In the days after Stephen returned from South Africa, I had so many questions.
The obvious one is why I couldn’t simply let it go and move on then and there.
He had left my house, flown to South Africa less than two weeks later and slept with another woman.
Surely that should have been enough.
I suppose the simplest answer is that I still loved him.
And Stephen never really stopped making himself available to me.
I told my sons what had happened. I don’t think I could have kept it to myself even if I had wanted to.
Everything I had feared when Stephen first mentioned South Africa had come true.
And then I did what I had done so many times before.
I tried to understand.
I wanted to know why he had done this when he had always seemed so sure that not all was lost between us.
Stephen and I had numerous heated conversations about why he had gone to South Africa and why he had slept with the woman I will call U.
I asked question after question.
U was a twenty-four-year-old student who lived with a female friend. Stephen said U had initiated the intimacy and that he had simply gone along with it. He did like her, although as we talked he increasingly began telling me about the things that had made him uneasy.
At one point, he said, her housemate had also shown an interest in him. He described the friend as nice but a little simple-minded. He sensed there might be some rivalry between the two women and said he wasn’t entirely sure he could trust what one was telling him about the other.
He also described U as unstable and as someone who had been through a lot.
That sounded strangely familiar.
I began wondering why Stephen seemed repeatedly drawn towards women he perceived as damaged or vulnerable. There was a contradiction in it that troubled me. He could recognise their hurt, feel drawn towards them, become intimate with them and then seemingly detach again afterwards.
It didn’t strike me as particularly kind.
When I questioned his decision to go to South Africa at all, Stephen reminded me that I had said travelling might be good for him.
But that wasn’t what I had meant.
When we had first discussed South Africa, I had imagined it happening much later, after he had spent some time alone and worked out what he wanted from his life and from us.
Instead, he had gone almost immediately.
His explanation was largely practical: timing, flight availability and when the women were free.
It sounded like an excuse to me.
I asked him whether he regretted going.
At first, he said no.
He stood by his decision. He had enjoyed himself. South Africa was a beautiful and fascinating country and he was glad he had experienced it.
That hurt in a way I found difficult to explain.
I couldn’t believe he had apparently managed to have this profound, exciting experience so easily without me.
Or perhaps I had simply given myself too much importance in his life.
But the more I challenged the contradiction at the centre of everything, the more his explanations began to change.
He had told me he needed his own space to work out whether he still wanted a future with me. Yet almost immediately after leaving, he had flown thousands of miles away and become intimate with somebody else.
How was that supposed to help him work out how he felt about us?
Now he told me he had been upset that I had forced him out. He had been confused. It had felt good to be free and spontaneous.
There was a problem with that explanation too.
I later discovered that Stephen had booked the trip the morning before I asked him to leave — the morning after he first mentioned South Africa.
He had therefore planned to go while still believing he would be living with me indefinitely.
If I hadn’t asked him to leave, what exactly had he imagined would happen?
Would he simply have packed a suitcase, flown to South Africa to stay with two women he had met through a game, and then returned home to me?
I also wanted to understand why, when I had given him three weeks to leave my house, he had gone the very next day.
Stephen claimed that leaving so quickly had actually been for my benefit.
He suggested that my eldest son had encouraged him to go, as though the decision to leave immediately had somehow been made on my son’s advice.
But that wasn’t what my son said had happened at all.
Stephen had spoken to him about what was happening between us, and my son had encouraged him to do the right thing. If Stephen genuinely loved me but knew he couldn’t give me what I needed, then perhaps the loving thing was to let me go rather than keep me trapped in uncertainty and continue hurting me.
Knowing my son, I could imagine exactly what he had been trying to say.
He wasn’t telling Stephen to pack his belongings and leave the following day.
He was asking him to stop keeping me in limbo and make an honest decision about what he was capable of giving me.
Stephen seemed to have interpreted that conversation in the most extreme and literal way possible.
So that became another explanation for why he had gone.
He had done it for me.
My son had told him it was the right thing to do.
But my son hadn’t made Stephen leave.
He had simply asked him to stop hurting me.
To this day, Stephen’s and my son’s accounts of that conversation are very different. I am inclined to believe my son. He is rational, thoughtful and consistent, and he chooses his words carefully.
I couldn’t always say the same for Stephen.
