I remember the weeks leading up to my wedding. I was 30 years old, and I tried not to think, tried to keep moving, tried not to stop for a single minute to consider that perhaps the reasons I was getting married were not the right ones; that those feelings I kept trying to stuff down were panic; that not only was there more to life than this, but that I deserved it.

I hadn’t had a good history of relationships. In my twenties, I had a series of flings, relationships that lasted a few months, all of which seemed to follow the same pattern. Men would meet me, think I was independent, attractive, good fun, all of which I was. And a few weeks, or months later, the neediness would kick in, and I became jealous, difficult, high-maintenance. The needier I became, the more they distanced themselves, and every relationship seemed to end with me in tears, wondering why I couldn’t get it right.

When I met the man who was to become my husband, I was 29 years old. I’d had enough. Thirty was my own personal sell-by date, a great looming cloud that hovered over me throughout my late twenties, and if I wasn’t married before 30, I believed I would be sitting on the shelf for ever.

The husband wasn’t like the others. For the first time, I was able to check all the boxes. Or at least, almost all. Ambitious? Check. Intelligent? Check. Would he be a good husband? A good father? Check. Was I attracted to him? I couldn’t check that box with a clear conscience, not entirely. I was attracted to his mind, to his personality, to the fact that he adored me, wanted to marry me, seemed to be everything I was supposed to look for in a husband. So what if I never felt swept off my feet with passion? It wasn’t everything; passion, in fact, was very little.

I even wrote a book about it, Passion Junkie, which was later changed to Straight Talking. I based it on a quote I’d read from William Wharton. What is love, his daughter had asked on the eve of her wedding. “It is passion, admiration and respect,” he told her. “If you have two, you have enough. If you have three, you don’t have to die to go to heaven.”

Which two were enough? Could you live without passion? Passion had not served me well: placed me on an emotional rollercoaster, falling in and out of love, either deliriously happy with the thrill of the ride, or in a deep depression as I crashed and burned once again.

I decided it would be safer to live without passion. That respect, friendship, shared ambitions and aims were more important. I sat in friends’ living rooms and told them earnestly that passion didn’t last, and that once passion dulled, as it inevitably did, more often than not, you were left with a partner you didn’t even like.

How much more sensible to choose someone who could be a friend, a true partner, and it wouldn’t matter if the rose-coloured lenses fell off, for they were never there to begin with. And he loved me. It seemed like enough.

He proposed on the banks of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, on a glorious night that should have been the most romantic night of my life, but, in fact, felt as if we were continuing to check all the right boxes. We sat in the restaurant, days before I turned 30, and I asked him if he was going to propose, because it seemed like the right thing to do. And he did, pulling my grandmother’s ring from his pocket and placing it on my finger.

I felt as if I were doing what was expected of me, being a good girl. I was marrying a man everybody seemed to approve of, stepping out of my twenties where I had dated musicians, artists and writers, and chosen an investment banker, someone I thought my parents might choose for me, someone who would help me grow up, give me the conventional life I had decided I ought to have, rather than the unconventional one that in retrospect would have suited me much better.

Everything about our marriage was conventional. We were married in the same place my parents had married 32 years earlier, with a reception at Claridge’s. My dress was beautiful, the flowers divine, and I didn’t stop to think about why I felt so empty inside. My husband was — is — conventional. He sees the world in black and white, whereas I have always seen it in shades of grey. He hated my “artistic” friends, and I found little comfort in his religious right-wing circles. There was not much kindness or respect in our marriage. It became a battle ground, of wits and words, a shared sense of humour, but a humour that had barbs, that stung, ever so slightly at first, but became sharper and sharper as time progressed.

Was I happy? I ought to have been. I thought I had everything I needed to be happy. Gorgeous children, a beautiful home, good friends. Whenever the panic became too great, I would fill my life with another distraction. I continued having children: four in five years. I decorated the house. I threw parties, cooking elaborate meals for dozens of people, wrote books, tried to ignore the feeling that I wasn’t present in my life, that I was hovering above, looking in and wondering how I’d got there.

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