As told to Alison Kervin

I didn’t believe in love at first sight until Dave* walked through the doors of my local. He swaggered in like a cowboy walking into a saloon bar. Everyone turned around; he was bigger, stronger, more handsome and better dressed than anyone in the room.

“Wow, who the hell is that?” I asked one of my closest friends, who immediately warned me he was an ‘arrogant prick’. Despite these words of warning, I pursued Dave as if my life depended on it, and within 18 months, we were married.

Things began to change after we had children. He came home less frequently, and when he did, we hardly communicated. But I didn’t mind. It didn’t matter that he spent all our money on himself and became more and more difficult to live with. I think I could have tolerated anything because I was so in love with him. I loved how his hair curled at the nape of his neck, the coarse stubble and the dark chest hair protruding from the top of his shirt.

What I didn’t recognise at the time was that I was in love with the look of him, the cowboy with swagger I’d met five years previously, and not the man beneath it all. Unfortunately, when my children were still tiny, I found out he was having an affair after I returned home earlier than usual and found him in bed with another woman. He confessed that this wasn’t his first affair; he’d never been faithful and never could be. He moved out a week later. Suddenly, aged 37 and with two young children, I found myself on my own, heartbroken and struggling with deeply low self-esteem.

“I settled in my marriage but here’s why it’s not a bad thing, according to a therapist”