All in all, these “serious” relationships taught me little lessons about what I was actually looking for. But I realized (after the second glass of contemplative wine) that when people asked me about past relationships, these weren’t the partners I thought of. I thought of Will, Jude, Rob, and the dozens of other men who have come through my life. There was the whiskey distiller who slept on an air mattress in a crawl space, the lawyer who picked me up on the subway, and the person who I was messaging on Bumble who wound up standing next to me in line at Whole Foods. Oh, and there was the guy my English professor set me up with out in San Francisco, with whom I had a passionate two-week love affair.