My husband has been sleeping in the spare room for five nights. He sleeps well there. I am in our bedroom, in the bed we shared for seven years. I do not sleep. I do what all women do. I think; I blame myself; I marinate in my failure; I hate myself for my feelings; sometimes I cry. More often, I stare at the ceiling and wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

It is August 2005. By September, my husband and I spend a lot of time walking around our garden, talking about ending our marriage.

"Maybe we should spend some time apart," I begin weakly. I do not mention "divorce". I tell myself this makes a difference, that until I say the word out loud it won't exist. That there is still a chance we will find each other again.

"Breaks never work," he snaps back. He is right, of course.

"I just want some clarity," I say.

"You just want to sleep with someone else," he retorts.

"That isn't what this is about."

"Isn't it?"

"Not for me. I am still in love with you."

That I can say. It feels hopelessly, urgently true. I say it again.

"I love you."

"That is such bullshit," he answers.

"No it isn't."

I take his hand. He lets me.

"I love you," I say again.

In my mind, I imagine that if I can convince him I love him, he will forgive me for wanting to leave. He will understand and know it isn't about him, and we will go on to be wonderful, dear friends. All of this mess will fade with time, and in the mutual love of our children we will rise above it, because we are good people and that's what good people do. But my husband doesn't want me to love him. That is too complicated. Better that I hate him. Or love another. He wants maths, not poetry.

"I love you," I repeat, starting to cry.

"Just shut the hell up," he says forcefully, dropping my hand.

Five months later, my husband moves out of the spare room and into his own unit. He leaves on New Year's Day, his belongings tossed into half a dozen garbage bags.

I was a good wife. I did all the wifely things you should, the old-fashioned duties, like keeping up with the "lost" socks and doctors' appointments and the amount of window cleaner in the house. I also provided the modern wifely contributions of an independent income and a body maintained within a few kilos of its premarital form. I cooked and cleaned and packed the kids' lunches. I laughed often, made love to my husband with vigour, making him feel brilliant and beautiful, which he was. I would like to say I liked being a wife. But if I am honest, I did not.

I liked being good. I liked being perceived as decent and honourable and committed to my family. And while I was committed beyond reason to my children, the same could not be said about my commitment to my husband.

If you ask my husband, he will say our seven-year marriage ended the day I began to have feelings for someone else. To be precise, it ended the day he broke into my email account and discovered I had feelings for someone else. For him, this is likely true. But for me, it is far more complicated. Because I am a woman, and women, as a rule, inhabit the grey areas of life.

Women want things to go on. All things. Even, or perhaps particularly, sad things. We want our lovers to love us forever. Not necessarily to be with us forever, but to carry us somewhere in their hearts, somewhere prominent. Women want to matter. And as such, we do not like endings.

We know that feelings are complicated, fluid, uncontrollable - and they are all that really count in the final days of life. We know this intuitively and because we know it, we are happy in the mess they create.

Men, not so much. When men leave a marriage, they just go. They make no apologies. They move on, the cord cut.

Women, however, need a reason to leave. "Because I want to" is simply not enough. We need witnesses and encouragement and approval and an alternative vision of our future, which explains why, statistically, most women decide to leave their marriages seven years before they actually do, and why, when they finally go, it is often into the arms of another man. Messy, but real. Or it feels real, which can sometimes be enough.

 I met my husband at a fancy-dress party. I was dressed as a schoolboy, a sartorial choice that left him assuming I was a lesbian. He chatted with me anyway, asking many questions. By the time he was undoing my shorts back at his place later that night, he had revised his initial impression. We had sex on the floor in front of his couch, with Mozart's Requiem blaring from the stereo. The next morning, in the cold, harsh light of sobriety, I hurriedly dressed and fled his apartment. Less than two weeks later, we were engaged.

It was a great story, one we delighted in retelling in the years that followed, watching the predictably startled response of people when we reached the punchline: "And then, 10 days later, he proposed!"

Two weeks was not a long courtship. But that is not what killed the marriage. In fact, our mutual impulsiveness and the pride we took in it bound us. We were ridiculous, madcap. Other people were timid. So we married, and nine months later (almost to the day), our first daughter was born. Fifteen months later, a second daughter came. During that time, we moved five times, twice interstate. We collapsed a lifetime of experience into a few years. We were busy, distracted.

There were signs. There are always signs. The problem for every married person lies in discerning what is a sign and what is a normal consequence of sharing a life with someone. Are you bored because you aren't with the right person? Or because no-one stays interesting after 10 years? Are you just going through a rough patch? Or is this it for life? Every day yields a reason to leave. What you need is a reason to stay.

