When I spotted Lauren—a slender blonde in a smart purple dress I met at one of the not-quite-fancy alumni events my university was always throwing in D.C.—she struck me as the type of confident and independent girl I’m always drawn to. Just shy of a semester out of college, she’d moved straight to the capital in lieu of settling in one of the southern towns that net too many of our fellow grads. A few open-bar Yuenglings and several passes of lackluster hors d’oeurvres later, I sidled over to talk to her. I don’t remember anything I said, but she smiled a lot and l aughed. I made sure to get her phone number before leaving.

I called, and a week later, we were washing down fried dates and chorizo with sangria and telling each other about our families and hometowns. Soon, we were hanging out in dive bars on Pennsylvania Avenue, rooting for our alma mater at Saturday football viewing parties, and dawdling through Trader Joe’s on weeknights, where she introduced me to the gloriousness of mint-flavored Joe-Joe’s.

Lauren and I got along well, shared the same values, and enjoyed the same snack foods, namely craft beer. Coming from the same South Carolina university meant that we had common ground that stretched beyond most of the people I’d met in my nine months in D.C. But once we had established all the little affinities you build a relationship on in those early months, I was ready to dig into the differences that set us apart, that make any relationship compelling.

My work at the time—economics and policy research—meant that, for better and worse, I was adept at turning the pegs of the latest news cycle into fodder for happy-hour debate. Even if you aren’t utterly informed about the latest ins-and-outs of global relations or domestic policy disputes—like when, say, U.S. ships fired Tomahawk missiles into Libya from the Mediterranean last year—I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you have a feeling one way or another about our military forces gallivanting around the world, intervening in other countries. But at some point, going out for a drink with Lauren went one of two ways:

1. I’d bring up a current event that she wasn’t quite up on. I’d give her a two-sentence backgrounder. “Isn’t that so absurd/wonderful/horrendous/amusing?”, I’d say. She’d agree. It was, in fact, absurd/wonderful/horrendous/amusing. Conversation over.

2. Lauren would bring up some other topic, like the relationship quandaries of a friend. I might play devil’s advocate and push back against her take on things, mostly for the hell of it. She’d say something like, “Oh yeah, I guess I see that.” The server would arrive. I’d ask her what kind of beer she would like. She’d ask me what I was having before responding.

This wasn’t exactly fair—it’s a lot easier to shoot the shit about relationship troubles than it is missile strikes. But while I’m not truly interested in yelling at walls, I don’t get too excited over conversation with invertebrates, either. Lauren was agreeable. About everything. And as we hung out more and more, her unswerving acquiescence only grew—and so did my urge to push back.

The worst part was that she was, deep down, an engaging person who could hold her weight in conversation. But quickly, the dynamics of our relationship tipped the scales. You know when someone is just a little more into stuff than you are in the beginning—when you’re still feeling the temperature of the water with your toes, but they’re already wading in the shallow end? Lauren seemed more invested than I was over those first couple of months, and she came to agree with me in that weird way where you like someone so much that you constantly and unwittingly affirm their every word.

I can relate, because I’ve been that person. I never noticed it until a girl I’d been dating pointed out how my normally resolute backbone had withered over the course of a few short months. When she broke things off, she told me that, lately, it seemed like I’d just agreed with her take on whatever happened to be the topic du jour. As soon as she called me out on it, I could picture my spine wilting under the weight of my crush. In a rush to please her in that big, romantic sense, I’d subconsciously tried to appease her over every little thing.

I’ve always known that I wanted to date an independent woman who stands up for herself, calls me on all of my bullshit, and occasionally disagrees with me just because she wants to get a rise out of me. But I also want her to have the resolve to stay that way, and to expect the same sort of independent spirit in me. And when I ask her what kind of beer she wants to drink, I want her to be offended that I assumed she wouldn’t be ordering a bourbon.

I had a crush on him for months. He was the biggest, loudest, and drunkest of our friends, but he was also well-educated and funny, with an appreciation of fine cuisine and sharp suits. The apparent contradictions put him on my radar the minute we met—my first boyfriend, in college, had also been big, loud, and smart. A whole year post-graduation, I was confident I had a type. When this new guy appeared in my world—he was drunk by noon at a weekend meeting of bike activists and introduced himself to me in flawless French—I was done for.

We saw each other frequently at rides, bar crawls, and parties organized on the fixed-gear bike forum where we both wasted time at work. A few months and two inebriated makeout sessions after we first met, he took me on our first official date. We were inseparable within weeks.

He was sweet and charming when we were alone. We walked his dog and he’d tell me how happy it made him, us taking care of her together. We’d gear up to play bike polo, and he’d tap my helmet and call me his little warrior. He cooked me buttery French dinners and took me out to expensive restaurants. Riding home from parties at night, he’d often detour miles out of our way to pause at some beautiful park, just so the view would be perfect when he told me he loved me.

He was uncouth, but it was an ebullient, almost admirable rowdiness. He made friends easily, and was constantly throwing parties. The door to his house was always open, and he kept the kitchen stocked with beer, Jäger, and chocolate cake. He was the guy standing on a ladder in the backyard, pouring beer onto his best buddy’s head. We all egged on his roughhousing, and we cheered when he’d shout, "I do what I want"—a common refrain.

After I dumped him, I found myself with a laundry list of reasons why I left. “He listened to Rush,” is my go-to excuse if I’m feeling flip. But, “he threw my bike once, when he was angry, and he didn’t throw it at me but he didn’t not throw it at me either” suffices for more serious conversations. I had started making new friends who gently pointed out that my boyfriend’s actions could be alienating, and I began to realize that I agreed with them. We fought constantly. I hated his non-bike friends. The drinking was a problem, and with it the fact that he routinely partied until dawn, leaving me sleeping alone in his bed even though I had my own apartment. Despite our wildly different schedules, he insisted on always sleeping in the same bed—because he couldn’t bring the dog to my building, I’d all but moved in with him. I have reason to believe he cheated on those long nights out, though I only went to the trouble of confirming it once.

Any of those reasons should have been sufficient grounds for a breakup, and we came close to splitting a few times before I left for good. But I held out hope that he could transform his destructive behaviors back to just plain bad ones.

Then we went tubing.

It was late summer, very hot, and we were in the river with his best friend, his sister, and a cooler of beer. It was nice. Everything felt infused with a shimmering, lazy sense of contentment that I’d found rare in the waning months of our relationship.

About an hour in, we found ourselves washed into a sort of rock-enclosed pool—still in the river, but out of the current. We sat on the rocks and drank beer for a while, not talking much, enjoying being out in the sun. When it got too hot, we got back in the pool and prepared to rejoin the flow. That’s when he made his announcement.

“I have to poop.”

“Go out in the woods—we’ll wait for you here,” his sister said.

“No. I’m just going to do it here. I really have to go.”

This launched a shouting match that lasted at least 10 minutes. His sister yelled, his best friend reasoned, and I begged. We pointed out that in the time he’d spent arguing with us, he could easily have made it to the woods and back. We asked him why he couldn’t have gone while we were still on the rocks. We reminded him that the pool he was in wasn’t part of the current, so the poop would just hang out in there, probably floating, waiting for an unsuspecting person in an inner tube to touch it. We were grossed out, and very, very pissed.

He just looked at us, grinning. He floated to a corner of the rock enclosure. Our shouting intensified until it registered. It was too late. He continued smiling at us the whole time.

I realized in that river that my boyfriend was a brute, but the bad behavior alone was never the problem—it was his cavalier disregard for how it affected everyone around him, his smile through our distress, that I could not accept. His friend and sister kept shouting at him from inside the rock pool. I swam back into the current, put a healthy distance between myself and the tainted water, and began to paddle back to shore. 

I never really wanted to go out with Josh.

We met at a birthday party thrown by a friend of my mom’s. The adults had invited us there specifically to set us up, and we both knew it—this was small-town Texas, where teenage matchmaking was practically a professional sport. I was a 16-year-old on the verge of turning politically liberal and religiously indifferent, so I wasn’t about to fall for that old game. Josh, on the other hand, was a budding conservative who did what he was told.

He asked me out. I hesitated. Then, I imagined the conversation I’d have with my mom later if I said no. “Why didn’t you say yes? Was there something wrong with him? He seemed so nice, Courtney, you don’t have to be rude.” I said yes.

I didn’t know that four years later, I’d be pissed off on a cell phone outside a bar in the rain, my friends dancing inside and Josh hanging on the other end of the line. Josh hated bars, so anytime I went to one, it was a girls’ night out. He hated that even more. I’d dress in something sexy and dance with my friends. Josh would text incessantly, worried I was flirting with another boy or drinking too much. I’d ignore him for hours, then finally call him back.

A typical exchange went something like this:

COURTNEY: “What is the emergency, Josh?”

JOSH (pathetic): “Nothing, I just wanted to see what you were doing. Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you ignoring me?”

COURTNEY: “I am in a bar. It is loud. And I am doing things other than checking my cell phone. Do you want something?”

JOSH (hurt): “I just wanted to talk to you.”

COURTNEY: “Josh, I am out, and you knew I would be. Go hang out with someone. Do your homework. Watch a movie. I will talk to you tomorrow.”

JOSH (tactical): “Are you having fun?”

COURTNEY: “I was, before I had to come outside and call you.”

JOSH:  “Why are you outside?”

COURTNEY: “Stop asking me questions! I just said I would talk to you tomorrow. I want to go back to my friends.”

JOSH (deliberately): “Why are you getting so angry? I’m just asking why you’re outside.”

COURTNEY: “I’m hanging up now. Don’t call or text me again tonight.”

JOSH: “Will you at least call me to tell me you got home safe?”

COURTNEY (beaten): “Oh my God. Fine.”

JOSH (sad voice): “I love you.”

