I was in a strange emotional place by June.
Sometimes I thought about whether I could become just one of Stephen’s women.
It wasn’t remotely what I wanted. I didn’t want to share him. I didn’t want some diluted version of what we had had. But if accepting less meant staying connected to him, perhaps I could tolerate it for a while.
Because somewhere underneath all of this, I still believed there might come a day when Stephen chose me.
I was living for a possibility I had created in my own mind while almost everything Stephen actually did contradicted it.
Intellectually, I wanted to move on.
Emotionally, I was still completely entangled.
Stephen was telling me again how badly he was struggling. He needed me beside him. He needed my support if he was going to get better.
And I still wanted to help him.
Even sex had become tangled up in all of this.
Sometimes I allowed intimacy I didn’t really want. I consented with my body while something inside me quietly withdrew. I wasn’t being forced, and I knew I could say no, but my yes wasn’t coming from desire. I was doing it partly to preserve his interest in me and partly because some irrational part of me believed that if I gave him enough sexually, perhaps he would be less likely to look elsewhere.
This was how far I had moved away from myself.
Stephen knew I would struggle to continue supporting him if he was seeing other women, so he told me he and K would go back to being just friends.
I saw less of him anyway.
My weekends began filling with friends and family, and finally the Isle of Wight Festival arrived. I had booked a week off work for it.
I enjoyed packing my suitcase and getting ready. The train journey was pleasant and I met my friend at Portsmouth Harbour.
I was looking forward to the festival.
But I wasn’t quite myself.
I was quieter than usual. Preoccupied.
With Stephen.
We took in the people, the music, the food and the sunshine, and I tried to enjoy everything around me. But I seemed to be carrying a cloud with me.
I did my best to conceal it, although I sensed my friend knew I wasn’t my usual self.
There were practical frustrations too. It was just the two of us for company, there was a lot of walking involved, and everything was expensive. Our caravan was a £30 taxi ride each way, which meant there was no real freedom to come and go as we pleased. Once we walked through the festival gates, we were committed to staying for the day.
Still, I sent Stephen little updates.
Photographs.
Pictures of me looking festival-ready.
I shared the good bits with him because I thought he would enjoy them. I wasn’t trying to make him jealous.
On our final day, Stephen told me he wished he was there with me.
Then he said it should have been him there with me.
Then he became angry that it wasn’t us doing this together.
Something about that bothered me.
It didn’t sound like the sadness of someone regretting what he had lost. It sounded resentful.
Instead of being happy that I was having this experience, he seemed sorry for himself that he wasn’t part of it.
I reminded him that I had booked the festival after he left me.
We could go together next year, I said.
It didn’t comfort him.
He was back in his flat, stewing in his own thoughts. Struggling to get out of bed. Ruminating. He told me he needed a break, some kind of escape from his life.
He wasn’t getting better on his own.
Then I think he decided to visit K.
Just as friends.
I didn’t like it.
Later he told me they had walked by the river and then sat together reading comic books.
That bothered me almost more than if they had simply gone for a drink.
It was exactly the kind of intimacy I believed belonged inside a relationship. The quiet, companionable things. Walking beside a river. Sitting together reading.
And from everything Stephen had told me about K, I could see that she possessed some of the qualities I thought he had once admired in me.
She was cool.
Interesting.
Different.
I saw her as a threat.
I even sent Stephen a selfie of tears streaming down my face. I caught myself doing something for the first time that Stephen use to do — something I always thought was so fucking weird.
And instead of asking myself why I was still participating in a situation that made me feel this way, I began thinking about what I needed to do differently.
By the time I was travelling home from the festival, I had a plan.
I would help Stephen.
I would give him fewer reasons to want to spend time with K.
I had deliberately left the day after the festival clear so I could recover from it.
Instead, I was using the train journey home to devise a rescue operation starting immediately.
I can’t remember the exact order in which I did everything, but over the following days I threw myself into helping him.
I made a healthy chorizo soup for us.
