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In an essay called “The Family: Love It or Leave It,” from 1979, my mother characterized the six years she spent without a partner in her thirties as “neither an accident nor a deliberate choice,” but rather evidence of feminism’s success: “The sense of possibility, of hope for great changes, that …

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…