We were on month six of counseling because we’d stalled out on the “next steps” stuff—getting a dog, buying a home, having a child. I knew it was my fault, if “fault” was the word. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want—to wash the dishes, to cook, to clean, to house a fetus, to raise a child. It was becoming a problem.

Jokes were made about simply knocking me up, as in not pulling out in time, on a night when I had had too much to drink. To me, having a child felt like a last gasp of hope for a dying relationship. Nothing’s working? Let’s add a baby to the mix.

It didn’t feel like I really had a choice in the matter. Everybody was tapping their toes, waiting for me to snap out of it. At night, I had taken to crossing my arms over my chest and lying very still. Trying to convey, Please don’t touch me. It’s a funny thing not to trust your husband. To feel like sex was suddenly weaponized.

I still needed my relationships to be radioactive in order for me to feel anything. Yelling, screaming. Flairs for the dramatic meant you really loved me—wanted to fight for me. I have been chased down the street no less than a dozen times by men after a fight, and that was the level of desperation I craved. My mother once told me that when she and my father started dating, she was walking down the hall in their school dorms with another boy. My father asked her who she was walking with when he saw them together, and she told him what she told me: a friend.

“He said, ‘If I ever see you walking with him again I’ll throw you out this window,’” she told me. “I looked out the window and we were eight floors up.”

My mother and I stared at each other and my heart flipped. Imagine someone loving you that much, I thought. Imagine someone needing you that much. I didn’t even have to say anything, because she said: “That’s how much he loved me.”

This is the pitch at which I wanted my love. But Bobby and I had moved from aggression to passive aggression, with underhanded jabs and long silences, and I didn’t like that at all.

“Let me ask you something,” our therapist said. He was someone we had started making up stories about. Our desire to know what his life was like had temporarily brought us back together. He was slim and often wore short-sleeved button-down shirts that needed to be ironed. Everything else about him, from his glasses to his haircut, was pristine and well manicured. I wondered why he didn’t think that a wrinkled shirt collar gave someone the wrong impression about you.