I went to his flat and made us clear up the rubbish and do the washing-up.
We took old kitchen units and cardboard to the tip.
I took him for a walk in the woods. He recognised the place as the same woods a volunteer had once taken him to after he had broken down at work.
And then I offered him something bigger.
Come home with me for two weeks.
I presented it almost as a rehabilitation programme.
Two weeks of recovery, healing, inspiration and comfort. A break from the oppressive flat. On his days off he could return there and do some DIY if he wanted, but my house could be somewhere safe to reset himself.
I brought him home.
I even made him sign a makeshift contract.
No alcohol.
No caffeine.
No tobacco.
Regulate his sleep.
Drink a litre of water every day.
I cooked healthy meals for him. We watched television. We rubbed each other’s feet. We enjoyed each other’s company.
While I was at work, he could use the quiet time to make plans for his future.
I thought I was giving him everything he needed to get better.
And perhaps there was another hope buried underneath all of that too.
If I could make him well, perhaps I could make us well.
And then something rather wonderful happened.
The previous month, Stephen’s son had got back in touch with him.
They had been estranged for more than two years, but his son was finally ready to talk. Stephen had travelled to Bristol to see him, and now, during a visit home, his son came to spend some time with us at my house.
He talked openly about the previous two years.
At first, he had gone off the rails a little. He had embraced the freedom of being young, partying, sleeping around and behaving recklessly. But eventually, having got much of that out of his system, he had begun to reflect on himself and what he wanted from life.
He explained that he had needed the distance from his father to work out who he was, independently of him. He had needed to grow into himself.
And it seemed he had.
I was struck by how much he had matured.
At twenty-two, he appeared to have reached a level of self-awareness and emotional understanding that still seemed to elude Stephen.
I found myself wondering whether this was the stage of development Stephen had somehow missed.
Perhaps there had never been a time in his life when he had been able to step away from everything, make his mistakes, reflect on them and emerge with a clearer understanding of himself.
Perhaps some part of him was still trying to do that now.
And perhaps that was why, despite everything he had experienced and everything he had lost, he still seemed so uncertain about who he was and what he wanted.
I didn’t know.
But watching his son describe the process of finding himself, I couldn’t help wondering whether Stephen was still searching for something his son had already begun to find.
On Friday night I needed to go to work to dog-sit.
Stephen was going to an evening event at the arts centre and staying at his flat.
On Saturday I was travelling into London to have lunch with my youngest son and my ex. The week before my ex and I had done something similar with my eldest. On Sunday I was going walking with my best friend and her sisters.
Then on Sunday evening, Stephen was supposed to come back to my house.
The healing would continue.
The night before I left, we tried to have sex.
It wasn’t working.
I wasn’t into it and Stephen had lost interest.
Eventually I told him the truth.
It was difficult to make love to someone who had been sleeping with so many other people.
On Friday night, while I was at work, Stephen’s phone went offline.
Immediately, I wondered about K.
Had she gone to the event?
Would he be tempted to go back to hers afterwards?
My instincts told me he would.
But surely not.
Surely he would understand what that would mean after everything I was doing for him.
I had opened my home to him again.
I had opened my heart again.
I was trying to help him get better.
Surely he wouldn’t do that now.
I sent dozens of messages expressing my growing fear.
No I couldn’t let him know what I had been doing for Stephen. As far as he was aware, Stephen and I barely had anything to do with each other since February.
None of them delivered.
Then I systematically deleted them all.
I didn’t sleep easily.
When I woke the next morning, Stephen finally made contact.
He saw the stream of deleted messages.
He couldn’t read them but he said it looked obsessive.
I asked him if he was at K’s.
He was.
I asked if they had been intimate.
They had.
Something in me collapsed.
I told him to collect his things from my house.
I didn’t want to see him.
He seemed confused.
But he was supposed to be coming back to me that weekend, he reminded me.
I couldn’t fathom how he couldn’t see the contradiction.
