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Sonia's story

Sonia Mossop’s husband, Miles, had a number of affairs before finally leaving her for the woman he is now living with. Miles is 83, Sonia is 62 and they had been married for almost 40 years

“Like most women, I never thought my marriage would end. You don’t analyse your relationship while you are in it, but I always thought we made a good team, he was intellectual, I was sociable,” she says.

Sonia has refused to grant Miles the divorce he wants because it would affect her right to his foreign office pension.

“If we get divorced I can claim half his pension until he dies and thereafter I get nothing, but if we stay married I am entitled to half his pension until I die,” she says. To accommodate this she has been granted a judicial separation.

When the Mossop’s separated they sold the ‘substantial country house’ they had lived in for 20 years. It wasn’t enormous apparently, but big enough to bear the name of the village it sits in and to have more reception rooms than I can remember.

Now Sonia lives in a pretty three bedroom cottage in which she is very happy, but Miles, she says, lives in "a sort of pre-fab…..a poor person’s house. At first I felt quite sorry for him.” The couple have two sons “and although they are practically middle-aged men now they were really quite devastated,” says Sonia.

“They tried to talk to Miles but he just said ‘I’m divorcing your mother and I will not discuss it’.”

Now, for the first time since she was 21, Sonia Mossop is learning to live alone. Her friends have been fantastically supportive. “Every one of them. I haven’t lost a friend and Miles hasn’t got one,” she says with some relish.

I ask if she feels lonely and she says ‘No, not at all. Yes, sometimes. The hardest thing is you don’t matter 100 percent to anybody anymore. There is nobody to wait for in the evenings, no one to talk to in the morning. Sometimes I’m driving half across England and I think ‘if anything should happen, nobody knows where I am’.

"Still, you must turn negatives into positives: I can drink a bottle of gin in the evening if I want to and I don’t have to cook dinner!”

Sonia does not envisage marrying again: she is still legally married, and the men she meets, retired Generals in the main, do not tempt her.

This article was created: 8 September 2006.
This article was last edited: 24 January 2007.

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