A few months before the wedding was supposed to happen, I began to keep a list of reasons why I should leave you.

• Smacks lips between bites of cereal.

• Disrespectful undertone to speculation about victim’s sexual habits while watching true crime documentary.

• Snapped at me in traffic. Again.

• Said you hated dogs.

Each time I wrote one down, I kept thinking, I wish you’d cheat on me. Then I could leave you and people would understand. I know people won’t understand, or will come up with reasons that make more sense to them. I know you don’t understand.

I imagined reading out the reasons I’d written down to most of the people we knew. Most of them would say, “Yeah, that sucks, but—” and then they’d explain why context was important, and each instance was small on its own, and that it’s okay to disagree as long as we have an anchorage of love.

The thing is, I don’t. We don’t. I think you know that, too.

That goes at the top of the list. I wrote it there this morning.

After my mom’s second marriage fell apart, I held her head as she cried, drunk. “Marriage is an act of desperation, Claire,” she said, staring into my twelve-year-old face like she was imparting a last kernel of wisdom from her deathbed. “You marry, or you live alone. And then you die alone.”

It was one of the few intimate interactions we’d ever had. I could have pointed out that my mother wasn’t alone. She had me. But we would have both known it wasn’t true, because when we were alone, we weren’t together. We were both just there.

“Remember to take the chicken out of the freezer.”

“Pick up the package on your way home from school.”

“I’m having someone over later, so try and make yourself scarce.”

“Don’t you have a friend’s house you can go to?”

That was pretty much the extent of it. She had a specific criteria for the kind of relationships she valued. I was a byproduct of one of those relationships, but that didn’t mean I was one of them.

As I started making a list of reasons why I should leave you, I thought about sleeping with my stepfather again. We’d done it the summer before I left for college and nobody knew it happened but the two of us. He was my mother’s third husband, with the beleaguered charisma of an 1980s rockstar who’d had one too many hotel-room trashing parties and was ready to start thinking about retiring to Spain. Interestingly, he was not a rockstar, but a federal prosecutor. Other than that, his lifestyle hadn’t been much different. When he married my mom, there was relief from everyone who knew him that he was marrying someone at least somewhat close to his age.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

I was nineteen, but now that I was more than half a decade older and getting a sense of how young nineteen was, I was beginning to realize the inherent power imbalance. I was a resentful teenager who wanted revenge against a mother who viewed me as a piece of furniture inherited from her first divorce. I was also full of hormones. I thought about sex in a way I thought only guys did, and once I realized I had the option of having it with him, I wanted it like air.

He was old enough to know better, and he’d known me since I was sixteen, which made it both creepy for him and weird for me. He shouldn’t have done it. I can say that with certainty. Yet, if I had a chance to do it again, I would. I don’t know what that says about me.

The last time we did it, the weekend before I left, I said, “This can’t happen again.” I felt so mature, like a married woman who’d been seduced into an affair.

He said, “I know.”

And it didn’t—at least, it hasn’t to this point. I don’t think I actually expected that.

I dated around at college, then my sophomore year, I met you. I liked saying I had a boyfriend, like it put me in an elite class of wanted and accepted women who were mature enough to remain monogamous. And I liked you. I did. And I could make myself like you more. You were good-looking in a college guy way. You weren’t smart, but you weren’t stupid; your family had enough money to invite me on vacations with you; and you could be really funny. Some nights, I’d stare at you and tell myself, “This is what love feels like.”

When I graduated, I came home to visit and my mom announced she was pregnant with Suzie. She was forty-six, objectively beautiful. They were a beautiful couple. My stepfather smiled and put his arm around her, and I smiled back. We looked at each other’s foreheads so we didn’t have to make eye contact.

In a few months, I’d have a sibling who could say, “My sister had sex with my father.” It’s never a good thing when you have to explain that something isn’t incest, it just sounds like incest. Surprisingly, that didn’t bother me that much, despite the repulsion I knew I should feel. I was neutral about it. Something about it bothered me, but not that.

A couple weeks ago, I added Babies are real to my list. If we got married, there would eventually be a baby, and the reality of my love for it would make everything disingenuous feel worse by comparison. Does that make sense?

I flew back to the apartment we shared, filled with an ache of loneliness I couldn’t explain. By that point, I’d gotten past the stage of convincing myself our relationship was idyllic. You started snapping at me in an unlikeable, impotent way whenever you were frustrated, in a way that made it feasible to imagine you hitting me. You got jealous not just when I got attention from other guys, but of my professional successes as well. The day I got promoted, you congratulated me before spending the evening getting drunk and picking a fight about whether porpoises were the same as dolphins. You made yourself smaller attempting to feel bigger.

But when I got home that day, I needed you there. I needed the warmth of a body in my bed. I couldn’t be alone. You felt that. You felt my desperation that night, heard it in my voice when I repeated, “I need you,” over and over. You looked up at me with a kind of awe.

We spent two more years getting used to needing each other. It was easier when I was away for business, or you for grad school. It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, I really felt like I loved you, and I definitely loved things about you. Other times, usually in the early hours of the morning, I knew it was mostly the habit of being together I’d miss.

When I was at your family’s house for the Fourth of July, you proposed. Everyone clapped. The lawn was green, the sky was full of stars, and the fireworks went off as I said yes. It was perfect, and as we sat holding hands after, I thought to myself, “I can do this, as long as I have alcohol.” I wasn’t even being funny with myself. I knew I couldn’t survive this relationship without a numbing agent.

I looked at you—watching the fireworks with a vacant, unreadable expression—and wondered if you felt the same way. If you felt the walls of our newly-minted permanence closing in around us.

Our wedding was scheduled for the following autumn.

Before then, and before I started making my list, we sat alone together. Each of us held something real, but it was something we couldn’t share.