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.

You could say that our cultural understanding of women’s autonomy isn’t totally in sync with the logistics of twenty-first-century partnership, and the internet would appear to agree. A 2015 thread on Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes board opens with a PSA: ‘You can break up with someone for any reason, or for no reason at all,’ it reads. ‘You don’t have to have a “good reason” to end a relationship.’

Posting under the handle MissPredicament, the page’s writer muses over the observation that an astonishing number of women in Reddit’s relationships forum seem to be mired in the same existential conundrum. They are unhappy in relationships that don’t really have anything wrong with them. ‘I wish someone had told me when I was much younger that I didn’t have to have an airtight legal case for a breakup – all I had to have was a desire to no longer be in that relationship,’ she writes. ‘I would have saved myself a lot of time.’ The post received over a thousand replies.

Married Love, a 1918 treatise by the British scientist Marie Stopes, changed that. Stopes’s book was one of the first popular texts to propose that women’s sexual desire was not only natural and universal, but an attribute that husbands would do well to attend to. Stopes didn’t mince words; most men entered into marriage not knowing how to sexually satisfy a woman, while most women didn’t grasp what the sexual encounter should entail. Stopes describes how sex should involve a real pleasure ‘which should sweep over every wife each time she and her husband unite. The key which unlocks this electric force in his wife must reverently be sought by every husband.’ In the same breath, Stopes made the bold hypothesis that men who had lost their virginity to prostitutes prior to getting married were inclined to mistake their paid sex partner’s yawps and quivers for a testament to their own sexual prowess; these same men were also likely, in turn, to blame their future wives’ lack of sexual arousal on what they perceived was her frigidity instead of their own shortcomings in the sack. (A hubristic misconception that many straight women would surely affirm has stood the test of time.)