We leave our child behind when we go on holiday - and it's bliss!

'Do you want kids?' asked the acquaintance I ran into one blue-skied December morning.

He was cradling his six-week-old son, and I was on my way to a scan, to check the breast cancer I'd had a decade ago, at 31, hadn't returned. 'Probably,' I told him. 'Do it. It's the best thing ever,' he said.

I decided, assuming my scan was clear, I'd speak to Mark, my boyfriend of a couple of years, and now my husband, about trying for a baby. We met on a dating website, after I spotted a photo of a smiling blue-eyed man, with an old-fashioned camera in his hands, and thought: I want to be with him.

After almost 15 years of being single, and having had cancer and chemotherapy, I delighted in our blossoming love affair — its evenings in London's tapas and cocktail bars and weekends away.

Despite then being 39, children were not at the forefront of my mind. I hoped, at some point, to have them. However, Mark had spent his 30s unwell from an autoimmune condition. At 40, finally better, he wasn't keen to spend his free time caring for a young child.

Annabel Chown and husband Mark noticed their romantic life dwindling - so set off on holiday without son Alexander 

He took some persuading. And during the four-plus years it took us to conceive, eventually via IVF, I carried both a deep longing for a child, alongside fear about how one might compress my life, and my relationship. Most of my friends were already parents. Many had stopped going out with their partner; they couldn't find childcare, were too knackered, or too fed up with one another. Some had split up.

The first summer of our son Alexander's life, we spent Saturday afternoons in Regent's Park, eating pizza on a blanket. Mark and I laughed as our gorgeous baby shovelled up handfuls of mozzarella. I loved our little family. But I missed our old life: Saturday afternoons having sex, before a film or dinner.

When Alexander was a few months old, we tried weekly date nights. But after a few attempts at sitting in a restaurant, yawning and fantasising about sleep, we stopped.

Soon, our relationship withered to one of flatmates-

cum-carers. Conversations were brisk, brief and logistical: 'you forgot to buy milk'; 'why should I tidy up the toys?'

With Mark working full time at the office as I used the handful of hours I had free to work as a yoga teacher and writer, chores became more fraught.

My habit of discarding tops in the laundry basket, their sleeves inside out, now infuriated Mark, who does the washing. And him coming into our narrow kitchen to make breakfast just as I was mid-emptying the dishwasher infuriated me. Sex dwindled from at least weekly, to sporadic.

Then, when Alexander was two, I asked Mark if he wanted to go away for a weekend. At first, he suggested we bring Alexander. 'No,' I said. 'I want to be with you.'

Our 48 hours staying in a log cabin with an open fire, on a Kent woodland, were filled with walks, fish and chips by Whitstable beach and afternoon sex followed by a nap. The next time I suggested we go away alone for a whole week, Mark was enthusiastic. I suggested it when we were stuck in a hotel room in Puglia, with Alexander, now three. He was rolling his handful of toy trains across the floor. It turned out he didn't like the beach, the pool or the heat.

'At least it's cheaper than divorce,' I half-joked, as we calculated the cost of childcare. Neither of us have parents who can care for Alexander, but we are lucky to have a babysitter he adores.

On our trip, the following year, I spent mornings by the glittering blue Aegean, reading and swimming. Mark explored local towns with his beloved camera. When we met for lunch at the seafront restaurant, I was excited to see him. Most evenings, we ate dinner on the hotel's balmy terrace, strung with garlands of tiny lights, overlooking olive groves. As my husband chatted to our waiter, I saw him through fresh eyes.

Occasionally, I missed Alexander. Visiting the ice cream parlour, we'd taken him to the previous year, I yearned for his ecstatic chocolate-smeared face. Seeing a woman cuddling her young daughter by the pool, I longed to hug him.

But later, when I saw the same child flinging her pasta across the table, I was grateful for my week's respite.

Within minutes of arriving home, we were plunged back into life's routine. But the memory of our time together reminded me that my husband is so much more than the man who dumps his empty Amazon boxes on the floor.

Being a parent might be one of the best things ever. But one of its shadow sides is the pressure it puts on a relationship. I don't want mine, with the man it took me half a lifetime to find, to become untenable.

As long as it's financially viable, Mark and I have agreed to take a trip alone each year. Now, I'm daydreaming about Slovenia in June; of lying alone together, in a bed in the Alps, surrounded by high peaks and a vast sky, with time and space to remember who we are and why we fell in love.