What did each marriage teach you specifically about yourself as a husband, and what would you deliberately do differently now?

I can't tell you whether Raluca and I would have survived if I hadn't quit my job, started the company that was meant to be ours, taken a contract far too big for us and then lost the team halfway through it. Nobody gets to run that experiment a second time. What she did afterwards is hers to own, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But the part that was mine was this. For about a month I stopped sleeping and effectively disappeared into the work. I didn't tell her what was happening, because I was busy solving it and I thought that was the responsible way to behave. So she filled the silence with a story — that I was working constantly because I no longer found her attractive after she'd put on a few kilos. That was untrue and it had never once crossed my mind. But I'd given her nothing to work with, so she wrote her own version, and hers was far worse than the truth.

That's the thing I actually learned, and it took me years. When I go quiet, people don't wait. They fill it in. And what they fill it in with is almost always worse than what's really going on.

So what I'd do differently is deeply unglamorous. Say what's happening while it's happening. Even badly. Even in three words at midnight. Not a report — just enough that nobody has to invent anything.

I had a short refresher course in that last Thursday, from the other side. You went quiet for a day, for perfectly good reasons, and by the afternoon I'd assembled an entire theory about what I must have said wrong. That isn't a complaint — you'd told me you were flat out and you'd done absolutely nothing. It was just instructive to be on the receiving end of it inside a fortnight of telling you the Raluca story.

One distinction, because there are two different versions of me going quiet. There's the one where I've got excited about an idea and vanished down a rabbit hole — that one is harmless, and frankly it's the entertaining part of living with me. And there's the one where something is going wrong and I've gone underground to fix it on my own. That second one is the dangerous one. It's mine to manage rather than yours to detect, and if you ever see it, say so out loud. You'll be right.

As for the first kind, you have a remedy available that will work every single time. Come and kiss me, and mention that you need focused assistance with something in the bedroom. I'll have forgotten the rabbit hole before your lips are off mine — and I'd like the record to show that I'm not remotely embarrassed about how cheaply I can be bought.