It was a modern non–love story, the only kind I’d ever really known. But this was my first time at the rodeo in my 30s, a decade so far remarkable for my first gray hair, my first time showing up for jury duty, and my first real heartbreak, stemming from the public dissolution of a six-year relationship I had believed to be permanent. Jeremy (his name has been changed) “slid into my DMs” after I posted a thirst-trap picture in some plus-size panties (fire emoji eggplant emoji water droplet emoji yasss). I was lonely as hell—maybe lonelier, because at least those baddies are all down there together—and I had been programmed by my near miss of a marriage to see off into forever. This seemed like a good way to find someone to spend my possibly long and assuredly messy life with.

During the brief spaces between rebound romances, I’d felt choppy and unrealized, like a vintage TV set without the sharpness adjusted. I had recently become sober after years of dependence on prescription pills, and the new community I was meeting with in rec halls and school cafeterias after hours was happy to call my preoccupation “codependence” or, less euphemistically, a sex-and-love addiction. To me, that was as tricky as calling food an addiction (something I’ve also been warned about, since I love to consume on all levels). What are you supposed to do, quit that too?

Jeremy and I flirted. I was recovering from my twelfth surgery in four years, an oophorectomy (the fancy term for having an ovary yanked out), and he nicknamed me “pajama queen.” I loved it, and I took to thinking of myself that way: Pajama Queen, master of all she surveys (and what she surveys is her bedroom). We graduated from DM to text to late-night calls where he told me about his grad school program and his real estate troubles, his exes, his favorite homeless man outside his favorite diner who turned out to be an esteemed folk artist. His Instagram had given me a time-lapse impression of his life (only the cutest parts, perfectly calibrated to make a woman think he might be able to put together her forsaken IKEA shelves), and the press had given him a tragic sense of mine.

Jeremy lived alone in L.A. He was in his 40s, and the day he followed me on Twitter I made sure to announce that I might like “to try sex with someone who was born in the ’70s.” He texted me photos of the twinkly view from his house, and I didn’t yet know that I’d spend two wonky nights in that sparse bedroom befitting an aesthetically committed modern sculptor and/or a serial killer. (“At least it’s a mid-century,” my best friend Scotty shrugged.)