My marriage ended because I was cruel. Or because I ate in bed. Or because he liked electronic music and difficult films about men in nature. Or because I did not. Or because I was anxious, and this made me controlling. Or because red wine makes me critical. Or because hunger, stress and white wine make me critical, too. Or because I was clingy at parties. Or because he smoked weed every day, and I did not think it was ‘actually the same thing’ as my drinking two cups of coffee in the morning. Or because we fell in love too young, and how could our actual lives compare to the idea we’d had of what our lives could be when we were barely twenty and our bodies were almost impossibly firm? Or because we tried non-monogamy for three months in 2011, and it was just fine, not great. Or because he put hot sauce on everything, without tasting it, even if I’d spent hours balancing the flavours from a recipe I’d had to scroll past a long and detailed story about some woman’s holiday to find. Or because he forgot our anniversary once. Or because I did our laundry never. Or because his large Greek family had not quite accepted me as one of their own, even after I learned his yiayia’s favourite poem for her birthday. Or because he walked in on me pooping that time. Or because, in 2015, we attended nine weddings and got carried away, and a big party where everyone told us we were geniuses for loving each other and gave us $3,000 seemed like a great idea. Or because we went to Paris and had an argument instead of falling more in love or at least rimming each other. Or because I’d stopped imagining what our children might look like. Or because he’d never started. Or because I was insecure and sometimes petty. Or because he kept insisting we go vegan, then sneaking pizzas into the apartment while I slept. Or because we finished watching The Sopranos and never started The Wire. Or because when we were first getting together, I’d kissed someone else, and sometimes still thought about her. Or because he was needlessly combative, with a pretentious streak. Or because I was a coward, whose work did not ‘actively seek to dismantle the state’. Or because I scoffed when he said that and asked about the socialist impact of his latest Burger King commercial. Or because he called me a cunt. Or because sometimes, I was one. Anyway, it was over.

‘I think the time apart will be good for you. You’ll find your way back to each other. Nine years is a big investment! There was a reason you were together. And sometimes, something that’s a little broken can be even more beautiful. Did you know in Japanese pottery there’s this thing—’

It felt humiliating to admit it, but without a partner to dissect things with, the big and small events of life seemed flimsy. I had accepted that it was over, that it would never be how it was again – even, possibly, that it was for the best, but I would have paid a million dollars for one more cab ride home from a party, drunkenly touching each other’s legs and poring over the night’s events – who had said what about what or accidentally offended whom, who was too drunk and going home with a new person, whether there had been enough snacks and if it seemed like the hosts were going to have an argument later – thrilled to have been out with so many people and more thrilled to be alone, now, just the two of us, on our way home to fuck and laugh and drink cold, cold water.

What were they all doing here? What were they hoping to feel, these adults engaged in games from their real or imagined pasts? Distracting themselves, I guessed. This was the conclusion my ongoing hobby experiment seemed to be working toward. Skiing weekends, bowling, after-work volleyball leagues, knowing about professional sports … all activities seemed to be transparent efforts in void-avoidance, when actually nothing drove home the meaninglessness of life more than watching thousands of people desperately cheer as one millionaire tried to get a ball across another millionaire’s line. The only activity that has ever really interested me is sitting around with my friends in flattering lighting, eating food and talking about who wanted to kiss us, and what we were wearing when they did.

Though they’d now been separated longer than I’d known them together, I was often struck by the similarity of my parents’ advice, how many values and first instincts and turns of phrase they still shared. They had been together thirteen years, after all. The love had gone away, by my calculation, sometime around my eighth birthday, but their impact on each other was not so easily undone. They did not seem to relish hearing this, which I understood better now. I was still buying eggplant on autopilot and had only recently realised I did not favour the left side of the bed. Without Jon’s playful sparring, my daily life had become less argumentative, and I discovered I preferred it that way. It was hard to learn traits I’d considered mine alone had been forged with or borrowed wholesale from someone else. How embarrassing, to have to figure out what was Me, what was Him, what was Us. How much more embarrassing, to find out you’d got it wrong.

The therapist opened our session by explaining the meaning of the word ‘liminal’ for almost ten minutes. I couldn’t tell if she felt this was important information for me to have – a legal separation being, fair enough, a definitively liminal period in one’s life – or if she was stalling for time, since Jon was late, and I was getting increasingly agitated looking at the clock.

Eventually I cracked, telling her that I was a graduate student, so knowing how to use the word ‘liminal’ in a sentence was one of my only concrete skills. She smiled with her lips closed and said, ‘How do you feel about your work, are you happy there?’ This is how they get you.

Telling this story, to myself or others, gave me a painful twinge, like snapping my feelings with a rubber band. Yet I repeated it often, loving how clearly it cast our roles: him the asshole, me the long-suffering wife. Not all our arguments were so clear-cut.

She smiled happily. ‘I know, right? I’m like an empath. I adjust to the emotional output of people around me, even if it’s all goth and intense like yours.’

‘I’m wearing Reformation,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you are exuding a gothic energy.’

I want to feel calm. I want a signature scent. I want to be the kind of woman who whips up a galette. I want to enjoy stretching. I want to mean it when I tell someone, ‘no worries’. I want to be good at sports or at least a good sport. I want a partner who thinks my best qualities are the Real Me and my worst qualities are manageable. I don’t want to date someone who thinks I’m only okay. I want to love easily. I want to be gentler. I don’t want to drink so much. I want to be open and nonjudgemental and warm. I want to look pretty with my hair wet