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“This man wasn’t in love with me. He wasn’t in love with anybody, it seemed. Though, in conversation, I would find out that the other women he saw wondered if that was a decision he made, rather than a feeling he didn’t have. His tendency was to lean toward the taken, and even when he saw women who were by any definition available, he preferred to speak about feeling second to their lives. One night at his house, he talked about how it felt to be so intimately involved with this collection of women who returned home to their husbands in the morning. In the moment, I listened and said I was sorry. Many months later, I wondered what it meant that he viewed us as a collection.”

—No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek