To say that I’m a “relationship person” is an understatement. I met my first husband at 17 and fell in love so hard that — for the first couple of years of our relationship — I had to remind myself to breathe when he walked into the room.

We married when we were 20, had two kids before age 30, and stayed together until we were 36. It was an intense and all-consuming relationship — first love energy that lasted nearly two decades. When I moved into a little apartment a few miles from the house we owned together, I was emotionally exhausted. We split as hard as we came together; I swore I would never get married again.

A few months later, lying in bed with my new lover, I read feminist texts to them about the raw deal marriage is for women (texts they were already familiar with). Later that year, deep in love again, I said yes when they asked me to marry them. I’m nothing if not a romantic. We’ve been together for more than 10 years.

The decade-plus we’ve spent together have been marked by intense beauty, but also more change and (in many ways) trauma than either of us could have expected or prepared for: My divorce started my new marriage out in a state of finanical peril; my partner went through cancer treatment twice and nearly died the second time; one of my kids suffered from significant mental health issues; we bought a house; we had a baby who was later diagnosed with autism and ADHD; my partner was diagnosed with autism while I started to recognize and deal with my ADHD; we built public careers as sex workers and advocates and faced public stigma and fallout from that choice; they came out as non-binary; I dropped out of my PhD program and became a writer while they finished theirs and became a professor; we shifted our relationship from being causally non-monogamous to polyamorous to accommodate a relationship they were in.

The combination of all of these factors made me lose my shit. Is there a better way to respond to all of this?

I share this not to air our dirty laundry (as a writer and public figure this information already exists in the world — even a casual reader could easily put these pieces together), but rather to say that we are not the same people now that we were when we entered the relationship.

This is true of any two people in a long-term relationship, but it is especially true for us given the circumstances that have shaped our life together. It’s only because we have genuine and deep love for each other that we’ve been able to survive. I also believe that we survived with more grace together than we could have on our own. That we accomplished any of these things while the world was on fire all around us is nothing short of a miracle.

That being said, it is with the same love and care for each other that we are now separating. I want them to have a chance to be the queer, non-binary, poly, autistic person that they are, and I want to have a chance — for the first time in my life — to stand on my own two feet and pursue my life and career goals outside of the trappings of wifehood.

I don’t know yet what our separation means for our future. It could be that our time apart makes us realize that we are better together. It could also mean that we come to terms with the fact that we no longer want the same things and we transition our relationship to a co-parenting partnership. I am open to both possibilities.

It is too soon to know how we will both feel outside of the pressures of our relationship and the co-dependency that our trauma bonding created.

What I can say is that separating from someone I still deeply love is painful and confusing. But also, it feels like its own act of love: love for the people we have both become.

Jessie Sage is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker, writer, and the host of the podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.

You can find Jessie on her website or her socials: X: @sapiotextual & Instagram: @curvaceous_sage.