Last summer, I met a handsome single dad on a Greek island. In the past, I’d have fallen head over heels in love, acted like a pick-me teenager and thought it was fate. By now, I’d have entered, and possibly finished, yet another epic Wuthering Heights-type relationship. But this time I didn’t. Instead, I was an ice queen, aloof and irresistible.

And I think I might have the most peculiar explanation for it.

It happened by accident, as all the best meet-cutes do. Lying on the sun lounger – aged 48, and newly thin in my skimpy yellow Melissa Odabash bikini, having lost nearly 3st on Ozempic in the previous 18 months – I wasn’t thinking about romance at all.

I was drowsy from the heat and listening to the gentle waves splashing against the diving platoon. Then my children, Lola, now ten, and Liberty, eight, came back from the resort’s kids’ club, where they had been making tie-dye T-shirts, and excitedly told me about meeting two new friends, who were also sisters of similar ages.

Whereupon, as I lay there, the girls’ father waltzed over – and asked my girls if they would like to celebrate his elder daughter’s birthday with a slice of cake at the club’s restaurant.

I noticed he was good-looking; in fact, on paper he was just my type: tall, dark-haired, well-spoken.

I waved my daughters off with him – and then he turned around and asked if I’d like to join too.

‘OK, why not?’ I thought nonchalantly, grabbing my shades and putting on my Levi 501 cut-off shorts, which I could now get into after years of covering up with kaftans.

And that was it. We spent the rest of the week together, eating breakfast, lunch and supper, synchronising our every movement, hanging out on beaches, paddle-boarding, swimming out to the floating platform and exploring local beaches.

Basically, we morphed into a blended family for the rest of the holiday. It felt natural – and fun – to be together as a unit, and when our children went off to the kids’ club, we sunbathed together on the sundeck.

We opened up about our lives, talking about our jobs – he was 40 and worked in finance – and how neither of us had had a serious relationship for years.

I knew I was attracted to him and the connection seemed deep. And yet I didn’t do two things that usually I very much would have done. I didn’t leap on him. And I didn’t think about him all the time. Or even very much at all.

Oh, the chemistry was there, but for the first time in my life, it felt as though I could take it or leave it. I didn’t sneakily look at his social media or start fantasising about a relationship. I didn’t worry endlessly about the impression I was making or how much he liked me. I didn’t chase him, or even imagine chasing him.

What I felt about him, I realise now, was how I felt about chocolate on Ozempic. I could see it was tasty and I’d be more than happy to have a little nibble, but I didn’t crave it. Sometimes I just didn’t fancy it at all.

I was still microdosing 1mg on that holiday to avoid overdoing it at the dinnertime buffet. Could it be that Ozempic wasn’t just killing the food noise but the ‘romantic noise’ too?

More intriguing still, my muted response seemed only to make him more interested in me. This newfound aloofness was apparently making me more magnetic.

For the rest of that holiday, he acted like the perfect man. He organised a seafood dinner for us all on a remote beach and a trip on a boat, just the six of us.

When the girls wanted to do arts and crafts, he drove them to a Hobbycraft-like megastore in the island’s main town, returning with bags of glitter, stickers and pens. He was nothing short of a ‘superdad’ – and that was very attractive.

Yet even when he was emerging from the swimming pool with water glistening off his fit body, I was as cool as a cucumber.

At the end of the holiday, they were heading back to Paris where his children lived, though he did talk about meeting up in London where he had a base. Was he asking me for a hook-up? I felt a ripple of excitement but I wasn’t bowled over.

But later that day, as we were boarding our plane, depressed at returning to normality, my WhatsApp pinged. ‘Hi, we miss you all. Would you and the girls come to Corsica with us in two weeks. We’ve got a villa.’

I’d barely got home before I found myself packing again. My best friend told me: ‘Marry him.’ I said: ‘Don’t be silly, he’s only inviting us because the kids get on.’

But none of the texts he sent me over the next two weeks were about the children. Instead, he told me more about his life, or talked about books, and politics. It was as close to ‘dating’ as it’s possible to get.

In Corsica, if I tried to pay even for the sparkling water, he’d stop me and pull out his wallet. It was very alpha male, but not in a controlling way. He was kind and simply wanted us to have a good time on him.

Halfway through that second holiday, I suddenly thought: ‘Am I mad? Why wouldn’t I be crazy about this man?’ I started to notice little things – like, when he talked, he generally looked at me and only me.

It was intense with the four children, all then under the age of nine, but I started to warm to the idea that maybe, just maybe, I liked him.

But we didn’t sleep together. One morning, as he stood topless like an Adonis on the other side of the breakfast island in our top-of-the-range villa, the sexual tension between us was palpable.

The children were still in bed, and I was in my tiny white shorts and T-shirt having just woken up, and he stared at me so deeply, he dropped a coffee cup. But, strangely, I let the moment pass as if nothing had happened.

The lust I’d have felt in the past would have ended with the pair of us on the nearest bed, but this time it felt peculiarly dialled down. I felt calm. Attracted, but not uncontrollably so.

