Electronic Post-It

There’s an episode of “Sex And The City” where Carrie’s boyfriend breaks up with her on a post-it. Just stuck on her computer. No phone call, no longer letter, nothing. Just a simple post-it that indicates, in a way words couldn’t even begin to convey, exactly what her boyfriend thinks of her and of their relationship.
It seems such a cruel thing to do that I thought it would be relegated only to the world of fiction. A hyperbole of an inconsiderate breakup used to make people chuckle and prove a point.
Oh how naïve I can be sometimes.
I had been dating the Brit for about two months. It still wasn’t serious, which was fine by me, but we saw each other about once a week and emailed every couple of days. About six weeks after our first date, I decided to throw a party.
And found myself facing a dilemma. Did I ask him to come? It was a weird situation. We weren’t dating all that long, but at the same time, wouldn’t it be rude for me not to ask? Were we ready to introduce each other to our respective social circles? I wasn’t quite sure.
Meanwhile, one very cold early December night, he asked a very simple question over a very nice dinner:
“Hey, after this, some friends of mine are at a bar around here. You want to go meet them?”
Very casual, very I-didn’t-deliberate-over-this-for-hours. And all of a sudden, I felt very silly about my dilemma.
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”
A little later on that night, I told him about my party.
The day before the event, I called the Brit. He had been sick earlier in the week and I wanted to check up on him. Plus, I hadn’t really gotten a definitive answer to my invite.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like hell. I was feeling better, but I went back to work today and I think it just wore me out.”
“I’m sorry. Are you going to be able to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Yeah. I’m in bed already. Just going to hang out all day. What are you doing?”
“Shopping for my party.”
“You’re throwing a party?”
This troubled me. I guessed it was a clear indication he wasn’t planning on coming, but I played it off.
“You knew that! You were invited?”
“I was not!”
“You were too! You just don’t want to come!”
“I do to! If I’m invited.”
We’re both laughing at this point. “Yes, you’re invited,” I tell him. “It’s at my house. Starts at 9. Bring friends if you want.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I went along with the rest of my preparations. It was a Christmas party and I was doing “Cookies and Cocktails.” I had spent the past two days baking dozens of cookies and cleaning my apartment. When Saturday came around, I was amazed and proud that I was not only on time, but actually ahead of schedule. I was an entertaining goddess! Clearly, this was my true calling.
And then I went and bought the Christmas tree.
A few of my friends came early to help me buy a tree and haul it five blocks home and up five flights of stairs. We figured that would be the worst part. Once it was in the apartment, it was just a matter of throwing it in the stand and decorating it. Easily done in 2 hours. And I’d have a live Christmas tree in my house for my party! Never mind that I live in 400 square feet and was expecting about 30 people. It would all be fine. After all, I was an entertaining goddess.
J,K and I lug the tree home, make it up the steps, and try to put it in the stand. And realize, quickly, that it doesn’t fit. There are too many branches at the bottom of the trunk. Shit. We try to break them off. That doesn’t work. We try to saw them off with a bread knife, the closest thing I have to a saw in the house. Not surprisingly, that doesn’t work either. It’s at this point that my neighbors come over to see what the hell is going on.
K and I run to the hardware store to buy a saw. The hardware store’s closed. Finally, in an act of desperation, K and I head back to the Christmas tree stand and beg their saw off them. Now we’re walking around the Lower East Side with a saw and increasingly desperate looks on our faces. We try to fix the tree ourselves. I straddle the tree to hold it steady while K, in her nice denim skirt and knee-high black boots, puts one foot on the trunk and saws away. Nothing works. We finally prop the tree drunkenly against the side of the fridge and K runs off to return the saw with a box of Christmas cookies for the nice man who let us borrow it on faith.
In the midst of all this, I’m still trying to get ready and finish putting the food out. So when this oddly silent Asian kid shows up 45 minutes early, I feel like I might just have a nervous breakdown. The food’s not ready, I’m not showered, my tree looks like it’s been celebrating Christmas early. And now there’s this weird kid that a friend of mine met on the internet and decided to ask to my house sitting on my couch, not saying anything. (Although, to be fair, looking back, if I had expected to come to a Christmas party and walked in to see a girl straddling a Christmas tree while another girl tried to saw branches with a bread knife, I might not have said all that much either).
Somehow, everything gets done before 8. I am showered and dressed and I have makeup on. A comes over and finishes putting out the food so I can get ready and somehow, magically, everything’s done by the time the first guests arrive. And even if everything wasn’t ready, the first guests are Jules and Sculls, and they’re family, so they’d understand. They’ve even brought a saw to help me fix the tree.
“Yeah, I think I may never be able to go back to the bodega on the corner,” Sculls says as he walks in the door.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I wasn’t thinking and I put the saw in the cooler. And when we went for ice, the lady asked, ‘Do you need a bag?’ And I said, ‘Naw, just put it in the cooler.’ And opened it up and took the saw out. And the entire bodega went silent.”
“Nice. She was probably looking at Jules, trying to find signs of Stockholm Syndrome.”
Sculls gets to work on my Christmas tree and before too many people even get there, it’s in the stand and Sculls has pretty much stopped bleeding. It’s a great party and I’m having such a good time I don’t even realize how late it is. I just happen to glance at the clock and realize that it’s late and the Brit isn’t there yet. Odd.
I send him a quick text message, jokingly saying, “I know you’re not standing me up. Where are you?”
I get one back almost instantly. “I told you I was a bad person. I can’t see you right now.”
And there it is, my own electronic post-it, telling me exactly what he thinks of our potential relationship.

