By ELISABETH EAVES
NY Times Published: January 5, 2012

WHEN I met Joe, he told me he was trying to decide where to live. At the time, he lived in — well, that was hard to say.

He was from New Hampshire, but after stints in various United States cities, he had moved to Paris, where he had been based for 10 years.

But “based” was a loose term. There had been six months in South America and a lot of time in Sicily. Once he’d moved to Barcelona on a whim. The last couple of months he had been in Seattle.

And here we were, meeting on a bus in Guadalajara, Mexico. We had come as journalists to write about tequila and were on our way to a distillery. In terms of expertise, I had no business being here, but he wrote often about food and drink. A photographer, too, he flipped open his computer to show me close-ups of Sicilian grapes. Later, as we whiled away the ride, he spoke enthusiastically of a Catalan tradition in which he and teammates built castles by standing on one another’s shoulders.

I was immediately attracted to his dark eyes, lean 6-foot-1 frame and sunny demeanor, and to a chivalrous streak that had him helping an older woman off the bus.

But his geographic dilemma and its lack of resolution discouraged me from considering romance. I was settled in New York and had just accepted the kind of job where they expect you to show up every day. He was a freelance writer, flitting around the world. I reminded myself that wanderers were bad bets. I had reason to know: I had been one myself.

Traveling was my first love, and plunging into a foreign culture (the more different from my own drab Northwestern existence, the better) had been my greatest thrill.

And so my university years took me to study in Egypt, backpack around the Middle East and work as a State Department intern in Pakistan. After college I settled in Seattle and tried to see my ensuing engagement, mortgage and office job as their own sort of adventure.

But I felt stifled by the weight of expectation I’d brought on myself: by the trips to Home Depot and earnest requests from family and friends to know when the wedding would be. Running from what I had just embraced, I broke off the engagement, with guilt but also with excitement. It was as if my horizon had narrowed to a tunnel and then suddenly expanded, giving me back the whole world. I traveled around the South Pacific for a year. I moved to New York for graduate school.

As Joe and I sat together on the bus that day, I told him a little about my trajectory, and for the first time in years I didn’t find it difficult to explain. To him, it all made sense.

During my traveling years I wasn’t exactly running from relationships, but the pleasure I took in moving dovetailed neatly with my fear of them. My unhappy years of domesticity in Seattle had left a scar. I was suspicious of myself, never quite sure that I could stay committed.

The years during and after graduate school had taken me to Jerusalem, Peru, London, Mexico, Italy, Croatia, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, Paris, Syria, Poland and New Zealand, a nearly complete list in more or less chronological order. I became a travel writer, which gave all the peregrinations more of the appearance of a purpose. Every romantic entanglement was a long-distance one.

But a few years into my 30s, ambivalence began to creep up every time I bought another plane ticket. Traveling for the fun of it was morphing into traveling out of sheer momentum. I felt the first tickles of envy for friends who were rooted. They had a gravitational pull that I lacked, drawing people to them, to their homes and dining room tables.

I wanted a dining room table, I realized. I wanted a dining room. Living in Paris at 34, I had awakened and realized that I wanted to go home, only to discover that I had no home to go to.

I began to fix that, first with trepidation (was I cut out for a stationary life?) then with zeal. It was a slog, though, because while you can take off in an instant, going back takes a long time. I saw that my faraway friends had made daily lives that didn’t include me. And I learned that a rooted life means making the kind of choices that I had avoided for the last decade.

Part of my impulse to travel came from never wanting to commit to just one thing; I had created a life that afforded me the illusion of endless choice. I could work for this freelance employer or that one; choose spontaneously to live in Hong Kong or the Outback. The “or” was what mattered. The “or” is what I was giving up by settling down.

I chose New York City, where I had friends and potential employers, and which contained worlds upon worlds of its own. I got a staff job and tried to become a center of gravity in my own right.

When I signed a lease, I felt a shiver of worry, but it passed. I bought not only a dining room table but also a sofa that visiting friends could sleep on, karmic repayment for all the times I had been the nomadic guest. I confined my traveling to vacations and occasional assignments.

