But he wasn’t. During our next few phone calls, he seemed gloomy, talking of the death of print journalism and his various aches and pains. He was late for our next date, and I craned my neck down the sidewalk, anxiously checking my watch and phone. I finally spotted him half a block away, walking at a pace I could tell was too fast for him. When he reached me, he apologized (“The subway!”) and was perspiring so profusely I was concerned.

“Do you want to take a minute to cool off?” I asked, fishing out a tissue for him.

He waved me off and mopped his brow with a handkerchief, a gesture that would have seemed quaintly old-fashioned if there had not been so much sweat.

He canceled our fourth date because of exhaustion; a few weeks later he had the flu; after that, a blood vessel burst in his eye (“I can’t go out like this!” he said when I urged him to join me for dinner anyway); then he tripped and broke an ankle, which laid him up for weeks.

“I’m having a lot of bad luck healthwise,” he admitted on the phone in his sonorous voice, a voice that made me want to keep listening, no body to get in the way. But his body was there, a body neither one of us could ignore, a body that kept him confined to his apartment.

I liked hearing his stories, but I wanted us to make stories of our own. I resented how his body had become a barrier between us, though not in the way I had expected. He didn’t ride a bike, couldn’t play a casual game of tennis, wouldn’t go for a spontaneous jaunt in the heat of a summer day. I’d never call myself sporty, but I longed for some physicality between us, something more than talk.

Then it ended.

“I just can’t do this,” he said on the phone one night. “I don’t have the energy.”

I was being cut loose again, this time by someone who outweighed me by 150 pounds. At 45, after too many relationships both long and short, I was disappointed that this man with the big brain could not see a way beyond his fear.