I met Кэндис for a nice outdoor Thai breakfast, the morning after sleeping over at Кэролайн's place for the first (and last) time.  I was skeptical because she was over ten years younger than me, and invited me out after only a few lines of online chat, saying that she preferred to "cut to the chase" and meet in person to gauge chemistry.

She was short, with curvy black hair just past her shoulders, and a round face. She wore bluejeans and a light sweater that accentuated her curves tastefully, and I was slightly disoriented by the age difference from the start because she looked like she fit in with all the other college students at the Thai place. The idea of dating someone still in college felt a bit dangerous to me.

We started off well, agreeing to wait in separate lines and buy two of each thing to cut the time in half, setting up across from each other at a little wooden picnic bench, and crooning over the amazing food. The first topic we settled on was summer adventures, and she enthusiastically listened to my tales of Alaska and Idaho.  She told me all about Burning Man and her weird social awakening there, falling in with a crowd of older men.  I surmised that while among them she had developed a taste for older men, hence her interest in me.

Attraction isn't straightforward, and most of the time people are just working with whoever appears in their path. But a skeptical person, seeing an older man and a younger woman together, would say the age difference alone was proof the participants had crappy priorities. Why would an older man like me entertain a younger woman if not for her body, since her personality would be less formed? Why would a younger woman entertain an older man, if not for his relative experience and power, since his body would be weathered and slow? It's all fertility on one side and money on the other.

Well, I can't agree with that misanthropic view. But I have to admit, some of my own experience - especially recently - has conjured a watered-down version of it in my head:

I feel like I've gotten confirmation of something I'd always suspected while dating in college: Some younger women target older men as dating partners because they feel overqualified to date someone their own age, based on "maturity". They might declare it like, "All the guys my age are macho, sex-crazed trash. Why waste my time? Older men treat me with the respect I deserve." ... But then they can walk into a situation where an older man is putting up with their worst personality traits for the sake of their sex appeal, giving them the perfect opportunity to fall behind in maturity, just as the men in their age group are catching up.

Then they enter their 30's and are confused to find that the men their age are now the ones complaining about maturity and respect. At least, the ones not dating college girls...

It's not a huge pattern. It's not a lot of men and women. But it's an explanation, at least, for the way some of these people I'm dating are behaving. And I was getting the solid impression that Кэндис was in this group, and expected me to act the complementary part, like she was the fertility idol and I was the horny gentleman. Someone only a bit less skeptical than the usual skeptic would say I was reading this into our conversation just because it's so plausible. ... I don't know; maybe?

But Кэндис kept teeing up opportunities for me to praise her sexual adventurousness at Burning Man and beyond, and mentioning her body, lingerie, and tattoos, as though she expected the focus to be there. I kept veering away to talk about culture or ideas, and found that the only thing she really responded to were travel stories that we could compare. She asked what I did for a living, and made a weird effort to be unimpressed by it, then started an inventory of Silicon Valley companies, pointing out that she'd dated at least one man from each, and tried to make general statements about what guys from each company tended to be like. I thought she was joking at first, but she took it seriously. In the end she gave me faint praise by saying that the company I worked for had the best dating potential, though she had most recently been involved with someone outside the industry, and from another country.

I set her Silicon Valley opinions aside and asked, "Oh? How did that go?"

"Well actually it's still going on," she said.

She told me about how she'd fallen for a French exchange student, despite "not wanting to," when he almost literally swept her off her feet at a dance party. She invited him home and over the next few weeks he convinced her to let him sleep at her place long-term, somewhere between a housemate and a couch-surfer, even though she "hadn't really wanted him to." They quickly got in bed together and into a relationship, which was currently ongoing, even though she "wasn't really interested in him."

"So really, what's happening right now is, I'm looking for someone to distract me from this guy, so maybe I can end things with him," she said.

I couldn't help poking at the subtext. "Well, if he wanted to climb into your bed, you could have said no, right? I mean, it's your house, your bed, your romantic life."

"I wanted to say no, but I couldn't. He was just so charming."

