By October 2021, the complaints and the investigation that followed had brought our brief period of living together to an end.

It marked the end of the first chapter of our romance.

By then, those first ten months had accumulated an uncomfortable number of things I couldn’t explain away.

A broken promise.

A night when his phone was switched off.

My aunt.

The things Stephen had told me about his marriage and previous affairs.

J and H.

Other women.

Moments when something had felt wrong, even when I couldn’t quite identify what it was.

My instinct that there was something untrustworthy about Stephen, particularly when it came to women, had not appeared from nowhere. It had grown from a succession of events, observations, comments and disappearances.

With each one, I had become increasingly anxious that Stephen was going to betray me, although I had no idea what shape that betrayal might eventually take.

When I was finally told that two women had made complaints about his behaviour at work, it came as a complete shock.

It wasn’t something I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.

And yet, once I knew, it seemed connected to the same unease those earlier incidents had created in me: that Stephen’s boundaries with women were not always where I believed they should be.

Stephen was devastated by what had happened.

When it came to the complaints themselves, however, I didn’t always feel that he was taking full responsibility for the part he had played. He believed the pressure of the training and safeguarding responsibilities had affected him, and argued that J in particular had exaggerated events in a way that portrayed him unfairly.

I struggled with that.

Whatever else had contributed to what happened, two women had independently complained about his behaviour.

I needed Stephen to look at his own part in that rather than concentrate entirely on why other people might have interpreted him unfairly.

But in our private conversations, there were also signs that he was beginning to do exactly that.

When we talked about H and his behaviour around women more generally, Stephen acknowledged that he sometimes looked for interesting conversation and stimulation from other people. He accepted that the way he had done that had been inappropriate and disrespectful to me and to our relationship.

He began trying to understand why he did it.

Stephen told me that when he became flirtatious or sought attention, it tended to happen when he was bored or unhappy, or when he felt that other parts of his life were beyond his control.

He was adamant that he wasn’t bored or unhappy with me.

And he told me that none of this was an excuse.

That distinction mattered to me.

I could understand dysregulation, stress, pressure and boredom contributing to somebody behaving badly without believing those things absolved them of responsibility.

In fact, I told Stephen exactly where I thought the problem with his explanation lay.

He was going to be bored and unhappy again.

Life would frustrate him again.

There would be difficult jobs, difficult people and periods when he felt trapped, unstimulated or out of control.

If his response to those feelings was to seek excitement, attention or validation through other women, then changing jobs wasn’t going to solve anything.

He needed to learn another way of dealing with those feelings.

And now something enormous had happened.

Stephen hadn’t simply upset me or had an uncomfortable conversation with a colleague.

Two women had complained.

There had been an investigation.

A disciplinary process.

And he had lost his job.

However painful that was, I found it difficult to imagine that somebody could experience consequences on that scale and not seriously reflect on the behaviour that had led them there.

Surely this would stay with him.

Surely the next time a conversation with another woman began drifting towards a boundary, he would remember what had happened.

Surely losing his job would make him question his own behaviour in a way that my anxiety, questions and warnings never could.

If Stephen had succeeded in keeping his job, I couldn’t reasonably see how he would have moved forward positively. As painful as his dismissal was, I thought it was probably best for everyone concerned that his employment ended.

And that was an important part of why I didn’t walk away.

I wasn’t relying solely on Stephen promising me that he would change.

I believed something had happened that might actually make him change.

It was strange to think that we had only managed to live together for less than three months.

And so much was going to happen before we would share a home again.

Stephen and I discussed how we should move forward.

He still wanted a future with me.

I wasn’t sure I wanted the same now that this version of Stephen had been revealed to me in such a devastating way.

But I wasn’t ready to end the relationship either.

Instead, I told him that while he was living with his dad, he needed to sort himself out.

That meant something quite literal to begin with.

His bedroom.

When I had first seen it at the beginning of our relationship, it had been in a terrible state. He was sleeping in his bed surrounded by piles of belongings. There was furniture, clutter, filled cases and bags bursting with possessions. The carpet was barely visible, with little more than enough room to stand beside the bed.

