That is the story! Who could live up to it? Not me, certainly. In the years between meeting and dating her, I had lost my heart a few more times, and I had learned the miraculous healing powers of irony, of laughing at your old selves so you could take the current one very seriously. Every several months, like a computer emptying a cache, I trashed my old selves. Ashley forced me to take seriously the sharpest and deepest experience I’d ever had of falling in love, an experience I had spent years ignoring or deprecating. (“Ah, to be emo again.”) It undid me. A man who is being undone is not always fun to be around. So many of our entanglements, in our twenties, are about the joy of being intimate, being intense, without having to be known; was I ready to be done with that most delightful form of self-harm? It’s a miracle that I didn’t break up with her in that first year—not because she was wrong but because she was so right that if I stayed with her, I would have to start to care what happened to me, and then to the embarrassing series of silly men that I lived in flight from having been.

But you have to have had the vision in the first place. In the time between meeting and dating Ashley, I had dated, among a few others, another woman who developed brain cancer early in our relationship, when we would normally be figuring out what we were to each other. After her diagnosis, I decided that I was obviously living in the story where I would devote myself to my poor, brave girlfriend because the alternate story, where she got sick and we broke up, was too sordid to contemplate. (I had also absorbed some odd scholarly notions about the newness and nonnecessity of companionate love between life partners.)

Of course, we broke up. For months I maintained the facade, to myself and to her, that ours was a great love affair, till one afternoon I couldn’t—I folded up like a tent. The effect of my attempt to be generous was mostly that she had to spend her last romantic relationship on an undiagnosed anxiety patient who was engaging in an attempt to be good. I denied her the chance to be fallen in love with. It may be the worst thing I’ve ever done. This may have been too eccentric of a mistake to be worth enjoining other people not to make it, but just in case: Don’t do this. It’s one of several reasons, too, that I’m depressed at how often single people, particularly women, are told to settle. Most straight men I know could stand to question their own physical preferences, learn to notice how often these are not indigenous to ourselves but overwritten on our sexuality by mass media and boy training. (“You like her? She’s a six at best.”) But otherwise, to them and to everyone else, I say: don’t settle. Marriage is hard enough. And it’s an incredibly contemptuous thing to do to another human being.

Ashley looks at this shambles of a person every day and sees someone else. She sees that person so intensely that I am renewed. I can never deserve this; all I can do is try to return the favor. When she has dashed herself against some bureaucracy for days and weeks to secure some small mercy for someone else and has failed to do so, I tell her, because it’s true, that I don’t know anyone else who does as much good for as many people as she does. I shovel snow. I clean the bathroom. Most of all, I see the more than there is in her that is in her. As she sees the more in me than there is in me that is in me. We will help each other remember it, till the error that is time is corrected and all those flickers stay in place.