When I met Joe I felt as if I was hearing my own story told back to me. I had to learn, late, to make certain big life decisions, and now he did, too. He had narrowed his options to three cities: Paris (which was familiar), Seattle (where he had family) and Barcelona — there had been a girlfriend there; that was over, but he loved the food and his Catalan friends.

Love can be narcissistic in that we often fall for a person in whom we see ourselves. Still, even though Joe captivated me, I was wary. New York was notably absent from his list. And when I chose to settle down, I resolved to avoid long-distance relationships, with their soaring highs and dismal lows.

In Mexico, we talked about his decision over steak and tequila. We talked about writing, photography and the mysteries of the blue agave plant, of which I was becoming increasingly fond.

Later we mapped out a year-by-year geographical overlay of our lives and learned that we had unknowingly crossed paths in Seattle and Paris, and I enjoyed imagining that I had passed him in the Metro.

We played the name game and came up with an acquaintance in common; again I envisioned the what-if. Might we have passed at the door to the same party? I was knitting a shared past where there wasn’t one. Although, in a way, there was.

We kissed goodbye in the airport in Houston, with no promises or plans. A week later I asked him to come see me in New York (I was grounded by my new job, so I couldn’t go to him). Extending that invitation gave me a strange new feeling. In relationships of all kinds, the wanderers are always assumed to be the flexible ones, the ones who will go wherever you tell them to for Thanksgiving.

Now I had become the center of gravity, with an irrefutably fixed address and a permanent job. The downside was that my new wandering star could just say no and be pulled in some other direction.

BUT a week later he walked into my apartment with a suitcase and a bouquet. I was heading into long-distance love, I could see. But being rooted firmly in place, I was able to take the leap of faith. At the end of his five-day visit, he invited me to the sofa and said, “We need to have a talk.” I knew he meant, “We need to find a way to make this work.” We plotted who would visit whom when, and talked about trips we could take together.

“How about driving from Alaska to Baja?” I proposed.

“Sure,” he said, just like that, as if I’d said why don’t we order sushi? He took these kinds of suggestions not as fantasies but as first steps.

That was 13 months ago. In April he moved in, bringing with him a beloved Peugeot bicycle, a collection of top-notch kitchen knives and not much else.

When I realized he was going to ask me to marry him, I wondered again if some part of me would seize up, if I would fall back into my old patterns. But since my decision to move to New York, through the four years during which I bought an apartment, was promoted at work and settled into routines, I had slowly become ready. And with this man, I saw, I wouldn’t be tied down so much as tied together.

When he asked, the choice was easy.

Tequila will be served at the wedding.

By SARAH HEALY
NY Times: October 27, 2011

SHORTLY after I turned 21, a boy handed me a poem. It was folded and folded until the words were concentrated and tucked away, handwritten black letters turned and flipped inside a small square.

We had been on a plane from Burlington, Vt., to Newark, seated a few rows away from each other. I had noticed him before we boarded: the way he sat with his feet resting on his carry-on, his gaze focused on the open pages of a book.

During the flight, I felt his eyes trying to catch mine as I turned and pretended to look for something behind me. The voice we used when ordering drinks, the way we stood to pull this or that from the overhead compartment: everything was choreographed for the benefit of the stranger across the aisle.

And then the plane landed and made its way to the gate. In my memory, it was evening and the rain had just subsided. Somewhere between the gate and my parents’ waiting car, he handed me the poem.

That was almost 13 years ago. I had been flying home from college for the weekend for my sister’s wedding — or rather, the celebration of her marriage. My family wasn’t big on weddings in the save-the-date, banquet-hall sense. So this was the small, elegant party held after she and her husband had eloped. Our tradition wasn’t to have weddings but to have elopements.

My parents had eloped. They had known each other for less than three months and had been on only a handful of dates before they went to a justice of the peace and took vows they meant and kept. My mother had been working at a welcome station in Florida. She handed my father a glass of free orange juice. That’s how they met: my mother with her thick dark hair and crystal-blue eyes, my father in his naval uniform.

