Transition.

Marriage is usually considered to be the beginning for two people developing their lives together. For us it was just a transition, a temporary phase before we resumed solitary living, although whether my wife was cognisant of that when she began the journey is unclear.

I have to believe she was genuinely in love and that diagnosis of my MS was a test of that, which she overcame. The elephant in the room, however, is that she was 29, had already tried on the wedding dress and was probably already thinking of the names she might call the daughter that she would surely have: few women would walk away from that scenario simply because their future husband might get ill. Divorce is so easy and my ex-wife gets enduring support without commitment. How could she refuse?

But I could have walked away from it. My wife displayed difficult character traits even before we married; self-focus, short temper, irrationally wild responses to mild irritation. She was a lot like her mother and I suppose I hoped she would not get that bad, just as she must have hoped that my disability might not get that bad. That she wants to divorce is not a surprise, she is too self obsessed to live with disability, no matter how mild and I knew this. But I was equally unable to turn my back on marriage, on the chance to be a father, because I knew that no other woman would develop a relationship with me; it was a gamble I had to take.

Being in love made us trapped, unable to respond appropriately to my diagnosis; she because she was nearly thirty and single and me because I would not then find someone else.

For us, love was always just a transition.