Girl Scout's Honor

Guys--I really am okay. It was just a pity party, not a cry for help. I've gotten a few emails and phone calls from the last post (the only one that's ever inspired such a reaction) and I felt I needed to respond before my birthday party became an intervention. I was having one of those moments where I felt sorry for myself and I decided to write about it. I don't go around every day feeling sorry for myself or shitty about myself or full of resentment. I promise.
The truth of the matter is that it's hard for me to put myself out there. I don't like risk. I'm not good at it. And I did this time and I got burned. Because, somewhere along the line, I got it into my head that getting burned translates into severe embarrassment and stupidity on my part, I didn't tell anybody about what was going on. It's not because I think anybody would judge me (I mean, you let not one but TWO gay guys slide. Really, if there was ever a time to judge ... ).
Yes, the guy is still in my life. And yes, that causes me some concern. He knows that. Things are a little confused right now, but the truth of the matter is, I want him in my life right now. I don't know why. But I do. As a friend.
No, I am not waiting around for him. I don't know what the future holds, but what this whole experience has taught me is that that's okay. I tend to play my life like a chess game: I need to be two moves ahead of everybody else. And if you live your life like that, you never take any chances and you're left wondering what if. I didn't think with him. I just took a leap and hoped for the best. It didn't end the way I wanted it to, but what I got isn't bad: a friend who will talk me through my insecurities and support me through a crisis and make sure I'm laughing when I really should be crying.
So, in conclusion, thank you for worrying about me. But I'm okay. Girl Scout's Honor.