When I got home, he’d tell me how boring his evening was, and we’d fight about whose fault that was. Four years earlier, I had emerged from a verbally abusive home and straight into Josh's arms. At first, his attentions made me feel safe. Now, they circled reliably around the same feedback loop: Josh would act jealous and manipulative; I’d respond with hostility and aggression; he’d use my anger to position me as moody and hysterical and himself as faithful and put-upon; I’d start to think that maybe I really was overreacting; we’d both apologize; he’d finish with something like, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just love you so much.”

Josh was an expert at that emotional turn. He always told me if he thought my outfit was inappropriately revealing (he just wanted me to know how I looked to the outside world). He made passive-aggressive remarks about my occasional drinking (he cared about my health). He expected us to be together every minute outside of class—even while I was studying (he just wanted to spend time with me). He took pains to befriend each of my friends so that he could tag along whenever we hung out (after all, they were his friends now, too). And he disapproved of some of those friends being male—especially my former high school classmate, Justin, who lived over 200 miles away. To Josh, he was still a little bit too close.

I recognized early on that this behavior was not romantic or cute. But I failed to see it as out of the ordinary. “I would feel lucky if my boyfriend loved me enough to get jealous,” my friends would tell me. Or, “Wouldn’t you be more worried if he didn’t act jealous sometimes?”

I eventually gave up going out—it didn’t seem worth it if Josh was going to ruin my night and make me feel like a bitch. But I still kept some things to myself. When Josh pushed me about marriage, I told him I wouldn't even consider it until I'd graduated. And when Josh told me he didn’t want me to talk to Justin because he thought he was attracted to me, I called Justin up and talked to him more—about books, school, religion, politics, and sometimes, the relationship I could see no way out of.

Then, Josh shipped off to basic training. Desperate to move his life along, and upset that I'd delayed marriage, he'd decided he needed to march in his brother's footsteps straight into the Air Force. Suddenly, we were apart for the longest we had been in years—a whole summer. He couldn’t call me all the time, much less wait up all night for me to come home to him. I began to envision myself outside of this relationship. I looked good there.

When I decamped back to my home town for the summer, I found myself spending all of my free hours with Justin—not because I had to, but because I wanted to. It felt liberating to be wanted by someone who didn’t need to control me. We flirted for a while, but he wouldn’t make the first move—I was, after all, in a relationship. I’m grateful that he didn’t, and that I was the one to decide that what I had with my boyfriend wasn’t worth keeping. I kissed my friend, and sent Josh my Dear John.

Instead, I wrote back to Brett—an old, dear, platonic friend—that her dream sounded remarkably accurate. That launched a long, textual argument over who was better in bed. We concluded that it was a question that could only be decided non-electronically. As Brett lived several states away, it was also one that could not be decided immediately.

So naturally, we passed the time with drunken bouts of awkward phone sex, always giggling over each session the next day. Our friendship quickly developed a thrilling new dimension. The distance allowed me plenty of space to fantasize about the possibilities spelled out in those texts and late-night phone calls. It also gave me time to weigh the conventional wisdom passed down to “just friends” since time immemorial: Do not sleep together.

We’ve heard it all before: Straight men and women can’t be “just friends.” Our interlocking body parts get in the way. Decades of cable sitcoms and summer rom-coms have warned us that any attempt to acknowledge a case of mutual attraction will inevitably end in tears, acrimony, and a ruined friendship—or marriage. I always thought that was all bullshit—I have wonderful friendships with women that aren’t remotely sexual, and wonderful friendships with women that are bursting with sexual undertones. It had never caused me any problems.

But I soon found that the nagging cultural cliché even had a following in my pseudo-bohemian social circles. Whenever I confided to a friend about the unfolding flirtation between Brett and myself, I received an ominous warning in response. The word “doom” repeatedly wiggled its way into these conversations. Also, “ idiot,” as in “you’re a.”

But when Brett finally flew south, we didn’t fool around—didn’t even kiss. The circumstances had shifted: A bottle of gin into her visit, both of us sprawled across my bed, I told her with slurred excitement about my new relationship (lifespan: four months). When I visited Brett five months later, I met her new boyfriend and slept on the couch.

Then, years after the inciting text, I visited Brett when we were both fresh from especially jarring splits, a situation best assuaged, we felt, by a road trip. We hadn’t flirted much in the last year, and we didn’t discuss the possibility of sleeping together. Our conversations circled the emotional fallout from our recently concluded relationships. When we were done wallowing, we went out on an epic binge. Late that night, we eyed each other woozily over Thai curry—it had a very Will-They-or-Won’t-They vibe—and then finally, definitively, ascended the stairs. The results were energetic and clumsy, but thoroughly well-intentioned. Fun was had by all.

The next morning, we hopped out of bed and got back on the road as though nothing had happened—no hand-holding, no surreptitious smooching, no more physical affection than we normally exhibited. Just the usual comradely tour of the city’s used bookstores, museums, and bougie little art galleries. We fell into bed again that night, and agreed that the contest had ended in a draw. Then, during a conversational lull, Brett said, in her painstakingly deliberate way, “Do you remember Freddie, my painter friend?” She hadn’t seen him in years, and we happened to be passing through his hometown the next day. “I thought it might be fun to stay the night,” she said. “I won’t, of course, if it makes you feel weird.”

I absorbed the query carefully, waiting for my heart to skip that obligatory beat, for jealously to work over me, as popular wisdom had assured me it would. But it never came. I knew Freddie, and liked him, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if I didn’t. My little fling with Brett was just that. We were attracted to each other and had fun sex. That didn’t trump friendship. Our last night in town, Brett and I talked late into the night, disarming each other’s anxieties. We fell asleep, clothed, in one another’s arms. The affair was over. We never considered turning it into anything more.

I was impressed with us. We were not doomed idiots. The whole thing had gone so well that I felt capable of navigating a sexual encounter with damn near anyone, especially if the friend in question lived far away. When Kim, another close friend of many years, visited from Memphis, we happily and causally indulged. “So, been dating anyone fun recently?” she murmured drowsily, head on my chest, afterwards. No problem.

Then, Martha visited from Chicago. We’d fooled around at parties before, but had never ended up in bed together. Like Brett, Martha lived states away, and the distance provided a firewall against complication. Or so I thought.

“I felt like I could have been just anyone you brought home on a Saturday night,” she told me the next morning. I didn’t know what to say. Martha asked me if we had just used one another. I told her I didn’t think of sex that way. But in my rush to fit our dalliance into my own narrative, I hadn’t stopped to ask about the way she saw it.

Martha and I are fine, but we don’t make out at parties anymore. Brett is still the first person I call to celebrate a new love, or mourn an old one. I’ve still never lost a friendship to a fling, or spun one into The Grand Romance We’ve Both Been Waiting For. These affairs all tend to loop back around to where they began: just friends.

When I set out on my own, I soon attracted other people who needed to lean on me. My best friend in college was the perfect example. A former child actor and the eldest son in a Caribbean family, he was charming, handsome, and needy. He was a Bronx-raised nerd of color like me. I loved the way he shouted when he entered a room. He made the best chili I’d ever tasted. I had a romantic dream about him shortly before I visited New York for a baby shower. We hooked up once. Then he called me after a wedding and asked if I would be his girlfriend. Thoughts of biracial babies danced in my head, and I said yes.

We quickly settled on the logistics. Because I was living in Austin, he in New York, I volunteered my place rent-free for a few months in exchange for him leaving the city he loved to be with me. He quit his job and had no car, but promised to look for both. I tried to ignore the strange sensation in my stomach as his things arrived on my doorstep in box after box, and settled easily into our new routine.

Some days, I was happy joining him for CSI Miami and 24 marathons and taking turns trying new recipes. But most of the time, I was out working one of my three jobs and running to grad school classes in my limited time off. Back at home, my new roommate was managing nine fantasy baseball teams and spending his days testing the limits of my utility companies. After working a 10-hour shift, I’d come home to all of the lights on, every window open, air conditioner on full blast, ESPN blaring, both his and my laptop plugged in. “I sent out five résumés today,” he would always start, when I pushed him on our finances. “The Yankees are going to take it this year,” he’d always end.

I told myself the situation was temporary and did my best to lend support. Because he had never learned how to drive, I escorted him everywhere, including his spoken-word open mics, where everyone smelled like patchouli oil and sounded like the 1990s. Compared to the other poets in attendance, who gesticulated wildly with one hand while spewing bad metaphors about American politics and the moon, my boyfriend was actually a decent poet.

This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Instead of chasing down job leads, he’d walk over to the library to check out old Def Poetry DVDs and watch them obsessively. I appreciated his commitment to studying his craft, but I labored to get him to show the same enthusiasm for more practical work. When I helped find him a temporary job as a substitute teacher, he was quickly fired for gossiping with students. It was like he got fired on his day off.

Increasingly, it felt like I was subsidizing his lifestyle, not our life together. We argued more than we cuddled. I gained weight and chain-smoked. He ate peanut butter sandwiches but bragged about losing weight thanks to his long walks to the library and leisurely jogs around the neighborhood. I wanted to break up with him, but the thought filled me with tremendous guilt. My mom and I had been evicted several times when I was a kid. I never wanted to be the girl who made someone she once loved homeless.

An out-of-the-blue call from an ex-boyfriend put things in perspective. “It’s your house and you pay all the bills,” he told me. “Turn off your cable. Stop buying groceries. Eat out. He’s a man, he’ll figure out a way to eat.” I looked at the stack of receipts from the local grocery store and reviewed all the money he’d eaten up over the past few months. I didn’t have to kick him out after all. Somehow, it seemed easier to just bring my lifestyle down to his level

I let my pantry atrophy to pasta, salad, and mustard. I called the cable company and switched plans. When the cable guy came in, my boyfriend pulled me aside in a panic. “I don’t have time to watch television, so I thought I’d downgrade,” I told him. “You know, to save money.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Are you planning to go to the store anytime soon?”

