I was struggling. I couldn’t figure out how to express my needs to my girlfriend. Did I want an open relationship? Did I need a break? None of those cliches fit with what I felt in my heart and because I couldn’t communicate what I wanted, our relationship, normally steady, started to suffer.

A week or so after another failure of articulation, I found myself at a friend’s house on our fourth glass of wine. She is what I consider a free spirit. She lives by her own rules and anyone she lets into her life can choose to accept that or not.

On our fifth glass of wine, she told me a story about breaking up with her ex-boyfriend. They had been together about five years and he asked her casually one day if she’d been with anyone else.

“About seven or eight people,” she answered.

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