Whatever the technical status of our relationship had been by the time he went to South Africa, I told Stephen that sleeping with somebody else so quickly after leaving still offended me.
Eventually, he seemed able to understand that.
And over the course of several conversations, his position began to soften.
He started expressing regret.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone to South Africa when he did.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have slept with U.
He admitted that he still had feelings for me.
And then another explanation began to emerge.
Stephen told me that he had been falling apart inside for some time. He said he had been trying to tell me that his mental health was deteriorating, that he was spiralling and feared he might be heading towards some kind of breakdown.
He said this had been part of the reason he had wanted to leave me in the first place.
He had wanted to move out, he said, to save me from having to witness what was happening to him.
It was another explanation I had to adjust to.
Before he left, I had understood his decision in all sorts of different ways. He had talked about needing his own space. About not knowing whether he still wanted a future with me. About things in my behaviour that had made him unhappy. About wanting independence and needing to work out what he wanted from his life.
Now he was telling me that perhaps leaving had also been an attempt to protect me from watching him fall apart.
And somehow South Africa became entangled in that explanation too.
He had been lost.
He had been spiralling.
He hadn’t been thinking properly.
He had left our home, gone halfway across the world and slept with somebody else while in a state of emotional turmoil.
Once again, the story rearranged itself in my mind.
If that was true, perhaps the decisions he had made weren’t evidence that he no longer loved me or wanted a life without me.
Perhaps they were evidence that he had been unwell.
And that mattered enormously to me.
Because it changed what his actions seemed to mean.
I could be angry with a man who had decided he wanted freedom, flown to South Africa and enthusiastically slept with another woman.
It was much harder for me to stay angry with a man who told me he had been falling apart, frightened by what was happening inside him and making chaotic decisions from a place of desperation.
There was still an obvious contradiction.
If the purpose of buying the flat had been to save me from witnessing his breakdown, why had he been prepared to remain living with me until the flat was ready?
The explanation didn’t undo what he had done.
It didn’t make the contradictions disappear.
But it gave me another way of understanding him.
And, as so often happened with Stephen, understanding created compassion.
Compassion created possibility.
And possibility created hope.
I went to visit him at his flat.
I didn’t stay long. The place was still sparse, although he had acquired a bed by then. No redecoration had happened yet. Stephen was still living out of boxes and suitcases, with fast-food packaging and rubbish strewn around the place.
I was upset to find out that he took my designer suitcase with him to South Africa without asking and I hadn’t even used it yet. I joked that I hope I wouldn’t find a pair of another woman’s knickers in it.
We talked again about everything that had happened.
This time, he was clearer that he regretted some of his choices.
He missed me.
He was still very much attracted to me.
So I asked him the question that mattered most.
Did South Africa and U at least mean that he now knew he didn’t want a future with me? I was hoping for closure.
No.
He still thought he might.
And now his explanation for South Africa had shifted again.
He had gone because he had felt lost and desperate. He hadn’t been thinking straight.
It was very different from the man who had initially told me he stood by his decision, had enjoyed himself and had simply taken an opportunity to visit a beautiful and fascinating country.
I went home drowning in mixed messages.
I could feel the mysterious spell being cast again.
He had even come home from South Africa with a gift for me.
I couldn’t wrap my head around this man who could visit another country, sleep with a virtual stranger and still stop long enough to buy a present for his ex.
What did that mean?
Perhaps nothing.
But I was still looking for meaning in everything.
Despite all that had happened, some part of me was still waiting for the moment when Stephen would finally choose me.
And once again, he had given me just enough reason to believe that moment might still come.
Perhaps his explanations for South Africa had made what I felt about it more confusing.
Perhaps I simply wasn’t angry enough to walk away yet.
Everything around me suggested that I should.
But hope was still louder.
A couple of weeks later, in a moment of instability that was very unlike me, I went to Stephen’s flat and got drunk.
That night, he said something I found interesting.
For years, I had occasionally described Stephen as being “like a rock star without the rock-star life.”
It was meant affectionately. To me, he was handsome, cool, creative and musical, with the sort of charisma that could make someone compelling even when they were unkempt, reckless or difficult.
Stephen had recently listened to a radio programme about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. He said maybe we were just like them. He started talking about musicians attracting groupies — women who would fall at their feet, tolerate their behaviour and remain devoted to them.
