I have, in my slightly perkier mo­ments in the wake of my and Jen’s break-up, let my­self believe that chatting women up might be fun; that, with age, I might have got bet­ter at it. For some rea­son, this as­sump­tion gets stronger with ev­ery break-up, de­spite not hav­ing done it for the years I’ve been in a re­la­tion­ship, and de­spite never be­ing very good at it in the first place. And then I’m thrown into the world of flirt­ing and I re­al­ize that sit­ting on the sofa with the same woman watch­ing box sets has not made me more coura­geous and charis­matic. In fact, it has done pos­si­bly the ex­act op­po­site. How could I have let my­self be­lieve, even for a sec­ond, that sin­gle thirty-some­thing life would be an end­less buf­fet of op­por­tu­ni­ties, when I know it is, at best, small plates.