It’s a subject that has, on a certain level, taken over her life … and has caused an immense rift between us. I am not fanatically pro-choice. As a Catholic I would try to argue someone out of ending a pregnancy. But abortion is still legal in this country – and as I am someone who believes the law is the law I certainly wouldn’t advocate violent protests or worse against the men and women who carry out this procedure. Agnieska, on the other hand, has become something of a radicalized fanatic when it comes to being what she and her fellow militants call being ‘pro-life’ … and trust me it gives me no pleasure to call my wife a fanatic.

When we first got together Agnieska was hardly an extremist. Yes, she too had been raised a serious Catholic – but was, like me, flexible when it came to many of the Church’s more inflexible teachings. She privately questioned the chastity vow that priests and nuns had to take, wondering if it went against ‘basic human nature’. Though she only agreed to start sleeping with me when it was clear we were ‘serious’ about marriage and a future family, she did go on the pill once we began to fall into bed on a very regular and happy basis. She knew I was a lot more ambivalent about the Church than she was, but she never pushed me to rekindle my faith. We were young. We were happy together. If I wanted to sleep in most Sundays early on in our marriage she didn’t insist that I was at her side taking Communion together … though she did ask that I show up at Mass once a month just to keep up the ‘usual appearances’ in our community.

We grew up a few streets from each other. She was two years my junior, so we knew nothing of each other at school. And her parents – tough-assed emigrants from Gdansk – took Mass at an all-in-Polish church deep in the Valley. As such we didn’t meet cute while preparing for our First Communion. That came many years later when I was in my late twenties. The circumstances were anything but romantic – as I opened my mouth in a dentist’s office and Agnieska reached inside with a sharp instrument to scrape the plaque off my teeth. Her first words to me – after the usual ‘Good morning’ and ‘When did I have my last cleaning?’ – were:

‘You’re not flossing your teeth, are you?’