This is a sad story only inasmuch as stories about people like me, who delude themselves, are sad. So maybe it’s not so sad at all.

I tried to help Joey because I thought that without the distraction of all his miseries—which seemed to me so easily solvable—he would finally love me properly. He would take care of me the way I’d been taking care of him. I would fix and fix and fix until he was able to notice that I was standing there, hoping to be loved. But of course it doesn’t work that way.

Would a good person be deterred by these things? I asked myself. Was it ethical to disqualify a person as a partner for any of these reasons? How would someone, most people, react to these profiles?

I told myself that someone, most people, would be fine with them. Excited, even. They would go on dates with these men. They would enjoy these dates. And so I forced myself to hover outside my own mind, and override my own, true, human reactions with what I thought a good and ethical and generally less-strange person would do.