"So, part of you wanted to say no ... but it was overruled by the rest of you, which said yes!"

I figured this wouldn't a controversial way of putting it. We often have mixed feelings about people we date. But she became suddenly angry.

"I wanted to say no!"

"Was he threatening you or something?"

"... He was just really charming!"

"So you said yes to this guy because he was charming."

"I never said yes! I didn't want to date him!"

"What?" I laughed. "Then how did he end up in your bed?"

"I don't know, it just happened!" she yelled.

I was taken aback, but also annoyed, so I didn't back down. "It sounds like you're describing yourself as a hapless victim in your own romantic life, when you actually made plenty of choices along the way."

"Well it sounds like you're judging me and telling me what I should think! And I don't have to deal with this. In fact I don't see you as dating material anyway so we should just end this date right now," she yelled.

Abruptly she stood up and grabbed her purse, and walked away, leaving her dishes at the table.

I watched her back as she went, my emotions shading from disorientation to a weird kind of amusement. What had just happened? After a minute or so, I went back to my meal, then moved my dishes and hers to the cleaning bins. Maybe by challenging her I overstepped my bounds as the tolerant horny older man or something.

That was obviously the last we saw of each other. Later - a year later at least - she tried to claim me as a co-worker on "LinkedIn". I rolled my eyes and deleted the request.

Вереск sent me an "icebreaker" message on okCupid. I rarely got unsolicited messages from women, and almost never got ones longer than a phrase like "hi there," so I paid attention. We hit the chat console and talked almost entirely about bike riding, with a detour into comic books. I'd never met a woman with a sizable comic book collection, so I had curious questions. Classic Wonder Woman and Catwoman were her favorites.

We met a week later for a morning bike ride.  A tall woman in casual cycling clothes, with long black hair, about my age. Again, the pictures were a little too flattering - she needed to lose over 25 pounds if she wanted to look like that profile - but I didn't care by this point.  I was going to have a nice day no matter what.

We biked over to Alameda and set up on a picnic blanket near the beach, in the same park Моника had taken me walking through half a dozen times in the past.  The weather was perfect, and teenagers and pets romped in the park behind us. We talked for over an hour, sitting near each other but not too close, and then went for a walk in the sand. The tiny waves off the bay lapped quietly alongside us. It might have been romantic except we were both in the same heavy mental space: We were unburdening ourselves, with someone who would lend a kind ear. Recent history loomed over us so completely that there was no ground for anything new.

Вереск had left a real downer of a relationship a few months ago.  That, after two back-to-back seven-year ones.  The guy she dumped had been a drug addict, and constantly lied to her face about big and small things to conceal the extent of his habit. When he "slipped up" - either in his lies or by overdoing his self-medication to the point where it was completely impossible to act normal - she would get upset and tell him she couldn't stand it, and beg him to change. But he was an expert at telling her exactly what she wanted to hear to calm her down and keep her on his side. This cycle repeated, and repeated, until she was emotionally crushed.

"It was the lying, really," she said. "I mean, I can understand addiction. Or maybe I just thought I did. I thought for a long time that if he would just be completely honest about what he was doing, I could manage it somehow. Like, manage to live with it. Because it would be hard, but it would be a known thing I could prepare for, right?"

I said nothing. I had my own experience with this, and it wasn't good.

"If I knew he was going to just be out of his mind for an entire day, and I knew he was safe somewhere, maybe I could arrange my schedule so I wasn't stuck waiting for him, and I wouldn't need to be disappointed and worried and ask him all these questions that he would just lie about. Or, if he was honest enough to tell me he really couldn't drive because he'd been drinking since eight in the morning, it would be a lot better than him smashing my car into a parking barrier and making up some weird story about a guy threatening him with a gun, then making excuses for why he never called a cop or even filed a police report, and then forgetting he made up the story at all and just saying his foot slipped, and there was no guy with a gun -- like, what are you talking about? Guy with a gun? When did I say that?"

