by Dave Itzkoff

While I sometimes wish I were the sort of person who could claim to have a checkered past, the truth about my romantic life is that it’s no more dangerous than a game of dominoes. In my dating history, there are no great love affairs, nor any illicit one night stands—and not for a lack of trying. Rather, my clumsy attempts at couplehood always fell apart in my overeager hands. And my dad had already been married to my mom for three years at the age at which I found my first legitimate, post-collegiate girlfriend: 28.

Though, truth be told, she found me. Back when it was still okay for people over the age of 25 to hang out on websites like MySpace, she contacted me through a friend of a friend of a friend to ask if I might like to meet for a drink. The conversation, mostly about our creative ambitions (she’s a musical theater performer, I’m a writer, I hope) was so relaxed, I missed my cue, and hardly saw it coming when she leaned in to kiss me goodnight. Still, we got to date two, and that night, she hugged me tight, so tight I knew without words how much she needed me. I also knew then and there that we were about to become inseparable.

Even when it takes a guy this long to formulate his first successful courtship, there were basic inalienable things I knew going in, like who chooses the restaurant, who pays for the meal, and where all the various body parts go afterward. I also sensed it was time to put my collection of comic books and vintage toys (all but that badass action figure of Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs) into hiding. But sometimes there’s just no substitute for experience.

Perhaps no amount of insight could have warned me that when she’s hanging out with you and a few of your rowdier buddies, it’s best to explain, before you chug a cup of it, that mushroom tea has only mildly sedative properties and won’t render you a drooling, hallucinating fiend.

And no one ever explained that…well, one night, after we had only been dating a few months, she chose to introduce me to some of her closest musical-theater pals. As it came her turn at the piano, and my new girlfriend launched into a passionate rendition of a Broadway tune she believed summed up not only her feelings for me, but her boundless optimism about our future, I was…I was in the kitchen, actually, wiping off some salsa I’d accidentally dripped onto my sneaker. That evening, we shared a cold, silent subway ride home, and I learned you never, ever leave the room while she’s serenading you.