He screamed, I screamed, and he moved out into the house of an older woman he’d met on the spoken-word circuit. But the time and money and mental anguish I’d sunk into this man still weighed on me. That spring, I claimed him as a dependent on my taxes, my last-ditch bid for compensation for our six months together. He called me, furious. “You acted like a dependent,” I hissed back.

He wasn’t the only one. As angry as I was with him for taking advantage of me, I knew deep down that he had not done so without my permission. I sent the biggest check I’d ever written in my life back to the IRS. In the scheme of things, it was a small price to pay. 

I was one year out of college and already felt stuck in the repeating playlist of my early adulthood—everything is possible, nothing ever happens. One Saturday night, I gathered all of my change, walked 500 feet from my apartment, and joined my most committed drinking buddy at a Miller High Life happy hour where drinks started at a quarter and climbed 25 cents every half-hour, a new game to help us all get drunk again.

By the time the bottles snuck out of my price range—$2, maybe—my eyes had fixed permanently on the curly-haired new barback circulating the bar, hooking, twirling, and stacking glasses as he went. My mind easily translated those skills to alternate situations. My friend told him I thought he was cute. When he went outside for a cigarette break, he signed his phone number to me through the pane of glass.

This was, in my limited dating experience, the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. It had been more than a year since I broke up with my college boyfriend. At least, that’s what I called him—he preferred me wordlessly following him up to his bedroom at the end of the evening and never touching him in front of his roommates to official “labels.” I had tried my hardest to steer our hangouts out of the drunken hookup zone and into a real adult relationship—I cooked him a steak, went down on him while he watched sports, and finally demanded that he treat me better or stop sleeping with me. He chose the latter. We remained friends.

Now, he was nesting with a pre-law student whose existence he acknowledged in public. Meanwhile, my personal life consisted of making out with guys who wore cut-off jorts, nodding into PBRs at my friends’ little music shows, and ingesting substances that would finally bury my childhood dream of applying to the FBI. Once in a while, I’d chat my ex-boyfriend to fill him in on what a craaaaazy time I was having out there on my own, my last bid to keep him close.

I called the barback when he was still outside. We eyed each other through the window as we made plans for later in the week. When we met late at another bar down the road, he quickly threw back a series of weird dad beers while I sipped Budweiser and fed dollars to the jukebox. He was charming, silly, broke, and—three drinks deep—intense. I had spent the entirety of my adult life writing made-up stories about down-and-out female protagonists with daddy issues and trying to figure out what I really wanted to dooooo for a living. He was a dropout with a broken attitude who kept moving to new cities until he scraped together enough money to move out to the next one. We had located each other at some tiny little point on the social Venn diagram where we listened to the same bands and liked the same drugs, and not much else.

When we ended up cross-legged on my tiny patch of bedroom floor, nursing a half-spent jug of wine he’d plucked from my kitchen, I assumed we’d make out. He wanted to talk. You know when you're so drunk that the connective tissue of normal human conversation begins to dissolve? Out of nowhere, he announced that he was the type of person who would do anything for money. Like have sex with a lonely older woman he picked up on Craigslist, or, theoretically, kill someone. Actually, he told me, he was bringing in some pretty good money hanging out with gay men in their hotel rooms, watching their televisions and chatting with his clothes on. One hour, $250, no sex—he wasn’t gay. This was not the type of drunk-on-a-floor convo I had envisioned, the one where we slowly inch closer together until our mouths are touching. He stumbled out my front door and made me promise not to tell.

The next morning, I opened my laptop and pinged my ex-boyfriend. “I went out with a male prostitute last night,” was my opener. “Tell me,” he shot back. I told him I met a boy who had sex with old women and not with old men, and that I wondered what they were actually paying for him to do in those hotels. “Amanda,” my ex responded, “he has sex with these men.” I conceded that murder was a red flag. My ex called him a “manwhore” and pressed me for details.

That night, I took a tour of Craigslist m4m, clicking at its blue links until they all turned purple. I found my barback’s ads and pored over each one—same age, same neighborhood, str8 boi, clean, small, fit, cute, free all day until his 8 o’clock bar shift. He did more than hang out. His services expanded desperately as his posts neared the first of the month. No sex. Only oral. Only on top. Anything goes.

Sitting there on my carpet, it was easy for him to insist and me to nod and us both to pretend that he was living how he really wanted. Seeing his reality spelled out for anyone to read made me sad and, unexpectedly, repulsed. I could feel my mind knocking on the door of its dark basement, the place where I push my most unacceptable thoughts and lock them in tight to keep them from creeping in to my clear, open mind. My irrational hatred of my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend bottomed out there, along with my deepest personal anxieties and all the residual shame drilled into me from years of Arizona sex ed. It was important not to spend time down there.

Then again, my ex-boyfriend had expressed real interest in my life for the first time in months. I cracked open the door. I copied the links to the ads and sent them to him, one after another. We spent a full hour batting our gleeful disgust back and forth.

When I saw the barback again, working at the bar like the night we first met, he looked different. His hair seemed longer, his face older, V-neck deeper, eyes crazy, not cute. My father once came across a man splayed out in a parking lot and helped administer CPR for several minutes before he realized that the man was a friend. They’d played a round of golf just an hour before. My dad told me that our features transform when the life goes out of us. This was different. I’d pushed this boy down so far in my mind that he turned under the weight of my judgment. It made it easier to look away.

I had been living on a tiny island for too long. I had moved as a temporary escape from my big-city hometown, gotten stuck, stayed for two years, and fallen into an abusive relationship with a local sociopath who had money, power, and a big truck. He was the kind of guy who could keep friends and neighbors under his thumb because he had the power to transport them from their isolated rural road to the only store in town that sold cigarettes.

When we broke up, I was ejected into in a social scene littered with his drinking buddies. I learned the hard way that most folks considered his personality fault to be more awkward than abusive. It was time to go. I decided to hole up in my house, eat beer and Chinese rice crackers for dinner, and wait out the month I had left on the island.

Then Jason washed up. He was under 40 and didn't dress like a teenage skate punk lost in 1993. He was nice to me. He didn't gossip. I made out with him.

The fact that Jason was drunk all the time didn't bother me in the slightest—I wanted little more than to escape into a tall can of pilsner, too. Plus, drunk seemed to work for him: He had a slow charm that reminded me of the boys I had crushes on at 18. His constant intoxication led me to believe he wasn’t all that sharp, but he was the type of fun I was happy to tag along with for the short term. So long as we didn’t converse, our chemistry was remarkable.

When it came time for me to head home—where my friends were sane, led interesting lives, and maintained their oral hygiene—I was surprised to find I felt more than just lust for my supposed fling. Jason found work on a tree-planting tour that summer, traveling between rural towns that took him less than a day outside my city, and he would would call me randomly from planting sites: "Hey, I'm thinking of busing into town tonight—what do you think?" I always waited for him with nervous excitement, my orgasms having rendered my rational brain useless.

Sometimes he showed up. Sometimes he didn't. He'd make plans with me, then I'd hear from him a few days later, confused: “We made plans?” Sometimes he'd apologize: "Things got crazy." I had no idea what “crazy” meant, but I reasoned that I wasn't in it for the long haul, so it didn’t really matter what specific kind of crazy he was.

The trouble with dating men who are not “boyfriend material” is that if you date them long enough, they eventually become your boyfriend.

One night, Jason and I went over to his friends’ place. I didn't know them, and Jason didn't make much of an effort to make me feel comfortable. So I sat alone, drinking wine in the hope that things would turn "fun" that way. They didn't. Late in the evening, he slipped out the door without a word. I waited and waited, then gave up and called a cab. The girlfriend of one of his buddies walked me outside to wait. I cried, thinking maybe he was cheating on me. “He’s up to his old tricks again,” she responded. I had no idea that meant.

Eventually, Jason stuck around long enough for us to grow domestic. We played Sam Cook songs together on the guitar and ate spaghetti. I began to believe that old cliché, that with a little love and stability he’d shape up. But when Jason and I moved in together, his behavior became harder to rationalize. Soon, he was forced to admit to me that he “had a problem” with crack.

I sobbed when he told me, but somehow it didn’t sink in. I thought I was far from naïve about drugs—my friends and I had logged years as party girls, and had snorted, inhaled, and ingested a wide array of substances. Still, I had always thought of crack as something “other people” did. I came from a working-class family but had gone to school with mostly middle-class kids who modeled a version of drug abuse in which we partied all weekend but kept it together. When we eventually tired of the awkward 10 a.m. walks of shame and the crippling depression that followed, we moved on and built lives. I didn’t understand why Jason couldn’t just stop when Monday rolled around.

And he tried, over and over again, to stop. After a binge, he’d commit to sobriety, attend one AA meeting, make another appointment at the Daytox clinic. But then he’d start making deals with himself, and with me. Only two beers on weeknights. Only six on weekends. Only cocaine, no crack.

Then suddenly, he would take off all night and show up at 7 a.m., anxious and sweating. Some days, he’d wake up on a Saturday morning, say he had to run some errands, and turn up 24 hours later. Other times, he would never come home from work. I soon came to realize that, often, he wasn’t actually “at work” at all. Meanwhile, I was logging hours at a nondescript university admin job while completing a master's degree. My own route to work took me through the poorest and most notoriously drug-addled part of town. I always stared out the windows of the bus, my eyes tracing the grey alleys for any figure that could be him.

I loved him, but I began to feel trapped in a life that wasn’t mine. Truthfully, I was embarrassed. None of my friend’s boyfriends were crackheads. After letting it go for three years—choosing to believe him when he said he wanted to get better, that he wanted to go to rehab, that he would stop lying to me and to everyone he knew—I gave him an ultimatum. Get clean or end it. “I don’t want to get sober,” he finally admitted.