She sighed. "In the end, I had to cut him off. I said I never wanted to see or hear from him again. And it was true. I mean, it had to be true. I can comfort myself with the idea that maybe it woke him up enough to make some real change. But if that happens, I won't know about it, because I can't ... care either way. Caring was how I kept getting pulled back in. So... Yeah."

After that imploded, she had taken six months off from all romance.

"At first it was all work. Healing from trauma is good for my job." She laughed. "I got so much done. My apartment is totally redecorated. It looks great."

She revealed that I was the first person she had seen, breaking the hiatus.  I felt honored.  We continued to talk, and I told her my traumatic stories from earlier in the year. As I spooled out the words to a willing audience, I blundered into a fresh perspective. We were technically on a date, which compelled me to tell the story in a way that sounded more settled, like I'd learned from it and done some kind of moving on - which I hadn't, at least not yet - because if I came across like I was stuck in the past, I would look like a jerk for even asking her on a date at all. Why would I do that, if she was just going to witness me moping for an afternoon? Of course, we were both doing some of that now, so...

Anyway, the thing I realized was, I had been using sex to feel more intensely connected to someone than I otherwise could be. I'd been doing that with Кэрол for months. And when things got complicated and her physical attention was split among several people, I felt deprived and nervous. The bigger pool of negative feelings demanded a bigger supply of positive ones to balance it out, making waves inside me that crashed back and forth, getting bigger and bigger until I couldn't stand it.

Some of the problem had been the huge pool of negative feelings from the rest of my life. Work stress, the end of my long relationship with Шеррила, the unfamiliar new house... But the problem was also Кэрол: We weren't actually a good match. Her lifestyle, her social circle, her priorities, her future plans, didn't mesh with mine at all. And worse yet, to get an emotional connection going with her I had to draw it out, almost from scratch every time we got together. What kept me coming back of course was the sex.

Yeah we talked a lot; we did social things; we shared some pretty legitimate romantic moments. But the actual point was the sex, because that's what it took to flush the physiological toilet in my head, draining all those negative feelings out: Pairing up with someone who didn't match me in a bunch of important ways but did match me in this one way, extremely well. Кэрол tore my fucking head off in bed, night after night, and that kept me from drowning in waves of anguish and disorientation.

This was mostly a rehash of things I'd already learned, but what struck me that day was the parallel with Моника: She had been using me exactly the same way I had been using Кэрол. By the time she met me, she had already broken up with her ex -- was already drowning in need. And when my commitment to Шеррила blocked her access to me, she felt the same despair, and tried various things to compensate, which failed.

The parallel came to me while I was describing it out loud to Вереск, and she nodded and told me it made sense.

"I think my six month break was me trying to avoid that, honestly," she said. "I mean, no judgement here. We all find a way to cope, right? But for me, after this last guy... The idea of going on even a single date felt terrifying. And you know, again, it was the lying. The idea of being lied to again just made my heart shrivel up."

"That sounds horrible," I said.

"It was! But I'm glad to be here," she said. "You seem nice. And hey, thanks for listening to this."

"Hey, likewise," I said.

Вереск wanted to set up a second date. I told her I would get in touch with her when I'd found a good time, though I doubted I would. I got on my bike and rode back home feeling triumphant, like I had reached a milestone in understanding. I don't think Вереск realized the depth of my ongoing obsession with Моника, and I was barely willing to admit it to myself, but because of it, I had wasted Вереск's time. I had no idea what she came away from our date thinking, and I was callous enough to not even care. I never contacted her again, and she never contacted me.

I took a nap in the afternoon, and was awakened by a text message from Эриска. She had apparently been waiting at home for me to show up. She'd been off work since 3:00pm. I quickly showered and dressed, then picked up the bag of curry supplies that Шеррила had very thoughtfully assembled for me, and was out the door.

Finding the place was no problem, but when I got there I realized I didn't know what apartment number she was in, so I stood outside and tried to call Эриска, but got no answer. Eventually she sent me a text saying she was on hold with AT&T - had been for half an hour - and that she'd come down immediately to locate me. A few minutes later she led me up to her place on the fourth floor.

