Stephen And The Changing Shape Of Our Lives

October 11, 2026October 11, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

The time eventually came for me to leave the job I had been in for sixteen years.

I was ready to go, but that didn’t make leaving easy.

I had first met my employers when I was working part-time as a cleaner for a friend’s cleaning company. They were among our regular clients and also among our favourites, largely because they allowed us enough time to actually do the job properly. There was none of the frantic rushing from one house to another that often came with cleaning work. Their house was somewhere I enjoyed going.

After a couple of years, though, I decided I’d had enough of cleaning and wanted to try something new.

On my final day, I happened to be working at their house. When I told them I was leaving, their eyes lit up. They immediately turned towards one another and began whispering.

Then they came back to me with an offer.

They were planning to build a large new house and, when it was finished, they would need a full-time housekeeper. Would I be interested? In the meantime, I could work for them part-time.

I said yes.

I was thrilled.

Sixteen years later, I was still there.

The role had grown enormously during that time. I wasn’t simply cleaning anymore. By the end, I was effectively managing the household, with five people working beneath me and responsibility for keeping everything running smoothly.

And I was good at it.

I had grown with the job.

Eventually, though, I began to feel I had grown beyond it too.

I wanted a new challenge. I was confident that the skills I had accumulated over sixteen years could transfer to another household, and I was ready to earn the kind of salary I now felt my experience deserved.

So when my final day arrived, there was sadness.

Sixteen years is a long time. I had spent a significant part of my adult life working for this family. I knew the house, the routines, the expectations and the people almost instinctively. Walking away from something so familiar felt strange.

But underneath the sadness was excitement.

I was ready.

That Friday evening, after finishing work for the last time, Stephen and I went out with his old friend from martial arts and his girlfriend. I really liked her and remember thinking that perhaps she and I could become friends.

Stephen and this man had become quite close since reconnecting. His friend did DIY work and had started giving Stephen occasional jobs with him, which meant a little extra money as well as some useful practical experience.

At some point, however, Stephen told me something about him that made me uneasy.

He said his friend could sometimes be inappropriate with some of the younger women at their martial arts classes.

I didn’t particularly like hearing that.

Given everything that had already happened with Stephen and women, I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of him becoming close to a man whose own boundaries with women apparently weren’t always great.

I didn’t make a huge issue of it.

But I noticed it.

The following day, Stephen and I travelled to Worthing for a music gig.

It was a small, intimate venue and the music was good. It should have been exactly the kind of evening we enjoyed together, but Stephen was drinking heavily. During the performance, he kept disappearing from my side and spending time hanging around the bar.

I remember wondering why.

There was nothing dramatic about it. He wasn’t doing anything obviously wrong. It just seemed strange that we had travelled there together to see the concert and yet he appeared increasingly interested in being somewhere other than beside me.

By the time we left, he was very drunk.

The walk back to our hotel should have taken about half an hour, but Stephen was moving slowly, becoming distracted by everything around him and repeatedly trying to strike up conversations with people we passed.

I found myself guiding him along and, at times, practically holding him up.

There was something funny about it too. He was drunk and sociable and easily distracted, and I couldn’t help laughing at some of his antics.

But as I watched him, another thought occurred to me.

So this is what he must have been like before he met me.

I had heard plenty of stories about Stephen’s old nights out, but this was one of the first times I felt I had actually caught a glimpse of that version of him.

Then it was time for my own new life to begin.

I had deliberately given myself a few days between jobs to relax and reset, but they disappeared quickly, and suddenly my first morning had arrived.

Almost immediately, there was a problem I hadn’t properly anticipated.

The commute.

I had estimated it would take about an hour, but rush-hour traffic made it considerably longer. Still, I arrived excited and determined to make a good impression.

The day began well.

I was issued with a laptop and phone, shown around and introduced to the workings of the household. Everything felt new and unfamiliar, but also exciting.

This was what I had wanted.

Something that would stretch me.

It was a full and varied day with an enormous amount to absorb. By six o’clock, I was tired. I gathered my things and prepared to leave.

The family’s executive assistant, who was also my manager, looked at me.

“Oh, the dinner service is about to start,” she said. “You can go if you want, though.”

I looked around.

Nobody else was leaving.

How could I possibly walk out?

It was my first day.

I messaged Stephen to tell him I was going to be late and stayed.

What followed was one of the most chaotic dinner services I had ever witnessed.

For much of it, I stood to one side of the kitchen trying to understand what everyone was doing. Everyone was present. Two housekeepers, a personal assistant, the executive assistant and the very stressed and flustered chef. People moved around one another, food appeared and disappeared, and there seemed to be far too many people tripping over each other without any obvious system.

At one point, I watched my manager spend what felt like an entire minute trying to balance a sprig of parsley on top of a plate of food.

By the end of the evening, the chef was sitting on the floor, rocking and crying.

I stood there taking it all in.

And somewhere amid the chaos, a thought occurred to me.

Is this why they’ve brought me here?

Was I expected to find a solution to this?

Eventually dinner was finished, but nobody simply went home. We stayed to clear the kitchen, wash everything, put things away and prepare for the following day.

By the time I finally reached home, it was around ten o’clock.

I had left the house fifteen hours earlier.

I walked through the front door, saw Stephen and fell into his arms.

Then I burst into tears.

“I’ve made a mistake,” I told him. “I can’t do this.”

All the confidence I had felt about leaving my old job had disappeared in the space of a single day.

Stephen held me and comforted me, although I don’t remember him saying very much.

Perhaps there wasn’t much he could say.

I was exhausted, overwhelmed and frightened that I had walked away from sixteen years of security for something I simply wasn’t capable of doing.

But I am also incredibly stubborn.

And conscientious.

So I slept on it.

The following morning, I got up, pulled myself together and went back.

This time, I approached it differently.

Instead of thinking, I can’t do this, I began thinking, I need to work out how to do this.

By the end of that first week, simply making it to Friday felt like an achievement.

So I was especially happy that we already had something planned for the weekend.

Stephen and I travelled to Bristol for an outdoor music festival. Four or five bands were playing, with one of my favourite bands, James, headlining.

The weather was lovely, the atmosphere relaxed and, after the intensity of my first week, it felt wonderful to be somewhere with nothing expected of me except to enjoy myself.

We watched the bands. We sang along.

Stephen stood behind me with his arms wrapped tightly around me.

It felt good.

His eldest son was studying in Bristol at the time, so we arranged to meet him while we were there. We ended up sitting together in a pub, talking and catching up.

During the conversation, his son tried to raise something with Stephen.

He was concerned about the way his dad sometimes spoke about his own father and his ex-wife — his son’s mother.

There was a sadness in what he was saying. He seemed to be trying to explain that he didn’t think Stephen was always fair to either of them, particularly considering how much they both continued to do for Stephen’s sons.

I listened as he tried to make his point.

His son wasn’t denying that Stephen had grievances with them. He seemed to accept that they both had their faults. What he wanted his dad to recognise was that, whatever had happened in the past, they were still there.

They were still helping.

They were still doing their best.

And that meant a great deal to his son.

It hurt him to hear Stephen be so critical of them.

I wasn’t sure Stephen was really hearing what his son was trying to tell him.

Then life moved on.

A month into my new job, things already looked very different from that first terrible evening.

The commute remained difficult and the days could be long, but I was beginning to find my feet. I was learning the rhythms of the household, understanding the personalities involved and, most importantly, beginning to see where I fitted.

There were problems to solve.

And I liked solving problems.

The chaos that had terrified me on my first day was gradually becoming something I could understand and organise. Every week I became a little more confident.

Perhaps I hadn’t made a terrible mistake after all.

Perhaps I could actually be good at this.

At almost exactly the same time, however, things were moving in the opposite direction for Stephen.

Not long after I left my old job, my previous employers emailed him to tell him they no longer required him as their groundskeeper.

The explanation they gave was that they were restructuring things and redistributing the work among the remaining team.

Perhaps that was all it was.

But I couldn’t help wondering whether my departure had played a part. I had been with them for sixteen years. Stephen had come into their lives through me. Perhaps once I had gone, they simply wanted a clean slate.

Whatever the reason, Stephen was angry and upset.

And somewhere beneath his anger, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that some of it was directed towards me.

I wondered whether, in his mind, my decision to leave had somehow cost him his job.

That hadn’t been my intention at all.

In fact, in my mind, I had taken the new job partly because of us.