How could he sleep with K and then return to me for support, comfort and healing?
How could those two things coexist in his mind?
I dragged myself into London.
I was meeting my son and my ex for lunch at the Walkie Talkie building. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been looking forward to seeing them.
I just had almost nothing left.
The emotional strain of trying to hold onto Stephen while watching him do so little to protect whatever remained between us was becoming unbearable.
We met.
We had lunch.
I talked.
I smiled when I needed to.
But I didn’t feel as though I was occupying my own body.
I was performing normality.
Inside, I was crying.
Confused.
Falling apart.
Somehow I made it through the afternoon and we said our goodbyes.
Then I got onto the Tube to go home.
And then the tears came.
I couldn’t contain them anymore.
More than anything, I couldn’t face walking through my own front door.
If Stephen had done what I had asked, he would already have been there to collect his belongings.
I even guessed correctly that he had K drive him to my home to collect them.
His keys would be waiting for me.
Another ending.
And suddenly I began thinking about ways I could kill myself before I got home.
There was the Underground.
There were trains.
Train tracks.
A very high railway bridge just metres from my home.
Or I thought about going home, running a bath and cutting my wrists.
It wasn’t that I had never had a suicidal thought before in my life. But this was different. I was contemplating my options. They seemed easy.
This was the closest I had ever come to seriously contemplating whether death might be the only way to escape the pain I was in.
And that frightened me.
I didn’t want to be thinking like this.
I didn’t want to die.
But I couldn’t see how to go home and face what was waiting for me there either.
Before the Tube reached Paddington, I messaged my ex.
He told me to get off my train.
He would get off his and come and find me.
He had a gig in Hammersmith that evening, but there was enough time to meet. I’m certain he would have abandoned the gig if he thought it necessary.
I got out at Tottenham Court Road and found somewhere away from the crowds where fewer people might see me crying.
My ex found me.
He took me somewhere quieter and more sheltered where we could talk.
I can’t remember much of what I said to him.
My inability to stop loving Stephen had made me uncomfortably secretive.
A year of concealing the extent of my involvement from those who truly loved me, was weighing heavy on me.
I remember what I felt.
Confused.
Helpless.
So very, very hurt.
Utterly humiliated.
Betrayed.
Perhaps somewhere inside all that pain I was beginning to understand something I had resisted for a very long time.
Whatever shape Stephen occupied in my life, I seemed to know pain.
Perhaps removing Stephen from my life was the only way I could remove the pain.
But that frightened me too.
I couldn’t imagine what my life would look like without him.
More than that, I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like without all of this.
The worrying.
The analysing.
The rescuing.
The hoping.
The waiting.
The pain itself had taken up so much space that I couldn’t conceive of what would replace it.
Nothingness frightened me.
And in that moment, death somehow seemed like a logical alternative to that nothingness.
I needed somebody to tell me there was another option.
Even if that option looked empty from where I was standing.
My ex was so good with me.
He listened.
He supported me without becoming overly dramatic or frightened by what I was saying.
And there was something incredibly freeing about simply being allowed to cry and having somebody witness me in that broken state.
He gave me enough understanding, and enough hope, to get me home in one piece.
I survived the night.
The following day I was supposed to go walking with my friends.
I didn’t feel like going.
But I made myself.
I hadn’t seen them all together for such a long time and I told myself that walking in the sunshine had to be better for me than staying at home.
Again, I felt physically present and emotionally somewhere else.
At least with them I could talk.
I could tell them about Stephen.
I could say how much it hurt.
Stephen and I barely spoke that following week.
I think I moved through the days automatically.
The following weekend I went to a silent disco with my best friend and a couple of her university friends.
I’d never been to one before.
It was actually a lot of fun.
And still, I was only half there.
My mind was on Stephen.
I knew I wanted to see him.
I no longer knew why.
We had exchanged some messages. He had been at K’s but was now in town, he said, not knowing what to do with himself.
I suggested we might meet when I got back from London. He neither confirmed nor declined.
