About 12 years ago, I came home with a new Labrador puppy. My wife, Maggie — mother to our primary school-aged daughter — looks shocked. “I thought you were joking about feeling lonely,” she says.
No, I wasn’t joking. And no, Maggie and I still weren’t talking in the evenings, we continued to feel more distant by the day, but at least I had the distraction of cleaning up Scotty’s dog poo. This giant furball even slept on top of me in bed, which distracted me further from our marital problems.
But having Scotty to look after means that — for a short time — I don’t feel useless or lonely. Scotty would reach the grand age of seven before I felt any genuine happiness again. That was the summer I met Caroline, the woman with whom I began an affair, and whose story you read in these pages last week.
I do not hate my (just) ex-wife. Maggie isn’t unkind, or a nag. She was and remains attractive.
We raised our daughter with loving kindness. So why did I do this terrible thing? By the time I chose to ask Maggie for a divorce, our 20-year marriage had been dying the way Hemingway said we go bankrupt: slowly, then suddenly. I met Maggie in the first term of university — she was studying law and I was doing a degree in English.
We were both shy and rather bookish. I worked up the courage to ask her out by first asking out two of her friends on embarrassing first dates. Maggie is very bright, with excellent taste in art and a soft spot for heavy metal that I still d.