So Stephen began clearing it.

He threw things away and rearranged the furniture until there was enough room for a desk. His bed was moved beneath a windowed alcove, and somehow the room that had once seemed so chaotic began to feel cosy.

Eventually, I started staying there for the first time.

In some ways, that little room reflected what I hoped Stephen might be able to do with the rest of his life.

Clear some things out.

Create some order.

Make room for something different.

We revisited the red flags that had troubled me during those first months. Stephen couldn’t really explain all of them, but he seemed remorseful.

I reminded him that stability and security had been part of our conversations from the very beginning.

They were among the things I had been looking for when I met him.

Ten months later, I felt he had provided me with neither.

If we were going to have any future together, that had to change.

I needed Stephen to create some stability of his own, and I needed him to stop giving me reasons to feel insecure.

This mattered particularly because Stephen had presented himself to me from the beginning as somebody capable of self-reflection and change.

When we first met, he had spoken about difficulties in his past and told me that it had taken him a long time and a lot of work to get through them.

I had admired that about him.

I had even told him that working on yourself was something to be proud of.

So when I asked Stephen to use what had happened as an opportunity to look at himself, I wasn’t asking him to become somebody completely different.

I believed I was asking him to be the person he had already told me he was capable of being.

I hated telling my friends and family how Stephen had lost his job and why he had moved out.

I think it inevitably changed their opinion of him a little, but they supported me in my choices and continued to welcome him into their homes.

I wrote Stephen a letter.

He pinned it to his notice board.

It was there as a reminder of what had happened, but also of what I needed from him if we were going to have a future.

One of the things I expressed was a suspicion I had begun to develop about Stephen and women.

I wondered whether he had a need to seek female attention whenever I wasn’t physically or emotionally available to him.

I had no proof of that.

It was an educated hunch based on the pattern I thought I could see emerging, and I had no idea whether I was right.

Years later, I would understand why that instinct had been so persistent.

But at the time, it was simply another question.

By then, though, I was becoming increasingly conscious of the difference between what Stephen said and what he actually did.

Words had always come easily between us.

From the beginning, we had talked endlessly about honesty, trust, communication, commitment and the kind of relationship we wanted to build. Stephen had reassured me many times.

But after everything that had happened, reassurance alone no longer carried the weight it once had.

I told him so.

“I can’t stress enough how little the words mean to me when the actions haven’t matched.”

It wasn’t that I believed everything Stephen had ever said to me had been meaningless. I still believed that much of what he told me reflected how he genuinely felt in the moment.

But feelings and intentions were no longer enough.

“We’ve exhausted the words.”

What I needed now was evidence.

Stephen told me that he understood.

“I am making my actions match how I feel. I will continue to do that.”

For the first time in a long while, I stopped listening quite so carefully to what Stephen was promising and started watching what he actually did.

Despite everything, there were still reasons for me to believe that Stephen might be capable of doing things differently.

Only shortly before everything unravelled, we had still been talking about the future we wanted to create together.

Stephen had told me that he wanted security for both of us.

He wanted a comfortable future with me.

Those weren’t merely things I wanted and was trying to persuade him to want too.

They were things we had talked about wanting together.

And that mattered.

Because I loved him.

Because much of our relationship was extraordinarily happy.

And because the Stephen I had fallen in love with had told me from the beginning that people could work on themselves, reflect, grow and change.

So I offered him a second chance.

But it wasn’t quite the clean slate I once remembered it as.

I didn’t tell him that what had happened didn’t matter.

I didn’t invite him straight back into my home and carry on as though nothing had changed.

Quite the opposite.

Stephen went back to his dad’s house.

I remained in mine.

He needed to sort himself out.

He needed to create some stability.

And I needed to see whether the man I loved could become someone I could feel safe trusting again.

We were also about to embark on a year of plans and experiences we had already been looking forward to.

In some ways, it would be like dating for the first time.

Even living separately seemed to bring back some of the small rituals we had developed earlier in our relationship.

One evening, Stephen and I decided to watch Parasite together from our separate homes. We couldn’t get the watch-together function to work through the television, so we resorted to synchronising the film ourselves.

