When the objects of our affections act in a manner that seems overeager or even presumptuous (or when we ourselves act that way), bells start to ring. Are these the pealing bells of a Swiss mountaintop village that’s perpetually awash in a goldenly caramel light, or are these the ominous tollings of a hunchback pulling a rope?

The actions of courtship are particularly difficult to parse when viewed through the prism of etiquette. What strikes one person as lovely (“You bought my mother flowers!”) strikes another as pushy (“You bought my mother flowers?”). Undoubtedly, a thoughtful, optimism-fueled gesture can, in the right context, make the heart throb, as if to signal the recent ingestion of much heavy cream.

But some of us have seen the narrative of overeager love play itself out so many times that a crust has formed over us. The setup and denouement seem never to change: Gatsby buys a house across the bay from Daisy, and it does not end well; Johnny Depp emblazons his arm with “Winona Forever,” and it does not end well.

Bob Gutowski, who works for the New York County Defender Services, remembered a man named George whom he had dated for two weeks in the 1980s. One night, while sitting in George’s apartment waiting for him to return with dinner, Mr. Gutowski was surprised when George’s roommate slid onto the couch next to him.

The foreign-born roommate said, “George really like you!” Then the roommate “looked around in the manner of a Hitchcock villain, as if to make sure that we were absolutely the only two people in the room, and happily dropped the bomb: ‘George have presents for you, in the closet! For Christmas!’ ”