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 length. The pros lavished praise on his tender heart—“generous,” “sensitive,” “affectionate,” “sense of comfort,” “always on my side.” The cons were mostly different ways of pointing out our incompatible interests: “we sometimes have nothing to talk about,” “doesn’t read.” And then, one vague entry, covered over with scribbles: “bad place with sex.”

Aaron found the list one day in our protracted post-breakup period, when, amid the rage and its rebound into knee-jerk intimacy, there was also a deluge of mundane tasks to do, like going through a bunch of boxes together and divvying up the items. When the paper fluttered out, he scanned the list, unsurprised by its content (we’d talked about all these issues to death), but flabbergasted by the date.

“Twenty thirteen?” he exclaimed. “You stayed with me for three more years after this?”

“There were just as many pros as cons,” I replied weakly. But I knew what he was thinking: Why did this woman stay with me for so long if she was clearly miserable?