I WAS drifting my way through college, coming off a rough year in which I’d started to suspect that the crushes I’d had on women for as long as I could remember weren’t simply going to stop, when I met Oren.

He was new to New York and the United States, a former prosecutor in the Israeli Defense Forces who still had basic training biceps and the dimples of a prankish kid. He was older than I, smart, had a great accent, and — best of all — seemed absolutely certain about me.

Within months I had decided he was the solution to my own uncertain life. That Christmas I looked at him sitting at my family’s dinner table wearing a reindeer sweater he had bought for the occasion and realized how badly I wanted to be a different version of myself. A better, happier version that could love a nice guy in a Christmas sweater and not be freaked out by the future that vision portended.

Later I told him I thought I was finally ready to embrace our life together.

“You mean you’re ready to hold a tarantula?” he asked.