Pity, Party of One

It’s official.
With the friend who was single for so long we were wondering what the hell was going on there now “kinda, sorta dating somebody,” I am the very last one of my friends in the single column.
The very last one.
I know you’re thinking, “Oh, come on. Somebody’s got to be single.” And yes, I have some friends, like the one in Ireland, who’s not dating anybody (although I haven’t talked to her in a while and, at last count, four men were vying for her attentions). But, of the people I interact with every day, it’s me and a bunch of couples.
How the hell did that happen?
I haven’t talked about the asshole much here for a couple of reasons. One is that it was just too raw. He really hurt me in a way I haven’t been hurt in a while. Every time I tried to write about him, my funny, insightful anecdote turned into a whiny pity party and I do not want my blog to become a series of therapeutic diary entries. I have a separate diary for that.
But now I’m the only single girl. So let the pity party begin.
I can’t help but think that I spent five of the last six months believing that the asshole was going to come home and make good on the promises he was tossing out liberally every single day. And when I should have been dating people that actually gave a shit about me, who actually had intentions to be with me, I was waiting for somebody who, well I don’t know what the hell he was doing but he didn’t have intentions of being with me. He told me that himself. So it’s hard not to view that time as time wasted. And it’s hard for me not to feel like a fool for believing his lies.
Another reason that I haven’t written about him is that to write about him is to admit, to myself and to the very few people who know the back story, that he’s still in my life. I talk to the asshole just about every day. And that causes me huge issues. Because I feel like I’m setting myself up to be hurt again and I know I capitulated too easily after he hurt me so badly. I’m not sure even how we wound up being friends again. Except that, after telling me that he never had any intentions with me, he wouldn’t let me go and there’s only so many times a person can apologize before you either accept of feel like a heartless bitch. It’s kind of funny how that works.
But now, as I see the asshole’s the consistent man in my life and I look around and find myself in the land of the single, party of one, I’m starting to wonder if forgive and forget was the wisest policy decision. It’s not easy to feel full of forgiveness when I’m feeling like I’m playing the fool. In fact, the emotion I feel full of right now is resentment. I resent the time I spent with him before, I resent the time I’m spending with him now. I resent the way he made me feel like shit about myself, how I felt like the world’s biggest fool because of him, how I wonder all the time if I’m being the world’s biggest fool right now for still being in contact with him. I resent that I let him get away with not answering my questions. I resent that he wouldn’t answer my questions in the first place. I resent that I don’t know what he’s up to and I’m not sure what the hell’s going on or why he feels the need to have me in his life even though, walking contradiction that I am, I know that I would resent it if he cut me out of his life when the shit hit the fan two months ago.
Told you it was going to be a pity party.
But when all that resentment confetti hits the ground, and I’m alone to clean up the mess, I really have to point the finger at myself. Why do I set myself up to be hurt? Why did I care if he thought I was a bitch for not forgiving him for lying to me for five months? Why did I let him back in my life when he needed me instead of protecting myself? And, most importantly, why, now, can’t I let him go?

Beware of Co-Workers Bearing Gifts

As some of the regular readers of this blog may remember, I met AJ (the Key West Wonder) through a woman I work with. It was very much a left-field setup. We weren’t particularly friendly, so I never expected her to come out with, “let me introduce you to somebody.”
I’ve learned the lesson the hard way: beware of gifts that come from left-field.
I was out at a movie with my friend Keaton when he dropped this bomb on me. Keaton and I also work together, so naturally he knows the woman who set me up with AJ. He asked if I had spoken with the matchmaker lately (the matchmaker has since moved to another company). I said I hadn’t.
“You know, we were never really all that friendly to begin with. The whole setup thing was kind of weird,” I said, throwing a handful of popcorn into my mouth.
“I was just wondering how she was doing with the gay husband,” Keaton said.
“You’ve referenced that a couple of times recently, Keaton,” I said. “You know, he’s an actor. That doesn’t mean he’s gay. Plenty of actors are straight.”
Keaton looks at me funnily. “I’m pretty sure actors that look at gay porn on their home computers are gay, though.”
I choke on my popcorn. “Excuse me?”
“How do you not know this story?”
“I’m not sure. Did you ever tell me this story?”
Keaton thinks. “I thought I did. But maybe not.”
I’m getting impatient. “So you want to start telling me now?”
“Sure. One day she comes in all nuts and grabs Carl and says she needs coffee. And she proceeds to tell him that she just caught her husband looking at gay porn on the computer and is that normal?”
“I guess it’s better that she caught him rather than, oh, I don’t know, one of their two very young daughters. But holy shit.”
“I know. So Carl’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s normal. IF YOUR HUSBAND’S GAY. Other than that, not so normal.’”
“Oh my god.”
“I know, it’s horrible.”
“No, not that. I mean, yes it’s horrible. But I’m just remembering something.”
After emailing back and forth for about two weeks, AJ and I made plans to go for drinks. Since she was the force behind us getting together, I told the matchmaker that we were finally meeting face to face.
Instead of being happy, she got a little weird.
“I’ve been struggling with if I should have told you about this or not,” she said.
Oh jeez. “Tell me what?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t know if I should mention something or not, and I keep going back and forth, but now that you’re meeting him, I guess I should say something.”
“What’s wrong? He’s not married, is he?”
“Oh, nothing like that. It’s just that, two years ago, he had [long dramatic pause inserted here] thyroid cancer. And I thought that he should tell you himself, but then I didn’t want you to think that I should have warned you.”
I’m stunned. Not that he had cancer, because I’m not a freak who somehow thinks cancer is catching. I’m stunned that she’s telling me this like it’s some big horrible secret. He had cancer. No big deal. Now if he had cancer and also a few rape convictions behind him, then that’s when I could understand the tone of this little speech. But this is just odd.
“Is he okay now?”
“Oh yeah. He’s fine now. I think he takes a pill every day because it’s affected his thyroid, but that’s it.”
I really don’t know what to say. I know what I want to say, which is “Seriously, lady, what the hell is wrong with you?”
Now, all of a sudden, the tone is flying back with me with a whole lot of sense behind me. Because I’m also remembering the time I met her husband, AJ’s best friend.
We went to the restaurant that the actor worked in (he’s not exactly a working actor. Much like, I’m finding out now, he might not exactly be a straight actor). It was the night of our first fight. I was out with him and my friend A and we decided to stop by the actor’s restaurant. A and I were introduced, then we were left to the bar to our own devices while AJ disappeared for a while. Kind of a long while. When he got back, he was incredibly nasty. He had never been like that before. After we walked Allison home, we would up having a huge fight on the street and I left in tears. I just couldn’t understand the sudden change in his behavior.
Now I found, I could.

