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And then, at the tail end of 1973, when she’d just turned thirty-two, Ellen initiated a breakup with Steve. He remembers it not as one defining incident—although their fights were at times acutely painful—but as a result of her amorphous desire for freedom and solitude. It wasn’t a clean break. She…

In the fall of 1967, a small group of mostly white, mostly educated women in their twenties started meeting in the evenings in narrow, tenement-style apartments on the Lower East Side in New York City, the kind that still had bathtubs in the kitchens. They wore fitted paisley minidresses and tidy u…

But there were other things holding me back, things that had little to do with the affection or emotional support I got from Aaron. The truth is I was secretly terrified of being single in my thirties, despite my feminist posturing about independence. Besides that, I worried about being a hypocrite…

Even when our sex was “good”—everyone’s body parts were doing what they should; if you saw a video of us doing it, you’d be like, “hot”—I wasn’t present, nor was I lost in bliss. Most of the time I was some putrid combination of bored, irritable, and dissociated. A couple of years in, when I reques…

Consider, for instance, the pros and cons list. I wrote it at the kitchen table on a gray afternoon, as naturally and casually as a shopping list. Transcribing the circular thoughts that had become fixtures in my brain, I put Aaron’s good and bad qualities in two columns. They were around the same …