I sleep well now. I don’t send texts that say: “Hey, just let me know you’re alive, please.” I don’t stay up listening for keys in the lock or wonder how long I should wait before filing a missing person’s report or lie when his parents call. But I still look for him in those alleys on my way to work, my own bad habit.

Dating in Los Angeles was never easy. For two years, my dry spell was broken only by crushes on unavailable men and old flames from out of town. I would have worried about my virginity growing back if that were medically possible.

Then a friend of mine emerged from a breakup and joined me in L.A. singledom. But while I sat at home Netflixing Lost in my pajamas, she was out having one-night stands and flings with bartenders. She had embarked, she informed me, on what she referred to as a "World Tour." She had to make up for lost time, she said. She needed to sow her wild oats. After another forgettable Saturday evening, I decided I needed to arrange a World Tour of my own.

I soon learned that having more sex would actually require me to change my behavior—namely, to lower my standards. If a guy asked me out and he wasn't that cute, I gave him a chance. If he seemed a little stupid, I went for it anyway. I had learned by example to talk to strangers and wear tight pants. Soon enough, my dance card was full.

So when I met a friend of a friend at a baseball game one warm summer night and he seemed a little crazy, it didn't stop me from flirting. And when he walked me to my car and kissed me, I kissed him back.

We traded a series of flirty texts. Then, "You up?" blinked on my phone at 3 a.m.

I was up.

Could he come over?

He could come over.

One night turned into two, and soon, he and I were telling each other our deepest secrets. Unfortunately, his were weird. Also, I started to notice that he was often drunk. And he kept offering me things he’d stolen from work. Then, he got kicked out of his apartment for "lighting a small fire." I ignored the signs. Signs were not to be heeded on the World Tour. Besides, he was making it happen for me on the regular. If I was going to have a standard, that seemed like an important one. 

One Friday, I was heading to a gay club with some friends and decided to invite him. He had never been to a gay bar before, but seemed up for it. We had a few beers at my place and met up with friends for a few more. When we got to the club around 11, I figured the night had just begun. As I headed out to the dance floor, he told me he was going to the bathroom. I expected him back any minute.

Minutes turned to a half hour, and there was still no sign of him. I asked if anyone had seen him. Nope. I texted him. No answer. I walked around towards the bathroom. Nothing. I scoped the outdoor smoking patio. I stalked the perimeter of the club. He was gone. Disappeared. As I stood in the middle of the club, Britney thumping so loud I couldn’t think, the smoke machine clouding my sight and lungs, the drinks from earlier in the night hit their peak. I broke into tears. I had never been the drunk girl crying outside of the club before, but now, I was sobbing for a drunk klepto- and pyromaniac. "Where is he?" I cried. "Is he okay?"

Drunk, confused, and sad, I went home and I tried to go to bed. Just as the sun was coming up, my phone rang.

"Where are you?" he said.

"Where am I?” I replied. “Where are you?”

"Chill out," he said. "I'm walking back. How do I get to your place?"

I told him to stay put. I would come find him. When I finally located him standing on a street corner, nowhere near the bar or my apartment, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I even cared. I didn't even like this person.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I stepped outside and saw this van parked in front, so I decided to sleep under it."

"What?" I asked, as if the situation could somehow be clarified into reason.

Nope. "I took a nap under the van."

I pressed on: "You realize you could have been killed?"

"I figured I'd hear them start it and I could move."

"Did you?"

"No,” he shrugged. “They must have drove right over me."

I let him sleep in my bed that night because he wasn't in any condition to drive. As he lay there, snoring and reeking of fuel, I stared at him wondering how I'd sunk to this point. But I knew how. I had compromised quality for quantity, and it had led me straight to a man who views parked vehicles as prime napping shelters.

After he left the next morning, I stopped returning his calls. I ran into him at a sushi bar a few weeks later and told him I was seeing someone else. I wasn’t. The World Tour was over. I'd raised my standards back to their proper place, high enough to wait for a man who could stay awake during our entire date. I found one a few months later, and married him. He has yet to fall asleep under a single motor vehicle. 

When I was young, I reveled in long layovers on transcontinental flights to visit my grandmother. I’d ride luggage carts through empty gates, try on duty-free lipstick, and see how long I could sit at the sky bar before they kicked me out. Once I saved up enough money, I began to travel by myself: A night drive to Joshua Tree, a bus to San Francisco, a week in New York, then three months in Buenos Aires because my boyfriend dumped me, I had a nowhere job, and I read too much into “Eveline” in James Joyce’s Dubliners.

The first week in a strange city without obligation was intoxicating. I could jump from museum to museum pretending I was an exiled spy or a brooding divorcee. Every sight became a snapshot landscape, another page for that hypothetical, melodramatic memoir I’m writing in my head. But by day seven, I’d be blowing my travel budget Facebook stalking friends in some internet café or else downing a bottle of American whiskey at the base of a marble monument.

When I set off to London, I realized that in order to achieve My Epic Adventure, I needed a quick in—access to people and parties I wouldn’t meet on the typical tourist route. I decided to do it the easiest way a young, single, lonely kid could. I would date.

In most cities, it’s easy to assimilate into young, nomadic groups in hostel lounges and dance club floors. But London proved to be a cold place. A friend had set me up with an acquaintance for drinks, and when the talk turned to dating, I asked her how people met each other in the city. “I suppose you meet the same person three or four times at a bar through a friend, and then eventually you’ll see them at a party and then maybe the next time you see them you’ll hook up,” she told me. “You probably won’t talk to them again.” Things looked bleak.

Then, one night after a walk alone on the Thames, I passed a bar called The Book Club. The place was split into a ping-pong and billiards room, a bar with candlelit tables, and a downstairs dance floor where the DJ was spinning some kind of electric swing.

Online, the place claimed to be the “younger, slightly smarter sibling” of a bar in Hoxton, a trendier neighborhood nearby. It sounded like they dealt coke and read Sartre. Not exactly my scene, but next to advertisements for Life Drawing and a DIY night, my mouse hovered over something labeled "last night a speed date changed my life." I figured the crowd ran toward nostalgic hipsters, a demographic I feel like I ought to snub, but among whom I actually feel quite comfortable. To some, speed dating is too aggressive an approach to romance, or too serious an attempt at fast friends. But Roman Holiday taught me that relationships in foreign cities are often forged with bold moves and deceit. I signed up.

As we put on our nametags (!) I began to wish I was as drunk as some other ladies giggling in the corner. Unfortunately, I was late, and sober. I was cramming some free Hershey kisses into my purse for later when my first date sat down. The five minutes dragged by in strained small talk. Then, the men shifted to their right. That’s when my next date left with his first date, grabbing her ass as they moved for the door. The DJ gave me a shrug of pity.

In an effort to remain remotely into it, I decided to pretend I was a lady receiving a lineup of gentlemen callers to claim my dowry. Things looked up from there. The men, who ran from their early 20s to mid-40s, were all kind, attractive, and had real jobs. Sex and the City had taught me this was mandatory, but at 21, it felt mysterious.

I submitted my choicest speed dates to the moderator and waited for any “match” emails the next day. I was honest with my dates: That I was new to the city and not particularly interested in a relationship. Those that sought out something serious turned me down, but offered invites to dinner parties and gave me tips on local spots. Other dates took me for cocktails at a ritzy speakeasy, a hike on the heath, billiards with friends, and to smuggle bottles of wine out of a Middle Eastern press event.

My new strategy as Experience gold-digger seemed to be working. I relaxed into a yes man mentality: In a foreign, friendless world, I speak to those I wouldn’t at home. I accompany them to places that have held no previous interest. I engage in activities I normally overlook on the off chance that in a new world I could learn something new about myself.

Then I found myself saying yes to a sort-of real relationship with a sort-of real person, setting  off to his family’s country estate two hours outside of my blank-slate city. Sam and I had gone on a few too many superficial adventure-like dates. The chemistry was lagging. I was ready to break it off when he invited me clay pigeon shooting for a long weekend. A glorious Wallace & Grommet image of me mud-deep in the great outdoors surged in my mind. I decided feeding my fantasy was more important than letting Sam down easy.

On the train down, he warned me his family was a bit conservative. I was too busy picturing myself horseback riding through a grove of trees. He spent the rest of the journey flipping though Instagram photos of his college crew jacket, telling stories about his grandmother’s cat, and inquiring about my summer plans. I spent the journey muting out the details and imagining the sepia-hued image of us cuddling in the country.  

When we got to the shooting range, I realized that years of classical ballet and fantasy novels do not necessarily prepare one for the drawback of a Remington rifle into a bony shoulder. Or the miles of manure-laden fields we would have to traverse. Or the best friend who slept in his Army uniform (to break it in). Or the family picnic in which we discussed that wacky theory the Poors were enraged about: global warming.

Dipping into an alien city makes it seem possible to condemn all assumptions, to label all values as limiting, declare all interests malleable. But there, in the country, I realized that I did not have feelings for Sam. That I did not like shooting. And that as open-minded as I can try to be, I do make judgments.

There’s a reason movies only last two hours: After too long, the sepia hue reverts to something more transparent. When Sam offered to take me to the ruins of a nearby castle the next morning, I told him I was taking the next train back to London instead.

Maybe dating isn’t so different from traveling. We walk in intrepid and alone, rosy-eyed with fantasy. Then, we realize we don’t want to make out with someone just because his head can be easily superimposed onto mental stock footage of romantic films and travelogues. We return home looking for old beds and good hamburgers. Then we forget, and venture out again.

The bathroom was down the far end of the hallway opposite my bedroom, but I could still hear him dry heaving over the toilet. When he sauntered back to bed, sloppy and drunk and defiantly unashamed, I asked if he was ok.

“No, Oscar. I need to go to the hospital,” he responded in a slow, sardonic tone. He wobbled out of his clothes and slipped inside my sheets but kept his broad back towards me. I slept alone clinging only to the smell of barf and beer next to me. Everyone has those crazy nights once in a while when they drink too much, I told myself. Who was I to judge?

