We leave our child behind when we go on holiday – and it’s bliss!

“Do you want children?” asked the acquaintance I met on a blue morning in December.

He was cradling his six-week-old son and I was on my way to a scan to check that the breast cancer I had ten years ago, at the age of 31, had not returned. “Probably,” I told him. ‘Do it. It’s the best thing ever,” he said.

I decided, assuming my scan was clear, that I would talk to Mark, my boyfriend of a few years, and now my husband, about trying to get pregnant. We met on a dating website, after I saw a photo of a smiling man with blue eyes, holding an old-fashioned camera, and thought: I want to be with him.

After being single for almost fifteen years and having had cancer and chemotherapy, I enjoyed our blossoming love affair: the evenings in London’s tapas and cocktail bars and the weekends away.

Even though I was 39 at the time, children were not at the forefront of my mind. I hoped to have them someday. However, Mark had become unwell in his thirties due to an autoimmune disease. At forty, finally better, he did not want to spend his free time caring for a young child.

It took him some convincing. And for the four-plus years it took us to conceive, ultimately through IVF, I carried with me both a deep longing for a child and the fear of how this could compress my life, and my relationship. Most of my friends were already parents. Many stopped dating their partners; they couldn’t find childcare, were too exhausted or too tired of each other. Some had broken up.

The first summer of our son Alexander’s life, we spent Saturday afternoons in Regent’s Park, eating pizza on a blanket. Mark and I laughed as our beautiful baby scooped up a handful of mozzarella. I loved our little family. But I missed our old life: making out on Saturday afternoons, for a movie or dinner.

When Alexander was a few months old, we tried weekly date nights. But after a few attempts at sitting in a restaurant, yawning and fantasizing about sleep, we gave up.

Our relationship with one of the housemates quickly withered…

cum caregivers. The conversations were lively, short and logistical: ‘you forgot to buy milk’; “Why do I have to put away the toys?”

With Mark working full-time in the office and me using the few hours I had off to work as a yoga teacher and writer, the chores became harder.

My habit of throwing away tops with the sleeves inside out in the laundry basket has now infuriated Mark, who does the laundry. And when he came into our narrow kitchen to make breakfast, just as I was emptying the dishwasher, I became furious. Sex dropped from at least weekly to sporadic.

When Alexander was two, I asked Mark if he wanted to go away for a weekend. At first he suggested taking Alexander with him. ‘No, I said. ‘I want to be with you.’

Our 48 hours stay in a log cabin with a fireplace, in a woodland in Kent, was filled with walks, fish and chips on Whitstable beach and afternoon sex followed by a nap. The next time I suggested going away alone for a whole week, Mark was enthusiastic. I proposed it when we were stuck in a hotel room in Puglia, with Alexander, now three. He rolled his handful of toy trains across the floor. It turned out he didn’t like the beach, the pool or the heat.

“It’s certainly cheaper than divorce,” I half-joked as we calculated the cost of childcare. Neither of us have parents who can care for Alexander, but we are fortunate to have a nanny that he adores.

On our trip the following year, I spent the mornings by the sparkling blue Aegean Sea, reading and swimming. Mark explored local towns with his beloved camera. When we met for lunch at the seaside restaurant, I was excited to see him. Most evenings we ate on the hotel’s balmy terrace, decorated with garlands of small lights, overlooking the olive groves. As my husband talked to our waiter, I saw him with new eyes.

Every now and then I missed Alexander. When we visited the ice cream parlor where we took him last year, I longed to see his ecstatic, chocolate-covered face. When I saw a woman hugging her young daughter by the pool, I longed to hug him.

But when I later saw the same child throwing her pasta across the table, I was grateful for the week’s reprieve.

Within minutes of arriving home, we were thrown back into the routine of life. But remembering our time together reminded me that my husband is so much more than the guy who dumps his empty Amazon boxes on the floor.

Being a parent might be one of the best things ever. But one of the downsides is the pressure it puts on a relationship. I don’t want mine, with the man it took me half a lifetime to find, to become untenable.

As long as it is financially feasible, Mark and I have agreed to travel alone every year. Now I daydream about Slovenia in June; of lying alone together, in a bed in the Alps, surrounded by high peaks and a vast sky, with time and space to remember who we are and why we fell in love.