I knew the moment I would leave my husband. Three years before our separation, I was having dinner with a woman I respected - older, beautiful and successful. She was in the middle of her own break-up, after 15 years of partnership, and it was levelling her. Not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because she was the one leaving. I asked her what made her so sure she should quit her marriage. And she answered, "I finally figured out that no-one would be grading me at the end of all this."

And there I sat, gunning for the A+.

For what? That one sentence made me realise for the very first time just how much of my life was about trying to please someone else, how it had been years since I had even considered what I personally wanted. When I got home from dinner, there was an email from her. "Trust yourself," she wrote.

I wept when I read it. In the years that followed, I found myself unconsciously seeking out women who'd left their men. Women who dared to listen to themselves. I would grill them with impertinent questions about divorce and loneliness and sex after separation. I wanted to see the consequences, the fallout. What I saw were women who were relaxed.

And then there was me, feeling balled as tight as twine and still gunning for the A+.

I tried to tell him: "Sometimes, when I walk across the overpass, I imagine if I timed it right, the jump would be quick and painless."

"Oh, so now you're suicidal?"

Was I? Maybe I was. Maybe for that few minutes when I crossed over the bridge and saw the traffic roaring below, it did seem like it would be simpler if it would just cease to be. Because the other option - facing myself, dealing with my inapprop-riate feelings of rage and isolation and self-loathing - was going to be a lot harder than jumping off a bridge. "You could tell the kids it was an accident," I say.

There was one time, in the middle of the end, when he mentioned our oldest daughter. Reminded me how emotional and sensitive she is. How his absence would cause her nothing but hurt.

"I'm her father," he said pointedly, as if I'd forgotten. I knew my choice would hurt my children, just as it would hurt my husband. To leave was to knowingly cause pain to my loved ones. And why? Because I wanted something else.

I remember when my first daughter was born. It was a difficult and terrifying delivery. There was talk of an emergency caesarean. Blinking equipment was wheeled into the room, the nurses talking in hushed, hurried tones. My sister, also present, began sobbing. At the last moment, the baby arrived, head squashed and face bruised, but alive. I wept with relief and fatigue, my body shaking enough to rattle the rails of the hospital bed. I looked at my husband, now a father. He was beaming. I thought to myself, we would never divorce because how could we ever leave each other after that?

No-one will remember the sound my second daughter made when she saw her first dog. Or how my eldest squealed hysterically on her first roller-coaster ride. To divorce is to say farewell to your record-keeper. It is to jettison your history, to abandon your ready identity. For years, you are someone's wife, then one day, you aren't. And then it becomes your job to decide who you are.

One Sunday morning, a week before he left, I made scrambled eggs and bacon. The girls, still unaware of the impending split, fought over who got to break the eggs. We all ate, and it was delicious. Everything seemed perfectly normal, as it had always been - the four of us sharing Sunday breakfast, deciding how best to spend the day.

Afterwards, the girls toddled off to watch cartoons while my husband and I talked about how we got derailed.

"Why did you always have to make me feel bad?" he implored. "That's what killed it. Your constant judging."

I did judge. And that is the thing about breaking apart. When the person who knows you best decides you are a loser, you kind of have to believe them. Because they've done the time. They've seen you naked.

"I'm sorry," I replied.

"I may not love you in the way you need. But I would carry you across burning sands. Doesn't that count?" he said.

It did. But not enough.

My marriage wasn't bad, I just didn't belong there. I know this now. I am not wife material. I like being alone. I believe the pay-offs of tending to a man pale greatly when compared to the benefits of tending to myself. I believe I am a better mother without a husband, because I am happy and strong and not sleepwalking in a bath of resentment about who is or isn't taking out the rubbish.

My divorce has also taught me some other hard truths about love:

That good sex can survive, even as your marriage dies.

That it really is the little things.

That you have to talk about the ugly stuff - with each other.

That only you are capable of asking for what you want.

That charisma gets old.

That love may be everything, but it is not enough to keep two people together, no matter what they say in the movies.

My love for my husband was, and remains, uncontested. I love him, and I will always love him. My heart cleaves to his, even as he moves away, loves another, even as time and paperwork dismantle us. I love him as a person apart, for who he is, not for what he does for or to me.

And that will last. Till death.

On our second real date, my husband and I went to a museum. We held hands. We ate sandwiches in the overpriced cafeteria. He told me he'd spent eight months in India. I told him I'd played high-school basketball. He told me he once loved a woman who brought a hairdryer on a camping trip. I said I didn't own a hairdryer.

We walked the three kilometres home, the wind lashing our faces. We stopped for sushi. We kissed on street corners. We did not say, "I love you."

The next morning, we were engaged. I told no-one. I had no words.

"Do you remember that day?" I asked him recently. His eyes instantly welled up. Then he swallowed, and I saw the tears recede. I saw him bury himself in front of my eyes. I recognised the move.