My personal love affair with drinking began when I was just 16, visiting relatives in Guadalajara, Mexico. In Tequila territory, the drinking age… depends. One night, my lawless cousins dragged me to a loud club styled after the city of New York, complete with a replica Statue of Liberty in the middle of the dance floor. We drank Bacardi until I walked right into a cement wall. I spent the rest of the night puking and the next day experimenting with my aunt’s famous hangover cures—a shower, coffee, lemon water, and sunglasses indoors. In Chicago while in college, I guzzled full bottles of gin spritzed with tonic on the train ride downtown. On momentous occasions, my vision would be totally blurred before I even stepped into the bar, and I knew that it would be a good night. When I first got to San Francisco, I drank every day, and my body—not just my head—began to ache in the aftershock.

Then one day, I stopped drinking so much. I stopped taking shots. I stopped blacking out. I stopped suffering from paralyzing hangovers. I even started seeing a man who, afraid of a relapsing meth addiction, had given up drinking all together.

At the beginning, dating someone who would rather spend his nights in watching Larry King than escorting me to the new hotspot in town was a relief from the party monster mentality I had adopted in college. But after missing out on happy hours and Sunday brunch mimosas, I realized that sober life was not for me, either. Even though I respected his decision and never attempted to curve his sobriety, I still felt guilty whenever I drank in front of him. And our sober sex was always as awkward as our first date.

When we broke up, I was happy to once again be able to fully appreciate the benefits of my favorite social lubricant: I rebounded with a drunk. Every time we’d go out together, we’d end the night collapsed. He’d have four, five, six shots of whatever liquor was around, then down an energy drink on the side. At his drunkest, he began sniping at my own personal habits. I gave strangers longing, lustful looks, he told me. I had this way of flirting without even realizing it, he said. Was I really prone to this type of indiscretions on the dance floor? I cried the night he confronted me in a crowded club. I wasn’t embarrassed for being scolded for imaginary, infuriating reasons—I felt ashamed at the realization that I had been flirting with bartenders, bouncers, acquaintances, people waiting in line next to me at the bar—even my boss!—all along.

From there, it was always easier to blame myself for his erratic outbursts. When he couldn’t stomach our fighting, he just walked out. I was fine with being left behind. In fact, I preferred it—it was at least better than him yelling at me in front of strangers, and just as bad as when he yelled at me in front of friends. Friends try to understand. Strangers can't help but judge.

The following morning, he always apologized by telling me he loved me to the point of temporary insanity. I forgave him, choosing to see jealousy as a sign of passion. I guess I preferred a temperamental, untrusting lover to an apathetic, boring one. Every time, his apology reaffirmed that what we had was worth fighting for.

But some mornings, he would not apologize. He began to get too distracted by the quivers and shakes that would overtake his entire body as he laid shirtless in bed, moaning and mumbling nonsense to himself. I began to get wise to the many secret spots in his apartment—big enough for bottles of vodka to hide. Out on a two-week-bender, he promised to swing by my place after each party to spend the night with me. But he never showed up, and he couldn’t tell me where he had spent the night because he didn’t remember.

“Nothing’s ever good enough for you!” he screamed at me in front of his roommate when I finally confronted him about it. Through all his unfounded accusations, his wayward logic, and his affinity for hoarding full bottles of vodka in his closet, it never occurred to me that maybe I was the one with the problem—an addiction to trying to fix an abusive relationship. “I can’t date someone like you,” was how he ended up breaking up with me. “I can’t date someone who’s practically sober.”

In moderation, alcohol is a one-of-a-kind social lubricant, making every party a bonding experience for those who imbibe. In excess, it destroys. But it is such a pervasive drug that anyone who abstains seems odd, and those who overindulge fade into the background of all the other drunk guys out on a Friday night. I finally found a place where I could push my limits without falling out of line. And it’s not extreme to want a mate who at least needs a mixer with every shot.

In our Dealbreakers series, exes report on the habit, belief, or boxer brief that ended the affair.

Halfway through our first date, I pulled out my phone and showed Sam a picture of my cat.

“That’s the one problem with you,” he told me. I’d met Sam at the end of a marathon weekend of dates, an event I’d engineered to kick off my newly single life after ending a four-year relationship. After meeting up with a programmer, a lady doctor, and a guy who’d once been on 30 Rock, Sam proved to be the most promising candidate in the running. He was incredibly attractive, a feminist, a former rape crisis hotline volunteer, and a flirt who translated our effortless chemistry into plenty of playful touching throughout the nightcap we shared on the Lower East Side. He was also allergic to cats.

I had cats all through my childhood, and my choice of pet never seemed to make much of an impact on my social life. But when I reclaimed my childhood cat from my parents as an adult, legions of the allergic came out of the woodwork. I learned I had several friends who couldn’t tolerate the slightest hint of dander. I’ve never considered myself a cat lady, but suddenly, Miagi was threatening to intrude on my dating life.

When it got late, Sam leaned in to kiss me. I kissed back, and our goodbye embrace quickly escalated into a hot-and-heavy makeout session. As I became increasingly aware of the people around us, I pulled away. “I’d invite you home with me,” I said, “but you’re allergic to cats.”

“I can come home with you,” Sam rebutted. He said he wouldn’t be able to sleep over, but he’d be fine for a few hours. We rushed back to my place and locked the cat out of my bedroom. When rolling around on my fur-infused bedspread didn’t immediately send Sam into anaphylactic shock, I figured we might actually have a chance.

The next time I saw Sam, we went to his place. Normally, I try to avoid roommate-filled apartments in the outer boroughs, but I figured Sam’s allergy justified the trek out to the Astoria apartment he shared with two other people. At least we could get through a night without me worrying about killing him.

Dressing for the date, I’d tried my best to pick out clothes that showed no signs of cat hair. The task proved harder than I thought. Most of my clothes have some dander on them, and even after an aggressive lint roller session, my outfit remained not entirely cat-free. I had done my best. I figured it would be fine.

“I see cat hair,” Sam commented as I took off my coat. That didn’t stop him from aggressively making out with me—or rubbing his face on select areas of my shirt later on. Everything was fine at first: We made out, we went to dinner, we watched an episode of QI. But hours later, Sam’s eyes had turned a distinct shade of red—and suddenly, the strange exhaustion he’d felt all evening started to seem like a sinister sign. Something was definitely wrong: Whatever traces of hair still lingered on me were causing an allergic reaction. And though we tried to muddle through, it definitely put a damper on the evening. Even after a full night of sleep, Sam wasn’t completely back to normal—and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to make this work.

Leaving Astoria the next morning, I formed an action plan. Seeing Sam at my apartment was out. Even going to his apartment had not proved as safe as I’d originally assumed. But I had options. I’d buy clothes to wear exclusively at his apartment. I’d shower when I got there. It was a hassle, sure—but if he was as awesome as he seemed, I could put up with a hassle. At 17, my cat was not particularly long for this world. If I had to jump through hoops a little bit longer in order to hold on to an awesome relationship, so be it.

The next few times I saw Sam, we hung out in public, and managed to navigate several more dates without any allergic reactions on his part. I was feeling pretty confident about things. Then I went home with him again.

I entered his bedroom and immediately shed my clothes. 

“Do you want me to take a shower?” I asked, overly conscious of the trace levels of cat that must be caking my skin.

“No,” he said. “It’s fine. If I get sick, I’ll just take some meds.” Hours later, when my body had left Sam sniffling and red-eyed again, he announced he couldn’t possibly take the medication: It was too late in the evening, and he’d either find himself unable to fall asleep or unable to wake up the next day. We passed the night, him awake with allergies, me with guilt.

In my infatuated state, I refused to see that the relationship was doomed. I didn’t want to believe that this boy who seemed so nice, who kept telling me I was gorgeous and amazing and wonderful, could possibly be felled by something so small as my eight-pound Siamese. Sam, on the other hand, saw the writing on the wall. Two weeks later, when we had made plans to hang out after his trip to Palm Springs, he called and ended things.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked, blindsided.

“There was one thing,” he said, his voice awkwardly stilted. “Whenever we hung out, you made me sick. And I don’t mean that you’re ugly or gross to look at—I mean that you have a cat, and I’m allergic.”

I moved to point out that I’d tried to work around that. That I’d gone out of my way to protect him from my cat. That, really, I could still do more, if only he’d let me. But I stopped myself. Sam’s overaggressive immune system was too strong. I had battled his allergy and lost.

It’s tempting to see this whole story as a "love me, love my cat" sort of tale, but I don’t think it’s that simple. After all, I know plenty of cat owners who’ve managed to find love with allergic mates. But if I ever fall for someone with allergies again, know this—they’d better be willing to at least take a Claritin for me.

“Relationships are very simple,” Chris Rock says in Rock This! “Only two things can happen: You get married or you break up. That’s it. There’s no third thing.”

Back in 1997, I took pretty much everything Chris Rock said to be the ironclad truth. Then, I watched as my own family members complicated Rock’s simple rule. My family does not break rules: It drinks warm caffeine-free Diet Coke and considers accountants rock stars. But as my childless uncles cruised into their 60s living with women to whom they were not married, I realized that Chris Rock had the right idea but the wrong framework: You have kids or you don’t. That’s it.

When I found my own loophole in Rock’s rule—I got married, and then we broke up—I managed to emerge from the divorce on relatively good terms (we did not have kids). In fact, the loss opened its way into a sort of freedom: I was a 30-year-old single man with a month’s worth of severance pay, a vast apartment for which the rent was already paid, and no impending job prospects—the comedy talent management business spends the first half of December throwing holiday parties and the second half on paid vacation. I don’t typically look on the bright side, but I decided to view this as a kind of state-sponsored retreat. I could play PS3 all day, tweet about meaningless bowl games all evening, and keep myself open to anything at night.

