'My husband is perfect, and I'm planning to leave him.'

I know how this sounds. I know how it looks on paper. I'm the woman with the kind, reliable, gentle husband. The one everyone says is lucky. The one who has nothing to complain about. The one who is about to break something that technically is not broken.

People love to talk about marriages that crumble under drama. Betrayal. Big mistakes. Explosive fights. Ours is the opposite. Mine is the kind of relationship that makes other women sigh and say they wish their partner was more like Brad*.

Yet here I am. Planning an exit.

The guilt sits in my stomach like a brick. I am not proud of any of this. But I am also not lying to myself anymore.

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I grew up as the girl who never quite got picked. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, and not even the fun bridesmaid. I was the safe one. The quiet friend. The good listener. The girl who never caused trouble, never chased boys and never got chased.

In a single-sex school full of teenage girls obsessed with who was hooking up with who, I was the one holding everyone's bags and pretending I didn't care.

My friends still tease me that my first kiss was basically a work of community service. I was 19, in a nightclub, and my drunken friends literally pushed my face onto some poor guy's. It was wet, clumsy and over before I understood what was happening. That was the peak of my romantic life until I was well into my twenties.

My first actual date happened at 21. A blind date disaster so humiliating that to this day I feel myself blush when I think about it. If the universe was sending me signs, they would be clear. Stick to what you are good at. Being sensible. Being safe. Being the friend with the big in-ground pool and parents who let us all use it.

Then I met Brad when I was 23. We worked together. He was shy. I was shy. We orbited each other like two awkward satellites until our colleagues basically staged an intervention.

It took eight months of pep talks before he finally asked me out. The date was sweet and gentle and careful. The one after that was the same. Two months later, at the grand age of 24, I finally had my first proper boyfriend.

Everyone said he was worth the wait. They were right. Brad treated me like he had studied a manual on how to be a good partner. He listened. He paid attention. He told the truth. He held my hand during the awkward early intimacy that I had dreaded for years. He made me feel safe for the first time in my life. I loved him. I still do.

But the feeling that sat underneath everything was relief. I had spent so long worrying about being the single aunty with a house full of cats that when someone finally chose me, I clung to it like a life raft. Our relationship was good. Solid. Never dramatic or difficult.

We fell into a steady rhythm that everyone around us admired. Even when we had kids and everything was messy and new, he rose to the challenge in ways that made my friends cry into their wine. He was hands-on. He was thoughtful. He never once acted like parenting was a favour he did for me.

If marriage came with a report card, Brad would get straight As. And then I changed.

I went back to study once our kids were out of nappies. I threw myself into a new career. I travelled for work. I met new people. I started seeing parts of the world I had only ever read about. It was like someone had adjusted the focus on my life without telling me.

Little by little, the home we built stopped feeling like a haven and started feeling like a weight.

The mortgage that was halfway paid off. The family car. The polite, friendly kids who are now teenagers. The predictable trips to the coast every summer and the biennial holiday to Fiji or Bali. The reliable routine that kept everything running smoothly.

What once felt comforting now felt like a chain around my neck. I know how selfish this sounds. I hear the words coming out of my mouth in counselling sessions and I wince. But the truth is, I feel like a woman who woke up in a life she chose too young. A life built on who I was, not who I am now.

My work sends me to conferences in different cities. I get 48 hours of breathing space at a time, and it is like tasting oxygen after years underwater. I walk strange streets and sit in cafés alone and, for the first time, I feel something spark inside me.

This is not about other men. If anything, I have realised I am not especially attracted to anyone. Not strangers. Not colleagues. Not even my husband. It is not desire that is missing. It is aliveness.

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I want more life. I want adventure. I want to know what it feels like to be alone and not lonely. I want quiet. I want to be selfish for once. I want to stop racing home from work to get someone to basketball training or soccer practice or a birthday party at a trampoline centre.

Sometimes I fantasise about living alone in a tiny unit somewhere no one knows me. A bed. A kettle. Maybe even the cats I once feared. No schedule. No expectations.

Even my friendships feel like another layer of performance. If I have to go to one more backyard barbecue where the men poke at the meat while the women (and usually my husband) do everything else, I might scream. I find myself sitting there thinking, is this it? Is this the grand prize?

I am not pretending I am the victim. I know I am the one creating the mess here. I know that if I walked away, the person who suffers most would be the man who has never been anything but good to me. I keep trying to explain this in counselling. My workplace offers free sessions and I have used every one of them. When the counsellor asks what is broken, I cannot answer. Because nothing is. Not really.

It is the sameness. The safety. The predictability. The sense that my life has been carefully landscaped into something beige and pleasant and suffocating.

I do not want to divorce Brad as much as I want to divorce this version of my life. But there is no way to do one without the other. That is the part that keeps me awake at night.

There is a version of me that would keep going. That would be grateful for what I have. That would bury the restlessness and try to rediscover the comfort. But the older I get, the quieter that version becomes.

I am not sure what I will do yet. I am not rushing anything. I am trying to honour the truth without blowing up my world in a moment of panic. But I am also trying to be honest with myself for the first time in a long time.

People assume marriages end because something terrible happened. Sometimes they end because nothing terrible happened at all. Sometimes they end because one person realises that safe love is not always enough. And that realisation, as awful as it feels, changes everything.

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