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I had always had a very clear vision of my life: I saw myself in a big old country kitchen, children everywhere, animals under our feet, chaos, noise and fun. I thought mine would be the house that everybody would be dropping into at all hours of the day, for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. And I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have that. I couldn’t understand why I had four children, two dogs and a cat, I cooked all the time, yet I felt as if I lived in a museum. It didn’t feel chaotic and fun, it felt strained and awkward. Wrong.

And then, because I refused to look too close to home, because I was too frightened to consider the real root of the problem, I decided we would move to the country; I was convinced that if we lived in the country, I would have the life I had dreamt of, that somehow I could make the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.

We moved to the most peaceful place I had ever been, and, finally, I stopped running. My husband worked in the City, so he wasn’t around Monday to Friday, and we moved there knowing nobody.

With no distractions, however, I couldn’t pretend any more. I was forced to face up to the reality: I was married to the wrong man, a man from whom I had grown further and further apart, a man I loved — he had given me four beautiful children — but a man I wasn’t in love with. A man I had never been in love with. I didn’t think, at the time, I deserved passion. I didn’t think I deserved true love.

We separated. I moved, with the children, back to my old suburban town, to a tiny little cottage by the sea, and slowly I began to heal. Then the strangest thing happened. My landlord, a man I had known vaguely for some years, became my friend. And slowly, slowly, he became my lover. And then, at 38 years old, for the first time in my life, I fell in love.

It wasn’t the soaring highs of passion I mistook for love in my twenties. It was respect. And admiration. And passion. Two were not enough, I realised. You need all three. And you need a fourth. Kindness. I hadn’t ever thought about kindness, because there wasn’t a lot of kindness in my marriage, from either of us, and having little experience of kindness in a relationship, I had no idea how important it is.

Finally, I have the life I have always wanted; and now, when I open the paper and study the engagement pages, read about the girls in their late twenties getting married, my heart goes out to them, and I pray they are doing it for the right reasons and not because they worry they are going to be left behind. I pray they are doing it because they have found someone they cherish, who they can grow old with, whom they truly love, and not just because they are reaching their sell-by date and have found someone who has asked. Simply being loved, I discovered, is not enough.

The Beach House by Jane Green is published by Michael Joseph (£16.99)

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