We had been talking about our future—working, saving, getting ourselves into a stronger financial position and eventually creating a life of our own. The increased salary mattered to me because I saw it as a way of moving us towards that.

The long commute, the responsibility, the exhausting days and even that first night when I had come home in tears were things I was prepared to endure because I believed they were taking us somewhere.

But while I was slowly establishing myself in a new working life, Stephen had suddenly lost part of his.

And there were other changes too.

Some of the projects he had begun at home lost momentum. The spaces he had been creating were left unfinished. He stopped going to his dad’s house to help tidy things there.

At home, though, he took on more.

He did a fantastic job of shopping and cooking for us, and most evenings there would be food waiting when I eventually made it through the door.

It must have been frustrating for him when I arrived home later than I had promised, sometimes after dinner had gone cold, or when I finally sat down only to open my laptop again or answer another work call.

The job followed me home in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

And so did the exhaustion.

There were evenings when Stephen wanted us simply to relax together and I was too preoccupied with work. There were nights when I was less interested in sex.

He rarely made a fuss about it at the time. He quietly got on with things, cooked our meals and adapted around my new hours.

But I knew it affected him.

We had imagined this new chapter as something that would move both of us forward. Instead, within weeks, our lives had begun moving at very different speeds.

I was becoming busier, more challenged and increasingly absorbed in proving myself.

Stephen had lost one of the few pieces of work he had, some of his projects had stalled, and more of his days were being spent at home.

Neither of us had planned it that way.

Still, autumn was approaching. Other work opportunities for Stephen were still in the pipeline, and we had some lovely things planned together.

I hoped they would give him something to look forward to.

More than anything, I hoped these were simply the uncomfortable first weeks of a transition we would eventually settle into.

We had wanted our lives to move forward together.

I hadn’t yet considered what might happen if, for a while, they didn’t.

Reflection

Looking back, I think this was the first time our carefully constructed plan encountered ordinary life. We had spent months imagining how things would work: Stephen would become more independent, I would earn more, we would save, and gradually we would move towards the future we had chosen together. On paper, my new job belonged completely to that plan. What I hadn’t anticipated was how differently change might affect each of us once we were actually living through it.

For me, the new job was initially terrifying, but it also gave me something I had been craving. I was being challenged. There were problems to solve, people to organise and an unfamiliar world to master. The harder it became, the more determined I was to prove that I could do it. Within weeks, something that had reduced me to tears on my first night was beginning to give me confidence. My world was expanding at precisely the moment Stephen’s seemed to be contracting.

That created a tension I didn’t immediately recognise. The more absorbed I became in work, the less available I was at home. I arrived late. I answered calls. I opened my laptop. I was tired and sometimes uninterested in sex. Stephen rarely complained, and in many ways he supported me beautifully. He shopped, cooked and made sure there was food waiting when I eventually came through the door. From where I stood, this was simply what partnership looked like during a demanding period: one person carried more at home while the other adjusted to something new, knowing that eventually the balance would shift again.

But I also knew enough about Stephen to understand why the change might be difficult for him. We had deliberately tried to build him a life that didn’t depend upon my constant availability. Now, almost by accident, we were testing whether that life was strong enough to sustain him when my attention really did have to go elsewhere. Losing his groundskeeping work mattered in that context. So did the projects that gradually stalled. I could see that something was changing, but I still believed it was temporary.

Perhaps the most revealing moments were the ordinary ones. Stephen wandering away from me at the bar in Worthing. His son trying to tell him something difficult about the way he saw other people. My own discomfort about the friend whose boundaries with women concerned me. None of those moments seemed especially significant by themselves. They were simply things I noticed and then carried on from. There was no reason yet to turn them into anything larger.

What mattered most to me was that we were still together and still moving towards the same destination. I believed my long hours were an investment in us, just as I believed Stephen’s quieter period would eventually give way to new opportunities of his own. I hadn’t yet understood that two people can agree completely about the life they want to build and still experience the journey towards it very differently. For the first time since Stephen moved back in, our lives were no longer moving at quite the same pace. I noticed the distance beginning to open, but I still believed it would close again.

Stephen And The Goodbye That Wouldn’t Hold

October 7, 2026October 7, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

In the weeks after Denmark, Stephen and I seemed to be constantly moving towards and away from each other.

One moment, I was certain it had to end.

The next, we were talking again.

Sometimes we were discussing practicalities: money, belongings, how we would begin separating the lives that had become so intertwined.

At other times, we were talking about love.

About loss.

About what had happened.

About whether there might ever be a way through it.

It was during one of those conversations that I told Stephen I didn’t want to lose him completely.

“I don’t want to lose you. By that I mean contact.”

And then I said something that probably described the weeks that followed better than I could have known at the time.

“I’ll always keep the door ajar.”

I wasn’t offering to resume our relationship.

I didn’t know whether I could ever trust him again.

But despite everything that had happened in Denmark, I couldn’t imagine simply removing Stephen from my life.

I still loved him.

And now I had another reason not to close the door completely.

I had suggested the personal-development programme I had attended many years earlier.

Stephen had been receptive almost immediately. He had looked into it, asked questions and seemed genuinely interested in what it might offer him.

That mattered to me.

I had spent so much time trying to understand Stephen myself. Perhaps this was something he needed to do without me.

But suggesting the programme didn’t suddenly make everything between us easier.

We were still raw.

Still grieving.

Still capable of hurting each other almost effortlessly.

I had begun trying to separate our lives.

There was enough of Stephen in my house to fill my car. Clothes. Possessions. The ordinary accumulation of a relationship that had gradually spread itself through drawers, cupboards and rooms.

Among it was his birthday present.

For the second year in a row, his birthday had become tangled up with betrayal.

I made arrangements to return everything to his dad’s.

I wanted the reminders gone.

At one point, I told Stephen I needed to eradicate the things that kept the wound open.

I deleted the photographs of us from my phone.

There had been hundreds.

Trips.

Christmases.

Walks.

Concerts.

Ordinary evenings.

Pictures of a relationship that, until Denmark, I had largely thought of as extraordinarily happy.

Deleting them felt brutal.

Stephen would remember that act for a very long time.

So would I.

There were other reminders that life was beginning to continue without him.

Only days after returning from Denmark, I attended a family celebration without Stephen.

I had been looking forward to going with him. Instead, I sat there alone, surrounded by people celebrating something wonderful, trying to participate while feeling as though part of me was somewhere else entirely.

Later, my sons and their girlfriends invited me out for drinks.

We went to a cocktail bar that Stephen frequented. The same one he stayed out late at, striking up conversations with strangers.

I knew what they were doing.

They were trying to look after me.

Trying to get me out of the house.

Trying, perhaps, to remind me that there was still a life around me that had nothing to do with Stephen.

I was grateful.

But I wasn’t free of him.

Part of me wondered whether he might walk through the door.

Even now, knowing everything that had happened, some part of my attention remained tuned to the possibility of Stephen appearing.

And Stephen and I were still talking.

That evening, another conversation began to unravel.

The exact argument is difficult to reconstruct because some of it happened by telephone, and Stephen and I subsequently disagreed about what had actually been said.

What I remember—and what my messages afterwards make very clear—is how I experienced it.

Stephen wanted to continue talking about something that felt urgent to him.

I was with my sons.

I felt that he was asking me to put his emotional needs above the people I was actually with and, once again, M became part of the conversation.

On the telephone, I understood Stephen to be telling me that the conversation couldn’t wait.

That if I wasn’t prepared to deal with it then, perhaps we needed to cut ties.

I was devastated.

I blocked him.

My sons, who had taken me out to try to cheer me up, ended up consoling me while I cried and panicked.

Hours later, Stephen and I were arguing about the argument.

He insisted I had misunderstood him.

He said he had known I needed to spend time with my boys. He had intended to continue writing down his thoughts while he waited for me to become available.

That wasn’t how I remembered the phone call.

“You said you couldn’t wait and hung up,” I told him.

Stephen said that wasn’t what he had meant.

I wished aloud that I had a recording of the conversation.

There was something painfully familiar in that.

Once again, Stephen and I weren’t only disagreeing about what should happen between us.

We were disagreeing about what had happened between us.

I told him I took him at his word.

If someone told me something, I believed that was what they meant.

Stephen believed there had been a misunderstanding.

Neither of us seemed capable of persuading the other.

And eventually I told him I didn’t want to speak to him.

That is where the surviving WhatsApp record from this period ends.

Perhaps that is appropriate.