I was proud of that, the story of my parents’ beginning. It was a glass of free orange juice, but it could have been a poem.

“Did you hear that a boy gave Sarah a poem?” my older sisters whispered. They were enamored with the idea, and I passed around the white sheet of paper with its pale blue lines so they could read it.

They smiled and teased and recalled memories of when they were single and it was summer, and the boys had dark brown eyes and crooked smiles. It was decided that it was a nice anecdote, the boy handing me a poem. That night, I smoothed it with my hands and put it somewhere safe.

The party the next evening was the first family function at which I was treated officially as an adult. I had recently come back after studying abroad, and so I held my glass of wine and talked with relatives about Florence and London and Paris, and my plans after graduation. I’d move to New York. I’d work at an art gallery. I’d find a boy who wrote poems. It all seemed not only possible, but fantastically so.

The next day, my parents dropped me off at the airport, and when I arrived at the gate, the boy was there. We smiled at each other, and I sat down.

It turned out we were on the same flight, and this time we were seated next to each other on the trip back to Vermont. He played in a band and studied English and had been home for the weekend as well, visiting his family in Greenwich, Conn.

We talked about music and art. His first name was the same as my father’s. It was the sort of thing that seemed magical, preordained. It was the sort of thing that made girls near their 21st birthdays use words like “destiny” and “fate.”

He walked me to my car, and we kissed in the parking garage, under orblike yellow lights. It was a still kiss, a postcard kiss, a Disney princess kiss, the kind of kiss that makes blue cartoon birds chirp and swirl in the sky, their beaks holding garlands.

And this is exactly where the story should end. It should cut to credits, and the music should be triumphant but soft. Your last image should be of the young girl and the handsome poetry-writing boy frozen in a movie kiss. You should brush the popcorn off your lap and leave the theater smiling because everything worked out the way you knew it would. You can leave remembering that time when you were young and lovely, and things like that could happen.

Because it’s boring to say that things don’t work out like they do in the movies. Everyone knows that. Even 21-year-olds. But it’s hard to resist a great story. If we had lasted, we would have had one hell of a story.

Maybe that’s why I clung to him in that particularly embarrassing way that young girls sometimes do, why I wanted so much for things to work out. Why I let myself turn into someone I didn’t really like when I was around him. Why I was willing to forgive his arriving hours late on the night he met my parents at a restaurant in New York.

He was the last person I dated before I met the man who would become my husband. My husband and I met in a bar. I knew a friend of his. He knew a friend of mine. You’ve heard it a hundred times before.

But a few years later, he and I married, in a big traditional wedding with a white dress and a tiered cake. My father walked me down the aisle. My niece was the flower girl. There was shrimp cocktail. That wedding was the first of its kind in my family.

At our reception, my father gave a toast. He told the story of how he and my mother met, the story of how all those years ago she handed him a glass of free orange juice.

“There’s no such thing as free orange juice,” he’ll sometimes joke when telling their story, a satisfied but somehow tired look in his eyes.

My parents have now been married for almost 50 years. They have five children, eight grandchildren. They have hurt each other and tried to. They have saved each other’s lives. There have been loud, harrowing fights. There have been slammed doors and threats of leaving.

I remember sitting on my bed and wondering whether my mother meant it this time, whether it was finally done. Sometimes I hoped it would be, that it would just end and that there would finally be quiet. But there have also been hushed reconciliations: apologies and remorse and kind words spoken when no one was around to hear. So it’s after the glass of orange juice that my parents’ story, that anyone’s story, becomes interesting. To me, anyway.

“You have to believe that the Lord put you together in the first place.” That’s what my father said in his toast. That was his advice to my husband and me, his way of saying that what we had was preordained, that it was divine. And really, it was as good an explanation as any for love.

A few years ago, my parents went on a nice vacation together. They drank good Mayan-honey margaritas and walked on the beach. There are pictures of my mother with a flower tucked behind her ear.

