When I told my old boss I was getting divorced, she said: “Well, you did get married in a very desultory way.” I puzzled over the comment for a long time, but she had hit on something. I was missing joy, excitement, fun. It’s good to be sensible when you are investing your pension, but if desultory becomes your permanent mood? It seems obvious now, and I don’t blame my husband for it. In the years since my divorce, I have lighted on that blossomy, foamy feeling more often. I have found it more easily outside the sort of relationship where you share a bank account, thrash out Christmas plans, and discuss what’s for dinner. (That daily discussion about dinner was one of the things I hated most about being married, as I hadn’t yet found my own way of enjoying cooking and planning meals, let alone doing it jointly. It had been a question my mother asked me, and I was often stumped for an answer as a child: I knew we couldn’t have pizza every night.) With men who aren’t my husband, or who don’t want to be, I can stay up all night talking and drinking and listening to music and having sex. I can kiss on manicured lawns, drink prosecco in bed, read poetry at dawn, dance naked in heels, paint my lips red. And the question soon comes: can you make a life from this? Early intoxicating love is one thing, but what about dinner on a Tuesday in March? I was worried about replicating the things I found confining about being married. I had a beautiful home now, but did I know how to live in it with someone else? I was scared of getting trapped again, and I couldn’t see what possibilities there might be in a joint life.

But I was learning. I held a party for my summer birthday: I warmed pizza and chilled rosé and turned the patio into a jungly dance floor, going so late that the neighbors behind started yelling. We had Easter Sunday lunch around my dining table, my little brother cooking lamb, my father sneaking around the corner for potted daffodils, my mother quite ill but accepting the dinner spoon by spoon. I held brunch for Melanie and our university girlfriends, warming croissants and brewing coffee while their babies sprawled over the carpet, clutching my wooden spoons in their little fat hands. I made overnighting friends “divorce pasta”: a lemon and Parmesan spaghetti I’d made for myself so many times that I could give my full attention to what they were saying as I cooked. I rolled out my yoga mat in the mornings—it was Melanie, I think, with the wisdom earned from her own single years, who reminded me of what I could do with a yoga mat of my own—and I read on the sofa while dal bubbled on the stove. I cried in the bath, on the sofa, in the garden. I watched formulaic rom-coms. I danced in front of the bathroom mirror when I got back drunk. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to make a life, I discovered, it just wasn’t easy. I had to be patient, and I had to try new things, and have them fail sometimes. I had to work out what was right for me.