And I don’t think I even wanted to go home – I was trapped between two cities I didn’t want to be in.

It feels like, for the last few years, I’ve been doing tourism into what your thirties are like, almost to prepare myself. I’ve dipped in and out. I’ve sampled the experience.’ ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Like … I don’t know, going to the Cotswolds for a weekend minibreak.’ ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Or having a cleaner come once a month.’ ‘Right! Or buying an

He was a picture of familiarity and love; and it had never felt so far away from me.

It’s a hackneyed notion for a reason: a couple need to be really, really good friends.

No matter how level-headed and wise you become, you are, I’m afraid, an animal still. I believe we are never immune to the potential humiliation of giddy, all-encompassing, adolescent romance. Lust is a silent disco enjoyed only by those in the throes of it – it allows you to dance and get lost in a song no one else can hear. The good thing is, as

In the run-up to my thirtieth, my twenties became my alpine dreamland. My twenties were my home, somewhere I knew and felt comfortable. In my rational mind, I was totally aware that most of it had been fraught – full of heartbreak, self-loathing, jealousy, and with no direction, security or money – but I was overcome with the sickness of nostalgia.

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with – a notion that was so foreign to me. I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and

I hadn’t ever thought that a man could love me in the same way my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realizing. Maybe Farly was what a good relationship felt like.

I had arrived at the big, brand-new number, and it wasn’t so bad after all. It was a place where I felt the same promise of boundless life ahead of me as I did aged seventeen, and perhaps I always would. A place where I remained full of wonder, hungry for experience, so lacking in wisdom. A place where I’d make mistakes as well as good choices, and