separate_roofs

We stopped trying to turn a good relationship into the wrong future

I’m 52 and he’s 49. We met just over three years ago, both divorced, both with children who are mostly grown up. For the first year I thought I’d accidentally found the easiest relationship of my life. We lived about half an hour apart. We usually spent Thursday night together and most of the weekend. We travelled well together, liked each other’s friends and our kids got on. There was no secrecy and no pretending we were casual. He was my boyfriend. I was his. The grey bit was the future. He wanted to live together eventually. Not immediately, but properly share a home. He also wanted marriage again. I didn’t. At first I said I wasn’t ready because that felt less brutal than saying I might never want those things. I’d been divorced for six years and I genuinely thought maybe another year of a good relationship would change something in me. It didn’t. The strange thing was that I became more certain about him and less certain about the future he wanted. I loved him. I could imagine being with him in ten years. I just couldn’t imagine giving up my house, combining our finances and getting married again without feeling like I was agreeing to a life that didn’t fit me. We had the same conversation every few months. He’d say he wasn’t asking me to move tomorrow. I’d say I knew. He’d ask what I was waiting for. I never had a useful answer. Last Christmas made it worse. We spent it with his family and his sister joked about us finally getting a place together once my youngest finished university. Everyone laughed and I laughed too, but he looked at me in a way that made my stomach drop. On the drive home he asked if I actually saw that happening. I said no. It was probably the first completely clean answer I’d given him. We spent January trying to work out whether there was a compromise. Separate homes but marriage? No marriage but buy somewhere with two very separate bits? Keep things exactly as they were? We weren’t fighting. If anything that made it sadder. Eventually he said something like, “I don’t want to spend another five years loving this and quietly hoping you’ll want my life.” I couldn’t argue with that. We ended it in February. No betrayal, no big explosion. I helped him take his stuff out of my bathroom and he cried in the kitchen and then I cried because apparently middle-aged men are capable of making a toothbrush incredibly tragic. For a while I wondered whether I’d made some enormous mistake. People kept saying things like, “But you were so good together.” We were. That was the problem. It would have been easier if one of us had been awful. It’s six months later now. We don’t speak much, although we sent each other birthday messages and I had lunch with one of our mutual friends last week. I’ve started dating again, very slowly. The main thing I do differently is say the awkward part earlier. I’ve put on my profile that I’m looking for a committed relationship but I want to maintain separate homes and I don’t want to marry. That has definitely reduced my matches. Good. I used to think being open-minded meant leaving all the doors open. Now I think it can also mean knowing which doors you genuinely don’t want to walk through. I still miss him. I still think we were compatible in a hundred everyday ways. But we wanted different structures for our lives, and neither of us was wrong enough to be persuaded out of it.