Sara Freeman, pictured. Photograph by Richmond Lam.

I fall in love and am married. No wedding per se, but a feeling of forever in all the looks swapped, in all the furniture acquired. Sexless now, my husband and I spend evenings playing backgammon and pick-up sticks. We sleep in and miss appointments and birthdays. We have jobs that we dislike to varying degrees. Then he begins to lose his hair, even though he is still young. And suddenly I am living with a bald man! I don’t mind a man who is losing his hair, but a man who has lost his hair is something else altogether. Fortunately, there are many places in the apartment where the light hides his baldness. In bed, for instance, when we are lying together, he looks from the side like the boy I met when we both had skin that fit taut and ...