I Had Money. He Lived in a Trailer. I Married Him Anyway.

Why I love the man I trashed in the New York Times

Click on this image to go straight to my Modern Love piece in the New York Times!

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Write first, consider the fallout later. That has long been my way, and yes, it has gotten me into trouble. Even into court. Exhibit A: a person old enough to remember when phones were bricks but still learning that words can flatten people. And yet tales must be told, and humour wrung out of life because that’s who I am.

Picture my husband, Paul, happily catching up on the Tour de France coverage on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Great news! I’ve got an email from the New York Times!” I say. “They like the piece I sent in for their Modern Love column.”

“The thing we watched on TV?”

“The column it’s based on. The editor wants to get on a call with me. Tonight!”

When I tell him what time, he asks me if I still want dinner at seven.

“It might be too difficult after,” I say. “But something small and light.”

So he changes his plans. Because this man — whose food is incredible, often restaurant-level — cooks for me every night.

When we met, the height of his skills was a fishfinger sandwich. When he cooked for my boys, we called it “orange food”: nuggets, baked beans and chips. But when I asked him to up his game a few years ago, and booked him into an online course, he developed serious skills. This is the man I’ve traduced in the New York Times, so you’ll understand why I need to share his plus points. It is bad form to offend one’s personal chef.

After our light meal, I get on the call with the editor of Modern Love. Who asks me, among other things, whether the other parties would be happy being mentioned. The upshot of that?

“They’re taking it!” I say.

“Congratulations,” he says. “What’s it about?”

“It’s our Costa Rica story.”

Which we’ve told friends, family and interested strangers dozens of times. But now it’s going out to a few hundred thousand strangers. And of course, it’s just my version. At no point did he get to interject like he does when I tell it face-to-face.

“Read it to me.”

I scroll through it on my phone. Some of the phrases start leaping out at me.

“Hmmm. I’m not sure—”

“Read it to me. I need to know what you said.” He knows my economical, humorous style and how it can… let’s be honest, eviscerate.

I read it to him.

“Wow,” he says. “You don’t make me sound much of a catch.”

He has a point.

For a start, I mention he was living in a wreck of a caravan (UK terminology; camper trailer is what we settled on for the NYT). It was mouldy, letting in water, and smelled of gas. This is a good representation:

This is the kind of thing he was living in, not a picture of the actual caravan. Image licensed from iStock

“But you haven’t said anything,” he says, “about the romance of the open road.”

“No,” I say. “There wasn’t room for that kind of thing.”

(Also, I’m not convinced that caravan was “romantic”)

“You make me sound terrible. Still being engaged, and being too cowardly to get out of it. Was I really still engaged to A when we started sleeping together?”

“You were.”

He’s at a disadvantage here. The past is not his territory. He often can’t recall what he did or when. He’s a person who lives in the moving present, is very good at being. Whereas I am by nature a historian. I pin events to a mental timeline, document details.

When we were first friends (no benefits), I grilled him for his relationship history. Partly because the writer in me is fascinated by people. Partly because it’s wise to assess who’s standing in your kitchen, especially if that person’s a man.

It was clear that none of his former partners were thrilled with him. One had turned up at an Open Mic he was running, and when he invited her on stage, she delivered a poem where she tore him limb from limb. Assessing his trail of destruction, I discovered his pattern.

I relayed it to him. Friend to friend.

“So you find a woman who needs you, make yourself indispensable, and as soon as she 100% relies on you, you start feeling suffocated, and run away.”

“Er—”

I laughed to see his reaction. He couldn’t deny it. But I wasn’t standing in judgment. How could I? I was still mid-divorce, fighting to be free of my own unwise actions. We were, as I say in the NYT piece, “two different models of mid-30s love-life trainwreck.”

For me, what matters is working out why you did a thing, so you don’t have to play it more than once. So I put the kettle on again (since I was largely fueled by tea) and started digging for the why.

