I liked it far more than I expected to and that is what is frightening me

We did this because he wanted it. I want to be honest about that. I agreed after a lot of thinking, and I agreed genuinely rather than to keep the peace, but the appetite was his and I was going along with something.

We have done it twice, in June and last month.

I loved it. Both times. Not in the polite sense of it having gone well. I have thought about it most days since, and I have caught myself planning the next one in my head while doing entirely unrelated things, and I have been in a better mood generally than I have been in about three years.

And that has frightened me considerably more than any of the parts I was braced for.

The fear is not about him. He is delighted, in a slightly stunned way, and has been generous about all of it. If anything he is handling my reaction better than I am.

The fear is about me. I have gone from being a woman who did not particularly want this to a woman who has to be careful not to bring it up too often, in eight weeks. If it can move that far that quickly, I have no idea where it settles, and I have started asking myself questions I do not like. What if this turns out to be the most interesting thing in my life. What if I want more than we agreed. What if the version of me that turns up on those evenings is closer to the real one than the version who does the school run.

I have not said any of this out loud to anybody, including him, because it sounds ungrateful and slightly unhinged.

So: is this a known stage? Does the intensity come down? And has anybody found that the person they were on those evenings started leaking into the rest of it, and was that a problem or was it fine?