at her house — putting up pictures and shelves, assembling furniture and doing various other practical jobs.
I remember feeling slightly uneasy about it, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. At the same time, I didn’t want to interfere with an opportunity that had come through legitimate networking, nor did I want to become suspicious simply because the person offering him work happened to be a woman.
Stephen had completed the programme in London, and the problems involving women that had once seemed so prominent in our relationship had become much less of an issue.
I wanted to trust that.
On one occasion, Stephen went to stay with P for a weekend while doing work for her, sleeping overnight in her spare room.
I did have concerns about that.
Stephen reassured me. He was open about the fact that he found P attractive, but said she could also be quite strange and that there was nothing sexual between them. Their relationship, he told me, was entirely platonic.
I accepted that.
Stephen also started making trips to Scotland — to the hostel his friend owned. He would visit off season and help the permanent caretaker with the maintenance.
Stephen was also beginning to pick up customers closer to home. He had a couple of older women living in a village near our former workplace who employed him for all sorts of small jobs — putting up curtains, gardening and carrying out general maintenance around their homes.
It was genuinely wonderful to see.
His little self-employed business was beginning to take shape. He was earning money, meeting people, learning new skills and gradually building the experience we hoped might lead somewhere bigger.
Then, in October, we went on holiday.
We chose somewhere I had wanted to visit for years, and I couldn’t imagine anyone I would rather experience it with than Stephen.
Berlin.
We spent about five days there and had the most amazing time.
We were busy from morning until night — sightseeing, walking, exploring, visiting cultural attractions and finding interesting places as we went. One evening we saw one of my favourite bands in concert, a band Stephen had come to love too.
One of my favourite days was when we hired e-scooters and explored the city that way, covering far more ground than we ever could have managed on foot.
It felt adventurous and spontaneous and very us.
Berlin also reminded me of something else.
When we had the time, privacy and freedom to properly enjoy one another, the physical chemistry between us was still there.
Our sex life hadn’t disappeared. Life had simply become busy. I was working long hours in a demanding new job, Stephen was trying to establish his business, and ordinary responsibilities had a habit of swallowing time and energy.
In Berlin, away from all of that, we found each other again.
I came home reassured.
Not long afterwards, we took Stephen’s youngest son to Alton Towers, one of the UK’s best theme parks.
His eldest son had been supposed to join us too, but pulled out at the last minute without much explanation. I was irritated because I had already paid for his ticket and the money was wasted.
At the time, that was mostly what I thought about.
I couldn’t have known that his withdrawal would eventually come to mean something much more significant.
It was sometime between then and Christmas that Stephen began starting some strange conversations with me.
The first concerned my new job.
For the first time, I understood just how angry he was that I had taken it.
He told me that he had expressed concerns before I accepted the position and that I had gone ahead regardless. To him, that was evidence that I hadn’t been thinking about us. I had made a major decision about our lives without making it jointly with him.
I was confused.
I knew Stephen had raised concerns at the time, but I hadn’t understood the strength of his feelings or realised that he might see my decision as some kind of rejection of our partnership.
From my perspective, I had been thinking about us.
The job offered better money and new experience, both of which could help with the future we had been talking about building together. But I also believed I still had to think about myself.
Our relationship had not always been predictable or secure. I loved Stephen and wanted a future with him, but I couldn’t make important decisions on the assumption that nothing between us would ever go wrong again. If an opportunity came along that could improve our future together while also leaving me in a stronger position if I ever found myself alone again, I wasn’t prepared to turn it down.
Perhaps that was the difference between the way we were beginning to see things.
I thought I was protecting our future while retaining some security of my own.
Stephen seemed to experience that same decision as evidence that I wasn’t fully committed to our future at all.
There was another conversation that surprised me even more.
Stephen suggested that the onset of menopause might be affecting me.
It came completely out of the blue.
I hadn’t noticed any changes in myself that concerned me enough to seek medical advice, so although I appreciated that Stephen might be thinking about my health and wellbeing, I didn’t feel there was anything I needed to investigate.
Again, though, I had the sense that my response disappointed him. From his perspective, perhaps it was another example of him raising something he believed mattered and me not taking his concerns seriously enough.