She ranted about her frustration with the phone company, then gave me a friendly hug. I got a quick look around her apartment, which was pretty well furnished considering that she'd just arrived on the West Coast a few seasons ago. The kitchen had granite countertops and a good-sized sink, and I expressed my envy. Then we got right down to cooking. She had eaten a handful of Oreos earlier in the day while waiting for me, and nothing else since lunch at the office.

We talked about frivolous things. Tastes in music. She played me something that a friend's band had sent her. New-wave punk-pop, by the sound. The band was called "The Harvey Cartel". Then Yann Tiersen came on and we discussed the movie Amelie briefly. I chopped vegetables and started the protein frying, and she cleaned things and moved them around. Her sous-chef skills were pretty good.

I found myself too focused on the food preparation to come up with genuine conversation topics, so I just threw casual words around. We traded stories about college radio. I remembered she had done an admission interview with a local college, and asked how it went.

"Oh, it went fine. I mean... I think it went fine. I need to file a report about it soon." Her work was financing the classes and there was some kind of hoop to jump through.

We chopped potatoes for a while. I asked her what she bought at the sports store the other day.

"I managed to escape after buying only a few things!" she laughed.

"Oh yeah?"

"I got some biking shorts that didn't look ridiculous, and this pair of pants." She turned and pointed down at her own ass, and since it was an invitation I took a nice long look at it. It stuck out like the rim of a coffee table.

While the curry was simmering she took me on a more detailed tour of the house. She told me about some photos perched on her piano, showed me the futon upstairs in the loft, and showed off the bathroom with the toilet-mounted cat-box. Her cat was hiding somewhere. The last item was a chair she had painted as a high-school senior project, and we talked about the details in the artwork until the curry was done.

The curry turned out a bit bland, which frustrated me. I usually do much better with the flavor. The rice came out well, which was a miracle since her rice-cooker was known for making messes. She poured some sparkling cider into nice glasses, set her little table for two, and placed a centerpiece in the middle with a collection of thick candles. The playlist she put on was relaxing but not sleep-inducing. With the lights low it was very pleasant, and more than a little romantic, which I liked. We both dug into the curry with zeal.

The intimate setting made the talk more intimate. When the meal was finished we kept talking, moving the dishes to the sink and our bodies to the couch.

I learned about the internal basis for her religious views. I heard the story of her teenage life, which was quite convoluted. I heard about her time in therapy sessions, and some allusions to deeper trauma that she was presently unwilling to even summarize. It must have been very personal, and very harrowing. She told me about her bipolar mother, and her emancipation, and about the severe communication issues that she was still sorting through. She had opened the heavy trunk in her mind labeled "emotional stuff," and was handing me unsorted hunks of a tapestry that was quite large, and I struggled to lay the parts out and get a coherent picture, feeling a compulsion to dig deeper, to see as much as I could because I knew I had a rare opportunity.

I told her that I perceived she had clearly built some kind of fortress inside herself, and as far as I could tell, she seemed fairly comfortable in it -- but that looks could be deceiving.

She offered me some orange sorbet. We each got little bowls and sat back down at the dinner table. It was very cozy.

She told me about her adventure buying and carrying a machete in Honduras. About dressing up as a "typical Honduran" at a college party a year later, and being confronted by some 'chicas' about it, and the mortifying self-examination that had prompted. About being popular with the inter-building bus drivers at her work because she knew Spanish and could converse with them. True to our earlier time together, she asked me almost no questions, but I was okay with it even then, because I was finally hearing things that mattered to her.

In the back of my head I made a hilarious observation: Both our profiles on the dating site had been sex-forward, talking about how important physical intimacy was to us, but here we were making a long evening entirely out of words, and both okay with it. Or perhaps just following a course that was possible, instead of the one we charted for ourselves in private moments.

