Not long before my dad’s stroke, Aaron had told me he wanted to slow the open relationship way down—I was hooking up with too many people for his liking, he explained, and he wanted to be able to catch up to me. Again, I thought that was crap, but I suspected that if I said what I really wanted, we would have to break up, and breaking up brought on those familiar fears of lonely, regretful singledom. So I said okay. Once I was plunged into the post-stroke chaos, though, I began flirting with guys in bars and on apps behind Aaron’s back, seeking a space that was all my own. Eventually I made a date with Rob, a guy from Kentucky with a boring office job, an artsy streak, and a nonmonogamous relationship of his own. He was a good texter, a little older than me, demure and self-possessed. I remember being impressed that he, too, had read The Other Hollywood, a moderately obscure oral history of 1970s porn.

Going over to Rob’s house offered me a few precious minutes or hours of respite. It felt effortless and light, a completely levelheaded sex arrangement. We regularly patted each other on the back for being the world’s chillest sidepieces. Of course, despite its lack of histrionics, my relationship with Rob ran roughshod over my own morals. I was lying to my partner and routinely ashamed of my selfishness. I knew somewhere deep in the recesses of my concupiscent mind that this cathartic sex was going to break any lingering bond I had with Aaron. In a certain way, that was precisely the appeal.

What happened next didn’t feel like liberation so much as demolition. After midnight, I started texting with a sweet, respectful software engineer I’d seen a few times before, aboveboard, within the parameters of Aaron’s and my rules. Eventually it became clear that I was, at that moment, again going to break those rules. I slipped out wearing nothing but a sundress to go meet the guy while Aaron was dead to the world. When I walked through my own door at four a.m., knees buckling and hair a mess, there was a large part of me that wished Aaron would wake up and demand to know where I’d been—not just because the despair was starting to creep back and an angry confrontation would have been more satisfying than nothingness, but because I knew it was over, and I wanted him to do the honors.

He didn’t. I don’t want this, I thought: not this relationship, not an affair, not a life devoid of the erotic. A few weeks later, I moved out.