“We found out how much we liked each other,” she said to me when they returned. Somewhere between their three-month courtship and five-decade marriage, my parents had figured out why they ended up together.

I told my husband that story, and he laughed softly. In my memory, he was doing the dishes, and the corners of his eyes creased as he smiled into the sink.

IT might interest you to know that the poetry-writing boy’s band has gone on to become one that you may have heard of, though it interests me less than I ever would have imagined. We were a good story. Nothing more. He is what I would have chosen when I thought I could choose. So, I suppose that’s the point: Love chooses us.

My husband and I don’t have a great “meeting” story. We met in a conventional way and had a conventional wedding. And in some sense, we lead a conventional life.

But my husband has seen me at my worst, at my most vile. And he has seen me at my best. He knows the things I don’t tell anyone, and the lies that I tell everyone but him. I have made sacrifices for him and been angry about it. Sometimes his flaws are so egregious, so blatant, they are all I see. And sometimes his kindness is so stunning that I am humbled.

And that’s love. Big, epic, fairy-tale love. The kind of love people write about. The kind of love that could inspire a poem.

It had been one of those infinitely long days where I did nothing but stare blank-faced at my computer screen. Time begrudgingly crawled its way to 4:30PM when I conceded it was time to duck out early to go home. The buzzing sounds of electricity and humanity started getting to me from the moment I got down into the station. After boarding my first train, I brought the book in my hand closer to my face and let my hair fall down over one eye. I never should have cut those fucking bangs last year. I’m drawn out of my haircut remorse by the crackling loudspeaker announcing our arrival at 6th Avenue. 

Stepping off with the rest of the after-work crowd, we slowly herded ourselves down two flights of stairs to the L. Everyone is visibly agitated, staring blankly while they shuffle up and down the line, looking for enough free space to stand comfortably apart from their neighbor; there isn’t enough room for any of us to stand comfortably. The ambient album of Tycho’s I had put on as I left the office blasts through the uncomfortable white earbuds that came standard with my last iPod, but I can still hear every aggravating verbal exchange around me. These headphones are so crap. I turn the volume up, again unable to lose myself in the book inches from my face. The words swim across the page; I can’t focus long enough to transition into zoning out. All the elbowing, bag-checks and trying to shuffle out of the way for people trying to make their way to the opposite end of the track has me on edge. The crowd is five people deep across the entire length of the track, Brooklyn-bound, and I’m ready to snap – on someone, on anyone.
A woman at the front of the pack leans forward, past the bumpy yellow marking the “danger zone” closest to the oncoming train and I visualize kicking her ankle, sending her to an untimely death. It’s an idle fantasy I would never indulge in, but thinking shit like this is one of the few things that gets me through all the near-panic attacks New York seems to bring out in me. Today I am too defeated by “The Man”, my nine-to-fiver, my weak income—and the vision of her head getting lopped off as a train pulls into the station too fast brings only the slightest of smiles to my face. The light from the oncoming train snaps me back to the present. Surveying the crowd in front of me, I realize I’m not going to make it on this train. I inch closer to the steel pillar nearest and half-lean against it, content to be the first in line for the next train. Once the cars are filled to capacity and the doors shut, I step forward onto the yellow tiles; missing one train is fine, but two simply will not do.

When the next train pulls in, I start looking for where I’ll be scrambling to stand before the door even opens, accidentally locking eyes with a sandy-haired man seated inside in the process. He looked away first before abandoning his seat to stand up, grasping the rail overhead while steadying the book loosely gripped in his other hand. I’m pushed inside by the rush of commuters behind me,  accidentally-on-purpose finding myself next to him, feigning rapt attention on my book while stealing glances at him from my periphery. Staring downward, his tan leather work boots catch my eye. The dust and splatters running down the legs of his pants and shirt make it clear he’s in construction. And, apparently, literate.

