'I've been celibate for five years'

Celibacy is the unspoken side of midlife divorce. There has been no plummeting of my libido, no preference for petting the dog, knitting or long hikes…

- ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Believing that no man would ever want me again, I felt like a 50-year-old virgin as I posted my divorce announcement on Facebook and Instagram. I experienced a tremendous sense of sadness as I wrote it, but there was also an element of excitement at the release from a situation that no longer made me happy. My intention was to announce the end of my marriage with all the love, respect and gravity I felt it warranted. The reaction was one of astonishment; everyone knew how ardently I had loved my husband. I’d waited until the decree absolute, almost two years after our separation, before publishing a word. A decade of marriage, gone. Love, grief and intimacy were the subjects of my Amazon #1 bestseller, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, after all. And then a handsome American friend, a lawyer, messaged me. He understood loss; his first wife, a model, had left him for another man. ‘That was before I made it,’ he said. ‘Now she rents in Hackney and I own a chateau in Auvergne. My God, you’re beautiful.’

When I told him I was celibate, he began to chase in earnest. It wasn’t the first time. Players have always targeted me because the seduction of an independent woman is a coup. But I wasn’t playing hard to get, I said; I really, truly was in pain. My heart was broken. Friends have asked whether there was ever a moment of temptation, but what I wanted was tenderness and sincerity; disconnected sex was the last thing on my mind. Indifferent to my suffering, the American saw me as a challenge. I cut him off.