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?

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 requested an open relationship, I came up with all kinds of sexpert-approved reasons: because it creates and maintains healthy tension, because monogamy isn’t sustainable, because to hell with patriarchy and the marriage industrial complex. But I knew deep, deep, deep down that the main reason I wanted to fuck other people was because I no longer wanted to fuck him.

So what, exactly, was so bad about our sex? During our harrowing mid-coitus fights, I’d fixate on technique and positions, not acknowledging that we simply didn’t have that unlearnable spark, which could, of course, be enhanced with but not created by skills. I knew I’d had wonderful sexual encounters with other people where our chemistry transcended mechanics or traditional markers of success; one of my favorite sex partners, for instance, had never even witnessed me orgasm. I was also attracted to Aaron, and always had been. So it really boiled down to the fact that most of the time, sex with him felt physically, rhythmically, olfactorily wrong. And once in a while, when I was in the mood for self-honesty, I could see clearly that our “bad sex” was the symptom of a bigger problem—that I didn’t love or understand him in the way I needed to. That our connection, though real, wasn’t strong enough. I was scribbling out the one con that mattered most.

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. How would it look if I admitted I stayed with a person I didn’t like to fuck, despite my almost religious devotion to the fruits of the sexual revolution, especially the pockets that focused on female pleasure? I couldn’t see clearly whether this was just my problem, or if this was a common feeling among women like me, who outwardly had their sexuality all figured out but privately had doubts about their lives.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me that if you keep your worries and fears and suspicions to yourself, if you travel halfway across the globe alone and still end up covering those fears and suspicions with scribbles, it’s impossible to know which parts are personal and which parts are political—or whether there’s a difference, or whether it matters. I hadn’t yet asked myself: What happens when you say your darkest thoughts out loud?

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 updos; long hair and jeans; billowy white linens and gingham clamdiggers. They’d sit on chairs or windowsills or cross-legged on the floor, chattering and taking notes. Later, when the meetings got crowded, they’d stand on the edges, craning their necks and moving their bags from one shoulder to the other.

Restless revolutionary energy was all around them. Some of these women had been active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, but many of them had caught a distinct sense of dismissal, even contempt, from the male activists for whom they’d been stuffing envelopes. They often struggled to gain political clout on the Left, especially if they declined to trade sexual favors—feminist Francine Silbar wrote that women were treated like “sexual garbage cans” by activist men.

The group was called New York Radical Women. Their idea was to talk about their daily lives and put them in the context of society. Though many of them had yet to consider how racism and sexism overlap and collaborate, they did draw inspiration from the civil rights movement. A couple of group members recalled their time in Mississippi working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where they’d witnessed mass meetings at which Black people would stand up and “testify” about their own personal experiences with racism. A radical civil rights worker from Iowa, Carol Hanisch, connected the concept to Mao Tse-tung’s slogan “Speak pain to recall pain.”

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 and Steve felt like family to each other, and for years they would occasionally sleep together after a night out on the town. But partnership never felt quite right. As she said to Steve, miffed after discovering he’d gone on a few dates with another woman: “You know, we were always better friends than we were lovers.” Looking back, Steve thinks she was probably right. “Ellen really did want to live on her own,” he reflected years later on the phone to me. “She wanted to have other relationships. She wanted to be by herself.”

And she would live alone, for six years after that, first in the place they once shared in Park Slope, then in a small apartment on Waverly Place in the West Village. Nostalgists might picture a modest but sunny studio, perhaps with dusty parquet floors and other prewar details. I certainly did as a young teen growing up with two professor parents in the nineties. By the time my mom got tenure at NYU and we moved into a university-owned apartment in 1995, Bleecker Street’s musicians and artists had long ago been replaced by drunk tourists and college freshmen brandishing fake IDs.

Sadly, old photos confirm that my mom’s place on Waverly did not fit my bohemian fantasy. It was shabby, without the chic. The floors were black-and-white-checkered linoleum, even in the bedroom; my mother’s thousands of records were held up by plywood and cinder blocks; her bed was a frameless mattress and box spring covered with tattered floral sheets. Still, this apartment was hers. It became the place she’d hole up and write (or have writer’s block) for days, eating marshmallow circus peanuts and blintzes from the Polish diner. It became a place she danced to Creedence Clearwater Revival, had affairs, gossiped with friends, and read books while chain-drinking coffee.

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 pervaded those years affected all my aspirations; compromises that might once have seemed reasonable, or simply to be expected, felt stifling. . . . For me the issue was less the right to be alone, in itself, than the right to take as much time and room as I needed to decide what kind of life I wanted, what I could hold out for.”