Then came a conversation of a very different kind.
For the first time, Stephen began talking about polyamory.
He wondered aloud whether this might simply be who he was — someone capable of loving more than one person, someone who could perhaps be happy having more than one intimate relationship at the same time.
My reaction surprised even me.
Part of what he was saying didn’t feel entirely surprising. In some ways, the idea seemed capable of explaining things about Stephen that I had struggled to understand almost from the beginning.
What I didn’t stop to ask myself was why he was raising it now.
Instead, I turned much of it inwards.
I had always believed in a monogamous relationship between two people. I thought that was what Stephen and I had been building. Hearing him wonder whether one relationship could ever be enough for him inevitably left me wondering whether I was enough for him.
It knocked my confidence.
Looking back, I think this was around the time I began comfort eating more. I became less confident about my body and more self-conscious in the bedroom. I stopped taking quite as much care of myself.
It wasn’t a dramatic transformation. There was no moment when I suddenly stopped recognising myself.
It was subtler than that.
I simply began feeling a little less desirable, a little less secure and a little less certain of where I stood.
I gave what Stephen had said a great deal of thought, but eventually I told him the truth.
I didn’t think polyamory was a life I could be happy living.
And then Christmas 2023 arrived.
Despite how difficult my new job had been, I was fortunate enough to have a decent break over Christmas, and we invited Stephen’s sons to spend it with us again.
We were disappointed when his eldest son came for only one day and one night.
We didn’t understand why he seemed to be pulling away.
And none of us knew that when he left our house that Christmas, it would be more than two years before we would see or hear from him again.
Reflection
Looking back, this period is difficult to reconcile because so much of it was genuinely good. Stephen was finally building the independent life I had hoped for him. He was working, meeting people, learning new skills and creating opportunities for himself. We travelled, went to festivals and spent time with his sons. Berlin reminded me how much fun we could still have together and how easily the intimacy between us could return when everyday pressures were removed. There was plenty of evidence that the life we had worked so hard to create was actually working.
I was also trying to live by the trust I had promised to give him. When Stephen worked for P and stayed at her house, I noticed my discomfort, but I didn’t want every woman to become a threat simply because of what had happened before. Stephen did exactly what I had once asked him to do: he acknowledged that he found her attractive and brought that information into the open. I took that as evidence of progress. We had talked about honesty being the protection against secrecy, and I believed this was what honesty looked like in practice.
What unsettled me more were the conversations that began later that year. Until then, I had believed Stephen and I were working from a shared understanding of the life we were building. Suddenly, I discovered that some of the things I had interpreted as commitment could be understood very differently by him. I saw my new job as an investment in our future while also protecting some independence of my own. Stephen saw my decision to take it despite his concerns as evidence that I wasn’t sufficiently thinking as part of an us. Neither interpretation felt unreasonable to me, but they couldn’t both describe quite the same relationship.
Polyamory disturbed me for a different reason. I had spent years trying to understand Stephen’s attraction to other women, and suddenly he was offering an explanation that seemed capable of making sense of some of it. Perhaps this wasn’t something he needed to overcome. Perhaps it was simply who he was. But if that were true, it raised a much more frightening question about who I would have to become in order for our relationship to survive. I knew I wanted monogamy, yet instead of stopping there, part of me began wondering whether my inability to offer something different represented some inadequacy in me.
That was a subtle shift, but an important one. My confidence didn’t collapse overnight. I simply began looking at myself through a slightly different lens. Was I attractive enough? Sexual enough? Open-minded enough? Was menopause changing me in ways I couldn’t see? Was my independence evidence that I wasn’t sufficiently committed? Questions about what Stephen wanted gradually became questions about what might be wrong with me.
I didn’t yet feel that our life was falling apart. Quite the opposite. There was still too much happiness around us for that conclusion to make sense. But for the first time since we had rebuilt the relationship, I was beginning to wonder whether the future Stephen wanted and the future I wanted were actually the same future. We had learned the same language and believed we were building the same life. What I hadn’t considered was that we might eventually use that language to describe very different things.