Baffled by this string of realizations, my attention shifted between the slow pace I was making through the printed paragraphs in front of me and the light scruff on this stranger’s face. It took all my focus to pretend I didn’t notice every time he looked up from what he was reading, the weight of his gaze sending a knowing tingle up the back of my spine. We stood next to each other through each stop in the city and well into Brooklyn, half-reading and half-studying each other as the crowd began to thin out. There was no way to exchange words now, too much ogling had occurred for speaking to be casual. An older man seated in front of me giggled as my new reading buddy got off the train at the stop before mine, saying something I couldn’t quite hear over the barely-there music still playing through the white earbuds. I peered over the edge of my book at the smiling man, raising my eyebrows as the corners of my mouth turned up in a wry smile. I knew something had happened behind my back, something amusing enough to cause a stranger to smile and laugh, but didn’t turn around, opting instead to relish in the thrill of not knowing.

Getting off the train at the next stop, the extra swing in my step accompanied a smirk I couldn’t wipe off my face. I had to do something—this sensation needed to last just a little bit longer. Only one possibility came to mind: Craigslist’s missed connections. Having used the walk home to mentally lay out the groundwork for what I would post, I went straight to my laptop once I walked through the apartment door. Fuck it, I figured, just take the plunge. Having laid the post out in my head while walking home, it effortlessly pieced itself together on screen in front of me. It was fucking perfect.

“I got on the L at 6th Ave. You were giving me the once over through the window before the doors opened so I could get on. You gave up your seat for old ladies and we stood next to each other on the way to Brooklyn. I stole sidelong glances at you, I think you stole some at me, too. You were wearing an army green t-shirt with Carhartt pants and work boots. I didn’t see what you were reading, but there was enough dirt under your nails and in hard to scrub crevices for me to suspect you work with your hands. You’re quite handsome, and probably not the type to read missed connections, but this is worth a shot.

The man seated in front of me started giggling when you got off at ______. Did you trip on your way out? Did you give me another good, long look? My back was turned, but I’d love to know what I missed.

Who was taller anyway, me or you?”

Stopping to marvel at my handiwork, I feel the small swellings of pride in my ability to turn the mood-lifting experience into something worth posting about, worth tossing outwards into the abyss of the internet. For all I knew, he actually deserved to have nice things written about him, whether he wound up seeing them or not; but this post? This was for me. With the majority of the ad finished, I struggled  with inconsequential details: should I list it as Brooklyn or Manhattan? Did it even matter? It did’t—if he was the type to cruise missed connections, he kept an eye on both. The title wrote itself: ‘To the blue-eyed man that works with his hands.’ I hit the last few buttons to confirm I really wanted to post this before sitting back, still gloating as I copied the post’s URL.

Opening a new email, I pasted the URL in the subject line and BCCed several friends before hitting send. It felt wise to prevent this message from becoming a round table discussion of my willingness to troll for construction workers on the internet. My humblebragging was quickly met with several replies, all of which praised me further while questioning my sanity. I was delighted enough by their responses to be comfortable with the fact I’d likely never receive a reply from the man on the train. The next hour was spent riding the small endorphin high that accompanied my frivolous internet posting. Until a new email popped up. 

“Taller, in plaid.”

I considered leaving Pandora’s Box unopened, deleting his reply in favor of enjoying the rush of mystery. But I made the first move and now, feeling obligated, open his reply and read the few lines he’d sent me. His email was flat; it wasn’t carefully crafted or as well-worded as my post, but his interest in meeting up was clear. The real gem of the message was at the bottom, his full name and website included in the email’s signature. It didnʼt take long for me to succumb to the lure of Google, clicking through pages of linked information so carefully cataloged by the internet over recent years. Despite a very-private FB account and blog that had clearly been deleted sometime recently, putting an overview of his life together is not difficult. He’s a recent college graduate—an artist, as it turns out. I find photos of him in classrooms and studios, some clearly taken with the need to showcase the school’s art credentials in mind. He’s not cute, but handsome, broad shouldered with several days worth of carefully procured facial scruff, hair always slicked up in that messily-clean attempt at bedhead nobody actually wakes up with. 