I am not the only woman who is wondering about the effect of Ozempic on her romantic impulses. Other users online have reported that weight loss drugs have dampened their libido – or their impulsiveness – along with the food cravings.

More studies need to be done on how fat jabs affect brain reward pathways, but recently GLP-1 users and doctors have started to report a new side-effect – ‘emotional flattening’, dubbed ‘Ozempic personality’.

While on GLP-1 drugs, some people experience a muted response not just to food but to other things that often bring pleasure and joy such as exercise, reading, or even gardening.

Some researchers think this is because GLP-1s affect the way the so-called pleasure hormone dopamine works.

‘We know that dopamine modulates pleasure, and we do have animal data supporting the idea that GLP-1s decrease dopamine signalling, but we don’t have a lot of data to really probe what is happening in the human brain yet,’ says Dr Daniel Drucker, an obesity researcher with the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

It is ‘certainly plausible’ that its effect could extend to other types of pleasurable behaviours, he tells me – and that could include muffling the thrill of the chase, or toning down romantic angst, in my case.

Prior to using Ozempic, it seems to me that I was quite addicted to falling in love, and not in a healthy way. I’d be hooked by the dopamine rush of early romance and then become even more dependent the more chaotic a relationship got.

My first proper boyfriend looked like a young Tom Cruise, but became distant while we were doing our GCSEs.

I worried about it obsessively – far more than I did my exams – and when he ended it, even staged a moped accident outside his house for attention.

Robert was followed by heartthrob Barney when I was 17. We had an intense romance in which I lived at his parents’ house most of the week, but he soon got sick of my insatiable need for reassurance. When I found out he was seeing another girl, I rang him daily, begging him to come back to me.

Then there was TV producer David when I was 22, who suddenly found work taking up all his spare time when I became overly insecure about ‘us’. And the Baywatch-like surfer Adam, who fled to Newquay, Cornwall, to escape my neediness. You get the picture.

Sick of all this heartbreak, I did a lot of therapy in my late 20s and early 30s. As soon as the therapist handed me a book, Facing Love Addiction by Pia Mellody, I could no longer hide from the truth. I used love like a drug to ‘fix myself’. Just as I ate chocolate biscuits for the dopamine rush, so I pursued men until I pushed them away.

But all the therapy in the world couldn’t totally rewire me – and when I met Alex in my mid-30s, I fell headlong again into all the old patterns.

A charismatic and successful property developer, Alex was the great love of my life. Within five minutes of meeting him, I knew he was the only man I wanted to be the father of my children. Again, I was too clingy and he retreated. But after much turmoil, we worked through it and settled down together.

Sadly, his mental health went through many ups and downs, and in 2014 he died by suicide. After his death, it took years for the intensity of my love for him to fade. I imagined him a ghost in our apartment and found it almost impossible to let go.

When he died we were halfway through IVF, and I went on to have his children – our girls – with his frozen sperm.

Now, many years later, my perfect holiday romance should surely revive all those latent feelings of lust and love and romance. But I just . . . didn’t feel it. Or not nearly so strongly.

On our final night, the only evening we were alone, the children were watching a film in another room, we lay on the sofa and he stretched his legs so they were nearly touching me. I knew that if I moved a millimetre, it might change everything. But I didn’t.

I wasn’t trying to be relaxed on purpose. I was relaxed, to the point of indifference.

Nearly a year later, he still texts me often. We’ve seen him and his girls in London three times, and though he lives abroad and has a hectic schedule, we’re booked on two holidays again this summer as his guests – Corsica in July and Greece in late August.

The magic is still there, in its dialled-down way, but it feels more complicated. My feelings have grown, since this is clearly more than a one-off holiday friendship. But that uncontrollable lust hasn’t materialised. We haven’t even kissed but he’s constantly in touch while he travels for work.

Will we or won’t we? That’s the romcom scenario I love. Usually I’d be obsessed endlessly, ringing friends with updates and analysis. But this time I’m not and I haven’t.

And, yes, I do think that Ozempic is the reason. On weight- loss drugs the struggle with fattening food is non-existent and you don’t need much willpower. I feel the same deadening of desire here too: it’s not that I don’t want to, I’m just . . . not that bothered.

I’m still microdosing Ozempic – and I wonder what would happen if I wasn’t. Would I be overcome by feelings of true love? Would I find myself overwhelmed by uncontrollable lust? It could be the making or breaking of me – or us. My friend thinks I should do it and see if the feelings come roaring back in. Is he the one? Is it meant to be?

But I don’t want that. On the GLP-1s, I tell my friend, I can be in control of the answers to those questions. I still believe there’s a great love story out there for me – but right now, it feels more manageable, less chaotic.

He is definitely special and I’m open to a relationship – but I’d rather not be swept off my feet. Too often in the past that meant heartache. This way, I’m the aloof, cool girl rather than the obsessed pick-me girl that was once my reality. But I’ll still pack that little yellow bikini.