That my husband, Reed, was texting the other woman just three days into our honeymoon wasn’t surprising. He had been falling in love with her for months. What was surprising was that we had gone through with our wedding despite the mounting evidence that our relationship might collapse under the weight of everything we had been piling onto it for the past year.

Now, watching Reed on the patio of our rental apartment in Spain smiling at the thought of a woman who was not me, I wanted to smash his glass of red wine into the ground and hurl his phone into the Mediterranean.

Instead, I headed to the kitchen, slid to the floor and buried my head in my hands.

In the months leading up to the wedding, friends and family had asked, gently, if we still planned to go through with it, “given everything.” Mere weeks before, Reed’s brother had taken him aside and told him to hold off on signing the marriage certificate “just in case.”

The tumult of the last year had dizzied us. Around the time of our engagement, we had opened our relationship. Although we had done our research into ethical nonmonogamy, we had still evaded, sulked and sabotaged. We had been reckless, inconsiderate and withholding.

Watching Reed fall in love with another woman, I leaned into my antidote, which was casual sex with a rotating cast of men and women. Despite our best intentions to build a more flexible, durable relationship, we had strained ours to its breaking point.

Now, days into our honeymoon, I contemplated bringing our love story to its end, which meant I found my thoughts drifting back to its beginning.