I am loading the debris of a family dinner into the dishwasher. I haven’t rinsed and am cramming them in haphazardly – bowls, plates, glasses – all piled on top of one another.
Clink, clank, crash. My husband is silent, but I can almost feel his irritation across the kitchen. When the machine is rammed like a crockery game of Buckaroo, I triumphantly slam the door shut and spin round with my chin tilted. Daring him to comment.
Of course, 20-year marriages like ours don’t just end over household chore clashes, but it’s often these small, domestic acts that signify the conjugal rot has set in. I’d become the sort of petty person who would purposefully drain the car of petrol and never fill it up, while becoming irrationally irritated by the way he would leave the recycling drawer ajar.
It was the slow creep of my passive aggressive gestures into our daily life that made me realise we needed to call time on our two decades together.
It was a year ago when we had sat down in that same kitchen with our three teenage children and announced our separation. The words we trotted out were clichéd yet real: we loved them very much and none of this was their fault. We loved each other too, but had decided we would both be happier living apart.
Our 19-year-old daughter found the situation quite challenging, while our boys, aged 17 and 15, appeared to handle it with surprising calm.
Finally getting it out in the open felt like a weight had been lifted.
We had privately agreed to split several months earlier, but had waited until the two eldest had finished their A-levels and GCSEs before telling them.
If anyone had noticed us rarely being in the house at the same time they never mentioned it. We’d stopped sharing a bedroom long ago.