At one point, I needed some air and went outside the Hall on Main Street – this was definitely not a City wedding – to join the smokers, and got chatting to another friend, called Charlene. ‘God, did you see how he just nearly fell down Orla’s cleavage?’ Charlene said. ‘Virginia is so gorgeous, what’s she doing stuck with him?’ We sniggered to each other but of course we knew, and there was envy and hypocrisy behind our sniggers. Charlene was in a suit, Next or Hennes I was guessing. I was wearing a purple dress from M & S that I was hoping didn’t look like a purple dress from M & S. We would both have loved a wardrobe that matched our youth, our looks, but neither of us could afford it – we would have put up with Alex, temporarily at least, in return for Virginia’s silk shift, those earrings that looked as though they were selected casually at the last minute from a wooden box. And yes, in public Alex came over as a bit of an arse but maybe behind closed doors he was perfectly charming. Who knew?

It’s a deal we all make, I remember thinking. What kind of life will I live with this person? All relationships are a balancing act, after all, each individual perched on either end of a seesaw. Your husband snores. Your wife leaves wet towels on the floor. But he brings you tea in bed every morning. She’s a terrific cook. All unions, all associations, every partnership – they all have their benefits and their drawbacks, their subscription fees.

*

When I met Matty at the entrance to the Minor Injuries Unit of the City Care Centre, with its snarling security guard and cautionary cat, I was thirty-five and he was thirty-one. I was a teacher, he a doctor. It turned out we both liked going to the cinema and Italian food; neither of us had been to Venice and we really wanted to go. We both thought that people who talked about their dairy or wheat intolerances were boring. Neither of us was on Facebook – him to avoid his patients and me to avoid my students – and we swapped notes on how friends gave us a hard time about this and how they didn’t understand. I loved the strands of white hair at his left temple, a thin badger-streak against his dark hair; he said he couldn’t decide if my eyes were green or brown and he needed to look at them a lot more before he worked it out. Here is the paradox of sexual attraction: how universal are our thoughts, just at the point that we regard them as particular.