On one such night, at a friend’s birthday party at the Improv, that meant Elise. I had spent the better part of the evening hanging around the dark part of the bar beneath the signed headshots, hoping to escape the notice of the comedians I used to work with. My approach was not smooth, or even preconceived, but the Freudian subtext was off the charts. My very recent ex-wife was slender, witty, bookish, Southern. Elise was the kind of girl I met at Jewish youth groups back in Philadelphia. I think Rob Schneider looked on approvingly.

Elise and I left at the same time. I walked her to her car. “We should hang out,” I somehow managed to spit out. Texts were exchanged. Then, enough time passed for me to talk myself out of thinking I had just asked her out on a date. Less than a month out of my marriage, I had made no attempt to hide my baggage with this woman. Besides, an occupational hazard of my old gig included watching literally hundreds of stand-ups relay stupendously unfunny reports from L.A.’s dating scene. I was not eager to begin doing my own research. Still, hanging out with new women seemed superior to the dull shame of spending my adult years deep in Madden Dynasty Mode. I haltingly suggested a Sunday night drink at a bar within walking distance of my apartment.

She agreed. When we met, I resorted to airing my resentment at my old job. She told me to stop talking about myself. For a while, we watched as Machete played silently on a TV across the bar. She seemed like she was having fun, but she also seemed like she would be having fun regardless of whether or not I was there. I figured I was going to go home and just sort of stare off into the middle distance—the new James Blake album had just leaked, after all. As I headed toward my apartment, she pulled me back in: “You’re not even going to ask me in?” 

My relationships generally evolve slowly—we discuss Built To Spill until we spontaneously start making out or whatever—but I was not opposed to her approach. I figured this was how it worked for everyone else—two people decide they are attracted to one another, and figure out whether they actually like each other later.

Did we like each other? I don’t think we disliked each other. Clinging tight to our patch of common ground, we fell into a typical entertainment biz relationship—what could we do for one another? She took a strange pride in the fact that I was on the rebound and had never been with a Jewish woman. As Chris Rock would say, I guess I just wanted to feel pretty. None of this transferred well to actual conversation. Sleeping together became less complicated than, say, sitting through dinner.

But quickly, our pillow talk advanced to the level of therapeutic confession. Once you recognize the fact that you’re sleeping together in what was three weeks ago a married couple’s apartment, there’s no real need for secrets. She told me she wanted kids. I explained that I viewed not having children as a matter of social and fiscal responsibility: my fitness for parenthood can best be demonstrated by the fact that I consider Lean Pockets to be a proper meal, and maintain a longform Tumblr in which I write about Lean Pockets for up to 10,000 words at a time. I feel I’m doing our crippled economy a favor by shooting for zero offspring. She wanted four.

Was I ok with that? After being in a relationship with my best friend for over six years, I felt I owed it to myself to find out. But before long, the issue had quietly turned our relationship into a race to find out who was going to let the other down easy. It wasn’t so much a mood killer as it was a game-changer—an issue on which each of us could pin our opposition to the other. One morning, she made the move.

“You’re telling you me you never wanted kids?” she asked me. “Never. Not even when I was married,” I replied. She told me she didn’t think this was going to work. I drove her home.

She called about a week later, wanting to know “if we could talk.” Considering the run of luck I had at that point, I was ready to concede that she was somehow pregnant. (I’m an Eagles fan with male-pattern baldness on both sides of my family—I’ve amassed enough evidence that God likes a laugh at my expense). Instead, she told me she thought we had rushed the whole breakup thing. I told her I needed to get my life together before I started something serious with someone else.

But I didn’t need to get my life together so much as I needed to take inventory of what was left. I realized that when you lose your wife and your best friend, you lose a third thing—a life partner.

We had a plan together, she and I. With all of our disposable income, we could ride things out as the cool aunt and uncle—the ones the kids secretly wish were their parents because we’d have jet skis and live in a place with great weather and terrible schools. We’d subscribe to a kickass cable package and leave out a vodka bottle with the understanding that they’d fill it with water when they started sneaking shots in their teens. Maybe we’d even take up smoking pot once we retired—good pot.

The armchair psychiatrist would tell me there are two options in relationships this close to a divorce: The one that offers the security, mutual understanding, and respect you’ve just lost; or the one that simply fosters your own arrested development. Of course, I'll always want that third thing—where the former facilitates the latter, and ensures the only kids in the relationship are ourselves.    

In our Dealbreakers series, exes report on the habit, belief, or boxer brief that ended the affair.

Derek is my favorite ex-boyfriend. Along the spectrum of damaging and abusive exes who litter my road of relationships past, he was one of the few truly decent guys who never hurt me.

We met at an undergraduate theater audition that was equidistant from our home bases in different Midwestern states. Neither of us got into the competitive program, but we exchanged contact info—back then, it was AIM screennames—and sent witty banter across the ether in the weeks following our respective tryouts. Soon, we were exchanging lengthy emails more than once a day.

A few months later, when I was accepted into a university in the town where he lived, it seemed like we might have a shot at something more than virtual flirtation. I drove into town with my teal Toyota full of moving boxes. He came over to see my new place and help me get the lay of the land. We purchased plants at Target and went to a forgettable film where we shared a jumbo Mr. Pibb. As our awkward, mostly platonic courtship progressed, we both confessed we’d survived recent relationship trauma. We agreed to take it slow in every sense of the word. He was the relaxed, post-abuse semi-serious boyfriend I didn’t even know I needed. He seemed to take comfort in the fact that I didn’t demand a label or too much of his time.

At 18, I also didn’t realize that a 20-something guy who needs to school everyone about his nuanced view of the world might be a jerk, even if a relatively harmless one. That’s because for a long time, caught up in the heady first days (and weeks, and months) of a fledgling potential romance, Derek’s good traits overshadowed his biggest flaw.

He was a mansplainer.

I should have spotted it sooner. His initial emails were often long-winded explanations about how yoga had changed his life or why he thought Wes Anderson was going to be huge. It’s not as if holding any of those beliefs makes you a patronizing creep. It’s all about the self-important presentation, the all-knowing attitude. Derek had both.

I soon found out that Derek’s condescending, male-centric commentary wasn’t reserved just for me. I once heard him lecture a counter clerk at a Tex-Mex joint about chilies. Another time, he cornered a multiplex concession stand employee and demanded answers about the butter substitute used on the popcorn. “I work at a movie theater too,” he said, as if that explained his entry-level entitlement to tell every other cinema staffer how to do his job. At the time, even though I was increasingly frustrated, I let it slide, thinking he was simply an ambitious intellectual or perhaps overcompensating for his wounded ego.

Within the confines of our relationship, almost any topic was fair game. When I tried to explain my devotion to Jane magazine, Derek began telling me all about its content. “My ex used to subscribe to that,” he said, as if it made him an expert on the glossy I’d read religiously for several years. We both knew a lot about music, but I’d never win a fight about whether the Rentals were a Weezer side project—even though I knew the answer. Eventually, I felt like I couldn’t hold my own about any issue. His habit was exhausting, even if he was still the kindest guy I’d known.

After he nonchalantly broke it off because he wanted to be unencumbered as he planned to “get in his car and drive west”—yes, really—he sent me a long-winded explanation about how great I was. When I attempted to discuss his egocentricity with him, I was met with even more explanations, more assurances that I just didn’t understand. I let it drop.

But every so often—and by that I mean every year or so—we'd try to reconnect, bolstered by happy memories of how much we’d helped one another overcome our hesitation and sadness about relationships. For that, we both remained grateful, especially as we moved on to date (and, in my case, marry) other people. But every time, he fell back into old habits, and I was put back in my place.

During one reconnection, I made the mistake of asking him for advice about buying a car. I didn’t have a lot of mechanics-savvy friends at that point in my life and figured a lifelong Audi aficionado might have a few pointers. In the course of explaining that I was seriously considering an old diesel Mercedes over a gently used Volkswagen, he mentioned that any VW would be a solid investment.

I politely demurred. “My last car actually was a Golf,” I explained. “I called it The Rig. It was the worst car, ever.” As usual, my lighthearted brush-off backfired. Instead of retreating, he responded with the inevitable lecture, the one I’d tricked myself into believing he might have outgrown. “Well you know,” he began, as he begins every seemingly helpful monologue about things only he can tell you, “It’s too bad you didn’t consult with me before buying it.”

Later, he stretched his mansplaining muscles even further, into areas I naively assumed were off-limits. Everyone has his or her strengths, right? Armed with a potentially pretentious women’s studies degree, I’d always thought I could offer some authoritative arguments in our discussions about gender. I never predicted that years after we split, we’d end up bickering over email about the prevalence of domestic violence in the United States because once in his entire life, he was asked to emcee a women’s shelter charity event. But we did. And that was one of the last times I bothered to write back.

He still knows how to get in touch with me, and if he finds this and recognizes himself in my description, I know he’ll likely want to hash out the decade-long misunderstanding. “You know,” he’ll begin once again, and he’ll tell me why his version of the facts is the only acceptable one. But I stopped arguing a long time ago.

In our Dealbreakers series, exes report on the habit, belief, or boxer brief that ended the affair.

She was a lithe, stylish creature who came into my place of work every day. She didn’t walk so much as she floated, high in the clouds upon tall platform heels, six feet tall if she was an inch. Not even out of her teen years, she boasted the poise and presence frequently reserved for successful, driven adults. Every day, her visits were a blessing and a curse: She brought a little nervous excitement into my otherwise dreary existence of sulking behind an espresso machine and glaring at customers over a copy of Stranger In a Strange Land, but the mere presence of a beautiful woman reminded me of my own perceived shortcomings.

