But I’d said those things from a place of frustration and exhaustion and fear. I wanted to be a father, dammit, and I saw my chances slipping away because of her relentless determination to “become a mother the real way.” I did blame her for that. Had I been wrong?

In the end, maybe it didn’t matter.

After five failed rounds of IVF, our savings were drained. After years of trying to get the timing exactly right for conception, sex became a chore. After months of endless fights and sleeping on the couch and apologizing the next day for whatever I’d said that made her cry all night long, I’d given up on having children and just wanted peace.

I wanted to talk about something other than fertility. I wanted to stop being unable to go places as a couple because seeing a pregnant woman—or worse, hearing one say we weren’t even trying—would put Renee over the edge. I wanted to want sex again, to take pleasure in it for its own sake, for the release, for the connection, for the fucking fun of it. My dick had become a clinical piece of machinery, just another cog in a mechanism that refused to work. And eventually, it was clear Renee had no use for it if it wasn’t going to get her pregnant.

We grew resentful of each other. We grew distant and angry. We grew apart.

Then she said she was leaving. That my presence in her life was a constant reminder of her childlessness, she wasn’t in love with me anymore, and she couldn’t stay. She took off one afternoon in early September, and I hadn’t heard from her since.

I’d been hurt, of course. Angry. Bitter. Resentful. But also . . . relieved.

Because I couldn’t honestly say I was in love with her anymore either—it felt shitty, but it was the truth. The years we’d spent trying and failing to start a family, the fights, the cost, the blame . . . all of it had taken a toll. I had no idea how to make her happy, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I knew how to make any woman happy. My whole experience with marriage had taught me that you could never really know a person. What you thought someone wanted, what you thought you could offer, it could all change. Life was unpredictable, and just when you thought you had it all figured out, just when you thought winter was over and spring was right around the bend, you got hit with a late frost that killed every bud on the vine.