The Accidental Date

The Brit was somebody who used to work at my company. We occasionally had to work on projects together, which is how we got to the friendly, “Hey, how are you?” passing-in-the-hall stage. But when I got promoted off the project I was working on, I moved to a different floor and I hardly ever saw him any more. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in months and months when I had to go up to my old floor and bumped into him.
“Hey, how are you?” He said in his beautiful London accent. “I haven’t seen you in forever. I wasn’t even sure you worked here any more.”
“Nope, still here,” I said, stifling the butterflies in my stomach that I always got when I was talking to him (he’s so pretty) and the disgust at how my own Northeast accent sounded next to his pretty across-the-pond one. “I’m good. How are you?”
“Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. I’m leaving. My last day’s on Friday.”
Oh. No more chance encounters in the hall with the pretty British boy. My stomach sank a little. In my company, we’re in a pretty-boy drought. We couldn’t afford to lose one of our best.
But I soldiered on. “Congratulations! Where are you going?”
We spoke for a couple of minutes about his new job and then I had to get going. “Well, keep in touch,” I said, because that’s what you say to people, regardless of whether you ever really kept in touch when they worked at the desk across from yours. Social convention and whatnot.
“I will,” he said, because social convention again demands it must be satisfied. “I’ll shoot you my email address before I leave.” More social convention, I was sure.
I went downstairs, never expecting to hear from him again. So when I came in Friday morning and there was an email with a link to his personal email instructing me to keep in touch, I was surprised. When I got an email a week later asking what I was doing after work on Wednesday, I was even more surprised.
I met him after work for drinks. Drinks turned into a meal. Several hours later our waitress, who had decided almost instantaneously that she didn’t like us, (it may have been because she overheard us laughing after, instead of reciting the specials, she recited the ENTIRE f-ing menu in her very heavy Russian accent. It was 15 minutes of awkwardly trying to follow along with our own menus, the whole process made more difficult by the fact that she didn’t go in order but jumped all over the place) dropped the check. He picked it up and I turned to get my wallet out of my purse.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said with my wallet in my hand. I never know how to play this game. I feel that once you move to get your wallet out, if you don’t pay, the move looks insincere. But pushing to pay gets uncomfortable. So I wind up with wallet in hand, hovering somewhere between the table and my purse.
“Please. I’ll get this. Don’t worry about it. Please.”
And then, the wave of realization hit me. I was on a date.
It had taken me nearly 4 hours to make that realization.
With all the vagaries of the male/female relationship these days, I feel like accidental dates are all too common. Boundaries are no longer clearly defined. In our parents’ day, things were clear. If a guy was meeting you for a meal, he was taking you out on a date. He would pay and most likely pick you up and drop you off at your parents’ house, where you would be forced to live until such time as continuous dates turned into marriage and you moved from one home to another. By no means am I advocating going back to that system. At the same time, there was something nice about the clear delineation.
After all, what does our inability to commit to a single date say about our inability to commit overall? We’re a society that values the transient. Take a look at this year’s Grammy winners. How many of them will even chart next year, let alone be nominated for an award? We are a society that watches that 15-minutes-of-fame clock like trend hawks searching for the next prey. We’re fickle. We love you one minute and the next we’re burning any evidence we ever acknowledged your presence.
And we’ve taken that attitude into the dating world. When it comes to relationships, most of us are like hobos hopping boxcars. We won’t even commit to a journey long enough to buy a ticket and sit in the comfy seats. Instead, we hop on and off where we please, traveling wherever the wind will take us. And that’s fun for a while, but eventually it gets hard to jump off that moving train with all that emotional baggage.
We don’t want to commit because if we commit, and it doesn’t work out, we’ve failed. We’ve been taught that “failure is not an option” (a phrase, ironically enough, uttered most often by a man who reigns supreme as the Midas of Failure … everything he touches turns to shit). And when faced with that kind of pressure, who’s going to be able to commit? You ask, she turns you down, you’ve failed. You’ve let God and Country down. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on drinks and maybe a nosh.
So instead we hedge our bets, see how things go, never say one way or another where we stand. We question the validity of our relationships, hesitate to say that we’re committed, that we’re off the market, well past the expiration date on the dating label. We fear putting ourselves on the record for anything and then act surprised when our relationships play out like a broken record, repeating the same scenarios again and again. And we wonder how we find ourselves accidentally on dates, accidentally in relationships, accidentally with exes we never meant to be significant others in the first place.

