Free Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin

album in my bedroom, declaring it “the cutest thing ever” before tacking it up on a bulletin board in his kitchen.
    I exposed every part of myself to him, keeping no secrets, no defense mechanism in place. I revealed all my insecurities, from insignificant but embarrassing things, like how I’ve always hated my knees, to deeper issues about how I sometimes felt inadequate around Margot and our other well-traveled, wealthy friends in the city. Most important, I told him all about my mother, including uncut details of her death that I had never discussed with anyone. How she looked so frail that it conjured images from the Holocaust. How I had watched my father clear out her throat with his hand one night when she literally couldn’t breathe—an image that continues to haunt me now. How at one point I actually said a prayer for the end to just come—and not only so she’d be put out of her misery but so the hospice people and the smell of sickness would be purged from our house, and my father could stop worrying about her death, hiding his notebook of funeral arrangements whenever I came in the room. And then how horribly guilty I felt the moment it finally happened, almost as if I made her die sooner than she would have otherwise. I told Leo how I sometimes felt almost ashamed to be motherless, like no matter what else I did in life, I would always be marked and categorized and pitied for that one fact.
    At every turn, Leo listened and consoled me and said all the right things—that although I had lost her at a young age, she had still formed the person I was today. That my memories of her would never fade and the good times would slowly supplant the end. That my descriptions and stories were so vivid, that he felt like he knew her.
    Meanwhile, the confessions weren’t one-sided. Leo shared his own secrets, too—mostly dysfunctional family tales about his passive, homemaker mother who had no self-esteem, and his mean-spirited, controlling father whose approval he could never quite win. He told me that he wished he had had the money to go to a better, bigger-named college and actually graduate, and that he, too, sometimes felt intimidated by the Manhattan rich-kid set with their fancy journalism school credentials. I felt it hard to believe that someone as amazing as Leo would have any insecurities, but his vulnerability only made me love him more.
    And then, aside from everything else, and maybe more important than everything else, there was our chemistry. The physical connection. The mind-blowing, ridiculous sex which was the stuff of both poetry and porn—so unlike anything else I had ever experienced before. For the first time, I wasn’t at all self-conscious or inhibited when it came to sex. There was nothing that felt off-limits. Nothing I wouldn’t do for him, to him, with him. We kept saying that surely it couldn’t get any better. But somehow it did, again and again.
    In short, we were completely in sync, insatiable, and sickeningly, crazy in lust and love. So much so that it seemed too good to be true. And so it shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that it was too good to be true.
    I can’t say exactly when it happened, but about one year into our relationship, things began to change. There was nothing dramatic that happened—no rift based on a major life issue, no big fight with nasty, irretrievable words. Nobody cheated or lied or moved across the country or delivered an ultimatum about what should come next. Instead, there was just a shift I couldn’t quite pinpoint, a quiet transfer of power. It was so subtle, in fact, that for a while I thought I was just being paranoid—a typical, needy girl, something I had always prided myself on not being, and something I never had to be with Leo. But after a while, I knew it wasn’t in my head. Leo still loved me; he told me he did, and he would never say those words if he didn’t mean them. But our feelings definitely became lopsided. Only slightly