After his experience in South Africa, he seemed to have connected that idea with the analogy I had once made about him.
And, perhaps, with me.
Even drunk, I remember thinking:
How arrogant.
I had said those things because I loved him and wanted him to feel good about himself. I wanted him to know how I perceived him.
I hadn’t intended to inflate his ego.
By now, Stephen was also telling me more about what he hadn’t liked about his connection with U than what he had.
He talked about some of the awkwardness between them, including physically. He made a comment that because of her size, they were physically incompatible.
Somehow, even that was enough to give me hope.
Perhaps I could still win him back.
With the help of Dutch courage, Stephen and I slept together.
Although imagined images of him with U kept invading my thoughts.
But underneath all of it was a question I wasn’t yet ready to ask myself:
How much of my dignity, and how many of my values, was I prepared to trade for one more night of feeling chosen?
Over the next couple of months, as Christmas approached, a routine developed.
I spent weekends at Stephen’s flat and sometimes stayed over during the week.
In some ways, it felt remarkably like the beginning of our relationship.
Without the pressures of sharing a home, it could be relaxed and fun. We ate together, talked, laughed, enjoyed our intimacy and did the things we had always loved doing together.
For a while, it was surprisingly easy to forget how we had arrived there.
Since he had left, I had started going to yoga twice a week. I was slowly losing weight, getting fitter and my emotions were settling.
I bought a chain to wear around my neck and hung the half-eternity ring Stephen had bought for me from it. I wasn’t ready to put it back on my finger, but during this period I felt as though we were slowly returning to one another.
There was one enormous problem.
Once again, our relationship was becoming a secret from my family.
They knew I was in contact with Stephen.
What they didn’t know was how close we were becoming.
My eldest son was still living with me. I was aware that I had begun disappearing in the evenings and sometimes staying out all night without much explanation.
I knew he must be sensing something.
Eventually, I tested the water.
I told him I had been meeting Stephen.
His expression became serious.
He told me he worried about me. He didn’t believe Stephen was good for me.
He wanted me to separate from him properly and rebuild my life. He hoped that, in time, I would be in a stronger emotional place and perhaps meet someone who could offer me something healthier and more stable.
Then he reminded me of the night I had been distraught and had accepted his advice and help, only for Stephen to leave the following day.
If I went back to Stephen after everything that had happened, my son said he would feel as though I was insulting him and the support he had given me. If I chose to return to the relationship, he would want less involvement in that part of my life.
He couldn’t keep supporting me through the consequences of it.
His warning terrified me.
It sounded as though, if I chose Stephen, I might lose my son.
And by then Stephen was beginning to say things about wishing he could turn back the clock.
That we could undo everything and pick up where we had left off.
I didn’t necessarily want that now.
But I didn’t want to close the door on it either.
At the same time, I couldn’t simply announce to my family that Stephen and I were giving things another try.
Too much had happened.
I told Stephen that if we were ever going to reconcile properly, I thought it would require some kind of significant gesture from him.
Perhaps he would need to speak to my family individually, or bring everyone together, apologise for what had happened and make a clear commitment about what he intended to do differently.
There was something else I needed to know too.
Was he still speaking to U?
He was.
He thought she wanted more from him than he was offering. She had even talked about visiting England.
I was annoyed.
I had thought that ship had sailed.
I asked whether he had told her what was happening between us.
He hadn’t.
He agreed that perhaps he should.
Stephen insisted he wasn’t deliberately leading her on. He simply wasn’t correcting her about where she stood.
To me, there wasn’t much difference.
It wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to me, for either of us to be left uncertain about what Stephen wanted.
I told him he needed to speak to her.
Come November, he eventually did.
He told U that he was still in love with me.
According to Stephen, she was upset but understanding.
Sometime around Christmas, either shortly before or just after, Stephen attended an event at a local arts charity near his flat. While he was there, he discovered they were looking for someone to work as a caretaker at the venue.
It was a paid role for just ten hours a week, and I thought it sounded perfect for him.
The ethos of the organisation seemed to suit Stephen to a tee, and the limited hours felt manageable. It would give him some structure, purpose and income without taking away too much of the time he wanted to spend working on his flat.
Stephen applied for the position and, not surprisingly, was successful.
Before long, he had joined the team.
Meanwhile, Stephen and I were beginning to talk more seriously about how we might move forward.
