Losing my job hit much harder than the money. I had no idea how much of being a good husband and father I had tied to being the provider until that role disappeared.

My wife and I found some of the material our 16-year-old son was watching online and we were horrified. The way he spoke with his mates had also changed — really degrading stuff about women that was completely at odds with how we thought we had raised him. We both saw the problem, but my wife expected me to be the one to tackle it because I was his father and I had absolutely no idea how. That became an argument between us as well. I do not hold those views, I have never spoken about women like that, and yet somehow I felt accused of having failed to teach him something. We spoke to a counsellor together and it helped enormously. He helped us understand the kind of manosphere content our son was being pulled into, stop turning on each other, and plan how to speak to him firmly without making the whole conversation one long lecture about what a terrible person he was. We are still dealing with it, but at least we are dealing with it together now.

I did not think I was depressed because I was not sitting around crying. I was working twelve-hour days, snapping at everyone and then wanting to be left alone when I got home. My wife called it depression before I did. Counselling helped me see that being productive and being okay were not the same thing.

My wife and I were talking less and less about anything real and sex had almost disappeared. I assumed the relationship was the problem. A lot of it was that I had been shut down for months and had not noticed.

I went to my GP because I was gaining weight around my middle, losing hair, struggling to get back into shape and feeling exhausted and angry about it. The blood tests also showed low testosterone. I was ashamed of how much it was affecting me — confidence, sex, mood, everything — and honestly felt sorry for myself most days. My GP suggested I speak to someone as well as dealing with the medical side. I found a male counsellor on Headroom who was around my age and had been through his own midlife changes. That connection was fantastic. My wife had gone through menopause and I had tried hard to support her, but neither of us had really talked about the male changes people sometimes call ‘andropause’. Counselling helped me stop treating ageing as a personal failure and work out what I could actually do something about.

My anger was not random. It was basically the only emotion I allowed to make noise.

My libido dropped and then I started having problems with erections. I panicked. I had basically understood sex as intercourse my whole life, so once that became unreliable I could not even imagine what intimacy was supposed to look like anymore. I withdrew from my wife because every touch felt like it might become a test I could fail. My psychologist helped me see how narrow my understanding of our physical relationship had become. I asked for homework, read what she suggested, and for the first time in my life actually learnt about desire, arousal and female sexuality rather than assuming I knew. She also suggested I speak to my doctor; after an assessment he prescribed treatment for the physical side, which definitely helped. But the biggest change came from the conversations. My wife and I became curious again instead of frightened of sex. At 58 I feel slightly embarrassed by how much I did not know, but mostly I am grateful somebody helped me catch up.

Online worked because I could do a session from my office with the door closed and go straight back to my day. No big production around ‘going to therapy’.

Retirement gave me all the free time I had spent 40 years wishing for. Then I discovered I did not know what to do with myself on a Tuesday morning.

I told the counsellor upfront I was not doing the whole ‘tell me how that makes you feel’ thing 😂. He laughed and said fine, tell me what you want to be different. That worked for me.

Becoming a dad was the best thing that ever happened to me and also completely messed with my confidence. Everyone asked how the baby and my wife were doing. Nobody asked if I was coping. I was not.

After the divorce I discovered most of my social life had actually belonged to the marriage. That was a rough realisation at 58. I started counselling because I was lonely; I stayed because I needed to build a life I actually wanted to be in.