When does love turn to hate? Why is the line between the two emotions so fine? Does anybody out there have an answer? If so, please let me know.

I seem to be bouncing between deep sadness and sorrow one minute, anger the next – it’s like walking a tightrope………….………very high up, with a long way to fall. One minute I am hanging on for dear life. The next I’ve fallen off.

Nearly 5 weeks ago my wife told me that she no longer wanted me.

Her explanation was that she had come to realise that marriage was not for her. She was “not cut out to be with one man for the rest of her life”.

She wants to be a “free spirit”, to rediscover her sense of “self” (or “find ME” as she put it, in block capitals); wants “excitement”; not to have to think about anyone else before she decides to do whatever she wants. She wants more than “this”. The two kids in tow would not hinder her in this quest - they would be happier if their mother was “happy”.

Whilst she says that she still loves me, she is no longer “in love” with me.

Well, that’s all very fine and dandy then – off into our separate worlds we can go at the flick of a switch, or so she believes. My own has fallen apart.

The trouble is she disappeared off into her separate world (her blog and cyberspace in general) some time ago, leaving no trace of her real self around since. She’ll have some trouble finding that again. I’ve been looking everywhere for her since she went missing, but all I keep finding are traces of her fantasy-self.

Suddenly, there’s a complete stranger in my house. She has changed she says. She is “not the same anymore”. She says she was a different person then (when I met her), but a different person now.

But, I know that she is really in there and cannot get away from the fact by trying to hide in a Chinese cabinet, like a magician’s trick – “now you see the lady, now you don’t”.

Another mid-life crisis perhaps? Easy to be flip and “dismiss” it as such – it is partly, but a little more complicated than that. But then she is a few years older than the 38 she states in her profile. Indeed, I am not the 49 that I say I am on mine.

Both are just a case of wishful thinking. I hope reader, that you will forgive the artistic licence. These are the ages we both would like to think that we probably look and feel now, but not for long. Not the way that the prelude to separation, divorce and beyond can treat you!