Ask anyone in family law which month their phone starts ringing again and they will tell you the same thing. Not January, though January gets the headlines. September. The fortnight after the uniforms go back on, when the house empties out at half past eight and stays that way until teatime.
Nothing dramatic happens in September. That is rather the point. A whole summer’s worth of noise stops, all at once, and whatever was underneath it becomes audible again.
The last Sunday of August
It usually begins here, with the label-writing and the shoe shopping and somebody discovering the PE kit has been in the boot since July. There is a particular togetherness in that Sunday. Two people working the same problem in the same kitchen, handing each other scissors, agreeing about something at last.
Karen from Stockport told us she remembered thinking, halfway through pairing up socks, that this was the most her husband had spoken to her since the ferry back from France. And then she remembered that most of it had been about socks.
The first week
Week one is busy enough to hide behind. New teacher, new timetable, somebody has forgotten a water bottle. There is admin, and admin is wonderful. It fills a car journey, fills a dinner, fills the fifteen minutes before bed that would otherwise need filling with something more personal.
Couples who have been quietly struggling often have a genuinely decent first week of September, and mistake it for a fresh start. It is not a fresh start. It is a very short-term contract with a fixed end date, and the end date is roughly the following Friday.
The second week
By week two the admin runs out.
The timetable is learned. The forms are signed. The new shoes have stopped being new. And two adults who have spent six weeks surrounded by children, in-laws, holiday traffic and other people’s swimming pools suddenly find themselves alone in a very quiet house at twenty past six on a Tuesday.
This is the fortnight we hear about most. Not because anything goes wrong in it, but because nothing does. Tom, a member from Warwickshire in his late forties, described it almost apologetically. “We had a nice summer. Genuinely. Then the second week of September I sat in the kitchen while she watched something upstairs, and I realised I’d been waiting all day for her to come home and then I had nothing to say when she did.”
That is the reckoning. It is not a row. It is a Tuesday.
The third week, when the comparisons start
Something else happens in mid-September that nobody plans for. The photographs go up.
Everyone else’s summer arrives on your phone in retrospect — the friend who looks besotted on a Greek balcony, the couple from the school gates who apparently still hold hands at forty-eight. And you catch yourself doing the maths on your own August. Not whether it was bad. Whether it was anything at all.
Comparison is a rotten guide to other people’s marriages, because nobody photographs the silent drive home. But it is a surprisingly accurate guide to your own feelings about yours. If somebody else’s holiday makes you feel hollow rather than envious, that is worth paying attention to.
By the end of the month
And then, usually somewhere around the last week, comes the sentence. Different words every time, but the same shape.
“Is this it, then, until Christmas?”
Because that is what the calendar now looks like. Twelve weeks of the same school run, the same Thursday bins, the same two people orbiting a kitchen island with the radio on. No holiday to plan for. No long evenings. Just the routine, restored in full, with nothing scheduled to interrupt it.
For a lot of people that is perfectly fine, even comforting. For a lot of others it is the moment they stop telling themselves the problem was the stress of the holidays, or the kids, or the heat, or the in-laws. There is no longer anything to blame it on. The house is calm and the diary is clear and they are still lonely.
Why this fortnight matters more than a bad row
Marriages very rarely end because of September. What September does is remove the scaffolding. It takes away the distractions a busy summer provides and leaves a couple looking straight at each other, which is either a pleasure or a problem, and most people know within about ten days which one they are dealing with.
Some couples use it well. They notice the quiet and put something in it — a Friday night that involves leaving the house, a conversation that goes past logistics, a holiday booked for February simply so there is something in the diary with the two of them in it.
Others notice the quiet and realise they have been managing around it for years, and that the summer was not a break from the loneliness so much as a very good disguise for it.
Neither reaction makes anybody a bad person. But if you have spent the last fortnight sitting in a very tidy kitchen feeling more alone than you did in a car park in Cornwall with three children shouting, it is probably not a phase, and it is probably not the school run’s fault.
Plenty of people reach that conclusion in September. Rather more than you would think are quietly doing something about it by October. If you recognise the fortnight, you know where to find illicitencounters.com.
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