"I just have trouble getting interested in [the conspiracy theory that the US government engineered HIV]. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don't already know?"

* * *

You're reading literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay Paranoid Reading or Reparative Reading: Or, You're So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You; it begins by recounting a conversation that took place during the 80s between the activist scholar Cindy Patton and Sedgwick about whether the US government had engineered HIV.

You finish reading the section of the essay that recounts Patton's response and stop reading for a while. Later, you go back and reread that sentence. And then do it again. It's one of those rare moments where you feel in awe of someone's genius, their way of seeing things. You had never considered the possibility that the act of revealing something might not actually be very important, might not really provide any new information.

Although Sedgwick's initial example is a drastic, large-scale societal one, she soon downshifts to the personal, considering her own terminal cancer diagnosis, her friends dying of AIDS, and the limited power that knowledge possesses in these scenarios.

Through these thought patterns, Sedgwick claims to move away from what she describes as the "rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know?" to the questions of "what does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it." Sedgwick's subsequent realisation is that knowledge is not a categorical imperative; to put this simply, she argues that our current culture places too much emphasis on knowledge, and assumes that if people know about something, they'll act on it. But what if knowledge isn't the answer? What if there are circumstances where knowledge doesn't really matter?

* * *

You had known for a while that your relationship wasn't working but you didn't know why. You didn't know why you cried all the time. You didn’t know why you'd see him and feel a wrongness in your gut, a sadness without explanation that seemed to surge even more on days that were, on paper, especially perfect.

You didn't want to end things because you didn't know what the problem was. Also because you loved him. You couldn't identify any flaws in the way that either of you behaved, couldn't find any toxic patterns.

It had reached a point, though, where things were more bad than good. You didn't know where that line had been crossed but it had, and he knew it too. He brought it up because you were never going to. And you said I feel like if we could just find the problem then we could solve it and everything would be great. He said he felt the same, but that you'd spent months now trying to figure out what the issue was, and you couldn't keep waiting in this state of unhappiness in the hope that you would.

You broke up. And a few days later you woke up with the feeling that overnight, all the pieces had fit together, without you even trying to solve the puzzle. You could see in your mind's eye, with astounding clarity, one central problem that had been at the core of your relationship: that you wanted to share more of your life with him than he did with you. You wanted your lives to overlap like concentric circles; more time together, more emotional vulnerability. He didn't. Now you could see this core issue, and from it, strings unravelling out to every bad day, every argument, every tear. A giant, messy, all-encompassing web with this rift at the centre.

You had found the problem. And yet you did not text him and tell him that you had. I feel like if we could just find the problem then we could solve it and everything would be great. And yet you knew that even if you had acquired this knowledge before you'd broken up—which you probably wouldn't have, because you realise now that hindsight is a bitch, that space (and not just a break, the kind of space that comes from knowing that it is truly over) is what makes you realise things—even if you had acquired this knowledge before you'd broken up, it wouldn't have solved things. Because the problem that you now saw before you was a fundamental difference in your respective visions of what a relationship should look like. And trying to compromise on something as significant as that—trying to be happy with a relationship which doesn't reflect, in a major way, the ideal relationship you've imagined for yourself, the relationship that you want for yourself—would not have made either of you happy.

And okay, maybe if you'd realised this and told him, with the full knowledge available to both of you, you might have had a level-headed, fully aware conversation about it, and agreed that you were willing to compromise on this, that you were willing to try to find a way to make it work. But the reality is that you didn't realise this while you were together. And one of the hardest things you've had to realise as an adult is that sometimes things are not reversible; not every mistake can be fixed with an apology. It's possible that once you have the knowledge you needed at an earlier time, it can be too late to use it.

As Eve Sedgwick says, at a later point in her essay, that to live life in a way that isn't paranoid means "that it is also possible for [you] to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did." Maybe things could have happened differently. Or maybe they couldn't have. The reality is that there was a fundamental difference which may or may not have been possible to overcome. You might have eventually been able to see the problem if you'd stayed together, but you probably wouldn't have; you might not have addressed it even if you had realised what it was. Crucially, though, he did not want to wait and find out. Another person might have had the patience and fortitude to wait for you to figure out the problem together. He didn't. And that's okay. You can't make someone want something that they don't want.

* * *

You knew that texting him to tell him you'd found the problem and asking him to try again wasn't the right decision before you read the Sedgwick essay. On some level you had felt, intuited, Sedgwick's point; that knowing something doesn't mean that you can act on it.

But feelings are slippery, and in the weeks afterwards you want him back and wonder if you could still fix it now. If the space that delivered you this realisation might have also delivered you both tools that you didn't have before, tools to fix things. That maybe what you needed was a break not a breakup, and that's what you've had now. Maybe you could try again.

In those moments you try to return to Sedgwick. Knowledge is not a categorical imperative. You try to remind yourself that the problem you found is a fundamental difference in what the two of you want from a partner. That this would have caused problems until the end of your lives. You force yourself to imagine conversations decades later, where the two of you are still discussing, compromising, rationalising—conversations where you try to logically reach a solution to something that's too deep and too entangled in feelings to have a logical solution. You know that if you tried to come up with one, you would have agreed to it and told yourself it made sense, that this was the best way. And the sadness in your gut, that deep and inexplicable sense of something not being quite right, would have followed you until the end of your life.

You try to rely on Sedgwick's sobering logic, on her crystal-clear rationality, her methodical devaluation of knowledge which puts into such rational words what you had felt once you discovered the problem. Sedgwick's arguments explain the sense of clarity and peace and closure that you felt when you found the issue and realised it was unsolvable.

But it's a hard thing to accept, that there is knowledge that can't be acted on—that you can become fully aware of the reason why a relationship wasn't working, and still not be able to fix it. And besides, knowing the bad parts weren't fixable doesn't erase the good ones. It doesn't make it any easier to accept that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. You still miss him. You wonder if you always will.