Stephen found a frame near the beginning where a pair of socks were hanging in the background.

“I’ve paused at the socks,” I told him when I found the same place.

Then he counted us in.

“3…”

“2….”

“1…..”

“Go, go, go!”

And we pressed play together.

It was such a small thing, but that was part of what our relationship was like too. Alongside all the difficult conversations and uncertainty, there was companionship. We could make something as ordinary as watching a film from two different houses feel like something we were doing together.

Covid had meant we hadn’t really been able to date normally at the beginning of our relationship. So much of those first months had taken place inside houses, during restrictions, while the ordinary world of restaurants, concerts, travel and spontaneous days out remained largely closed to us.

Stephen had said himself that he probably hadn’t been ready for a relationship when he met me.

Perhaps, I thought, this was our opportunity to begin again differently.

For Stephen to sort himself out.

For both of us to enjoy the things we had missed the first time around.

And for me to get to know him again without immediately rebuilding the domestic life that had just fallen apart.

At the time, I believed perhaps this was exactly what we needed.

I thought the worst might finally have been exposed.

I thought losing his job might be the consequence serious enough to make him understand where his behaviour could lead.

I thought consequences might lead to reflection.

I thought reflection might lead to change.

And I thought that, if it did, perhaps we could begin again.

I didn’t know whether Stephen had changed.

There was no way I could know that yet.

That was what the second chance was for.

It wasn’t a declaration that I trusted him again.

It was an opportunity for him to show me that one day I might.

And, for a while at least, what happened next would give me reason to believe that hope had not been misplaced.

To be continued…

For months, I had been collecting fragments.

A broken promise.

A night of silence.

My aunt.

The stories from Stephen’s marriage.

The rule about cheating.

J.

Women in town.

A hand suddenly released when he saw me.

None of those things had given me certainty.

They had given me questions.

And because I loved Stephen, because so much of our relationship was extraordinarily happy, and because there was usually another possible explanation, I had continued living in the space between suspicion and proof.

Then Stephen told me he had been suspended from work following complaints involving two women.

Something changed.

Until then, almost everything troubling me had existed inside our relationship.

I was the person noticing.

I was the person questioning.

And increasingly, I was also the person wondering whether the problem might be me.

Had the broken promise involving his ex damaged my trust?

Was I becoming hypervigilant?

Was I connecting incidents that had nothing to do with one another?

Was I becoming jealous?

Was I interpreting ordinary friendliness as flirtation because I was frightened of being hurt again?

Then two women I barely knew stepped into the story.

They had experienced something too.

That was both validating and devastating.

There is a peculiar kind of relief in discovering that something you feared wasn’t entirely in your imagination.

But it isn’t a comforting relief.

It is the relief of discovering you may have been right about something you desperately wanted to be wrong about.

And then Stephen handed me his phone.

That changed things again.

Because I no longer had to choose between his interpretation and mine.

The messages existed.

I could read them.

What I found was more complicated than a man who had simply failed to understand that he was flirting.

Stephen knew there were boundaries.

He and H actually discussed them.

He referred to “casual flirting” himself.

He acknowledged that she was a young, attractive woman.

He knew she was twenty-two and that he was almost twice her age.

He told her that he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

He told her that if he were single and available, from his side there would not be a line.

And eventually, when H challenged the direction their conversation had taken, Stephen acknowledged it himself.

“I need to check my own emotions and behaviour.”

“I should have been more aware of boundaries.”

“I got a bit carried away.”

Those words mattered.

They made it much harder to understand what had happened simply as social clumsiness or an innocent misunderstanding.

I still couldn’t know exactly what Stephen had wanted from H.

Perhaps he hadn’t known himself.

Attraction, curiosity, excitement, validation and emotional stimulation may all have become tangled together.

I cannot retrospectively climb inside his mind and separate them.

But I no longer needed to know his precise intention in order to judge the behaviour.

That distinction was becoming important.

For so long, I had been trying to understand why Stephen did things.

Perhaps if I understood the mechanism, I thought, I could determine how seriously to take the behaviour.

But intention and effect are not the same thing.