Because there was no clean conclusion.

No final message in which we calmly accepted that the relationship was finished.

No dramatic declaration that we were going to try again.

Just another rupture.

Another attempt to close a door I had already admitted I wanted to leave ajar.

What happened between us over the following weeks is much less clearly preserved.

Without the messages, I don’t want to pretend I can reconstruct every conversation or place every moment precisely.

What I remember is the strange in-between state of it.

Stephen was no longer my partner.

But he wasn’t quite absent either.

I was trying to build a life that didn’t include him while still carrying the emotional weight of one that had.

And somewhere in the background was the programme.

The idea had been planted.

But Stephen wouldn’t actually attend until the end of September.

There were more than two months between me suggesting it and him finally walking through the doors.

During that time, life continued.

We weren’t speaking to each other much.

Then, in September, Queen Elizabeth II died.

Stephen told me he was going to London to see her lying in state.

There were queues stretching for miles, with people waiting through the night for the opportunity to walk through Westminster Hall and pay their respects.

It was such a Stephen thing to do.

The event was broadcast continuously, and as Stephen slowly made his way through the queue, I knew roughly when he was getting close.

I opened the live broadcast on my laptop at work.

And I waited.

For almost two hours, I watched the endless procession of strangers filing through Westminster Hall, searching for one familiar face.

Then suddenly, there he was.

Stephen.

His hair had grown long enough to pull into a tiny ponytail.

He looked solemn.

Almost painfully so.

I hadn’t felt particularly emotional about the Queen’s death myself, but there was something strange about seeing him there.

This man who had hurt me so profoundly only weeks earlier was walking quietly through Westminster Hall, looking humble, respectful and deeply moved.

Again, there were those two versions of him.

The man whose behaviour I sometimes found impossible to reconcile with love.

And the man I knew could be thoughtful, curious, sentimental and deeply affected by the world around him.

I captured several stills as he passed the coffin and lowered his head.

Within moments, he had disappeared from the screen.

I sent him what I had captured.

He was incredibly touched.

And once again, kindness found its way back between us.

That was the difficulty.

Love didn’t disappear simply because trust had been damaged.

Affection didn’t vanish because I was angry.

Stephen could hurt me profoundly and still be the person whose face I searched for amongst thousands of strangers.

I could decide that our relationship was over and still want to give him something I knew would matter to him.

The door moved constantly.

Sometimes I pushed it almost shut.

Sometimes Stephen did.

Then one of us would reach through the gap.

By late September, however, something was finally approaching that felt different.

Not another argument.

Not another explanation.

Not another promise between Stephen and me.

On 29 September, more than two months after I had first suggested it, Stephen was due to begin the programme.

I had no idea what would come from it.

I didn’t know whether it would change him.

I joked that once he found out who he really was, he might not actually want me. But at least I’d have my answer.

I didn’t know whether it would change anything between us.

I didn’t even know whether change would bring us closer together or finally make it clear that we needed to let each other go.

Reflection

Looking back, I don’t think I was indecisive about what Denmark meant. I knew something fundamental had been broken. I was returning Stephen’s belongings, deleting photographs and beginning to imagine a life without him. Those were real attempts to separate. But ending a relationship practically and detaching from someone emotionally turned out to be very different things.

I had imagined that once something sufficiently terrible happened, love would somehow fall into line with reason. It didn’t. I could be furious with Stephen and still worry about him. I could believe we shouldn’t be together and still want to hear his voice. I could remove hundreds of photographs from my phone and then spend two hours staring at a screen filled with strangers because somewhere among them was a face I knew intimately. None of those things cancelled the others out.

The arguments made the separation even harder. Stephen and I were still trying to establish what had happened, what had been meant and whose understanding of a conversation was correct. I wanted certainty at precisely the point when everything felt uncertain. Perhaps that was part of why I kept engaging. It is difficult to put something down when you still feel you haven’t completely understood it.

Seeing Stephen in Westminster Hall captured the contradiction particularly clearly. There was no crisis for me to solve and no argument to untangle. I simply saw someone I loved doing something I knew mattered deeply to him, and my instinct was to give him something that would matter too. Capturing those photographs wasn’t a decision to take him back. It was an act of affection. I was beginning to learn that affection could survive even when a relationship perhaps shouldn’t.

That was what I meant when I said I would always keep the door ajar. At the time, I thought I was describing contact. With hindsight, I think I was also describing my emotional position. I was trying to leave without completely letting go. The programme gave that open door somewhere to lead. I didn’t know whether Stephen would change, whether we would find our way back to each other, or whether understanding himself might take him further away from me. I only knew that I wasn’t yet ready to close the door and stop wondering.

Trying To Understand Stephen

October 6, 2026October 6, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

For a few seconds after waking, there was nothing.

Then I remembered.

It hadn’t all been some awful dream. It was real.

And now Stephen and I had to make the long journey back to England with the unspoken knowledge that our relationship was over.

My aunt had already left for work. We had been asked to lock up behind us and meet her in the town centre to hand over the keys and say goodbye.

Stephen and I dragged our suitcases through the streets to the nearest bus stop. We stood there waiting, barely uttering a word to each other.

When the bus arrived, we found some seats and I stared out of the window.

The streets of Denmark passed by — a country that had always meant so much to me, filled with childhood memories and family and belonging. Just days earlier, I had been standing in these same streets believing I was here with the man I loved, surrounded by the people I loved.

Now I could barely comprehend what had happened.

Tears filled my eyes.

Stephen remained silent.

About half an hour later, the bus pulled into the terminal and there was my aunt waiting for us. She smiled when she saw me, but I could read the sympathy all over her face.

I hugged her and thanked her. I probably apologised too, although I can’t remember exactly what I said. Everything felt embarrassing somehow, even though I had done nothing wrong. I hated that something so private and devastating had unfolded in front of my family.

We went into the station and waited for the train to the airport. It was the same station I had been standing in twenty-four hours earlier, frantically trying to understand what Stephen and M might be doing.

Now there was nothing left to chase.

On the train, I stared numbly through the window as Denmark’s flat, beautiful landscape rushed past.

Stephen still said almost nothing.

At the airport we boarded our plane and took our seats beside one another. Those cramped airline seats suddenly felt unbearably intimate. I could feel Stephen’s shoulder and arm against mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

I tried to imagine that the man sitting beside me was a stranger.

Ironically, that was almost exactly how he felt.

Somewhere during that flight, the numbness began to wear off.

The reality of what had happened started pushing its way through, and I began to cry. I tried desperately to hide it, turning my head away and keeping as quiet as I could, but eventually I was sobbing silently and couldn’t stop.

Stephen knew.

He did nothing that was helpful.

I don’t remember much about landing in England. We retrieved my car and began the journey home. We must have spoken at some point, but I can’t remember a single thing we said.

I probably told him I was taking him back to his dad’s.

He didn’t argue.

I can’t even remember leaving him there.

Nor can I clearly remember arriving back at my own house.

There are pieces of that journey that seem to have disappeared completely from my memory. I only remember the feeling of it: an enormous emptiness, as though something that had occupied so much space inside me had suddenly been ripped out.

That evening, I told my sons the whole nightmarish story.

I expected them to be horrified.

Instead, they reacted almost as though they had been expecting something like this all along.

They had never trusted Stephen.

They were angry on my behalf and far less charitable about him than I had ever been. To them, he was a low-life. Someone who didn’t know who he was. A parasite who attached himself to other people’s energy.

It was difficult to hear.

Partly because I understood where they were coming from.

But also because their version of Stephen didn’t contain the man I knew.

They hadn’t experienced all the other parts of him. The funny, curious, affectionate, enthusiastic man who could make ordinary things exciting. The man I could talk to for hours. The man who had become woven through almost every part of my life.

Both versions seemed to exist.

And I still didn’t know what to do with that.

But understanding Stephen did not mean that everything between us suddenly became calmer.

If anything, those first few days after Denmark were extraordinarily volatile.

The following day, Stephen suddenly became intensely worried about M.

My parents and other members of my family were still in Denmark, and M was due to be around some of them. Stephen wanted to know exactly what I had told them about what had happened.

He was frightened that somebody might confront her or say something that would destabilise her.

At first, I could understand the concern. M was vulnerable. Whatever responsibility she might or might not have had for what happened between them, I didn’t want her harmed either.

But then Stephen’s messages escalated.

He told me that if anyone said anything that caused M to have a meltdown, he would “set off a ‘bomb’ in that family they will never recover from.”

