How often does a story of depression start with the words…’everything was going well in my life’ ?

I was partner in an Architectural practice, had two lovely kids, a lovely wife, a nice home in an idyllic Cornish town by the sea.

For some inexplicable reason, as the millennium drew to a close, I decided that I wanted to change both of my partnerships.
I have no idea where the thought came from and I do not know why I didn’t ignore it and I wish it hadn’t formed…but it did.

And within two years I had destroyed everything.

The rot began as the new millennium truly dawned on January 1st2001 and like all good rots it remained largely hidden for nine months. I had always courted other womens company far too freely in the naive belief that if they were with a partner or married they were safe and it was acceptable.

Although our ‘line’ was drawn at sleeping with another person, I now realise that unfaithfulness starts way before that ever occurs. It begins with an innocent jibe about your partner in the pub with your mates and grows from there.

Another relevant factor was that I was a new age man and looked after the kids. I am not seeking to excuse my actions but in a strange demonstration of yin and yang this may have sealed my fate but also given me the path out at the same time.

Modern man often becomes emasculated and is drawn to a woman in need who restores his masculinity. I had such a relationship. In a classic mid life crisis format I went for a younger blonder version who had an appalling partner who treated her and their kids atrociously. Our kids were friends and our lives intertwined with after school swims and walks and trips away which all seemed very normal and innocent and ‘we were just good friends’.

I keep my pocket diaries going back to 1972 and the 2001 diary has blonde hair sellotaped to the cover as illegible evidence that there was more to it than that and the love truly is blind.

The rot emerged through the floorboards in spectacular fashion on the 11thof September 2001.

She asked me to come up to the Squash Club she managed for lunch and told me that we were getting too close and that we should cool off. I agreed but an involuntary tear came to my eye as I was already very fond of her and flattered that such a lovely girl wanted my company.

I returned to the office and asked my partner to take all calls that afternoon and switched off my mobile.

After school, the kids used to go over to the Squash Club and she would keep an eye on them before I picked them up. This day they were transfixed by the TV and images of burning buildings. I called them outside and began to drive away but she ran in front of the car and stopped me. Of course the kids were delighted and ran back in to rejoin the TV audience. We went round the back of
the courts and agreed we couldn’t live without each other and sealed the deal with a kiss.

To this day I am haunted by the image of my Son who was playing chase and witnessed that kiss.

With ten years of hindsight I can now look back on 9/11 as the day the twin towers of my two partnerships came crashing down in flames. My partner was very loyal to my wife and cracks started to appear in the partnership from that day. It ended two years later. As for my marriage, things accelerated from this point and I walked out four months later and it ended two years after that.

I was on xenical and losing weight rapidly. I used to find out when she was on duty and book squash courts on those nights. I would stay behind after the bar shut and walk her home, stopping for long chats on a bench overlooking their house. We would sneak dances together and when swimming would submerge below the kids and kiss underwater. It was a heady time as I plunged headlong to destruction !

She made the first move and left her partner to set up in a flat with her girls. As things progressed we became unafraid of being seen in public together. I raced past all the warning signs like an incident when my wife came home early and found us sitting on the sofa giggling like kids. I am not proud of what I put my wife through during this period as she must have been wracked with worry about how it would all pan out.

Not a day has gone by that I don’t recall the day I left. We were due to drive north to visit the in laws for Christmas and I said ‘I’m not coming’. The sound my daughter made still haunts me to this day. The way she said ‘Oh Daddy’ still cuts like a sword to the heart every time I think of it. Now looking back I cannot imagine the feelings for my Son as the bottom fell out of his World. As the first year of the new millennium closed I well and truly hit the self destruct button!

Although presented with several opportunities, I had not slept with her until this point but as I had officially ‘left’ I felt in a bizarrely twisted logic that it was now OK. We had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I had not made love to my wife for almost a decade and so the passion for a woman 14 years my junior was intoxicating. That festive season I hardly thought about what I had set in motion.

The first two months of the year passed in adjustment of the new circumstances as I got myself a tiny flat called the ‘hobbit hole’ and spent most of my time with her and the daughters. February saw her 30thbirthday and I took my son to their holiday home in Spain for a holiday. For me it was wonderful but the scratch marks on my son’s chest were the first body blow in a process that was to bring me to my knees in less than a year.

Life settled down into some sort of new routine as I collected her children from school instead of my own. One day I emerged from my office and saw my daughter walking down the road with another man. The darkness started to close in quickly like the sides of a Venus fly trap.

I had said that I wouldn’t be one of those guys who came and went and kept mistresses hanging on a string with a carrot of eventually leaving the wife which never happens. If I committed then I would go 100%. Talking of commitment, as a sign that I was serious about her I got my nipple pierced which is very unlike me! It hurt like hell and after removing it for a squash game it wouldn’t go back in so I abandoned my wild side!

But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I left three times and tried to go back to my wife who had shut the door as soon as I walked out. On the third time both doors shut and I was alone.

I remember getting the text on a tennis court that she couldn’t keep doing this and had ‘moved on’.
The trap closed and the light went out and I descended into John Bunyan’s Slough of Despond. I was alone in my hobbit hole.

It took the month of July to descend into hell. My best friend came down to see me and when I complained that I wasn’t sleeping he said ‘You don’t need pills to keep you asleep…you need pills to keep you alive’. I submitted to anti depressants and counseling in a desperate measure to gain emotional relief. At the end of the month I joined my ex wife and her sister who was married to my best friend and all the kids on a camping holiday. It was very strained and the more so as we had shared such happy times as a group in the early days of the marriage. It reinforced the guilt about what I had done.

We returned to Falmouth and they all went down to my old house and had a photograph competition while I sat alone in my dark and lonely little hole. It was awful.

I spent the night crying and literally clawing the wall with my fingernails and planning how to hang myself from the rope swing in the tree outside. The exposed black beams of my bedroom ceiling became bars on a cell that I couldn’t escape.

It was without doubt the lowest point of my life and the most awful pain that I have ever encountered.

Dawn broke and a shaft of light filtered through to my bed. I felt relief that I could go to work [although it was a Saturday] and distract myself from the pain. But then the phone rang and my life changed course and a hand reached down and saved me but in a sad and tragic way.

It was my sister in New Zealand who was screaming that her daughter had been killed in a quad bike accident. I can’t remember what I said but I packed a few things and drove down to the old house to tell them I was heading to my Mothers. ‘Take your passport’ said my friend in one of those amazingly insightful moments for which I will always treasure him.

The next day we were on a plane to New Zealand. My partner was apoplectic! My ex wife was stunned and my kids bemused, but the way out of the slough had opened up.

Within a year I had sold up and moved to New Zealand. I had three friends that said I was ‘stewing in my own juice’. I felt like I was at a cross roads and all roads lead to hell. Another good friend who happened to be a counselor said ‘running away…running away’ which of course I was.

But ten years down the line, I am recovered. Still wracked with guilt for what I have done to my children and my wife and my partner. I am attempting forgiveness, of myself first before asking others.