I had no thought my loving husband Rob was a heroin addict. Four years later he was useless. I missed so many indicators – like foil vanishing from the kitchen

Two years into their ­marriage, Poorna Bell’s husband told her something that sparked grief, anger and a corrosive kind of guilt. How had she, an experienced ­journalist, not realised that Rob, the man she planned to have ­children with, was a heroin addict?

‘It’s one of the questions friends often asked me, and that I asked myself repeatedly,’ she says. ‘How could I not have known?’

With the clarity of hindsight, there were signs that Rob was in the grip of a ­desperate addiction: long stretches locked in the bathroom, drawers slammed shut when Poorna entered a room, doors abruptly closed because of work ­‘deadlines’ and even, she later realised, the absence of tin foil in the kitchen which he used to smoke the drug.

Yet with no frame of reference in her ­otherwise comfortable world, she had no idea such things pointed to heroin use.

‘Finding out was one of the worst moments of my life,’ she says now. ‘Alongside it, though, there was also relief because, after months of confusing behaviour, at least now I knew what was happening.’

What she couldn’t have known, however, was that far worse was to follow.

Within two years, Rob was dead, having taken his own life, leaving Poorna – the fresh-faced bride he had married just four years earlier – a widow at 34.

For a long time afterwards, the grief and bewilderment were so intense that she lived in a ‘liminal state’, navigating a ­nebulous cycle of eating, sleeping and going to work. Days blurred into each other, while future happiness felt not just distant but utterly impossible.

Yet a decade on from those often ­hopeless days, Poorna has found it – and not, as so many assumed she would, through the safety and comfort of a new relationship and motherhood. In the years after Rob’s death, Poorna became acutely aware of the societal script ­hovering around her, telling her that grief has a socially ­acceptable expiry date, and that a woman’s life regains legitimacy in a new ­relationship with partnership and family.

Instead, her recovery has come from a determined decision to forge her own path, outside the expectations placed on women.

It has been a ten-year journey of self-­discovery chronicled in her searingly honest new book, She Wanted More.

Part memoir, part manifesto, it is both an indictment of the narrow scripts women – particularly older women – are expected to follow, and a defiant call to tear them up and create their own rules.

‘It’s not about telling women what to do,’ she says of her rallying cry. ‘It’s reminding them that they’re not powerless, and that they don’t have to continue with things just because that’s how it’s always been done. They can think about what they want.

‘Many women my age and older are leading lives shaped by ­decisions we didn’t necessarily engineer ourselves. I hope the book helps women take an ­inventory: am I still OK with this choice? Is it still serving me?’

Charismatic and articulate, Poorna, now 45, is the daughter of first-generation ­immigrants from south India, and grew up in suburban Kent assuming, as most of her peers did, that marriage and children would eventually follow.

‘I was an enormous romantic as a teenager,’ she says. ‘And throughout my 20s that idea crystallised into a very clear goal: you date to meet the soulmate, which leads to marriage and children.’

After studying English at Queen Mary ­University of London, she began her journalism career and, in early 2009, aged 28, she was set up on a blind date with Rob Bell, an environmental journalist.

A New Zealander five years her senior, with a shaved head, ­tattoos and an enormous dog called Daisy, he did not, at first, strike her as an obvious match.

‘I was sceptical,’ she laughs. ‘But it turned out to be an amazing first date. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was – I’d just never met anyone like him before.’

Their relationship progressed quickly. ‘It felt like my whole life I’d been told that ­dating was a game, but with Rob it didn’t feel like that. His intentions were clear without being overwhelming,’ she says. ‘We moved from a few dates to talking about ­marriage and kids – ­something I’d never done before.’

Looking back, she describes that period as ‘soft focus, like a Monet painting’ – a vision of a future from the things she had been taught to want, without ever questioning why or how they would actually fit together. But she was also deeply in love, and loved in return.

As she writes in She Wanted More: ‘It felt limitless. I didn’t have to worry about Rob’s intensity of ­feeling because I felt it. I never doubted how much Rob loved me, and I still don’t.’

The couple married in the ­summer of 2011, Poorna by then aware that Rob suffered episodes of severe depression with which he had ­struggled since childhood.

‘The conversation around ­mental health was so different back then,’ she says. ‘So when he told me, my impression was that it was something he managed, that he was on top of his care, and that we’d deal with it as we went along.’

In hindsight, she believes that Rob struggled to articulate the severity of his illness, and ­perhaps to acknowledge it fully himself. ‘When we’re in relationships, we want to be loved for who we are,’ she says. ‘But there’s also a fear: if you let someone see all of it, will they still love you? I think that was a battle for him.’

The truth about his heroin ­addiction finally emerged after another mysterious weekend ­during which Rob lay in bed, sweating and exhausted, with what Poorna assumed was a fever brought on by a virus.

After returning from the gym to find him still in bed, she reached breaking point. ‘I said, “Something is going on. And if you don’t tell me, I’m packing a bag and leaving right now.” That’s when he told me he was addicted to heroin. And the bottom fell out of my world.’

She ran into another room, ­feeling her brain was about to explode. Amid the shock and bafflement, there was anger, too – that on their wedding day ‘one of us knew the truth and one didn’t’.

There was also soul-searching about the way she had not been able to recognise the truth about the man she slept beside every night.

Today, though, she stresses that addiction rarely announces itself in obvious ways, particularly when it exists alongside ­professional success and ­emotional intelligence, both of which Rob had in spades.

‘He told me it was because addicts are very good at concealing things,’ she says. ‘And there was no reason for me not to trust the person I trusted most in the world.’

