ARE YOU LIVING WITH A MIDLIFE MISERABLE MAN?

Lucy Cavendish couldn't bear it when her once fun, happy partner started complaining about everything

-  LUCY CAVENDISH AND ROLAND WHITE

Glass half-empty men. I've had quite a few relationships with them in my – and their – middle age. So it comes as no surprise to me, nor to my friends in a WhatsApp group that pings every day with anecdotes about grumpy husbands, that Miserable Man Syndrome is a recognised psychological state many arrive at in their 40s and 50s. Not that they start out that way. My most miserable partner, the one who really took it to an art form, was great fun for many months when we first got together. Charming, upbeat, spontaneous – he was everything I was looking for. He was in his mid-40s and I was heading towards mine, and we'd do crazy things together that reminded me, gloriously, of being a teenager again.

We packed picnics at the drop of a hat, full of smoked salmon and wine, and ate them by the side of the rural Thames. We'd skim stones and talk about how happy we were. I regard myself as a sunny, positive sort of person – like most of my female friends – and he clicked straight into my life. He had energy and ideas.

One day he went out to buy some food and came back with a rented VW camper van and we set off for the coast, later spending a hilarious hour doing the ‘oyster challenge’, as we called it, which simply meant trying to eat as many oysters as possible. The prize was a bottle of Moët, and he beat me by 45 to 30.

After six heavenly months, we moved in together. I was totally in love. All my friends thought he was absolutely wonderful. And yet, three years later, he had become such a sullen, difficult misery guts that he'd get furious with the cat for sitting on his favourite cushion.