Nor does understanding why somebody does something make the consequences disappear.

I could have compassion for whatever was happening inside Stephen and still decide that what he had done was unacceptable to me.

Perhaps the most extraordinary discovery, though, wasn’t any particular flirtatious message.

It was a date.

9 July.

I had lived that evening once already.

I remembered Stephen seeming troubled.

I remembered trying to understand what was wrong.

He had suggested that perhaps it was work.

I had told him I didn’t think it was situational.

“It seems every time we remove what troubles you, you remain troubled by a new thing.”

“I fear this may chase you the rest of your life.”

Then he told me:

“I am so confused.”

And when he stopped responding to me while remaining online, something inside me had reacted.

“Are you talking to someone else?”

“You’re staying online but not responding.”

I had no evidence.

I didn’t know about H.

I didn’t know what was happening in another WhatsApp conversation.

I just knew that something felt wrong.

Now, weeks later, I could finally see the part of that evening that had been invisible to me.

He had been talking to someone else.

He had been talking to H.

And while I was trying to understand Stephen’s strange mood, H was confronting him about comments that had made her uncomfortable.

Stephen was acknowledging to her that he needed to examine his behaviour and that he had become carried away.

The answer to the question I had asked had existed all along.

I simply hadn’t been allowed to see it.

That feels important to me now because for years afterwards I would struggle with the distinction between intuition and anxiety.

Both can feel remarkably similar in the body.

Both can make your heart race.

Both can make you search for meaning in tiny changes of behaviour.

Both can whisper that something is wrong.

And sometimes anxiety does create stories where there are none.

But sometimes the nervous system is responding to information the conscious mind hasn’t yet assembled.

A change in attention.

A delay in a response.

A slight withdrawal.

A shift in energy.

Something familiar behaving differently.

I don’t think that means I possessed some mystical ability to know Stephen was talking to another woman.

I didn’t.

I knew something without knowing what I knew.

There is a difference.

My instincts had detected the disturbance.

They could not supply the missing information.

And that distinction matters enormously when I look back at the woman I was becoming.

I wasn’t losing my mind.

I was trying to make sense of a reality from which relevant information was repeatedly missing.

There was another painful discovery in those messages too.

During the same period that Stephen’s attention was becoming increasingly focused on H, I had been trying harder and harder to settle him.

I had worried about the training.

I had encouraged him through difficult subjects.

I had come home at lunchtime.

I had tried to make our home comfortable.

I had tried to keep our emotional connection strong.

I had even thought about our sexual relationship partly in terms of helping to satisfy and settle him.

There was an assumption underneath some of that which I don’t think I fully recognised at the time.

If Stephen was happy enough with me, perhaps he wouldn’t need to look elsewhere.

If our sex life was satisfying enough.

If home was peaceful enough.

If I was supportive enough.

If he felt understood enough.

If I could help him regulate whatever restlessness was driving him.

Perhaps then he would settle.

But while I was trying to provide those things, he was still becoming preoccupied with somebody else.

That should not be interpreted as evidence that I failed.

It was evidence that my theory was wrong.

I could influence the quality of our relationship.

I could not regulate Stephen into fidelity.

That was his responsibility.

Interestingly, I was already beginning to understand that in 2021.

When Stephen explained that he tended to seek interesting, flirtatious interactions when he was bored or unhappy, I didn’t simply reassure him.

I told him:

“You will be bored and unhappy again.”

That was remarkably important.

Because I had identified the flaw in an explanation based entirely on circumstances.

There would always be another difficult day.

Another boring job.

Another period of low mood.

Another attractive woman.

Another interesting conversation.

Another opportunity to feel noticed.

A relationship could not be safe if Stephen’s loyalty depended upon never being bored, unhappy, insecure or stimulated by somebody new.

He needed another way of managing those feelings.

And I told him so.

When I was bored, I learned Danish or played Overcooked.

I didn’t create flirtatious intimacy with other men.

The solution, I told him, was to find ways of making himself happy and regaining control of his own life rather than escaping those feelings in ways that could make his life worse.

Reading that now, I am struck by how much I already understood.

