It was early August 2025 when I returned from my retreat.
I can’t remember whether I came home having reached any great conclusion. Perhaps I had expected a weekend away from everything to somehow give me clarity, but life was waiting for me exactly where I had left it.
I was still sad. Still confused. Still rudderless.
Nothing between Stephen and me had actually been resolved.
He was still planning to leave. He had bought the flat. And yet he was still living with me. We were still sharing our lives in all the ordinary ways. We were still occasionally intimate. And after turning down the possibility of something more in Manchester, he had given me just enough hope to believe that perhaps his decision wasn’t as final as it seemed.
We were neither properly together nor properly apart.
And I was learning how difficult it was to live somewhere in between.
Not long after I returned, Stephen told me he had been inexplicably kicked out of our gaming alliance.
Except it wasn’t inexplicable to me.
I knew why.
Perhaps I should have come clean then, but instead I acted surprised.
Stephen messaged the alliance leader asking for an explanation and was fobbed off with something vague about the decision being made in the best interests of the alliance. He knew there was more to it. I knew there was more to it.
But I didn’t enlighten him.
I think it says something about the strange place I had reached emotionally. When I had spoken about him at the hotel to my alliance leader, everything between us had felt so finished that I hadn’t really considered what the consequences might be. But now I was home again and nothing felt finished at all.
Stephen was still there.
He had offered me hope over Manchester.
We were still occasionally sleeping together.
And suddenly telling him the truth felt as though it might jeopardise whatever fragile connection remained between us.
So my integrity went out of the window in that moment.
Stephen joined another alliance and carried on playing.
Around the same time, I started taking HRT.
The effect seemed surprisingly quick. My joints began aching less. The brain fog started lifting. I was sleeping better. Physically, I began to feel more like myself.
There was something painfully ironic about it.
After months of feeling exhausted and unlike myself, parts of me were finally beginning to get better just as the life I had imagined sharing with Stephen seemed to be falling apart.
And emotionally, I wasn’t coping well at all.
My feelings seemed to change from one day to the next. Some days I could almost accept what was happening. I would tell myself that Stephen had made his decision and somehow I would have to find a way through it.
Then hope would return.
I would look around at our life and struggle to understand why he was prepared to walk away from it.
We had an affordable home. I had secure employment. My family, after everything that had happened, had finally come to respect and like him. His sons liked me. He had money behind him now. We still had chemistry. We had nearly five years of history and had already survived things that could easily have ended us.
There was so much here.
Why couldn’t he see it?
Why wasn’t it worth fighting for?
Then the story of the flat changed again.
Stephen told me he had bought it with us in mind.
He talked about it as security. An investment. A home. Something that could potentially benefit both of us.
He said, in some sense, he was doing it for us.
But that didn’t resemble what I had understood when he first took me to see it.
He had never said, I’m confused and struggling, but let’s buy this flat together. Let’s renovate it together. Let’s make it part of our future. I can use the project to give myself some focus, and perhaps it can also give me somewhere to go when I need space to think.
Had he said something like that, I might have understood.
I might even have embraced it.
Instead, he had bought a flat because he was leaving me.
Only now the flat was apparently for us.
The narrative had changed again.
And despite the new explanation, I didn’t feel included in the flat at all.
I felt increasingly excluded from Stephen’s future.
By the middle of August, I was becoming deeply sad.
My father’s birthday was on the 14th and Stephen’s was on the 17th. I was dog-sitting at work that weekend and my boss very generously said I could bring my family over and use the swimming pool.
So on the Saturday my family gathered at mine and we enjoyed a meal together. On the Sunday we celebrated Stephen’s birthday at my place of work.
Nobody knew.
My family didn’t know Stephen had bought a flat.
They didn’t know he intended to leave.
They didn’t know that beneath the appearance of an ordinary couple, I no longer knew what I was to the man beside me.
I had bought Stephen a large coffee machine for his birthday before he told me he was leaving. For a while I wondered whether I should return it.
But what was the point?
He could use it in his new flat.
Even that thought hurt.
Something I had chosen as a present for our shared life had quietly become something he could take into the life he was planning without me.
I bought a chocolate birthday cake and we celebrated as though everything was normal.