He said he wanted us to be together again, although he was frightened by the gesture I was asking him to make towards my family.
He told me how much he had enjoyed the previous few weeks and how well we had been communicating.
Better, he said, than we had communicated in a long time.
He felt that this kind of communication was what he needed to restore his faith in us.
I was trying to find a route through the mess we had created.
How could we reunite?
How could we recover?
How could I possibly make my family understand?
And beneath all of those practical questions were much bigger ones that neither of us had answered.
Why had our relationship fallen apart in the first place?
Why had Stephen behaved as he had?
Why had he wanted to leave, only to begin moving towards me again once he had?
And if we somehow found our way back to each other, what would stop all of this from happening again?
I suggested relationship counselling.
It wasn’t a new idea.
I had suggested it when Stephen first told me he wanted to leave, but at that point he hadn’t been interested. He had seemed to have already made up his mind.
Now he was willing to consider it.
Perhaps counselling could help us understand what had happened and whether there was still a way back.
I found a relationship therapist online and spoke to her first.
I told her about the betrayals and difficulties that had accumulated over the years.
As far as I knew, there had been no actual infidelity during our relationship. Stephen had slept with another woman almost immediately after leaving me, but he now regretted it.
I explained what I thought we needed help understanding.
What had gone wrong?
How had all of this happened?
Was there a way back?
And if there was, how could I possibly tell my family that we had decided to try again?
She said she could help us.
We arranged our first session for 22 December 2025.
Almost exactly five years earlier, Stephen had answered my message on the dating site where we had met.
Five years after we had first begun to find our way towards each other, we were about to sit in front of a stranger and ask her to help us find our way back.
Reflection
South Africa should probably have made everything simpler. Instead, I made it complicated by trying to understand it. Every contradiction generated another question, and every answer seemed to produce a slightly different version of what had happened. Stephen had gone because he was free and spontaneous; because I had made him leave; because the timing happened to work; because he was lost; because his mental health was deteriorating. Eventually, the version that affected me most was the one in which he had been falling apart. That explanation didn’t make the contradictions disappear, but it changed how I felt about them. Anger was much easier to sustain when I imagined Stephen choosing freedom. It became harder when I imagined him struggling.
That had always been one of the vulnerabilities in the way I loved him. Understanding rarely helped me detach; it usually made me more compassionate. Once I could imagine pain underneath Stephen’s behaviour, the behaviour itself became easier for me to forgive. His regret over South Africa, his continued attraction to me and his admission that he still didn’t know whether he wanted a future without me were enough to reopen a door I had briefly begun to close. I wasn’t unaware of how contradictory his explanations were. I could see them. I simply kept believing that somewhere amongst them there might be an explanation that made everything salvageable.
Our relationship at the flat made that possibility feel real again. Without the pressures of our old domestic life, we rediscovered much of what had always worked between us. We laughed, talked, ate together and enjoyed being intimate. I was also beginning to recover parts of myself: yoga, losing weight, feeling physically stronger and becoming less emotionally overwhelmed. But there was an uncomfortable imbalance underneath it all. I was keeping our growing closeness from my family while Stephen was still maintaining contact with U. My son’s reaction forced me to confront something I hadn’t previously had to consider so starkly. Returning to Stephen no longer affected only me. The people who had watched me fall apart were beginning to protect themselves too.
That was why I couldn’t simply slip back into the relationship as though nothing had happened. I still wanted Stephen, but I needed something more substantial than attraction, regret and another hopeful beginning. I wanted him to acknowledge what had happened to my family and demonstrate that he understood what returning to me required. I also wanted clarity for U. Perhaps I was trying to create structure around something that had become frighteningly unstructured: if Stephen chose me clearly, told U clearly and showed my family clearly, then perhaps all the ambiguity that had caused so much damage could finally be replaced by commitment.
Counselling felt like another attempt to do that properly. I wasn’t pretending the previous months hadn’t happened, and I wasn’t yet willing simply to trust that love would be enough. I wanted us to understand why Stephen had left, why he had gone to South Africa, why he had moved back towards me and what would prevent us from repeating the same cycle. Five years after we first began imagining a future together, I still hadn’t stopped believing there might be one. But this time, I didn’t just want Stephen to choose me. I wanted to understand what his choice actually meant.