There is a temptation, knowing everything that happened later, to imagine the woman I was then as somebody who simply couldn’t see what was happening.

But I could see a great deal.

What I couldn’t know was whether Stephen would do anything meaningful with what I was telling him.

That was the unknown.

And Stephen gave me reasons to believe he would.

He acknowledged that his behaviour had been inappropriate and disrespectful.

He apologised.

He said he needed to behave differently.

He told me:

“I only want you.”

And I did something else that feels extremely important now.

I gave him a way out.

I did not demand that Stephen choose monogamy because I was terrified of losing him.

I explicitly told him that if some part of him needed sexual freedom — if he felt he had missed out and needed time to “sow his wild oats” — he could take it.

Perhaps we would find one another again afterwards.

That wasn’t what I wanted.

It would have devastated me.

But I would rather have endured the truth than lived inside a commitment Stephen didn’t genuinely want.

He rejected the alternative.

“I know in my heart that I do not want any other woman.”

So I asked him directly.

Was he choosing a monogamous, devoted, loyal, long-term relationship with me over sexual and relationship freedom?

“Yes.”

“I do.”

That matters enormously when I think about why I stayed.

Because I wasn’t standing in front of a man telling me he couldn’t promise monogamy and deciding to pretend otherwise.

I asked the question.

I offered the alternative.

I made my requirements explicit.

And Stephen chose the relationship.

At least in words.

I even told him that words were no longer sufficient.

“Beautiful, sincere words aren’t enough anymore.”

I needed actions.

That may be one of the most important sentences I wrote during our relationship.

Because the problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what I deserved.

I wrote that too.

“I know I deserve integrity, truth and respect.”

The problem wasn’t that I had never established boundaries.

Or that I had never recognised danger.

Or that I had never given Stephen an opportunity to tell me that the relationship I wanted wasn’t the relationship he wanted.

I did all of those things.

What I did was believe that the answers he gave me were sincere.

And perhaps they were sincere in the moment.

That possibility is uncomfortable because it is much easier to understand betrayal if every promise preceding it was simply a calculated lie.

Human beings are more complicated than that.

Someone can desperately want to be a particular kind of person and repeatedly fail to behave like that person.

Someone can mean a promise when making it and later violate it.

Sincerity and reliability are not the same thing.

I hadn’t learned that distinction yet.

I still believed that sufficient insight, sufficient consequences and sufficient desire to change would eventually produce different behaviour.

And there were reasons for me to hope.

Stephen became quieter when confronted with the messages.

He acknowledged things.

He appeared ashamed.

He recognised that attention from other people felt good after spending much of his life believing himself unattractive and unlikeable.

He said he needed not to let it go to his head.

Those moments mattered to me because they looked like insight.

And if Stephen could see the problem, surely he could change it.

So I didn’t end the relationship.

We tried to rebuild.

That part of the chronology matters too.

There wasn’t one enormous revelation followed immediately by me forgiving everything and carrying on as though nothing had happened.

I told Stephen our relationship was on thin ice.

I told him what needed to change.

I told him beautiful words weren’t enough.

I offered him freedom if that was what he actually wanted.

He chose monogamy.

He promised action.

And I watched.

Then the full written grievances eventually arrived.

H’s account broadly corresponded with messages I had already read.

That gave it weight.

J’s complaint affected me differently because so much of it felt possible.

Some of the behaviour I had witnessed myself.

Some I already knew about.

I knew Stephen found her attractive.

I knew about the drinking while working.

I had seen the casual attitude towards online training.

Nothing about the account felt so alien to the Stephen I knew that I could dismiss it outright.

That frightened me.

Earlier in the relationship, when something unsettling happened, I had often asked whether it was out of character.

Now another question was beginning to emerge.

What if this is part of his character?

Not all of him.

That distinction matters.

The man behaving this way around women was also the man who could walk into a gathering of my oldest friends and fit beautifully amongst them.

He could be funny, clever, warm, engaging and attentive.

He could tap-dance unexpectedly in somebody’s living room.

He could make me laugh.

He could make ordinary life feel exciting.

He could understand parts of me other people missed.

