Began the new year in an eccentric way; a dear friend rang me out of the blue on New Year’s Eve afternoon from Stansted saying she was on her way to Edinburgh, did I want to come?

Checked the Net for seats on her flight, decided not to balk at the price (my inner bargaining went along the lines of: so much for the CD player I was promising myself); entered my card details, got my reservation number, told her I’d see her there, and off I went, a toothbrush in my pocket.

Within a few hours we were wandering the streets of a festive capital city in good company, saw amazing fireworks at midnight, received the sincere good wishes of many a strange Scot in a kilt, went to a club and drank till the wee small hours, walked home and crashed out on the living room floor of her kind-hearted friends’ apartment.

After a few hours’ sleep I staggered out of bed, having set three alarms to wake me, slithered into a taxi, and was back in a sleepy London by noon, and a friend’s New Year’s Day do by 1.30pm. I think I spoke some sense.

In some ways I still haven’t recovered from the shock to my system. But I’m glad I made the gesture, for spontaneity is something I’ve been lacking in quite a while.

I was aware, as I was making my way to the airport, that I had the freedom to do something as ridiculously extravagant, as gloriously frivolous as that, only because I was single and solvent, with no responsibilities except to pile up my cats’ dish with plenty of food, and drop an extra pellet in the fish tank.

The single life is the envy of many a soul, and although Sondheim’s wonderful line on marriage “You’re always sorry, you’re always grateful” speaks to the complexity of interdependence in a relationship, for many a year I’ve been blind to the joys of being single, carrying the burden of yearning for a merged coupledom like a lead weight, feeling incomplete and somehow alien.

The sorry/grateful experience of life itself was not available to me; I was only capable of feeling sorry for myself. In my own particular situation, financial stress had added a sense of feeling trapped in my life, thereby cancelling out any potential benefits of not having to take an Other into account.

Much to my surprise and relief, at the end of last year I sold a small loss-making internet business for a respectable sum. The chains have fallen away. Though not rich by any stretch of the imagination, I am no longer on the struggling student-poverty line, under which I’ve been labouring ever since I moved to London nine years ago. I feel empowered now to be fully responsible for myself and my life, in a way that I couldn’t have appreciated before. And the best part is that I feel I fully deserve every goddam penny.

Money and relationships are so intertwined symbolically that it’s hard to separate them. Money can’t buy you love, it’s true; but its lack corrodes self-love and self-respect in this materialistic society, without which true relationships are impossible. The imbalance of power, when two people have different financial clout – which of course is most people, and to this day is mostly gender-related, with women the losers in most cases – is something that cannot be underestimated.

The insights I gain from my work as a counsellor into people’s lives are many and profound, and my clients’ stories would make a powerful book. But of course writing about them is not possible. But, just before Christmas, I got a phonecall to say one of my clients had died of a heart attack, and I found myself crying like a baby, much to the consternation of the receptionist who called me.

Mostly I was sad that someone should know such despair and pain in the last week of his life; should feel so imprisoned. He was in the middle of a messy divorce, waiting for snail-like lawyers to resolve a complicated settlement; depression had prevented him from working, his sick leave had run out, and he was sleeping on the sofa in his home with his wife not talking to him, his children withdrawn because they could not bear to take sides. A prescription list as long as his arm did not provide him with the inner peace he craved.

Sitting with him, the last time we met, I saw the look of a drowning man, the absolute wide-eyed terror of someone believing he had nowhere to go. His gentleness prohibited him from making any demands to ease his situation; his inclination was to disappear emotionally, with alcohol, rather than tell anyone – least of all his wife or children – how much he was hurting. My only comfort is that he told another human being how he really felt, before he died; I have no idea of course whether or not he felt unburdened or terrified after he left me. Maybe it was both; but maybe his heart could not bear the thought of upsetting another human being, and faced with the prospect of breaking the habit of a lifetime, it gave up the ghost.

Money, or more accurately his capacity to feel that he was worth something by being paid, was crucial to his identity. Without it, he felt impotent, a pricked balloon. Men in particular are driven by a need to prove themselves financially; for we attribute so little value to other qualities. It’s a societal bias. Financial poverty is a symbol of failure in the West, whereas spiritual wealth is unrecognised. I’m not saying that poverty is a picnic in the mythical East; that’s nonsense. But there are other values, other ways of judging success.

My client’s capacity to move me was not based on his earning power; the devotion that his friends showed to him through his troubled last few months were a testament to his other qualities. Although he recognised their loyalty, he could not untie the knot he had deep inside, which was that as a non-earning man, he was worth nothing.

I may wonder about the price one pays when one chooses to avoid hurting other people; I may surmise that his compliance was at the root of his marriage failure, for there was no one there for his wife to relate to, to bounce off, to engage with; but still I’m left with a doubt that it’s as simple as that.

However flawed his desire was to please others, I for one want to honour his passing with these words, and the wish that our society may change to allow men to feel valuable for qualities other than that desired by the marketplace. Soul is priceless, and his touched me in a way that few have.