The more posts I see related to his higher education, the more bummed I am. I wanted him to be the epitome of manliness, the complete opposite of all the Weenie-Boys of Bushwick I kept seeing on the street. Their carefully curated facial hair and penchant for dressing like they belong in a decade past doesnʼt do it for me. Those mousey-faced girls with greasy hair can have them all – I’m looking for something like the person I thought I’d seen in him. We exchange several more emails as I troll him, finding enough to know he’s real but not enough for all my questions to feel answered.

His last email includes a phone number; clearly, he’s done with the internet dance and looking to get down to business. Still giddy and slightly flushed at how quickly he had responded, I waste no time in texting him. He’s quick to suggest we meet up in the neighborhood after work some time to catch a drink. I knew I had a friend staying on my couch for the next week, and told him his options were limited to before or after their stay.

Tomorrow then. New spot I want to check out… Meet me at _____ at 7.

A squealing, girlish glee begins to build in the bottom of my stomach, the kind I remember feeling each time I got a new boy’s number in high school, the anticipatory knowledge we were going to “hang out” back when alcohol didn’t lubricate the awkwardness of first dates. The sensation moves from stomach to tail bone before making it’s way up my spine and out my mouth, the victorious “Yesssssss!” hissed into my empty room.

By TERRY TOM BROWN
NY Times: October 13, 2011

A FEW days before I was dumped, I sat in the campus library. It was the eve of my first chemistry exam that semester. Under the dusty lights of the reading room, I was supposed to be studying. Instead, I stared at the cracked screen of my cellphone, waiting for a call.

Scattered across the table were my textbooks, laptop, pencils and two stacks of index cards. One stack had the names and definitions of the seemingly endless number of organic compounds I had to memorize. The other tackled more complicated material: my love life.

It had been almost two weeks since I’d seen the guy I was dating. Based on his lack of communication, I feared our next phone call would be our last. So I took pre-emptive action, composing on index cards a list of reasons why he and I should still hang out. One read, “I’m not looking for anything serious either, just fun” (a completely false statement). “My friends love me,” read another.

He did not call that night. I guess he didn’t want to break up with me on Valentine’s Day. Memories of better times galloped through my head: cuddling in bed, watching nature documentaries. I thought we had a connection, some bond.

When I got home I didn’t bother taking off my jacket. I just collapsed into bed and stared off, in that way. I had dated this guy for only a month. How pathetic. Why did I miss that hulking hockey-player-turned-vegetarian-paralegal so much?

Throughout the school year I am employed at a popular nature museum where I care for animals, primarily insects. To me it’s the best job ever. For a science student, it’s much better than folding clothes at a department store. I have also learned a lot, odd facts I tend to spout out during dinner conversations, like: “Butterflies can see with their genitals. They have photoreceptive cells on their sex organs.”

I actually have said those words on dates. That’s how a nerd copes with first-date anxiety.

I also collect information on animal courtship, and my knowledge is extensive enough to make David Attenborough blush.

Did you know that a female humpback whale lifts her genitals above the water while males fight for her affections? Male fruit flies give females a gentle pat on the behind to let them know they are interested (not much different from some guys I know). Panamanian golden tree frogs wave their tiny hands to communicate their desires. And albatrosses, which stay together their entire lives, keep it interesting by entertaining each other with goofy ritual dancing.

I think life would be good as a monogamous albatross, partly because I find human courtship senseless. In almost all species of animals I have studied, a remarkable gesture of interest is what wins a mate. In humans, it’s the opposite.

Constructing a brightly colored nest works wonders for the bowerbird. Clownfish will actually change their sex in the right setting. Bonobo chimpanzees display their physical interest in one another directly and ceaselessly, performing sex acts as greetings.

Perhaps humans have simply entered a new stage of evolution in which we have abandoned chocolates, door holding, flowers or any overt gesture of interest for a new and unnatural order of things.

“The smartest thing you can do is play hard to get,” said my best friend, Becca, during a brunch at which I was discussing my relationship troubles. “Don’t make yourself too available.” Becca must know what she’s talking about because she has been with a guy for more than a year, and they are talking marriage.

