The hierarchy of failure

I’m talking to my friend. Friend? She’s more like an acquaintance, because we don’t really hang out that much. She’s pretty hot, and I’d kind of like to have sex with her, and I think she kind of knows that, because she flatters me in this strange way where I wonder if she’s trying to manipulate me. I don’t think sex is going to happen, though, and that’s fine.

There was a time when I was more keen to have sex with her, back when my sexual desire made me less able to see more fundamental incompatibilities. Although, over the course of my life, I have managed to get into long relationships in spite of retrospectively obvious differences, so who knows what might have been possible. In any case, I took her on a date one time, but that’s as far as it got.

That was about twenty years ago, and at the time, she was clearly pursuing a very different type of guy than me. She wanted someone richer, more career driven, the kind of business suit wearing guy that you had no questions about whether or not they could buy a house in the next few years. Definitely not me.

This wasn’t just a theoretical list of qualities in an ideal mate that I was projecting onto her. She told me one time back then, in a conversation that for some reason I clearly remember happening on a street corner in Omotesando where we must have randomly bumped into each other, that she had made…