I don’t remember who finally asked who out, but there we were at the local Mexican joint. She retained her natural elegance while eating an overstuffed taco. I just tried to keep from wearing mine. I hadn’t been on a “real date” in years. Stumbling home drunk from a bar and engaging in some frotting was more my speed. This was the classic: dinner and a movie. The conversation was pleasant, if sometimes strained—probably because I spent most of the time trying to figure out if we were actually on a date or just hanging out. What the hell did the belle of the ball want with me? The movie was fun. We both liked it. We headed back to my place, but, in an omen of things to come, she left for other plans. I spent the night smoking pot, masturbating, and listening to William Burroughs' Giorno Poetry Systems sessions, as was my custom.

Physical contact came slowly. I was ok with that. There was something about this bright young woman that set her apart from the endless torrent of emotionally unbalanced partners who had characterized the sexually active parts of my 20s. Generally speaking, I didn’t date. I just had sex with anyone I didn’t terrify and who liked doing the same drugs as me. When we got tired of that, we went back to being strangers. She was different. We did simple and meek things together. A walk after dark. A bike ride. A round of chess in the park. A meal together in one of our respective homes. Beyond her natural radiance and youthful energy, I loved that she made me put down my bong for a couple hours and live life.

The building physical tension was wonderful. I began to take pleasure in things I never thought I would enjoy again. A peek at her bra strap. Her brushing up against me as we both navigated through a narrow clearing in the woods. Once, she jumped into me and held herself against me as we walked around an abandoned, allegedly haunted mental asylum. It was a wonderful little instant that I carry around with me like a treasured good luck piece. Eventually, we got more intimate. We’d make out or I’d spend the night in her bed, the two of us just sleeping next to one another.

After a few weeks, however, it became clear that something was amiss. The physical contact remained—“remained” being the key word. Things went around in circles, but rarely progressed anywhere. We might have gotten to second base once. The tentative, jittery quality of it could have been somehow endearing if we were high school students or Mormons. Seeing as we were both more or less grown adults—she was 19, I was basking in the extended adolescence of the nontraditional college student—it was a bit odd. Once the levee of physical intimacy broke, we should have been tearing each other’s clothes off or, at the very least, constantly reminding one another why we were delaying gratification.

But none of this happened. What did happen is that we dated on and off over a period of years with no significant change in physical intimacy. We both dated other people in between, and while I can’t speak for her, I know that I was having sex elsewhere. Our abortive relationship ended twice—for me to pursue someone that I had far less emotional intimacy with, but who at least possessed the attractive quality of turning me on.

I’m not sure precisely when I figured out what the problem was. But I did eventually resign myself to the fact that, no matter how much my heart felt for this person, we were never going to have anything resembling a sustainable relationship with one another. I just wasn’t all that attracted to her. We split.

There exists a vast chasm between knowing that a person is attractive and being attracted to a person. This young woman would be stunningly beautiful anywhere, to say nothing of the crummy little town we shared. But viewing her physical qualities made me feel like a modeling agent scouting new talent or an art aficionado viewing sculpture at the local gallery. Attraction has more to do with the heart and the loins than it does the eyes. If they aren’t on board, beauty doesn’t count for a whole lot.

In our Dealbreakers series, exes report on the habit, belief, or boxer brief that ended the affair.

The first time we had a conversation outside the confines of our student newspaper office, I told him I wanted to figure him out.

“You’re a tough nut to crack,” I said. “I like that. It feels like a challenge.”

If I have a type (I later learned that I definitely have a type), he embodied it perfectly: reserved but not shy, just playing his cards close to the vest. He seemed perplexed by my incessant questions about his life and would never give more information than was required. When I asked where he grew up, he said he had lived in the same house for almost his entire life, leaving out the fact that his mother had recently sold his childhood home after his parents’ traumatic divorce and he was planning to help her move out a couple of weeks later. When I confessed a head-over-heels crush the next semester, my nerves causing me to talk way too much and way too fast, he calmly responded he was interested in me as well. He used no more than 10 words.

For the first several months, I treated him like a reporting project. Every revelation about what he was actually thinking or feeling felt like a hard-earned victory. He was more of a challenge than I thought. He was a numbers guy, and he approached relationships with the same dispassionate logic he would any other equation. Over time, I needed to ask fewer and fewer questions to get at the heart of the matter, but he still rarely volunteered anything. Including his feelings about me.

I can count on one hand the number of times he told me I looked beautiful, or even “nice.” Most of them were a direct result of me baiting him. “You look so handsome,” I’d say when he put on his best-fitting slacks and my favorite pink button-down in advance of a dinner date. “I feel so outclassed!”

“No, no,” he’d say. “You look nice too.”

It wasn’t just the shallow stuff. Journalists crave positive feedback as validation that the hours we’ve spent covering mind-numbing school board meetings or staring at blank Word documents have been worth it. As he became the most important person in my life, he became the one whose approval I most craved. But he almost never read my work. Usually, that made perfect sense: For years, I covered education policy, local governments, and big-money philanthropists—hardly scintillating material for people who didn’t have kids, live in the suburbs, or have a vested interest in who was donating money to whom.

But even when my newspaper ran a huge feature story I’d worked on for weeks, even when I wrote long pieces about life in Baghdad when I was stationed there covering the war, he rarely read my articles unless I asked him to. Once, when I told him over a crappy satellite phone connection that I was upset he hadn’t read an A1 centerpiece I wrote about Iraq’s emerging black market for real estate, he said he didn’t understand the complaint. “Why do I need to read the story?” he asked genuinely. “You told me all about it last time we talked.”

It’s not that the lack of compliments made me doubt his feelings for me. He gave the best hugs, ones that communicated how much he meant it. He called me loving pet names and gave thoughtful gifts. We could talk about any subject for hours on end, and after the first year or so he even began trusting me enough to reveal more than what was on the surface. I was in love with him, and for most of the time we were together, I didn’t have any serious doubts that he was in love with me.

Yet his reticence turned me into someone I didn’t want to be—an insecure woman who fishes for compliments. I pouted when he didn’t remark on something I wanted him to notice, and then I felt badly about myself for being that girl. I bought items of clothing I didn’t like that much because I thought he would like them, then shoved them to the back of the drawer when he didn’t comment. Rather than adjusting to his ways over time, I became more frustrated with my inability to elicit approval. We’d have stupid arguments over why he never said “I love you” first—if I knew he loved me, what was the point of him saying it all the time?

The dynamic made it difficult to see when the relationship started going south. Was he acting weird, or was I being paranoid again? Were we having less sex because we weren’t attracted to each other anymore, or because my insecurities had built up to the point of impossibility? Honestly, I still don’t know.

In the end, we couldn’t agree on how to split up, either. He called things off, then immediately flew away for an extended stay with his family to avoid talking about it further (he had secretly booked the ticket three days earlier). When he returned, he had no qualms about continuing to live together while he scouted new apartments, because it was more convenient that way. I had begun to mentally prepare myself for the breakup, but I fought the cool, detached way he executed it. When it came time to divide our things, he produced a spreadsheet.

Part of me still feels like I was in the wrong, like it’s needy and narcissistic to demand compliments from your partner when he’s communicating love and affection the best way he knows how. But when you make a living stringing words together for maximum impact, you tend to be committed to the idea that words matter. I wanted to be told as well as shown that I was smart and desirable and maybe even beautiful. It turns out that for me, love can’t be left unspoken.

"She lives in Chicago and thinks she's a lesbian," my friend told me before introducing me to Daria. "She's perfect for you." I have never actively pursued queer women who live half a continent away. But let’s just say this wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in this situation.

Suffice to say, Daria and I did hit it off, more than either of us had expected. Daria was incredibly hot—self-assured, wickedly funny, a complex and nuanced thinker with a striking face and an empathetic singing voice. She struck a precise balance of femininity and androgyny—pretty much my dream girl. She identified as bi (in Santa Cruz, where I lived, this was not rare). After a week of passionate sex and drunken late-night conversations, we dove into six months of nightly phone calls, $200 phone bills, and monthly cross-country flights. I left my band, quit my coffee-shop job, and moved in with her. Nine months later, we were engaged.

Suddenly, our lives were consumed by the wedding. Over the course of that year, Daria's sexuality wasn’t verboten, but it was rarely discussed. Daria told me she didn't feel the need to act on her attraction to women at the time, and we were confident we could work through it when that time came. As we finalized the guest list, scouted Big Sur venues, and enlisted my friend’s bluegrass band to play us down the aisle, the topic stayed neatly folded beneath the logistics. “I was afraid to say anything to you, that you’d think I wasn't thrilled to become your wife,” Daria told me later. “But there was a second twinge I had to bury.”

Then we got drunk. Two nights before the ceremony, we threw an ad hoc bachelor-bachelorette party at a Santa Cruz dive bar. At one point, an unusually intoxicated Daria confessed her attraction to a close female friend she’d known since high school while I downed another celebratory shot at the other end of the bar. The next morning, the incident was written off in our circle of friends as the sort of “crazy shit people say right before they get married.” Daria and I knew better, but the narrative was useful as we contended with last-minute wedding emergencies through a hungover haze.

After the ceremony, Daria and I watched the sun set over the Pacific, wedding photographer in tow. "I can tell which couples are going to stay together and which aren't. You two will,” she told us. Maybe the photographer said that to all of her clients, but at the time, we believed it.

After the traditional wedding clichés had faded, we made a pretty great married couple. Our domestic life was harmonious—we were happy to sit around the house, order dinner from the noodle house, and queue up an evening’s worth of Battlestar Galactica. On nights Daria was out late directing theater productions, I held bourbon-fueled personal viewings of BBC space documentaries. When Chicago got old, we sold our possessions and drove around the country for five months. Our time traversing the United States brought us closer than ever. We devoured Radiolab episodes, took videos of each other singing along to “Papa Was A Rodeo,” and talked.

While driving a punishingly long stretch of road in the South, we had our most honest conversation about Daria’s sexuality to date. After circling around Daria’s drunken confession to her friend for months, we were now really talking about it. I sympathized with Daria’s feelings that it was an opportunity lost. We agreed that Daria might have a special dispensation in her friend’s case—but later. We had only been married a year.