Read Me a Story

Guy One (the nice single dad) called me up again for a first date (oddly, about the same time Guy Two came back, but more about him later). We went for our first date, to the opera. A little intense for a first date, but I think he had tickets previously (at least, that’s what he told me) and I like the opera. The perfect gentleman through the whole date, very nice.
Nice turned to creepy pretty quickly.
He and my friend A were in the city for some work function and they stopped by for lunch after work. A had an appointment and left early, but Guy One stayed behind for a little while. He was looking at my bookshelf, going through the titles when he said, “I didn’t know this was a book first.”
He was holding a copy of “Howl’s Moving Castle,” an amazing young adult book that I loved as a kid. Recently, it was turned into an animated film where they turned Howl, the outlaw bastard rock star wizard, into some prissy, homosexual 16-year-old in tights. It’s not my favorite film. But the book is something you all should read. To yourselves. It should take you two days.
We talked briefly about the book and the movie and then it was time for him to go. We weren’t seeing each other that weekend (he was out of town) but we were going to get together the following Friday. So about a week later, he called to make plans.
“Are we still on for Friday?”
“Sure!” I replied. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well, I was thinking we could go to dinner,” (so far, so good) “and then go to a movie” (still good) “and then I was thinking we could go back to your place” (wait, this is a little presumptuous for a second date—shouldn’t we see how things go first? Oh wait, he’s still talking …) “and you could read ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ to me.” (EXCUSE ME?????)
Who ever thought premature sexual activity was ever going to look like the better option?
He wants me to read to him? Really?
Now, normally, given the people I tend to date, I would think that there was a good chance that he was illiterate and couldn’t read to himself. Or that drugs were screwing up his vision too badly for him to focus on the teeny-tiny words. But he’s a teacher that doesn’t even drink. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with his vision or his cognitive skills.
Trying to make lemonade out of this sudden batch of lemons I found myself with, I started asking people what they thought. I figured somebody had to think this was normal.
Not ONE person thought this was acceptable second-date behavior. Not too many people thought this was acceptable ANY date behavior.
“Maybe he’s just trying to get into your apartment late at night,” my friend Chris suggested, trying to be helpful. You know there’s something wrong with a situation when your friends are suggesting that the guy you’re dating is trying to get in your pants too early … and that’s the better scenario.
I decide that I’m going to just say my apartment’s too messy and that nobody’s coming over. That’s something everybody can understand, a messy apartment, and if he’s not in the apartment, I can’t read to him. Because I really just can’t. I’m picturing plot lines to bad “Who’s the Boss?” episodes, where Tony tries to seduce Angela by seeming literate and cultured, taking her to Vermont and reading her poetry on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. But then Mona shows up and somebody cracks a tooth and antics ensue. In short, I CANNOT read to a guy on a second date.
We go for Ethiopian food, which was a lot of fun, if you put the fact that actual Ethiopians aren’t eating anything while you’re stuffing your face out of your mind. And then he starts in.
“I’m thinking, instead of going to the movies, we go back to your place.”
I choke on whatever tasty-but-indistinguishable thing I’m eating. “Oh, no, not tonight. My apartment’s a mess. I had a choice between taking a nap and cleaning up and unless I got a nap in, I wouldn’t have been able to see you tonight.” That’s flattering, right? I chose seeing you over cleaning my apartment. So now it’s your turn to be understanding and drop the freakin’ “read to me” bullshit.
He wouldn’t let it go though. “But I brought dessert! And it’s going to go bad! I was having this the other day and it was amazing and I thought I had to share it with you. But I have to make it tonight!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a surprise, but it’s amazing. You have to let me make it for you. I can’t wait until the next time I see you, it’ll go bad.”
He kept it up through the end of dinner and through two across-town blocks until I finally just let it go. I could care less if my apartment was a mess at this point. I wasn’t ever going to see him again. Of this I was damned certain.
He came over. He made me dessert (oh, it was hot chocolate. From a mix. He left the mix at my house. Expiration date: November 2007.) We watched a movie on tv. He finally left. I didn’t have to read to him. More importantly, I never had to see him again. And that was a sweeter ending to the date than any dessert he possibly could have had in his messenger bag.

