But the dating problem. My mother, it should by now be clear, chooses men poorly, and so do I, and this is why I was not dating, do not date. What was happening to me then, at the time when I sat in my mother’s kitchen and turned my sweating glass of lemonade on a damp coaster, was not unlike the problem that had driven my mother to analysis, to her analyst. I’ve said that I did want to date and that there was a problem preventing me, but this, too, is not quite accurate. The truth is I wanted to date and for a time I did, I went on dates with lovely men, men with advanced degrees and wit to spare and working definitions of the word feminism and shoulders just as broad as my mother’s GI turned analyst. And when they bent down to kiss me my entire body recoiled. Their lips fell on mine and it was as if every cell in my body began immediately trying to pull away. I could feel my pores shrink, the little hairs on my arms retract, anything my body could do to put even a negligible, an imaginary distance between itself, between myself, and these men. I mean, anything besides actually pulling away. Meanwhile at work, alone in an office with the oldest, the sweatiest, the baldest of our lawyers, I found myself blushing, found my knees growing weak, found myself backing toward the door, trying again to put as much distance between me and the decaying specimen before me—but this time it was to stop myself from jumping him. It was like I was being reminded that I could feel desire. But then also that desire was purposely being misdirected so that I wouldn’t have sex. And I didn’t know what to do with that. With my body telling me, You don’t want to fuck these men that you are—that you should be—attracted to. With my body telling me, You do want to fuck this eighty-five-year-old lawyer who thinks corporations should have the same rights as individuals and whose youngest granddaughter is just about your age. I didn’t know what to do with my body telling me You don’t want what you want.