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I want to feel calm. I want a signature scent. I want to be the kind of woman who whips up a galette. I want to enjoy stretching. I want to mean it when I tell someone, ‘no worries’. I want to be good at sports or at least a good sport. I want a partner who thinks my best qualities are the Real Me …

She smiled happily. ‘I know, right? I’m like an empath. I adjust to the emotional output of people around me, even if it’s all goth and intense like yours.’

‘I’m wearing Reformation,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you are exuding a gothic energy.’

Telling this story, to myself or others, gave me a painful twinge, like snapping my feelings with a rubber band. Yet I repeated it often, loving how clearly it cast our roles: him the asshole, me the long-suffering wife. Not all our arguments were so clear-cut.

The therapist opened our session by explaining the meaning of the word ‘liminal’ for almost ten minutes. I couldn’t tell if she felt this was important information for me to have – a legal separation being, fair enough, a definitively liminal period in one’s life – or if she was stalling for time, …

Though they’d now been separated longer than I’d known them together, I was often struck by the similarity of my parents’ advice, how many values and first instincts and turns of phrase they still shared. They had been together thirteen years, after all. The love had gone away, by my calculation, s…