It was Valentine’s Day 2023 that Ruby*, a teacher in her early 30s, realised something was different about her boyfriend. They were heading to the gym, as they often did, before a date at an art exhibition in the evening.

“He was usually a really helpful coach,” she explains. “I was struggling to get a new exercise right that day, but when I called over for help – as I normally would – he snapped in a way I’d never seen before. He shouted at me across the gym: ‘It’s not my job to help you, you shouldn’t expect so much of me.’ I was really shocked and like, woah, where has this come from? We left the gym, immediately afterwards he said to me: ‘You really need to go away and reflect on the fact that you’re displaying codependent toxic behaviour’.”

To say this came out of the blue is an understatement, Ruby tells me. At that point, Ruby and her boyfriend had been together for the best part of a year, during which she “couldn’t have asked for a better relationship”. They’d met on Hinge, where Ruby was delighted to find a guy who was her type, shared her interests and made references to attachment styles in his profile. “He was studying philosophy and psychology as a mature student,” she says.

“We had intellectual conversations and immediately set up a date, where we just hit it off straight away. Within a couple of months we were completely exclusive – boyfriend and girlfriend. All of my friends and family met him and were like, ‘oh my goodness you seem so happy, we’ve never seen you like this before, he’s great for you’. I thought I’d found the love of my life, my future husband and father of my children.”

“My boyfriend told me he wanted to become an ‘alpha male’ – it ended our relationship”