Over the weeks, it surfaced. A chronically ill and protective mother (an immigrant to the UK), frightened on his behalf. A rough council estate where he, as a tween and teen, got beaten up. His home and his mother’s dependence on him felt suffocating, but it wasn’t safe to go outside.

Unless you took the circuitous route. Unless you kept moving. No wonder he had suffocation issues. No wonder he liked living in vehicles.

To others, it looked different. As our daughter exclaimed when I shared a few stories, many years later,“Dad! You were a PLAYER!”

But that wasn’t it. It was never about conquest. He meant well, and began each time as a decent human being. He was drawn to women who needed help, and he helped. But once they had come to rely on him, he’d feel the replay effect of his childhood dynamics, feeling trapped by what he’d created.

He hadn’t spotted the pattern. And if you can’t see a thing, how can you break it?

We were friends all this time. Knowing all this about him, and what I told him, too, brought us close. I wasn’t considering him — not for a second! — as a lover. So that helped.

At the same time, I grew to trust him. Not once had he used our closeness to make a pass at me. He was genuinely interested in me as a person, which seemed — among the men who were crossing my path at that time — a real rarity.

The men I met dating then showed their hands depressingly quickly. They’d press me to come in for a coffee. I’d tell them,

“Coffee means coffee.”

I’d say,

“I don’t sleep with people until I get to know them.”

Like Homer dreaming of doughnuts, I guess their heads echoed “SLEEP WITH PEOPLE” because they certainly didn’t act like I’d spoken. Once or twice, it was scary. And the rest, when I didn’t put out, they skedaddled. Apparently, getting to know me was too much work. But not Paul. Getting to know each other was all that was happening.

He was a trained puppeteer who — like Johnny Morris from Animal Magic in my childhood — voiced animals in our vicinity. He could also turn almost any inanimate object into a puppet. So he was entertaining. When I met him, he was a performance poet, with his main focus on curating spaces for others, running live literature events. It was always about facilitating other people's creativity, not just focusing on his own. This doesn’t, of course, make money, but that was not something he cared about. And when my ex had been focused on nothing but money, that, frankly, was a relief.

Months went by with us getting closer and building trust, but always just friends. Then the unexpected moment of frisson, and the story recounted in the New York Times.

Did I trust him after those two weeks, knowing what I knew? And given what I’d been through? Of course not. But we have worked out the knots.

Do we still seem the oddest of couples? Indeed. Chalk and cheese.

But he takes pleasure in easing my life. We travel very well together. Our philosophies are different, but have informed each other’s. We each have respect for the other’s point of view.

Those things we hold in common are probably the critical things. A love of language. A sense of humour. We are never bored: I still surprise him, and he still entertains me. We still find plenty to talk about.

Growing up, neither of us had any sense of belonging. We didn’t fit into our families or into the groups that formed at school. We didn’t fit into communities or clubs. We found ourselves outsiders.

But eventually — after a lot of testing the ground and discovering it didn’t collapse — we found we belonged with each other.

The author plus husband, performing a comedy love poem together on stage not long after returning from Costa Rica. Photo credit: Julia Indelicate.

P.S. If you loved this story, I’ll send you more, once a week — honest, often funny, sometimes raw, always real. You can subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

For paid subscribers this week, just for fun, expect this extra on Sunday: the poem we co-wrote (about each other), which we are performing on stage in the pic above. Also in the pipeline: How I Got My Love Story Into the New York Times (with tips!).

This week I have

• Had a first meeting towards a UK-Touring production of the award-nominated stage play of The Marlowe Papers for 2026

• Had to pause our Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge so I can make the most of this wonderful Modern Love boost! The Challenge will return when the dust settles, I promise!

• Taught six creative writing workshops in the glorious Music Room of Oriel College, Oxford

Your Turn

1. Do you have a spouse who looked like a bad prospect?

2. Friends to lovers? Enemies to lovers? What’s your trope?

3. Say whatever moves you in response to this piece.

+++ Yes, touch the heart! Look, there it is, just below! Help others find this. +++

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