Lena Dunham and ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff dated for five years before breaking up last January. In a new essay for Vogue, Lena opens up about the undergoing a total hysterectomy and how it affected the relationship.

“My beautiful partner, who has seen me through so much pain with compassion and care, has to be away for work, and I can feel us growing slowly apart, since life is so determined to display its full complexity right now,” she says. “I am surly and distant. I offer nothing.”

“He reminds me again and again that I am still a woman and still alive,” she continues. “But I also know that soon — for so many reasons that have nothing to do with my uterus — we’ll slip away from each other and I will face everything I am losing in impossibly tiny step.”

“I’ll always wear it because love is a really cool, powerful, eternal thing,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be defined the way that we, in Western culture, define it as beginnings and ends.”