I’ve never even been on holiday alone before, never mind on honeymoon. Alone. To the most romantic place on earth. Now that I’m here, with my bags packed, waiting to fly off on my own, I do wonder whether or not this is a good idea… but I can’t exactly go home, can I? Not when I’m not ready to face Daniel yet.

5

Day 2

I was a bloody good girlfriend/fiancée. It might sound big-headed of me to say as much, but I was.

I have been loyal to Daniel since the day we met. I haven’t cheated on him – I haven’t even been tempted. I’ve done everything I possibly could for him, even turning myself into a regular Cinderella, taking care of all the cooking and the cleaning. Not because he made me, or even expected me to, to begin with, but because he had the busy office job with the early starts and the fixed hours, and I worked from home. I could do my work at any time. I could take breaks to empty the washing machine or clean the windows whenever I wanted to. If I had work that needed doing, I could do it whenever, whether it was during the day or at night, after Daniel went to sleep. And let me tell you something, while I might have been Cinderella, that Disney shit is absolutely false: cute little critters do not come in and help you tidy. In fact, since we moved to the suburbs, the closest thing we’ve had was a fox in the kitchen, and it did the opposite of tidy up.

So I’m sort of like a housewife, but one with a full-time job. Except, when you work from home, even if people know you work from home they still don’t actually think you do any work at all. They think you sit around, watching TV, drinking tea, or that you go out and shop and get your nails done. Sometimes, people are actually baffled that my house could possibly have a thing out of place, because I just have so much free time in it, apparently. As though books just write themselves.

Perhaps it’s my age, gender, occupation and very specific personal taste, but I think Carrie Bradshaw has a lot to answer for. Throughout the entire Sex and the City TV and movie universe, she lived the high life on a writer’s wage, while seemingly never really putting all that much time into it. I used to have a weekly column in the local newspaper, and it pretty much allowed me to buy a takeaway a week. Her local area might be larger, but she’s enjoying a lot more than a Deliveroo in her life. Perhaps a Mr Big is the key – when I asked a fellow writer when I was first starting out if she had any advice for me, she simply told me to ‘marry well’. But sadly, I don’t have a Mr Big, all I have is a Mr Big Fucking Liar, and I don’t even technically have him any more.