After the disco I went for a drink with the girls, but by then all I really wanted was to get home and see Stephen.
When I arrived back in our town, his phone was offline.
I couldn’t reach him.
Immediately I wondered whether he had gone back to K’s.
I drove to his flat.
He wasn’t there.
So I drove back into town.
I parked the car.
And then I started looking for him.
I walked around for about an hour.
I went into every pub, every bar and every restaurant I knew he frequented.
I was looking for Stephen.
Or Stephen and K.
I was intense.
Obsessive.
Determined to find him.
When I had exhausted every place I could think of, I got back into my car and drove to K’s flats.
And I sat outside.
Waiting.
Watching.
Wondering whether I might see one of them.
At some point, sitting there in my car, I seemed to become aware of myself from the outside.
What has happened to me?
What am I doing?
What outcome am I even hoping for?
I didn’t like what I had become.
Once, I had had a boyfriend who adored me.
Now I was sitting outside another woman’s home trying to discover whether he was inside.
My life had become almost unrecognisable to me.
Eventually, I drove home.
Dejected that my hopeful plan to find him had failed.
But there was something even more disturbing that I had to admit to myself.
I had no fucking idea what I would have done if I had found them.
Reflection
By June, I had begun living between two entirely different understandings of my life. Intellectually, I knew that the relationship I wanted no longer existed. I knew Stephen was continuing to pursue other women, that his promises offered little reassurance and that my efforts to help him were costing me dearly. Yet emotionally, I was still living for the possibility that something might change. I had begun contemplating arrangements that contradicted everything I believed about love and commitment, not because my values had changed, but because losing Stephen altogether seemed even more unbearable. I was no longer asking whether the relationship could give me what I needed. I was asking how little I could accept and still keep him.
Looking back, I can see how completely I had returned to the role of rescuer. I had barely recovered from my own emotional exhaustion before I was cooking, cleaning, organising and creating a rehabilitation programme for Stephen. I genuinely wanted him to get better, and there was satisfaction in feeling useful to someone I loved. But underneath that compassion was a hope I struggled to acknowledge. Perhaps if I could make his life comfortable enough, safe enough and loving enough, he would no longer need to look elsewhere. I was trying to create the conditions in which Stephen might finally choose me, without recognising that being chosen should never have depended on how much of myself I was prepared to give.
What happened that weekend brought me frighteningly close to the limits of what I could endure. I had spent so long trying to manage Stephen’s distress that I had almost stopped recognising the seriousness of my own. My thoughts on the journey home weren’t simply an expression of heartbreak. I had reached a point where I was contemplating death as a way of escaping emotional pain that felt impossible to survive. I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t imagine how to continue living with what I was feeling. What stays with me is the kindness of someone who had no obligation to rescue me, but who came when I needed him. For a little while, I didn’t have to explain, analyse or take care of anybody else. I could simply fall apart and allow someone to care for me.
And yet, even that frightening experience wasn’t enough to break my attachment to Stephen. Within days, I was longing to see him again, searching for him through the town and eventually sitting outside another woman’s home. I can scarcely reconcile that behaviour with the person I had always believed myself to be. I had become so consumed by the need to know where Stephen was, who he was with and whether there was still some possibility of reclaiming him that I was acting in ways I would once have found incomprehensible. I wasn’t proud of those moments. But I can recognise now that they came from a state of desperation in which uncertainty had become almost intolerable and finding Stephen seemed, however irrationally, like the only way to relieve it.
Perhaps the most disturbing realisation was that I was no longer entirely in control of the direction my life was taking. My happiness, my peace of mind and even my sense of who I was seemed increasingly dependent on Stephen’s behaviour. I could recognise the damage, understand the choices I needed to make and still find myself doing the opposite. I had spent years believing that if I could understand Stephen well enough, I might find a way to help him. Now I was beginning to confront a much more frightening question. How had I become so determined to save someone else that I was losing the ability to save myself?
