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I came to hold both truths at once: I’d caused him deep and lasting harm, by leaving him. And also, I did not regret choosing a life that would not share a home with his anger.

When I say I held both truths, I mean that I lay with them, sleepless, in the dark.

A friend suggested that his anger was a sign of how much he’d loved me. As if love might curdle to anger with an equal but opposite intensity, like putting a negative sign in front of a very large number. But I knew that some version of this anger had been there the whole time.

One time in coupl…

Was this frolicking—being with the baby all day? It rearranged my soul, sure, but it didn’t exactly feel like frolicking. I wondered if the only way to make the labor of my day legible to C would be to frame it as entirely exhausting. But I did not want to create a home where the main measures of l…

When we got home from the botanic gardens that day, C was in a bad mood. I could tell from his gaze, and his posture on the couch as he swiveled toward me. I wanted to tell him about the greenhouse, the ways the baby’s eyes had tracked the flickering shadows, how good it was to feel my own pretensi…

Lying in bed, under the sloping roof of our Paris garret, C said we should get married. I said yes, because I was in love with him, and because I wanted my whole self to want something, no questions asked. I wanted that consolidation. I wanted to believe in love as a conscious decision more than an…