When we returned to Chicago that fall, something changed. We remained emotionally close, but sex became rare. We spoke in comfortable hypotheticals about Daria’s sexuality, but discussion of our own sexual relationship was halting and defensive. When her high school friend came to visit two years later, they had sex in Daria’s office.

The next evening, Daria and I took a long walk around our neighborhood. My "holy shit, this is really happening" shock gave way to a strange calm. What had long been hypothetical might actually work in practice.

For months, we explored our options. Daria was still identifying as bi, in love with me but curious to start seeing women on the side. Meanwhile, she and I experimented with approaches to intimacy not involving your typical meat-and-potatoes heteronormative sex.

But when Daria fell into a relationship with a woman at work, she came out to me again, this time as a lesbian. "I felt like I had been carrying a perfectly tailored suit over my arm for years and years," she told me later. "Then one day I shook it out and put it on my body and it fit perfectly." We didn’t know where our relationship would go from there, but we both knew we didn’t want a divorce.

Our immediate concerns were practical. Daria had been accepted to a directorial graduate program in Austin and was set to leave in a month. I was excited to move to a town stocked with old friends and a more forgiving climate. I would tie up some work in Chicago, then meet her there. But when Daria packed up and left me alone in our empty three-bedroom apartment, things got rough. I spent many blank nights watching Netflix Instant and obsessively playing iPad games. I had never expected a conventional marriage, but now it was looking like it might cease to exist. We talked on the phone every day, but it was a strange reversal from our long-distance beginnings. As happy as I was that Daria had finally embraced her true identity, the specter of bachelorhood occasionally appeared, and I did not welcome it.

When I joined Daria in Austin, the parameters of our relationship shifted instantly—we took separate rooms, stopped having sex, and began figuring out what it meant to be single married people living under the same roof. We went for walks by the lake, took advantage of Austin’s live music scene, and made a house together. We even adopted a cat—a sweet indoor kitty with an autoimmune virus we named Wimbledon.

But our domestic bliss was built on a precarious state of cognitive dissonance. We remained true to our emotional commitments to one another, but Daria was already dating, and it wouldn’t be long before I attempted the same. What would happen if one of us fell in love? Would we have to sneak away to others’ houses to get laid forever?

Once, when Daria was out of town for a theater conference, I brought a friend I was attracted to into our home. Six years out of practice, I haltingly attempted to set a mood while she examined the artifacts of my marriage—shots from a trip to Australia, road-trip postcards, Loch Ness Monster cartoons I had drawn for Daria. A few minutes into an awkward couch makeout, she stopped and said: “You’re married.”

“It’s fine,” I drunkenly responded. “Daria’s totally cool with it, and she’s doing the same.”

Word to the wise: No matter the nature of your platonic married relationship with a queer woman, the correct answer to “you’re married” is rarely “my wife is cool with it.” My friend excused herself a few minutes later. Daria was dealing with similar issues—even in Austin’s queer community, a platonic marriage with a straight man was sometimes just too weird.

Then, Wimbledon escaped from our house and hid deep in a storm drain. Daria and I spent the night dangling sardines over the grate in an attempt to lure him out. When we finally went inside to sleep, Daria couldn’t stop crying. It was clear that we were mourning for more than our recently adopted cat.

After we had stood vigil for four nights, Wimbledon emerged. The episode was rich with symbolic resonance—we wouldn’t give up on our beloved gutter cat, and we sure as hell wouldn’t give up on one another.

Then, burglars broke into our house while I took a midday coffee break. They stole my wedding ring, the computers that held all our road-trip videos, even the car we had driven in. This wasn’t just symbolism anymore—this fucking sucked. Daria and I were gutted by the loss and unsettled by the violation of our fragile domesticity. We moved out three months later.

Today, I live in a two-bedroom bungalow with Wimbledon. I work from home, talk to my cat like he’s a person, and have the physical and emotional space to process the past six years and figure out what it means to face down the second half of my 30s as a single person. This year, I hosted Christmas dinner with Daria, her girlfriend, and our closest friends. It’s a strange family we’re building here, but it's the best one I could ask for. That night, as I looked out at my guests from the kitchen, I realized the wedding photographer was right: We did stay together. I contemplated my past six years—graduating from drunken barista to full-time writer, moving cross-country three times, visiting locations around the world, watching my father die. Daria had been with me the entire time. She now lives in a studio just a bit north of me. We speak more freely than ever.

It wasn’t a date—at least, that’s what I told the woman who asked Ralph to light her cigarette, then cornered me in the bathroom to see if she was allowed to ask him out. I was 25 and in a relationship. He was 44 and looked it—even his clothes screamed standard-issue middle-aged businessman. It takes more than two years in a city for a small-town girl to start to recognize high-end menswear.

When he tried to kiss me in the parking lot, I demurred because of the boyfriend. When he found out several months later that we had broken up, he didn’t waste a second following up. After our real first date, we made out on my sofa. He didn’t stay the night. He said he wanted to wait.

So I waited—two weeks, until he surfaced from a series of business and personal trips that took him from New York to Miami and back. He returned with stories of limo rides, champagne, and the type of women who glom onto you when you have those things. I only half-listened—I figured he was spinning some wild story to tease me, to compete with the fun of being 25. I was busy wondering when he would kiss me again and nervous about being naked with someone new for the first time in more than three years. At the time, I didn’t think my H&M finery would be more of an oddity to him than my little pooch.

As we got more serious, there were a lot of things I didn’t think about. I didn’t think about the rooms in his house we never entered, or the pictures of his niece and nephew that peppered the walls (he wasn’t baby-crazy, but he wanted kids someday). I didn’t think about the fact that the house was in a tony D.C. suburb (grownups all have houses, right?)  I didn’t think about the swank hotels he said he frequented on his company’s dime, even as I was trying to find room in my company’s budget to afford a night at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Econo Lodge. I didn’t think about how someone like me, even 20 years later, would ever end up popping bottles in limos in Miami.

Meanwhile, Ralph put a lot of thought into our relationship. He thought about where we could grab a drink without being seen by people we knew from work (for our privacy, of course) and what kind of restaurants I’d feel “comfortable” going to (since I wasn’t very glamorous). He thought about why we shouldn’t talk when he was on the road (he was always working), and about how my vagina wasn’t as tight as some of the rich, thin women he said he’d had sex with (fat girls, you know).

Sometimes, I knew enough to feel slightly insulted, though I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate it. Other times, I got angry and fought back. But he had a way of turning every accusation back on me: He just wanted to take me places he really liked, or for our sex life to be as satisfying to him as it was to me. Arguing with a good lobbyist is like trying to hold a snake coated in Astroglide—it feels slightly gross, and you’ll never get a decent grip on it before it slips away. I could never pin down why I felt crappy before he’d convince me that I didn’t really have any reason to. Then, he was gone again—there was always a plane ticket, a hotel reservation, a bag in the hallway, some place he needed to be that wasn’t with me.

I knew what it felt like to be the smart kid who had to work for everything surrounded by privileged rich guys who climbed their connections to the top. Now that he had some money of his own, I understood the impulse to want to play around with it a little. But every time he dropped a bunch of cash on another fancy hotel, I’d remember how excited he was to buy a Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster on sale to make me dinner (he served it with canned corn). Rich people were this alien species to me. Ralph had just enough of the blue collar left in him to fool me into thinking we were alike.

But the longer we dated, the more the details failed to add up. I asked to meet his friends, but he advised that we take it slow—he’d already lost a marriage and a serious long-distance girlfriend because he was ultimately committed to work. When I called his house on a Sunday, a kid picked up during what sounded like a party—it turns out Ralph coached a kid’s hockey team for his nephew, but he hadn’t wanted to brag. He was in it for the kids, not to impress women.

In the end, it was my supposed bad behavior that ended things: After months of him telling me how he wasn’t ready to be monogamous and disappearing from my bed for two weeks at a time, I slept with someone else. Unlike him, I was honest about it. His ego couldn’t take it. We broke up. But we kept spending time together in a kind of limbo state, making out but not having sex, telling ourselves we were friends. I waited around stupidly for him to tell some version of the actual truth, anything to break through the story I’d built up around him.

Then he got a job across the country— It turned out his “ex”-girlfriend was more of a present-tense situation. He wanted to say goodbye. He picked me up in a Lexus (somehow, I hadn’t even realized he’d owned one). When we arrived, I found he hadn’t just picked a bar, he’d rented it. Surrounded by coworkers I’d never met and friends I’d never heard of, I was nursing my second cocktail as he chatted with a friend behind him. “So are you selling the house here?” he asked Ralph. “Nah, I don’t need to,” Ralph replied. “I can get one there and keep this one in case things don’t work out.”

“Right,” his friend replied. “Plus your kids are here.”

Kids? I watched them in the mirror behind the bar, saw Ralph acknowledge the statement while looking at my back. Everything slid into place. There was the Ralph I knew, and then there was the real Ralph—the one with two kids and an age-appropriate girlfriend half a continent away, a Lexus and enough money for two houses and future college tuitions. He had hidden his life from me at every turn when the truth wouldn’t have changed anything. Everything was a lie, I decided, and he’d bought and paid for every one. Not because he ever needed to, but just because he could.

I turned around, shaking. “Your kids,” I said. He started up with another story, this one with another alternate ending. I cut him off with a hand motion and marched to the bar to pay for my drinks.

“You can’t pay,” he hissed. “I’ve seen you naked. I owe you.”

Just as the conversation in the room went silent, I shoved my credit card at the bartender and said, louder than I meant to: “Well, I had more orgasms.”

Heads swiveled. The bartender stared at us but I didn’t blush. He took my card and said, “I think she wins.” Two drinks were $23, before tip. Everything has a price, even the truth.