My feeling was hard to find words for because words weren’t involved — no weighing of pros and cons, no argument, no anger. Just the full-body sensation of: Oh, we’re done.

It choked me up. I had known this man since I was 17, a freshman in college wearing knee socks and plaid skirts. He was the mystery man on campus, an artist, a sport parachute jumper, a few years older than my friends and me.

Our start also had taken place in a dining room. While sitting at a table with my girlfriends, I stared at his reflection in a window across the room. It took me a minute to realize that he was staring at me in the window’s reflection too. We smiled at each other.

Decades later and thousands of miles away from our college flirtation, our dinners arrived, and I could barely swallow my food past the lump in my throat. There was a moment when I had to restrain myself from throwing my face down on the table sobbing, smearing mascara and pink lipstick on the white linens. I was saddened by all that I had hoped for this marriage, all the intimacy and sharing I had imagined could be possible and we hadn’t achieved, and that I now understood we never would.

I remembered another restaurant meal 20 years earlier, dining in Florida with my parents, who at the time also had been married more than 50 years. My mother was quite deep into Alzheimer’s disease and yet my father had rouged her cheeks and combed her hair for our evening out. I sat beside my mother in the booth, my father across from us. He reached for my mother’s hand and said, “We’re partners, aren’t we?”

My mother was incapable of responding, but I teared up.

I saw a truth in his remark that went far deeper than my father had intended, though it wasn’t an insight I was comfortable saying out loud. My mother had wanted my father’s undivided attention more than anything else in life, and she never felt she had received it. And my father, who viewed his breadwinner role as his entire reason for being, had rarely given her his undivided attention.