I was stunned.

Only days earlier, Stephen had left me alone in my aunt’s house to follow M through the streets of Denmark.

He had refused my pleas to come back.

He had stayed at her flat.

Our relationship had ended because of what had happened between them.

And now, while I was still trying to understand the wreckage of it all, he was threatening some kind of retaliation against my family in order to protect her.

Something in me snapped.

“You are not welcome at my house or my place of work,” I told him. That morning I had told him his job was still there for him if he wanted it.

I said I would return all his belongings the following weekend and block him at midnight.

“Your choices are horrendous. I don’t want it anymore in my life.”

When he told me he was panicking and didn’t want anyone else hurt, I answered:

“You’re damaging me and it stops now.”

Stephen quickly retreated from what he had said.

He told me he would never actually do anything. Becoming threatening, he said, had been a protective reaction. He had panicked.

But by then I had had enough.

“I’ve given everything I had to give,” I told him.

“The buck stops here.”

What strikes me now is how quickly I could move between compassion and absolute certainty.

I could believe Stephen was unwell.

I could believe he was overwhelmed.

I could desperately want to understand what was happening inside him.

And I could still reach a point where I thought: No. This is unacceptable.

That evening, I meant it.

I told him I couldn’t keep living inside ambiguity, never knowing which things he said were real and which things I was somehow expected to understand he hadn’t meant.

I told him that life was a sequence of choices and hoped his next one would be to get help.

Stephen acknowledged that something was seriously wrong. He described himself as going through a major relapse and, significantly, told me that it wasn’t mine to fix.

It sounded like an ending.

Except endings between Stephen and me were rarely clean.

By the following day, we were talking again.

Stephen told me he had been tempted to check whether M had replied to a goodbye message he had sent her, but instead he had gone outside for a cigarette.

I encouraged him not to reopen contact. M had family and friends around her. She had support. Whatever had happened between them, Stephen did not need to be the person who rescued her.

Then Stephen became overwhelmed.

He told me he wished he could hold me.

A little later he said he had finally broken down completely.

Sobbing.

Wailing.

For all my anger the previous evening, hearing his pain still affected me.

“I’m here,” I told him.

“I’ve got so much love for you.”

That contradiction is difficult to explain unless you understand what those days were actually like.

I wasn’t simply forgiving Stephen.

I wasn’t simply leaving him either.

I was moving between grief, anger, love, self-protection and a relentless need to understand what had happened.

By that evening, I told him something that probably captured my position better than anything else could have.

“I don’t want to lose you. By that I mean contact.”

The following morning I was still overwhelmed by sadness and disbelief. I admitted that I worried about how badly Stephen coped with being alone — whether loneliness or boredom would send him searching for connection again, perhaps even back towards M. According to Stephen, M had begged him to return to Denmark.

He told me he had been tempted to contact her, but hadn’t.

He was trying.

And perhaps that was what kept catching me.

Whenever I reached the point of believing I had to walk away completely, I would see some small indication that Stephen understood there was a problem and wanted to do something differently.

Later that morning, an idea occurred to me.

“Would you ever consider attending the the programme I did ?”

“I would consider anything that may help,” he replied.

Around twenty years earlier, I had attended the programme myself.

For me, it had been transformative.

It centred around ideas such as integrity, authenticity, forgiveness and personal responsibility. I had carried parts of what I learned there with me ever since.

Stephen became interested almost immediately.

He asked questions. He looked at the course. He investigated the cost and accommodation and wanted to understand how it worked.

“If it helps me to get better at Life…… price doesn’t matter!” he told me.

Then, having compared it with things he had previously learned in therapeutic community, he described it as potentially the perfect “top-up” for what he had learned and forgotten.

Something about that gave me hope.

Not because I suddenly believed Denmark was forgiven.

It wasn’t.

Not because we had decided to get back together.

We hadn’t.

And Stephen wouldn’t actually attend the programme until the end of September.

But for the first time since Denmark, there was something other than another conversation between the two of us.

Something he could do.

Something that didn’t depend upon me finding the right explanation, asking the right question or somehow teaching Stephen how to understand himself.

Perhaps someone else could help him see what I couldn’t make him see.

And perhaps, eventually, that might tell us whether there was anything left between us worth saving.

Reflection

Looking back, I think this was the point when understanding Stephen became almost inseparable from loving him. Denmark had given me every reason to walk away, and at moments I was absolutely certain that I would. I could recognise when his behaviour was unacceptable. I could draw boundaries, return his belongings and tell him that I had nothing left to give. But understanding why he behaved as he did still mattered enormously to me. If there was an explanation for what had happened, some part of me needed to find it.

That didn’t mean I was excusing him. In fact, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by explanations that seemed to make sense of Stephen’s emotional state without ever accounting for his choices. He could be overwhelmed, frightened, dysregulated or desperate to protect someone, and I could have compassion for all of those things. But I was beginning to understand that intention and consequence were different. Stephen didn’t have to intend to devastate me for me to be devastated. He didn’t have to mean a threat for me to experience it as threatening. His internal reasons could explain his behaviour without making the behaviour acceptable.

The difficulty was that compassion kept reopening doors that anger tried to close. I could tell Stephen, with complete conviction, that the buck stopped here and then hear him sobbing the following day and instinctively reach towards him. Neither response was false. I was furious with him, and I loved him. I wanted to protect myself, and I couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning someone I believed was struggling. I didn’t want the relationship we had just had, but I wasn’t ready for Stephen himself to disappear from my life.

Perhaps that was why the programme gave me so much hope. For years, talking had been the way Stephen and I tried to solve things. I listened, questioned, challenged, reassured and searched with him for explanations. After Denmark, I was beginning to reach the limits of what those conversations could achieve. Suggesting the programme was an attempt to place some of that responsibility somewhere other than with me. Maybe Stephen needed something I couldn’t provide. Maybe understanding himself had to become his work rather than ours.

I can see now how powerful that possibility was for me. As long as Stephen could recognise that something was wrong and seemed willing to seek help, it was difficult to believe that all hope was gone. I wasn’t yet offering him another chance at the relationship. I was offering him a chance to understand himself. But somewhere underneath that distinction was a question I wasn’t ready to let go of: if Stephen could finally understand why he kept making these choices, perhaps one day he might learn to make different ones.

Stephen And The Denmark Event (Part III)

October 4, 2026October 4, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

He was distressed. He told me he had left M’s flat and was now wandering around, lost and not really knowing where he was.

I told him I was at the station. I had changed my flight and was waiting for a train to the airport.

He started crying.

He said he didn’t know what he was doing. He tried to explain that he had felt overwhelmed at the party. It wasn’t only M, he said. Apparently, my sister’s children had also been asking him to help them talk to their dad about some family problems. He had felt pulled in different directions, responsible for everyone, unable to cope with it all.

I couldn’t understand what any of that had to do with what had happened.

How did feeling overwhelmed explain why my cousin was lying in his arms?

How did it explain leaving the house with her?

How did it explain ignoring me while I begged him to come back?

We argued through tears, each of us trying to explain a completely different version of the same night.

And then he said he was going to find the nearest bridge and throw himself off it.

Everything in me changed instantly.

Minutes earlier, I had been leaving him.

I had changed my flight. Packed my suitcase. Walked through the quiet suburban streets as a new day dawned. I had finally removed myself from a situation that had become unbearable.

Now none of that mattered.

Whatever he had done to me, I couldn’t leave him wandering around Denmark talking about killing himself.

I told him to send me his location.

Then, at 6:40, a message appeared.

“Can you see where I am?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Why don’t you answer my calls.”

A few minutes later, another message arrived.

“I know it won’t mean much now, if anything….”

“I Love You and I am sorry.”

And there it was again.

Even after everything that had happened during the night, I loved him.

“I love you too,” I replied, “but there will always be times you find something else more important that you forget about considering me.”

By then, I had made my decision.

I wasn’t going to the airport.

Not yet.

I withdrew some cash from the ATM, hailed a taxi and put my suitcase in the boot. Within fifteen minutes, I was being driven away from the station and back towards the man I had spent the entire night begging to come back to me.

I found him standing beside a lake in a quiet suburb, smoking.

I got out of the taxi and looked at him.

He looked terrible.

So must I.

We were both exhausted, our faces swollen and our eyes full of tears. Seeing him again hurt in a way I find difficult to describe. This was still Stephen. The man I loved. The man I had travelled here with. The man who, only hours earlier, had been part of my family celebration.

