The inside of my house is a complete mess. The boxes I have opened to find the knives are stacked up against the other boxes. I start to take the stuff out and make a couple of trips to the skip with empty boxes, but I’m tired. Then I suddenly remember that I have no bed. No mattress, anyway.

I go upstairs and survey the damage. As well as what’s left of the the ripped-up pillows and mattress, and the dresses and tiaras, the tiaras’ metal has ricocheted off the back of my bedroom door. The beautiful wood is damaged. I run my fingers over the rough welds. In a previous drunken temper I’d scrawled on the walls in red lipstick that I deserve everything I got and didn’t I know that you never loved me?

It seems like it was someone else who did that now – someone desperate – whereas now I’ve changed direction and I’m not craving the in-between so much. But how appropriate those words were. These words decorate the very room where I realised that you didn’t love me. I’d been interviewing people for my Ph.D. studies. It was about relationships. Most of the women I interviewed had talked about their husbands or boyfriends like they were friends. Many described them as their best friends and the person they trusted the most. It had rankled. One of the questions in the study was: how has your relationship changed after five years?

All but one of the women told me that their relationship had improved. Particularly their sex lives – less often but better. The one quality that stood out in their relationship was laughter. They laughed with their partners. I didn’t laugh with you. We went out to restaurants and you talked about your work. I talked about my work. We discussed the kids. Sometimes the past.

We never talked about sex. It was as if it was a taboo subject between us. Even when we were doing it we didn’t speak to each other, did we? It was a performance. Worse, it had always been that way. No laughter. No fun. It was as if the kids, the house and I were just a container that you could step into every so often for clean clothes and respectability.

I suppose I knew deep down that you didn’t love me. After the study, it nagged at me more and more every day. I watched other people, couples, wearing wedding rings. I sat in cafés in shopping centres in town and watched how people reacted to each other. Was there laughter? Was there touching? Listening? Yes. Yes, yes, yes.