From Two to Zero

In six days or less, too! I’m checking with the Guinness foks, but I think it may be a new record.
Guy One (the nice one) went first. He wanted to come visit me at work. Considering I had met him once, briefly, at a bar and would have never even given him my phone number if hadn’t come with references, I thought it would be really unprofessional to bring him to work with me. I wasn’t going to mention it and hope he forgot it, but he asked me on Monday and I told him the truth.
Haven’t heard from him since.
Guy Two (the asshole) was a little trickier. He came back into town for a brief time and was there but not there. Something was up.
That something was his on-again, off-again girlfriend. They were kind of off-again when we started talking. But she’s good. Oh, she’s real good. She lost her job and started freaking out and guess who she turned to to get through the crisis.
Guy Two didn’t have a chance.
What pissed me off about the whole scenario was not so much that I lost either one of them. Because let’s be realistic. If either one was the right guy, then I wouldn’t be writing this right now. Truth be told, if either one of them was the right guy, then I wouldn’t be worried about the other one. But I really didn’t like how I felt used. Both guys had other agendas. It wasn’t about me. It was about filling a specific need in their lives. And when that need either wasn’t fulfilled (in the case of Guy One) or wasn’t necessary any longer (Guy Two) then Goodbye Hopeful.
Sometimes (and this has been a huge issue in the past year), I feel like I have the Mark of Cain on my forehead and it shines like a huge beacon to needy men around Manhattan. Need someone to get you through the long, lonely nights in a war zone? Call Hopeful! Need to work on your career? Hopeful’s good for advice. Need a beard, because you’re 33 and your friends are all wondering why they’ve never met a single one of your girlfriends? Hopeful loves the gays! Trying to come down off a coke addiction? Hopeful will put a wet compress to your head and hold you while you shake.
Jesus Christ. What is wrong with me?
My mom attributes it to the fact that I curse. She says guys are “old-fashioned” when it comes to cursing. I wish it was as simple as my filthy mouth, but I really don’t think my love of the word fuck is what’s attracting the needy weirdoes.
I think my big mistake in all this is that I genuinely care. When Guy One was worried about his daughter (oh, yeah, he’s a single dad to boot), I assured him that he was doing a great job raising her and that she had amazing people around her so he shouldn’t beat himself up for not being able to provide her with the white-picket-fence dream. When Guy Two was getting shot at, I made a point of checking in with him and of making him check in with me, so he knew somebody wanted to make sure that the only hole he should be concerned about was the huge asshole he was turning out to be.
In the last post, I talked about how all girls want is the asshole, the guy they can’t have, but I’m realizing this week that guys are the same way. You don’t want the nice girl. You want the bitch. The one who could care less if you got shot in the ass or if your daughter wound up on the pole.
When it comes to matters of love, is it all about the thrill of the hunt? And, once someone resigns themselves to becoming the prey, do we all just sniff the carcass and walk on to fresh meat?