She is also careful to ­dismantle the stereotypes around addiction. For Rob, she believes heroin was not recreational but a form of self-­medication – a way to quiet depression so severe that it allowed him to feel halfway ­normal. ‘There’s a belief in society that addiction is a choice,’ she says. ‘But when you look at what it costs people – prison, their ­relationships, often their lives – you can’t call it that.’

In the months that followed, Poorna did everything she could to support her husband. There were doctors’ appointments, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and two stints in rehab at the Priory, in July 2014 and February 2015, all taking place against a backdrop of Poorna’s then full-time job as an editor at a successful news website.

The stress was profound: she writes movingly of screaming at the steering wheel as she drove home after Rob’s first Priory admission, and of the dawning realisation that they would not become parents together as they’d always planned. ‘I don’t think I’d said goodbye to motherhood at that point,’ she says. ‘But I understood how ill he was, and that it wasn’t going to happen with Rob.’

She writes in her book of how the door to her and Rob becoming ­parents together ‘shut for ever’: ‘I might not know what it is like to be a mother, but I know I felt enough love for that could-be child that if I couldn’t ­guarantee that she could have a safe life, a good life from the very beginning, it wouldn’t be right.’

There were periods of ­sobriety but Rob relapsed and, in May 2015, three months after he had left the Priory for the second time and while back in his native New Zealand in another attempt to get clean, he took his own life.

Poorna learned the news in the small hours, via a phone call with his mother, and remembers letting out a ­primeval howl of pain.

‘It was absolute devastation,’ she says now. ‘It’s grief, but amplified by trauma. People sometimes assume it was inevitable because of his mental health, but it wasn’t. None of us thought this would ­happen. The shock was enormous.’

Today, she can barely remember the aftermath. She knows she returned to work, but says much of that period is now a blur. ‘When people say, “I met you in 2015 or 2016”, I don’t remember,’ she says. ‘It felt like life had stopped.’

Yet as she slowly began to emerge, she noticed another pressure taking shape: the assumption that her healing would involve restarting what she calls the familiar ‘soulmate to marriage’ pipeline.

Well-meaning questions about dating or ‘meeting someone’ carried an implicit belief that her single ­status was an intermission.

‘People would ask if I was dating, and while it was well meaning, of course, it used to really irritate me, as if that was going to make me less sad. Dating became a measurement of growth – and it just wasn’t for me. I became very aware that whether I meet someone again shouldn’t ­matter to anyone else.’

The same assumptions ­surrounded motherhood.

‘There was this clear sense that it was still possible for me to have children, and so that my life couldn’t be “in vain”,’ she says. ‘Before Rob died, I felt all these expectations woven so tightly into where my life was meant to go. When I was yanked out of that, it became easier to see how ­arbitrary they were.’

The seeds of She Wanted More were planted there. She recalls many of her friends ­navigating turning 40 with real fear, having absorbed a ­cultural narrative that suggested they had reached a sell-by date and were plunging on a downward slope.

In the book she writes: ‘I had crawled across a broken glass carpet of grief to be met by a world trying to wash away my ambitions because of my age.’

She adds now: ‘The latter half of my 30s involved a lot of self-evolution. Alongside the realisation that other people have metrics for what ­happiness should look like. And those metrics don’t ­necessarily match mine.’

Those feelings crystallised in the pandemic, a period that intensified isolation and self- reflection. Poorna turned 40 and developed Long Covid, wiping her out for months.

‘Turning 40 was fine – the world didn’t end,’ she says. ‘But recovering from Long Covid was a catalyst. I ­realised I had a choice: believe that life only gets worse as you age, or start actively living it.’ Along the way, she realised that she did not want children; she has only assumed motherhood lay in her future without fully interrogating that assumption.

‘I realised I’d never really thought about what motherhood involved,’ she says. ‘Only that it was something you did. Whatever part of me wanted that died with Rob.’

She also faced her finances for the first time. During their marriage, she had deferred much of that responsibility, unaware that Rob had accumulated tens of thousands of pounds of debt as a result of his addiction.

‘I didn’t feel able to ask to see his finances,’ she says. ‘After everything that happened, I realised there’s a huge financial literacy gap between men and women. I had to unroot my fear around money and develop healthier habits. I thought you needed a lot of money to start saving. You don’t.’

She now believes that knowing and understanding your finances is one of the single most empowering things a woman can do. And empowerment is a theme that runs throughout She Wanted More, a call to arms for women of all ages, but particularly those in their 40s and upward.

She emphasises that it is not meant to be ­prescriptive, and that there is no ‘right’ way of living. ‘I think most people are making some kind of ­compromise with themselves,’ she says. ‘It’s making sure we know what that is and that we’re happy with it.

‘When I asked women what they thought the most ­important thing was to them as they grew older, I thought it would be romantic relationships and family, but it was their friends,’ she says.

While single herself, she emphasises she’s not ‘anti-­relationship’. ‘Being single and having a partner both have challenges. I’m open to meeting someone, it’s just no longer my focus, and that’s been incredibly freeing,’ she says.

‘It creates space for friendships and for my career which is extremely important to me. If I’m in a relationship again, I want it to come from fullness, not from trying to fix a void.’

What she won’t do is marry again. ‘I loved being a wife,’ she says. ‘And I would say my views on it have evolved over time, but my eyes have been opened to the fact that, beyond the romance, ­marriage is a serious legal commitment. For me, it’s possible to have everything we’re told ­marriage promises without being legally bound.’

The thing she prizes most, in fact, is something she wants for all women, regardless of their age or path. ‘It’s freedom,’ she says. ‘Whatever that looks like for you.’