We weren’t unhappily married. To most people, I suspect we just seemed … normal. My husband and I had been together for 17 years and had recently celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. We were plodding along just fine: comfortable, slightly complacent, grunting at each other from behind our phones, eating dinner in front of the telly, focusing on childcare, keeping on keeping on – like most of our married friends. When our mortgage payments doubled, paying for a babysitter to go on nights out alone seemed an unnecessary expense.
On New Year’s Eve, we went to a party at the home of another couple – parents of a child in our son’s class: a bring-kids-along, more-the-merrier thing. I ended up chatting to three women I had never met. They didn’t have children at the school and, it turned out, they were all single – at least one had been hoping there might be eligible men at the party.
