“We need to get to Tripoli,” Anthony said. “We will never get released if we don’t get to Tripoli. We will probably survive, it will be difficult, but we might live if we get there.”

“If we do, I am going to be so fat in nine months!” I cried out suddenly.

After more than a decade of feeling ambivalent about having a child, I knew that if we made it out of Libya alive, I would finally give Paul what he had been wanting since we married: a baby.

My friends and family sometimes ask why photojournalists don’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their relationships and their safety, why they don’t simply work in some sunny studio adjacent to home. The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires. Leaving at the last minute, jumping on planes, feeling a responsibility to cover wars and famines and human rights crises was my job. To stop doing those things would be like firing myself.

In the first few years of my career, I didn’t fully understand how my attitude toward work might make stable relationships impossible. While I loved showing up in a country on an open ticket with nothing more than my cameras and a duffel bag, this freedom and uncertainty often put off the men I dated. I even had one boyfriend buy me a king-size bed in an attempt to introduce some permanence into my nomadic life.

One night in Baghdad, where I was photographing the American occupation from 2003 to 2005, I was at a party with other foreign correspondents when someone said, “Who has gotten separated since the start of the war?” Almost all the people in the room raised their hands. There were many divorces after the fall of the Taliban, many more after the fall of Saddam Hussein. No other period in our careers would compare with those post-9/11 years. The war on terror created a new generation of journalists, and as the wars dragged on and thousands of civilians were killed while American troops continued to give their lives, our commitment to exposing the mushrooming violence deepened. But this often came at the cost of our commitment to our spouses and partners.

There was a lot of cheating in war zones, a lot of love and a lot of mistaking loneliness for love. But the reality was different for men and women. Most male war correspondents had wives or girlfriends waiting at home while they fooled around on assignment. Most female war correspondents and photographers remained single, searching fruitlessly for someone who would accept our devotion to our work. My romantic life was colorful but difficult: I had an affair with a Cuban diplomat in New York, fell in love with an artist in Mexico City and had a relationship with an Iranian actor in Tehran, whom I could rarely get a visa to visit. But I gave only a finite part of myself to each of these men; work remained my priority, keeping me on the road 280 days a year. I began to assume that my relationships would end in affairs and heartbreak.

Eight years ago, when I was 33 and living in Istanbul, I met Paul, a foreign correspondent, who had recently been appointed the bureau chief for Reuters in Turkey. He worked long hours dictated by breaking news and the demands of running a bureau, and he respected my industriousness and drive. We started spending time together as friends, staying up laughing and talking over languid dinners that lasted deep into the night. Paul grew up in Monaco and Sweden in an aristocratic family that couldn’t have been more different from my own middle-class Italian-American household in Connecticut. But he was flexible, embracing without question my unusual life. The love between us was so effortless, it was liberating. We married in 2009.