I’m still trying to work out all the reasons why I decided to ‘out myself’. After all, why advertise the fact that you’re in intensive psychotherapy and a relationship disaster zone? I’d be the first to say it’s a rather weird thing to do. Initially, I suggested writing a one-off piece for The Observer. It was a general article about therapy and not too self-revealing. At the time, I honestly thought my motivations for writing this were simply to challenge the stigma and help other people. It seemed like a good idea at the time and it filled a page in the new Berliner-style Observer. But the kind of therapy I was having has a bizarre way of stripping you of self-deception and forcing you to look at yourself from a completely different perspective. This meant considering some of the less altruistic motivations. I had to consider the possibility that I found it easier to have a relationship with a large, anonymous audience than an intimate one-to-one relationship. I also had to ask why I found it easier to observe myself rather than just be myself. Why everything had to have a purpose, including being in therapy. I realised this early on in therapy and, after the first piece, I turned down requests to write other personal articles about it as I was aware that I was in therapy first and foremost to get myself sorted out, and not primarily as a journalistic exercise.

However, after about four months, I was asked to write a weekly column for the popular women’s magazine Grazia. I thought very carefully about this for a long time, and eventually felt that I could use a little bit of the experience of being in therapy for entertainment and journalistic purposes. I was going to therapy three times a week for 50-minutes a go, and writing a 450-word column. I felt I could do this without jeopardising the process or hurting anyone. The identities of significant individuals were changed to protect their privacy.

As a writer I do feel it’s important to challenge some of the myths and taboos that exist about both therapy and infidelity. And, since I’d honestly thought I was self-aware before I went into therapy, I was very interested in the extent to which human beings are capable of unwitting self-deception. I also realised that some of the feelings that had arisen for me in therapy – about, for instance, repressed anger, envy, sibling rivalry, the desire for unconditional love, fear of rejection, fear of getting completely emotionally involved with someone, the search for meaning and purpose – were not unique but were in fact universal and all part of the crazy human condition.

I’d wanted to write a book since I was a teenager and had tried to so many times. When my wonderful agent, Rupert Heath, contacted me after he’d read the columns and suggested putting together a book proposal, it was the beginning of a dream come true.

So many women had written to say they could identify with some of the issues I talked about in the Grazia columns. Although it is a personal story, my hope with the book was always that it would resonate with some other women, and men, and make them think not about me but about their own lives and relationships.