And yet something enormous now stood between us.

We looked at each other and I think, for a moment, we both understood that.

I paid the driver, took my suitcase from the boot and went to him.

Then the questions came pouring out of me.

Why did you leave with her?

He said M had become upset and run off. He had chased after her to find out what was wrong. When she insisted on walking home, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone.

“But what about me?”

He said he hadn’t been able to think about me. All he could think about was M being distressed and needing to make sure she was safe.

I stared at him.

There had been so many other choices.

He could have shouted for my help.

He could have woken my aunt.

He could have called me immediately and my aunt could have picked them up.

He could have called M a taxi.

He could have persuaded her to come back inside.

He could have walked part of the way and then returned.

He could have answered his phone and listened when I told him that I was falling apart.

He could have done almost anything other than what he had done.

He said none of those things had occurred to him.

All he had been able to think about was looking after her.

I felt something twist inside me.

“What about my distress?”

He told me that when I threatened to end the relationship if he didn’t come back, it had made him angry.

It was almost impossible to comprehend.

I had been pleading because I was terrified of losing him.

And somehow my terror had pushed him further away.

I still needed to know what had happened once they reached her flat.

“Where did you sleep?”

He said he had got into M’s bed because the flat was so small. Surely there was a sofa?

My stomach dropped.

“What happened then?”

He told me that M had undressed down to her underwear and got into bed beside him.

I could feel the anger rising through me, but I needed to keep asking.

I needed to know.

“What happened next?”

He hesitated.

Then he told me he had tried to kiss her.

For a moment, I could barely process the words.

I had spent the entire night listening to him tell me that he was only walking her home because she was vulnerable. That he couldn’t abandon her. That he was looking after her.

Now he was telling me that once he got her home, he climbed into her bed and tried to kiss her. How is that behaviour protecting her?

“Why?”

His answer stunned me.

He said he was in bed with an attractive, almost naked woman. Wanting to kiss her had felt natural.

Then he said something else.

“You told me we were finished.”

I stared at him.

Was he seriously using that as a justification?

I had told him our relationship would be over if he didn’t come back. I hadn’t ended our relationship and released him into the night to do whatever he wanted. I had been distraught, pleading with him to turn around. I had said those words because nothing else was working. I was trying desperately to make him understand what was at stake.

I had wanted the possibility of losing me to stop him.

Instead, he seemed to have taken it as permission to continue.

“But you knew why I said that,” I told him. “You knew I was begging you to come back.”

There was no answer that could make it make sense.

And I couldn’t believe I was hearing any of this from the same man who had once told me that sharing a bed with another woman meant nothing. The same man who had insisted he could lie beside a woman without anything sexual happening because he had self-control.

I had believed him.

Now that old argument came crashing back into the present.

Another reassurance that suddenly meant nothing.

Another thing I had trusted because I wanted to believe him.

Still I kept asking.

Perhaps some part of me was waiting for the piece of the story that would hurt less.

Perhaps I wanted him to tell me that, at the final moment, he had remembered me.

That he had looked at M and thought of us.

That he had stopped because he loved me.

“Why did you leave?”

His answer took even that away.

M hadn’t wanted things to go any further than the kiss.

So he decided he should leave.

I felt sick.

He hadn’t left because he remembered me.

He hadn’t left because he suddenly understood what he was doing.

He hadn’t stopped himself.

She had stopped it.

I couldn’t understand how we had got here.

How had we travelled from the year we had just shared to this lake in Denmark, standing beside my suitcase and smoking cigarettes while Stephen explained to me how he had tried to kiss my cousin?

There were more questions. Hundreds of them.

But we were both exhausted beyond reason.

I messaged my aunt and told her where we were. I asked whether she could come and collect us.

The drive back was silent, the three of us sitting with the hollow, exhausted feeling that something terrible had happened and none of us knew what could possibly be said to make it any less real.

When we arrived, my aunt was quiet but kind to us both. There was so much that needed to be said, but none of us had the energy left to say it.

I changed my flight back to the original booking.

I wasn’t leaving after all.

Then Stephen and I went to the guest room.

Only hours earlier, I had walked away from that house believing I might never return to it with him.

Now we were back in the same bed.

I lay with my back to him.

I was so desperately sad.

Not angry anymore. Not frantic. Just broken-hearted.

I cried quietly into the pillow.

I wanted him to reach for me.

After everything that had happened, after everything I had heard, some part of me still wanted the comfort of the person who had caused the pain.

But he didn’t touch me.

He didn’t put an arm around me.

He didn’t tell me he was sorry.

He didn’t comfort me at all.

Eventually, exhaustion took us both and we slept for a couple of hours.

When we woke, M was trying to contact him.

That was when I discovered they had exchanged numbers.

Another question.

When?

Why?

At what point during that night had exchanging numbers seemed necessary?

I was furious that he took her call. He could barely speak to me without becoming overwhelmed, yet he was willing to speak to her.

We eventually got up and went outside.

We sat in my aunt’s garden, eating and drinking almost nothing, chain-smoking in near silence. Our eyes were swollen from crying. Everything around us looked exactly as it had the day before, and yet nothing felt remotely the same.

I asked him again.

Calmer this time.

I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t pleading.

I simply wanted to understand.

Why had he done this?

He told me about Scotland.

During his recent trip there, he said, he had stayed awake all night talking to a young man who was considering suicide. Stephen had spent hours trying to convince him not to take his own life. He said the experience had taken an enormous emotional toll on him and, because we had flown to Denmark almost immediately afterwards, he hadn’t had time to recover.

Then there had been the party.

My sister’s children had apparently been asking him to intervene with their father over family problems. I hadn’t considered how much it affected him at the time.

And then there was M.

Stephen believed she was a troubled young woman, possibly with the same diagnosis as him. He said people with similar difficulties could recognise something in each other and be drawn together.

I listened.

These were explanations.

They weren’t excuses.

And there was one question I couldn’t get past.

If he was emotionally and physically exhausted, why hadn’t he come to bed with me?

Why hadn’t he removed himself from everything that was overwhelming him and come to the person he had travelled to Denmark with?

Why hadn’t he come to me? The woman whom he loved. The woman who could support and comfort him.

He didn’t know.

That seemed to happen whenever I reached the question underneath all the other questions.

He could explain the circumstances.

He could explain M’s distress.

He could explain Scotland.

He could explain my sister’s children.

He could explain feeling overwhelmed.

But when I asked the question that mattered most to me—

Why did you choose to leave me and go with her?

—there was no answer.

M arrived that afternoon.

She wanted to speak to me alone, so the two of us walked out through the front of the house and sat on a bench opposite.

I remember surprisingly little of that conversation.

Perhaps by then I had simply reached the limit of what I could absorb.

I asked her what had happened at the flat. Her account seemed to corroborate Stephen’s. But, like him, whenever I asked questions that moved away from what happened and towards why, she became distressed and confused.

Before long, we were talking about her father’s suicide, her mental health and the way the family had never really spoken about what had happened.

I understood her pain.

And somehow, sitting on that bench opposite my aunt’s house less than a day after she had disappeared into the night with my partner, I found myself comforting her.

I was devastated.

I had barely slept.

My relationship felt as though it had been ripped open in front of my family.

And still, when someone else cried, something in me automatically moved towards their pain.

The rest of that day is hazy.

At some point Stephen spoke briefly to M alone, although they remained within my sight. I remember wondering what they were saying to each other.

Then she left.

As the day wore on, my sadness began turning back into anger.

I was angry with Stephen for allowing any of this to happen.

I was angry with both of them for behaving as though I had somehow disappeared from the equation.

My aunt naturally felt protective of M, but she was also angry with Stephen. Before long, the two of us were questioning him together.

He looked frightened.

Overwhelmed.

Confused.

Eventually I realised there was nowhere left for the conversation to go.

We had to stop.

My aunt prepared a beautiful dinner that evening, but none of us could really eat it.

We sat around the table with everything that had happened hanging silently between us.

The celebration was over.

The excitement of Denmark was gone.

The easy happiness Stephen and I had arrived with only days earlier felt impossibly far away.

Eventually we went to bed.

There were still so many questions I wanted answered.

There were still things about that night that didn’t make sense.

But there was nothing left in me with which to ask them.

We went to bed in silence.

The following morning, we would begin the journey back to England.

Together.

But something had happened in Denmark that neither of us could simply pack into a suitcase and leave behind.

