I had heard such stories, which in the end were stories about a single realization, the understanding that you had never fulfilled or even addressed the secret desire, the most vividly imagined fantasies, of your partner. That you had never been, on some level, what he or she had been looking for, your partner’s mind always elsewhere or making do, something that cast the record of your sexual encounters into a paltry and humiliating light, he had always been trying not to see you, not as you actually were.