My friend David was also on the cusp of being in a serious relationship, but he prided himself in staying detached enough so he would not be forced to label it. “It ruins it when you have to call it something,” he said.

When I was with my guy, the last thing I did was play hard to get. Once I even badgered him with six texts in a row, and the fact that he did not respond only made me want him more. It left me wondering: Why can’t we get enough of people who don’t give us enough?

After brunch with Becca, I was ruffled by how little my guy was talking. I wasn’t quite at the point of writing “I love myself” index cards (What crazy person does that?), but I found myself reading a lot of dating material, articles like, “How to Know He’s Just Not That Into You” and “When He Doesn’t Text.” It did not matter that the articles were about straight relationships and I was gay. They assured me of nothing except that I wasn’t alone in how I felt.

When he finally called and said he wasn’t looking for anything serious, I was crushed. I passed through the stages of grief that follow a breakup: denial, anger and depression. But not acceptance. My pride stood in the way of that. Pride also is what filled my planner with the long list of guys I dated for two weeks after, most of whom I met on dating Web sites.

Dating sites are like virtual zoos, but for humans. You can learn about the various creatures by reading their panels and observe them without any real danger, but you should think carefully before squeezing through the bars to meet what is lurking on the other side. At least that is what I should have done.

Among my dates were a boring professor of Shakespeare who made dinner feel like office hours and a Texan who thought he could lasso me by subtracting 15 years from his age.

But then one morning I saw Nick waiting tables at the restaurant around the corner from my apartment. He hustled around the dining room serving a combination of eggs and attitude. His piercing blue eyes and messy dark hair made me bite the inside of my lip. He reminded me of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but made in Little Italy. As it turned out, we shared mutual friends.

At our first dinner I sighed with relief when he rattled off names of barbecue places he liked. We laughed over our mutual obsession with superhero films. And after watching me chew the meat off a chicken bone, he still gave me a kiss goodnight.

On another date he suggested a trip to a shooting range near the West Side Highway. I was excited but nervous, never having shot a firearm. He smiled and laughed and held my hand. His skin was always warm to the touch.

Working at the museum greenhouse recently, I saw a pair of birdwing butterflies engaged in a courtship dance. The male, with his shimmering green wings, flies up and under the female repeatedly until she submits. This male looked exhausted; he had spent so much time seeking her attention that his wings had become tattered and faded.

That evening a large group of children were in the museum for a special event. A few were excited seeing a large butterfly carrying a smaller one in flight. At first I thought it was the same mating behavior of the previous pair, but then I realized it was something tragically different.

The female was spiraling in the air with the corpse of the male butterfly attached. He had died during intercourse. He must have been so exhausted from impressing her that when she finally gave in, he gave out. Spending most of the day resisting him, the female did not have the strength to remove him, so she died also. The moment felt very metaphoric, probably because Nick had been so persistent in pursuing me.

AT first his behavior was endearing. He constantly gave me attention, lavishing me with compliments, calls and sometimes gifts. But one morning when I slid out of bed from next to him, things felt different. All his wooing suddenly repelled me.

I crawled back in and tried my best to pretend things were O.K. He showered and dressed. I clenched my teeth when it was time to kiss goodbye, then shut the door behind him, sighed and wondered if he had any idea.

Slouching into a nearby chair, I found myself questioning the nature of our relationship, how uneasy I became when Nick gave me everything I supposedly wanted. I began to think how ridiculous it is that our most useful allure is resistance and that our natural reaction is to push away someone who shows that he cares.

Would I hurt Nick the same way I had been hurt in the past? I was reminded of my friends and their need to stay detached. I thought about the guy who dropped me and wondered if he experienced the same thing I was experiencing now. I wasn’t used to being liked so easily.

Could it be that I was conditioned to think I had to work for someone’s affection and if I didn’t it meant something was wrong? All that effort did the birdwings little good. Then I thought of my friend the albatross, and I smiled for a moment.

It wasn’t long after that I realized I was now failing chemistry.

Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.