Divorce #1.

I asked my first ex-husband to move out and said I wanted a divorce. He didn’t argue with it or make any promises to change, he just accepted it and left.

The night I called my mum and told her that I had asked my husband to move out she responded without hesitation:

‘Well, you know we are going to see it more from his side than yours, you are very difficult to live with.’

That one stung a bit as by this stage it had been 6 years since I had been a frustrated teen living in a fractious household with 3 siblings all trying to get their needs met by parents who assumed our needs identically matched their own.

Thankfully, a shred of self-confidence still existed and I knew I had to get a real job. I couldn’t get a divorce and not have a proper job. I had been working as a Personal Shopper in Mango in Convent Garden which was in essence, due to the fashion of the day, folding fuzzy jumpers for several hours interspersed with pulling fluff from my eyelashes and blowing it out my nose, and helping women buy the most expensive items in the store. Retail was never going to be for me long term.

I signed up with a recruitment agency and I listed a few interests and I got an interview with a global real estate firm as the receptionist of their Knightsbridge office. I got the job. A few months in, for the first time in my life, I made friends that weren’t friends of my family or friends of my husband, they were my friends. It was liberating.

The divorce was amicable and he was very good about it and I was very good about it. ‘No fault’ divorce wasn’t a thing in England yet so we needed a reason and my lawyer, having heard my sad story, suggested ‘abandonment’ as he just wasn’t able to be there for me in the marriage. He agreed and the paperwork was all signed up. He gave me some money to get me started and paid my rent for a year which was very good of him.

My lawyer suggested I read On Chesil Beach, a novel by Ian McEwan. A little random to get reading recommendations from your divorce lawyer but he was on the money.

The divorce was obviously poorly received by my parents. They came for their first visit together to see me in London and it was probably the first time they didn’t see me as a difficult teenager. They recognised how hard the marriage had truly been and, despite their firm belief that following divorce any other sexual relationships are viewed as adulterous biblically and divorce was a sin, it’s a lot harder to stand firm on this belief when you actually see the sadness of a real-life marriage breakdown and it’s your own 25-year-old daughter.

I rented a little one-bedroom ground floor flat in Clapham and if it hadn’t been for my next disastrous relationship, I would have been very happy that year.