My relationship ended for any number of reasons, but a dearth of affection wasn’t one of them. I was unhappy for reasons that felt trivial when I said them out loud, which was almost never; I barely had the language to describe my predicament in the first place. More than anything else, my uncertainty manifested as a physical sensation, a gut-level insistence I no longer had the option to ignore. I was privileged enough to recognize a value in my own happiness and the integrity in making a sacrifice to achieve it. I also knew that to do otherwise would be, at the act’s core, a selfishness of its own.