From the outside, perhaps it was.
The weather was beautiful. Everyone was together. We laughed and swam and ate cake.
Inside, I was breaking.
I had become remarkably good at occupying two realities at once.
There was the life everyone could see, and then there was the one happening inside me.
At one point I was sitting on an inflatable in the swimming pool when I toppled into the water.
I’ve never been a particularly strong swimmer. For a few frightening seconds I went under, swallowed water and struggled before buoying back to the surface, spluttering, coughing and visibly shaken.
Stephen was in the pool with his youngest son.
They both laughed at me.
Perhaps to them it simply looked funny.
But something about that tiny moment stayed with me.
Because I remembered another Stephen.
A Stephen who would once have immediately come towards me.
A Stephen who would have checked that I was all right.
A Stephen whose instinct, when I was frightened or hurt, had been concern.
Yet treading water and spluttering in the sunshine while he laughed, I felt the absence of that man.
It wasn’t really about falling off an inflatable.
It was about noticing that something I had once taken for granted between us no longer seemed to be there.
Care.
Tenderness.
The instinct to move towards me.
I think part of me understood in that moment what the endless explanations had been preventing me from fully seeing.
Whatever Stephen’s reason for leaving was—whether it was confusion, my behaviour, the need for independence, the flat, or some combination of all of them—something between us was changing.
And I could feel it.
My family eventually left and went home.
Stephen, his son and I stayed overnight at my workplace.
Stephen and I slept in the same bed.
It would be the last time we did so for a very long time.
The next day Stephen and his son left and I remained at work to mind the dogs another day.
By then another understanding was beginning to form beneath all the hope.
I couldn’t keep pretending that we were still a couple simply because neither of us had completely let go.
I couldn’t keep sharing a bed, occasionally having sex, celebrating birthdays, eating together and carrying on with the routines of our old life while Stephen simultaneously built a new one elsewhere.
Hope had kept me participating in something that increasingly hurt.
Every new explanation made me believe there might still be a way back.
But the life we were actually living was beginning to tell me something different.
And for the first time, I was beginning to wonder whether continuing to behave like his partner was keeping me from facing the fact that I no longer knew if I was one.
Reflection
By then, ambiguity had become almost a relationship in itself. Stephen was leaving, but hadn’t left. We still lived together, occasionally slept together and moved through many of the familiar routines of being a couple. Then he would say something that allowed me to believe the future might still include me. I could move from acceptance back into hope remarkably quickly because nothing had been allowed to become definite.
I wasn’t behaving perfectly either. When Stephen was removed from the gaming alliance, I knew why and pretended I didn’t. That wasn’t how I normally wanted to conduct myself, but I had become frightened of anything that might disturb the fragile connection still remaining between us. In a strange way, I was beginning to adapt myself to uncertainty: withholding things, watching for signs, trying to work out which version of Stephen’s explanation I should believe and protecting whatever scraps of hope came my way.
The birthday weekend showed me how divided my life had become. My family saw Stephen and me celebrating together as we always had. They didn’t know about the flat or that he intended to leave. I could laugh, swim, serve cake and participate in the day while privately wondering what I was to the man beside me. I had become capable of living the appearance of our old life while simultaneously grieving its possible disappearance.
Then I fell into the swimming pool. It was such a small incident, but Stephen’s reaction affected me more than I could explain at the time. I wasn’t expecting some dramatic rescue. I simply remembered how instinctively he had once moved towards me when I was frightened or hurt. This time he laughed. Perhaps it meant very little to him, but to me it exposed something that all our conversations had obscured. I had spent weeks listening to explanations for what was happening between us; in that moment, I simply felt the absence of tenderness.
For the first time, I began to understand that hope itself could keep me stuck. As long as Stephen occasionally offered me a reason to believe in us, I could continue behaving like his partner while he decided whether he wanted me to be one. But sharing a bed, celebrating birthdays and preserving the routines of our relationship wasn’t making me feel more secure. It was making the uncertainty harder to survive. I still desperately wanted Stephen to choose me. I was just beginning to realise that, while I waited for him to decide what he wanted, I might have to start deciding what I could live with.
