I was in a long-distance relationship last year with a man claiming his ‘long, broken,’ 24-year-old marriage ‘was over’. He constantly referred to his wife as ‘ex’, while occupying the same suburban London home, co-parenting their autistic daughter, and our relationship ended a day before our one year anniversary. It was just the kind of complicated affair that being single in one’s mid-forties one desperately hopes to avoid that wound up on a cruel, one-sided voice note sent in the middle of my night (“I am now going for an office dinner,” it winds up, matter-of-factly), barely three weeks after a holiday in Thailand, as I writhe in bed, battling a complicated chest infection contracted from him on the same trip. My eyelids are heavy from steroids. My auto-immune, fibromyalgia, is through the roof. Everything is in pain. Everything feels broken…