Stephen And The Denmark Event (Part II)

October 3, 2026October 3, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

Panic hit me in the chest, hard and immediate, as though my body already knew what my mind was still refusing to understand.

I ran back inside for my phone.

“Where are you?”

For seven minutes, there was no answer.

Then Stephen replied.

“I’m walking her home.”

I stared at the message.

He had left my aunt’s house with M without even telling me.

“You didn’t think to say anything to me?”

“Stephen. I need to talk to you.”

“It’s important.”

I tried to call him several times.

Finally, I got through.

He told me M had become upset and run off. He had followed her and caught up with her. He had tried to persuade her to stay at her mum’s, but she was determined to walk home.

So he was walking her.

I told him this was ridiculous.

Come back.

Come back now.

He said he couldn’t leave her walking alone at night.

I couldn’t understand what I was hearing.

I was his partner.

I was alone in a foreign country, in my aunt’s house, devastated by something I had just witnessed between him and another woman.

And he was explaining to me why she needed him.

I needed him.

I told him that if he cared about me, he needed to turn around and come back.

He refused.

I became more upset, more frightened and more desperate to somehow reverse what was happening before whatever line was being crossed became impossible to uncross.

I was bargaining with him.

Pleading with him.

Trying to make him understand the enormity of what he was doing.

Just come back.

Please.

Come back now.

Eventually, I became desperate enough to give him an ultimatum.

“If you don’t come back now, our relationship is over.”

I didn’t say it because I wanted our relationship to end.

I said it because I needed those words to stop him.

I needed the possibility of losing me to be enough.

It wasn’t.

The call ended.

“You’ve made your priorities loud and clear,” I wrote.

“I mean so little to you.”

“I guess it’s over.”

“You are so cruel.”

“It will be hours until you’re back and leave me here suffering.”

“Leaving me guessing. Wondering.”

“I just can’t believe this.”

“Who the hell are you?”

For thirteen minutes, there was nothing.

Then Stephen finally replied.

“I thought you had already made up your mind.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” I wrote.

“So now you won’t tell me where you’re going or talk to me.”

“Was trying to persuade her to stay at her moms.”

“She wanted to walk home.”

“I am walking her home.”

“Please answer the phone,” I wrote.

“Why don’t you care about how I feel?”

“This is killing me.”

His response came back.

“You trashed tonight.”

I didn’t even know what that meant anymore.

“So you don’t want to talk to me anymore?”

Then I asked the question that frightened me most.

“Are you staying over there and not coming back?”

No answer.

Everything was suddenly beyond my control.

That’s when I unravelled.

I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t reason with him. I couldn’t persuade him to come back. I didn’t know exactly where he was, what he was doing or whether I would see him again that night.

Only hours earlier I had been at my grandmother’s party with the man I loved, surrounded by my family.

Now he had disappeared into the night with my cousin.

I felt more alone than I can remember ever feeling.

I called my eldest son.

I told him what was happening.

He listened and then told me he wasn’t surprised.

He had never trusted Stephen.

I checked on my aunt, perhaps hoping absurdly that someone older and wiser might wake up and somehow take control of this nightmare.

She was fast asleep, snoring loudly.

And I was alone again.

I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I was furious.

Terrified.

Humiliated.

Heartbroken.

But more than anything, I was in disbelief.

This couldn’t actually be happening.

Not after the year we’d just had.

Not after everything we had survived.

Not after I had forgiven him.

Not after I had given him another chance.

Not here.

Not with my cousin.

Eventually, the only thing I could think to do was leave.

I asked Stephen whether he wanted me to change my flight and go home that day.

There was no answer.

“Yes or no?”

Still nothing.

Eventually, I made the decision myself.

“I’m a broken woman and I can’t be here any longer than I have to,” I wrote to him.

A minute later:

“I’m leaving for Copenhagen first thing. This is the worse day of my life.”

Our flight home was supposed to be the following day, but I couldn’t imagine remaining there waiting for Stephen to return. I changed my flight, packed my suitcase and sent my aunt a message explaining what had happened.

Then, while it was still dark, I left her house.

I began walking towards town, pulling my suitcase behind me.

There is something very strange about walking alone through an unfamiliar place in the hours before dawn while your entire life seems to be collapsing somewhere behind you.

At 4:20 in the morning, my phone lit up.

Stephen.

“Tess, are you awake?”

I looked at the message.

I was already gone.

“I’m walking to town.”

Then we spoke.

He told me he was at M’s.

I told him to get in a taxi and come back.

He said he couldn’t. He was too tired. He was going to stay at M’s for the rest of the night.

I couldn’t understand what I was hearing.

He could have called a taxi and come back. I hadn’t slept either. I wasn’t asking him for anything complicated.

I just wanted him to come back.

“Where are you going to sleep?” I asked. “What’s M doing?”

He said he didn’t know. The flat was very small. M was in the toilet.

By then, I was pleading.

“Please, Stephen. Just get a taxi and come back. Please come back now.”

For the last time, I asked him to choose to come back to me.

His answer was firm.

“No.”

I was walking through Denmark in the early hours of the morning with nothing but my own thoughts for company.

I replayed everything.

The party.

The way Stephen had looked at M.

His attention towards her.

Her lying in his arms.

His face when I caught them.

My walking away.

His not following.

The empty conservatory.

The garden gate.

The unanswered calls.

Again and again I asked myself what I could have done differently.

Why hadn’t I stayed in the conservatory?

Why hadn’t I insisted he come to bed?

Why had I left them alone?

Why hadn’t I stopped him?

There was a terrible desperation in trying to find the precise moment when I might have changed the outcome.

And beneath all those questions was another one I simply couldn’t make sense of.

Why was Stephen willing to throw us away for a woman he had barely met?

Not just any woman.

My cousin.

After everything I had done to understand him, forgive him and believe in him, how could I possibly matter so little in that moment?

As the sun began to rise, I called my mum and dad.

I told them what had happened.

They were devastated for me and understood immediately why I needed to leave.

By the time I reached the station, daylight had arrived.

I stood there with my suitcase waiting for the train that would take me to the airport, utterly exhausted but far too distressed to feel tired.

The enormity of the night was beginning to sink in.

A year earlier, I had asked Stephen to leave my home because I believed that loving him did not mean protecting him from the consequences of his behaviour. I had given him another chance because I genuinely believed people could learn, grow and change.

And for almost a year, everything I saw seemed to tell me I had been right.

The alarm bells had become quieter.

And when they did sound, I had learned to question them.

Was I seeing something real, or was I allowing what had happened before to contaminate what was happening now?

I thought that was what learning to trust looked like.

Now I was standing alone on a railway platform in Denmark while the man I loved was somewhere else with my cousin.

Then, suddenly, my phone rang.

It was Stephen.

To be continued…

Stephen And The Bedsit

September 12, 2026September 12, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

As Stephen’s unhappiness with living with his father continued, he began hinting more frequently about living with me.

I reminded him that he had told me about moving in with his former girlfriend very quickly. His story was surprisingly similar to what was now happening between us. He had been in a very difficult place mentally, and she had driven to collect him and brought him back to her home. Before long, he had effectively moved in.

I could see the temptation for Stephen to repeat that pattern with me.

So I set a boundary.

I told him that he couldn’t move into my home until he had found a job.

He accepted that, but he was becoming increasingly desperate to get away from his father’s house. Instead, he arranged to rent a bedsit.

I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad idea. In fact, I thought it might be good for him. It would give him some independence, some privacy and a place of his own while he worked out what he wanted to do next.

He put some effort into making it feel like home. He bought things he needed to cook and some nicer touches to make the little room more comfortable.

I was pleased for him.

The first time I visited, we were both excited about having somewhere of our own to spend time together. We joked that we needed to christen the new place.

What followed was an unexpectedly intense and intimate experience, and I remember leaving with a real glow of happiness.

I felt incredibly close to Stephen.

But there was something else I was carrying home with me.

I had pretended to have reached a level of sexual pleasure that I hadn’t quite reached.

It was a tiny lie, but it bothered me enormously.

The following day, I was still thinking about it at work. I felt guilty. I was falling deeply in love with this man, and the last thing I wanted was to start our relationship by hiding things from him. I didn’t want to create a pattern where I pretended everything was fine when it wasn’t.

So I decided to tell him.

I imagined we’d laugh about it.

Perhaps he’d tease me.

Perhaps we’d simply talk about it and move on.

Instead, his reaction was completely disproportionate to what I had expected.