He could make me feel deeply loved.

Those things weren’t necessarily fake simply because other things were also true.

That was the cognitive dissonance I was trying to resolve.

Stephen loves me.

Stephen behaves in ways that make loving him unsafe.

Both could be true.

At the time, however, I still believed the second statement could be changed without losing the first.

J’s allegation that Stephen had effectively told her he would go for her but had a girlfriend crystallised another difference between us.

The wording mattered enormously to me.

Perhaps Stephen genuinely couldn’t understand why.

But I could.

I didn’t want to be the fence separating Stephen from all the women he would otherwise pursue.

I wanted to be the choice that made pursuing them irrelevant.

I tended to understand commitment from the centre of the relationship outward.

I choose you, and therefore I protect what we have.

Stephen sometimes appeared to understand it from the boundary inward.

I may want something, but I have a girlfriend, and therefore this is where I must stop.

Perhaps that distinction is too neat.

Human desire is complicated. Loving someone doesn’t make every other human being sexually invisible.

I had never expected that.

But increasingly I was beginning to understand that attraction wasn’t really the issue.

What mattered was what happened next.

Where attention went.

What was encouraged.

What was disclosed.

What was hidden.

Whether attraction was simply experienced or actively fed.

And whether the relationship was treated as something precious to protect or merely as the line beyond which Stephen wasn’t supposed to go.

Eventually I asked him to leave.

Not because he had already been dismissed, as I later remembered the chronology.

At that point the employment process was still unfolding.

I asked him to leave because I needed space and because something fundamental between us had been damaged.

That correction matters.

I wasn’t enforcing a technical rule that he could only live with me while employed.

I was responding to what had happened between us.

Stephen asked:

“Are we splitting up?”

And I answered honestly.

“I don’t know.”

I wasn’t endlessly permissive.

I wasn’t pretending nothing had happened.

And I wasn’t incapable of acting.

I was establishing a boundary while still hoping the relationship could survive it.

Perhaps that sounds contradictory.

It didn’t feel contradictory then.

I didn’t believe I was choosing between Stephen and myself.

I believed I was creating conditions under which I might eventually be able to have both.

I could protect myself.

Stephen could reflect.

The employment process could resolve.

He could examine what had happened.

He could understand why he sought attention when bored, unhappy or insecure.

He could learn to recognise boundaries before somebody else had to enforce them.

He could become responsible for regulating himself rather than relying on me, another woman, alcohol, cigarettes or stimulation to change how he felt.

And perhaps, eventually, he could come home.

That seemed reasonable to me.

Healthy, even.

People make mistakes.

Relationships survive crises.

People learn.

People grow.

Sometimes consequences really do force us to confront things conversation has failed to change.

I had no reason then to believe that the only sensible response to somebody behaving badly was permanent abandonment.

What mattered was what happened afterwards.

Did they understand?

Did they take responsibility?

Did their behaviour change?

And I thought I was about to find out.

That is why his belongings remaining in my home feels so symbolic now.

I hadn’t closed the door.

But neither had I simply left it wide open.

I had placed something in the doorway.

A condition.

Change.

Looking back, perhaps the mistake wasn’t giving Stephen another chance.

It was something much harder to recognise.

I still believed insight would reliably lead to change.

I believed consequences would deepen that insight.

I believed that if Stephen finally understood how close he had come to losing our relationship, he would protect it differently.

And perhaps most importantly, I believed that because Stephen repeatedly told me he wanted the same relationship I wanted, we were ultimately working towards the same destination.

I had asked.

I had challenged.

I had offered him another path.

I had told him exactly what I needed.

He had chosen me.

So I believed him.

I didn’t yet understand that eventually I would have to judge the relationship not by the clarity of Stephen’s promises after something went wrong, but by what he did when the next opportunity arose.

For now, though, I watched him leave my home.

I still loved him.

I still believed in his capacity to change.

And somewhere amongst the sadness was hope.

Because for the first time, I thought the problem had finally become visible enough for both of us to see.

I thought seeing it would be the beginning of changing it.

I didn’t yet understand how many times I would see the same shape again.