Perhaps with someone different - or someone who presented differently - an evening like this would have moved rapidly, from cuddling to kissing to naked shenanigans, with no reservation or doubt, just some basic negotiations. But something in me was curled back and waiting. I didn't think it was a perceived lack of trustworthiness. More an unfamiliarity with the process, maybe the whole concept, of becoming intimate with someone in a complicated situation like this. There were too many paths to choose, and being open to anything, I found myself unwilling to take one that would rule out the others. And so was she. We were at a crossroads with a tent and a camp stove.

So I had to ask myself: What was drawing me to her? Wasn't sex supposed to be the main motivation? Her coffee-table ass? If I were judging this the way I judged my past relationships, I'd say there was something in her nature I wanted in my life, and the sex was just part of it. It was confusing.

The cat came out, and we crooned over it for a while, then put our bowls away and cleaned the table. We talked about the evolutionary pressure humans put on cats, to create a cat that did not use its claws while being held, and about the way that cats can be taught pretty easily to hold back with their biting and clawing during play. Somewhere in the exchange my brain flip-flopped and it seemed we were talking about Эриска herself, metaphorically, and whether she knew how to be gentle when angry. The indirectness reminded me too much of those clever wheels-within-wheels flirty conversations I had as a young man in college dorms, so I pushed the metaphor away and made the topic explicit. She seemed pleasantly surprised by that, and gave a thoughtful answer.

It was getting late. She packed up some of the curry for me in a plastic tub, and as she was doing so she did a little "packing up the curry" interpretive dance, which I found very endearing. Even this basic evidence that she was having a good time was something she would never broadcast in public, and I knew it. She trusted me to relax. I felt relaxed as well, but I knew there was too much on my mind.

I mentioned to her that we should probably have our "talk" at some point, about the relationship paths we might choose, and that I'd done some writing to try and prompt the discussion. We gathered together on the couch, touching side-by-side in a cozy but still plausibly deniable way, and started that conversation. After only a few more minutes she became very drowsy, then hunched over on the edge of the couch complaining that she was cold, and for a few seconds it seemed very clear that I was supposed to hug her, or at least ask if I should. I deliberately ignored the hint, because I wanted us to talk first.

There were a few revelations: First, she'd had no idea that Шеррила and I had opened our relationship recently, and that she was among the first people we were experimenting with, at least on my side. She was under the impression I was a seasoned veteran in all this, and was shocked when I said I wasn't.

Second, I got a big chunk of the puzzle about her mixed signals. She confessed she was afraid of physical intimacy, and had worked around that in the past by constraining the depth of her relationships with the people that she became sexually intimate with. "I always put 'casual sex' in one category, and friends in the other category," she said. "And I build up a wall between them. That's basically been the way my sex life has worked, for as long as I can remember."

"Well," I said, "I see how that approach makes sense, based on the history you're shared. I also have to say 'good for you' for being able to recognize that and explain it. I think most of the people who operate that way don't even know it's what they're doing."

"But," I said, and shifted on the couch, still touching her from the side, "that sort of confines sex to casual sex, and that isn't the way I work. Well, not the way I work now. It was for a while in my 20's."

She nodded. And there it was: Our age difference, under a spotlight. This was the impasse I hadn't seen coming, but should have expected because we were ten years apart. Was I willing to try and help her forge an entirely new path into physical intimacy? It would be complicated and probably fail: She could freak out and pull away, or a Pandora's Box of trauma could spring open inside her and demons could possess our relationship.

This only occurred to me later -- weeks later. At the time, on the couch, I was just telling her where I was, and feeling a bit sad that we weren't in the same place. I was optimistic about future conversations, and seeing her again. But for now she needed to go to bed.

We hugged at the door, warmly and a bit carefully, and then I left, and searched the area for the elevator. She opened her apartment door to direct me, and I took the opportunity to hug her again. "Tell the Шеррила hello for me!", she said, and I said I would.

As I drove home I wondered what had just happened. Did Эриска need me to make the first move? I needed something more than a hint, to do that. Would it have been a good idea? What if we'd tumbled suddenly into bed, and then she called a stop to it because she didn't have the usual sense of emotional detachment? If I was going to get really physical with someone other than Шеррила I wanted a different start to it.