He became extremely upset.

He compared me to his ex-wife and spoke at length about how much her lying had hurt him. He seemed to experience my admission as though I had deliberately deceived him, rather than what it was: something I had admitted to less than twenty-four hours later because I didn’t want to be dishonest with him.

I tried to explain.

I tried to reassure him.

Nothing seemed to help.

I was shocked by the intensity of his response and frightened that something so small might somehow cost me the relationship.

I went home from work that evening feeling ashamed and deeply upset.

Then things became much more serious.

Later that night, Stephen had returned to his father’s house and called me.

He was in an awful state.

He was crying, distressed and increasingly paranoid, and he had been drinking. I was so worried about him that I got in the car and went to collect him.

I brought him back to mine.

I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed, confused and barely coherent. He seemed completely overwhelmed by whatever was happening inside his head.

I didn’t know what to do.

Until then, I had known that Stephen had mental health difficulties. I knew about his EUPD and I knew about his traumatic childhood.

But this felt different.

This was the first time I began to understand that his difficulties could be much more serious than I had appreciated.

There wasn’t much I could do except stay with him, apologise for upsetting him and try to comfort him until eventually he slept.

Thankfully, the episode passed.

We got through it.

And from that point onwards, I never deliberately lied to Stephen again throughout the rest of our relationship.

The bedsit itself, however, soon became another source of difficulty.

Stephen moved in just as the UK entered its third national lockdown in January 2021. Restrictions meant that there was very little for him to do, and he quickly found the isolation difficult.

He struggled with the empty days and lonely nights.

He would try to cook, but often ended up bringing takeaway food back instead. He didn’t seem to know how to fill his time or settle into living alone.

I tried to help.

Sometimes I stayed over, even when I had work the next day, because I knew how difficult he was finding the loneliness. We still spent some weekends together when he didn’t have his sons, and I suggested different things he might do to occupy himself.

But nothing seemed to make much difference.

Within only a couple of weeks, I noticed that he was spending more and more time back at his father’s house.

When he had his sons, his father would often collect him on a Thursday, and Stephen wouldn’t return to the bedsit until the following Tuesday.

By the end of this period, my impression was that he was spending only two or three nights a week there, although I know Stephen may remember this differently.

I could see that the independence I had hoped the bedsit would give him wasn’t working out quite as I had imagined.

Then, sometime in March, Stephen told me he wanted to visit his ex-girlfriend to collect belongings he had left behind.

He planned to stay for two nights.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea.

Why did he need to stay for two nights?

Why couldn’t he collect his things and come home?

And why was he relying on her rather than asking me?

But I didn’t want to become the jealous or difficult girlfriend. I’d started this relationship wanting to be trusting and easy-going, and I wanted to maintain that part of myself.

So I didn’t make too much of it.

When the day came for his ex-girlfriend to collect him from the bedsit, I asked him for just one thing.

One promise.

“Just please don’t share the bed with her.”

He reassured me immediately.

“No way. I’ll be sleeping on the sofa.”

I believed him.

Meeting Stephen For The First Time

September 6, 2026September 6, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

It’s the day after Boxing Day, 2020.

I’m back home after spending a lovely, quiet Christmas with my parents, and now I’m getting ready to meet Stephen for the first time.

I’ve chosen my favourite dress, added some accessories and put on a little make-up. I’ve made an effort, but I’ve stayed true to myself. I feel pretty, confident and ready to meet this new man who has somehow become such a significant part of my thoughts in such a short space of time.

I make the fifteen-minute drive to the park where we’ve arranged to meet.

I’ve never been there before, although I’ve studied the location on Google Maps so I know roughly where I’m going. The weather is good. It’s cold, but dry, and the sun is shining.

I enter the park through the gate opposite the one Stephen will use and make my way down towards the lake. According to our plan, I’ll walk anti-clockwise and he’ll walk clockwise, so we’ll eventually meet somewhere along the path.

I send him a quick message to let him know I’ve started.

And then I set off.

I’m excited, but underneath the excitement is a little apprehension. This is the moment when everything we’ve imagined through our messages has to become real.

I walk briskly around the lake, wondering when I’ll see him.

The minutes seem to stretch.

I’ve already made my way around half the lake and there’s still no sign of him. I approach a wooded section and think, It must be soon.

I’m also slightly conscious that I’m about to leave the open space around the lake and enter the trees.

Then, just seconds after I walk beneath the canopy, I see a man approaching me.

He looks like Stephen.

This looks like him.

As we get closer, I’m certain.

He ambles towards me while I’m striding towards him, and my first thought is that he’s good-looking — just as good-looking as I had imagined from his photographs.

He’s wearing a blue shirt printed with fern leaves, blue jeans, trainers and a classic tweed blazer. Across his body is a small man’s bag.

I notice his clothes immediately.

He’s clearly given some thought to what he’s wearing, but there’s also something carefree about the combination, as though he’s thrown everything together without worrying too much about whether it all matches.

I like it.

He looks effortlessly cool.

Then his face lights up when he sees me.

He smiles, and almost immediately he makes an involuntary little growling sound as he looks me up and down.

I’m slightly disarmed by the reaction.

It’s intense, but it also seems completely spontaneous, so I take it as a compliment.

He finds me attractive.

Very attractive.

We hug and exchange a quick kiss before continuing in the direction he’d just come from.

Almost immediately, he takes my hand.

As we walk through the woods, he keeps looking me up and down. I’m no stranger to a man checking me out, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. There’s a very obvious physical attraction between us, and although it makes me feel slightly self-conscious, I also have to admit that I love being looked at like that.

After days of talking to someone through a screen, there is something thrilling about suddenly being wanted by the person standing beside me.

Eventually, we leave the woods and make our way back towards the lake, where we find a bench.

Stephen rolls a cigarette.

I remember that we both described ourselves as occasional smokers on our dating profiles, so I’m slightly surprised that he wants to smoke so soon.

I don’t mind particularly, but I do wonder whether his idea of “occasional” might be rather different from mine.

We talk about how I look.

He tells me again how beautiful I am, that I look fit and that I’m quite small. He tells me he’s used to being with bigger women.

I laugh and tell him that I don’t consider myself particularly fit, although I appreciate that he sees me that way.

The conversation continues easily.

We’re already talking about what we might do next, and I suggest that we drive to the village where I work. I can take him for a walk along the canal and show him the lock, as well as pointing out the large house where I work every day.

It’s a simple suggestion, but neither of us seems particularly keen for the date to end.

We make the short drive and park up.

Before we get out of the car, Stephen hands me two wrapped presents.

I’m completely taken aback.

I haven’t brought him anything.

The presents have handmade labels attached to them, with words written on them that seem surprisingly intimate and romantic considering we’ve only just met.

I don’t quite know what to make of it.

The first present is a bottle of Hendrick’s gin. That makes sense because I’d mentioned during our conversations how much I like it.

The second is a DVD of The Last of the Mohicans.

Stephen knows I haven’t seen it, but it’s one of his favourite films.

They’re thoughtful gifts, but the labels make me feel a little uncomfortable. The words seem to suggest that we’re further along in our relationship than we actually are.

I say something that makes him a little embarrassed.

He shyly asks for one of the labels back, wanting to take it away and destroy it.

Before he can, I grab it.

“I’ll keep it,” I tell him.

And I do.

We leave the car and walk along the canal.

The conversation continues easily. We’re getting on remarkably well, and the chemistry that had existed through our messages is very much there in person.

There is laughter, attraction and an increasing sense that neither of us is quite ready for the afternoon to end.

We sit on another bench, and Stephen lights another cigarette.

He’s also becoming increasingly physical with me, finding reasons to touch me and making it very clear that he’s attracted to me.

I enjoy being desired.

After all the uncertainty about whether our chemistry would translate from the screen into real life, there is no question now.

It has.

Eventually, we get back into the car and drive to a disused cinema car park.

There, we fool around.

For a moment, I feel like a teenager again — excited, giddy and swept up in the thrill of something completely new.

When the afternoon finally comes to an end, I drive Stephen home.

Neither of us seems quite ready to say goodbye.

So we make arrangements for me to come back later that evening.

Our first date isn’t over yet.

Getting To Know Stephen

September 2, 2026September 6, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

Christmas Eve 2020 was the busiest day of my working year. Normally, it would have been impossible to give anything else much attention, with important tasks to complete and an impossible long list of things that needed doing before Christmas could properly begin.

