My marriages: the best laid plans.......

I had a very conventional upbringing; the eldest of two children, I was taught to respect my elders and not to answer back. I worked hard at school and I fully expected to marry reasonably young, to have two children and to broadly have the updated version of the life my mum had.

It's funny how life never really pans out as you expect.

Instead I was married at twenty-two to a man who was the first adult to really show me attention; I was so grateful I let him put a ring on my finger. It broke my dad's heart; my mum told me the day I got married was the second of the two times she has ever seen him cry. The marriage lasted less than two years; I returned home to my parents.

At twenty-eight I was married for a second time to a man three years younger than me; he worked hard and our backgrounds were similar. He had told me he wanted children so imagine my surprise and frustration when, eighteen months into the marriage, he announced he didn't want them. He sat and watched my heart break in front of his eyes; I pleaded and begged him to change his mind but he refused to budge. Marriage number two was over.

I met my last husband in my early thirties having recently relocated from Sheffield to Harrogate. He was tall, handsome and seven years younger than me. We had a matchmaker, Jenny, who worked for him as a receptionist at the local swimming pool where he was the manager. We quickly became an item.

A year after meeting we were married in the Caribbean; this time I felt I had met someone who doted on me and who would look after me. He looked after me in the practical sense; the rubbish was always put out, he could vacuum a carpet to within an inch of it's life and Saturday morning saw him cleaning the bathroom with remarkable regularity. My mum frequently commented on how unusual it was to find a man so domesticated; it was like having a built-in housekeeper. Lucky me.

There is always a trade-off, though. In this instance it was emotional immaturity for a spic-and-span house. I remember having an argument about six months into our marriage during a week we had taken off to spend with each other. His friends had called and asked him to go out to play golf and I made it known I wasn't happy; we were newly weds when all was said and done. He told me he thought I was being totally unreasonable and that he wanted a divorce.

I finally realised when our son was two years old that we were never going to be happy. At this point we had slept in separate beds for seven of the nine years we were married; our evenings were spent in different rooms in the house. The realisation dawned on me that our son was going to grow up thinking this was what a relationship looked like. Coupled with that, if we continued in the same vain he would leave home at eighteen and I would sit and wonder how on earth I would fill my life up from thereon.

Many people say they stay together for the sake of their children, and I think that is admirable. For me that was never an option. If we had done that I would have become a sullen, drawn and embittered mother; someone very different from the girl who existed deep down.

We parted; it was painful and, if I'm honest, it still is at times even though two years has passed.

But now my son and I laugh on a daily basis, we regularly dance around the kitchen at breakfast time and we are forever hugging and kissing each other. If I wear something new or do my hair differently, he tells me how pretty I am; he effortlessly makes my eyes water with tears of joy. I am now the mother I was meant to be, not a miserable shadow of someone who felt burdened and old beyond her years.

So when people have commented that I selfishly bailed out of my marriage and should have thought more about Ben, I reply that it was because of Ben that I did it. A happy, empowered and strong mother is what my son needs, that is the sort of mother he is likely to remember fondly in years to come.

What comes next? A journalist recently asked me if I would ever get married again and rather bizarrely I had to stop and think about it.

The truth is that getting the relationship right is what is important to me now. And if I really felt deep down that this time I had done that, then hell yes, why not?

There ain't nothing like the real thing, to quote Aretha Franklin.