But somehow, Stephen and I managed to keep talking all day.

Messages flew back and forth between us whenever I had a spare moment. Each one seemed to open another door into the other’s life, and beneath the practicalities of my busy day, we were quietly assessing the chemistry between us.

There was definitely a spark.

Our communication seemed to work effortlessly. We shared a similar sense of humour and enjoyed playing with ideas, and the more we talked, the more common ground we discovered. We were beginning to recognise similarities in our pasts, but perhaps more excitingly, we were discovering that some of our hopes for the future weren’t so different either.

It was during those conversations that I learned my first surprising fact about Stephen.

He wasn’t actually a property developer.

He confessed that he had listed it on his dating profile because, although property development was something he aspired to, it sounded considerably better than putting ‘unemployed’ on his profile.

It was, technically, a lie.

It raised an eyebrow.

But I also appreciated that he had told me himself, rather than allowing me to continue believing something that wasn’t true. He was remarkably open about other aspects of his life, and I could understand the embarrassment behind wanting to present yourself in a better light when entering the dating world. I decided not to make too much of it.

There were more important things I was discovering about him.

Stephen spoke warmly about his previous girlfriend, describing her as a lovely and kind woman but explaining that, despite those qualities, he couldn’t see a future with her.

I remember finding that refreshing.

There was something reassuring about hearing a man speak kindly about an ex-partner rather than dismissing her or turning her into the villain of his story. It suggested a degree of maturity and compassion that I found attractive.

Then Stephen told me something else.

He had EUPD — Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.

He suggested that it had developed as a consequence of something traumatic during his childhood, although he didn’t tell me what had happened. I didn’t push him. We’d only known each other for a day, and there were some things that I felt belonged to a later conversation, if and when we got to know each other properly.

I listened carefully, though.

I was aware enough to understand that entering a relationship with someone who had a significant mental health diagnosis could bring its own complexities. I wondered what it might mean for him, and potentially for me, if our relationship developed.

But at that point, what stood out more strongly than the diagnosis was his apparent openness about it.

He seemed self-aware. He wasn’t hiding it or pretending that everything in his life had always been straightforward. There was something quite compelling about that honesty.

I suspected that whatever had happened in his childhood had been serious, possibly involving abuse, but I didn’t need to know everything immediately.

There was plenty about Stephen that I found fascinating already.

My curiosity about him was stronger than my reservations.

We talked about the sort of lives we imagined having one day. Stephen dreamed of owning some woodland and creating a self-sufficient life for himself. I had rather more modest ambitions.

I simply wanted a lovely home to come back to after a day’s work.

Somewhere I could feel safe. Somewhere I could feel secure. Somewhere I could build a happy life.

When we talked about it, neither dream seemed incompatible with the other.

In fact, they seemed as though they might fit surprisingly well.

It was far too soon to be imagining a future with a man I’d met on a dating app only the day before, and I was perfectly aware of that.

But it was difficult not to entertain the possibility.

Something exciting and, perhaps, surprisingly realistic seemed to be taking shape.

That evening, I think we had our first telephone conversation.

Until then, Stephen had existed as words on a screen and a handful of photographs. Suddenly, there was a voice attached to him.

I loved it instantly.

It was quite low and textured, with a slightly silky quality that I found incredibly attractive. There was something almost contradictory about the way he spoke — occasionally quite polished and almost posh, then suddenly dropping into much more ordinary, familiar pronunciations.

And when I made him laugh, he would giggle.

Not a restrained, self-conscious laugh, but something much more childlike and spontaneous.

I found it adorable.

Hearing his voice made the attraction I’d already felt through our messages grow stronger. There was something about Stephen that seemed to combine confidence with an almost boyish naivety, and I found the combination irresistible.

It was Christmas Eve.

The timing somehow made everything feel even more exciting. There was something wonderfully surreal about being on the threshold of Christmas, surrounded by all the usual preparations, while at the same time beginning something completely unexpected with a man I’d only just met.

I was already pretty hooked.

I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to see where this extraordinary conversation might lead.

But I also knew that the next couple of days would probably put everything temporarily on hold.

Christmas was here.

For the moment, I had to put my phone down, finish my work and get on with the festivities.

I had no idea then that the conversation I’d started just a few days earlier would become the beginning of a relationship that would change my life.

For now, it was simply Christmas Eve, and I was excited about a man I had only just met.

The Beginning (REFLECTION)

September 1, 2026September 6, 2026 ~ m0dernm0nkey ~ Leave a comment

When I think about the woman who opened that message now, I don’t think of her as vulnerable in the way the word is often used. I wasn’t broken, desperate or searching for somebody to rescue me. I had already survived the ending of a long relationship and, although I was lonely, I was looking forward.

I wanted love again.

Perhaps more importantly, I still believed I was good at it.

I thought patience was one of my strengths. I was proud of my capacity to understand another person, to forgive mistakes, to work through difficulties rather than walking away from them. Fifteen years in a mostly loving relationship had taught me that lasting love wasn’t something that simply happened to you. It required compromise, generosity and the willingness to remain curious about another person’s experience.

Those were qualities I valued in myself.

I couldn’t have known then that our greatest strengths can become complicated things when they meet the wrong circumstances. Patience can sometimes keep us waiting long after something has begun to hurt. Empathy can encourage us to search for explanations when perhaps we should be looking more closely at behaviour. Forgiveness can be beautiful, but without change on the other side of it, it can become permission to try again.

I knew none of that when Stephen appeared on my screen.

I chose to call him by his full name because he just didn’t seem like a Steve to me

What I did know was that I wanted something different from what I had just left behind. I wanted companionship and excitement, but I also wanted security. I wanted someone settled. Someone who knew what he wanted. Someone with whom I wouldn’t have to struggle quite so hard to build an ordinary life.

And before Stephen had written a single word to me, I had already begun constructing a version of him.

It wasn’t foolish. We all do it.

A handful of photographs and a dating profile can only provide fragments, so the mind supplies the rest. I saw intelligence, humour and adventure. I saw someone attractive and interesting. I saw a property developer and translated that into independence and stability. I imagined yoga and healthy food from photographs that had never actually promised me either.

Psychologists sometimes talk about projection in much more complicated circumstances, but there is an ordinary version of it too. When information is incomplete, we fill the spaces with our own expectations, preferences and hopes.

Stephen was doing exactly the same thing with me.

I sometimes wonder what he imagined when he looked at my photographs.

What did he think I might offer him?

Perhaps he simply thought I was attractive and interesting. Perhaps, after his own experiences, he was lonely too. Perhaps there was something about my warmth or enthusiasm that felt particularly inviting. Perhaps neither of us was doing anything more psychologically interesting than two single people becoming unexpectedly excited about each other.

I don’t want hindsight to steal that possibility from us.

Because something genuine happened during those first conversations. Whatever difficulties came later, I don’t believe the connection I felt existed only in my imagination. We were fascinated by each other. We made each other laugh. We wanted to know more.

And there is something intoxicating about being wanted by somebody you had already decided was unlikely to want you.

Only days earlier, dating had left me wondering whether I was attractive enough, interesting enough, perhaps simply enough. Then the man I considered least likely to respond wasn’t merely interested; he seemed exceptionally interested.

Of course that affected me.

His attention didn’t manufacture my attraction to him, but it amplified it. After the ambiguity and disappearing acts of the men before him, Stephen’s enthusiasm felt wonderfully uncomplicated.

Here was someone who wasn’t making me guess.

Or so I thought.

Looking back, I’m interested in how quickly we began exchanging pieces of ourselves. There is an intimacy peculiar to meeting online: two strangers can reveal things through a screen that might take considerably longer to emerge across a table. By the time you finally stand in front of each other, you can feel as though you’re meeting somebody you already know.

But knowing about someone and knowing them are very different things.

At that point, neither Stephen nor I could possibly know who the other would become inside a relationship. We knew the stories we told about ourselves. We knew what we hoped for. We knew what attracted us.

Everything else would have to reveal itself slowly.

There is a temptation, knowing what I know now, to return to those first messages searching for clues — to identify the moment when I should have known better.

I don’t want to tell the story that way.

There was no reason for the woman sitting with her phone on 23 December 2020 to know where any of this was going.

She had met an interesting man.

He seemed equally interested in her.

And she was excited.

The things that would eventually become difficult to understand had not happened yet.

For now, there were simply two strangers on opposite sides of a screen, each imagining the person they might have found.

And neither of us yet knew how much those imaginings would matter.