Stay over at The Forehead’s.

But we haven’t been invited. And I have a plus-one: Gary.

Tell her the inn lost your reservation and everything else is booked because her incredibly popular retreat has taken up all the available rooms.

Flattery, as we both learned at Black Bear Press, always works.

But it’s less about the awkwardness of asking to stay with Sari Epstein and more about the prospect of socializing with her and her husband that is my concern right now. Since our “separation,” Gary and I have stopped going to other people’s houses, and we don’t invite other people to our house for dinner, either. This voluntary curtailment of our social life just happened to dovetail with the fact that we’ve run low on friends anyway: the older Teddy got, and the further away from the preschool and elementary school years we’ve moved, the fewer obligatory back-to-school nights we have to go to and the fewer Saturday or Sunday afternoon paintball or indoor-rock-climbing or bowling parties Teddy is invited to. In fact, he hasn’t been invited to any this year, and maybe not last year, either.

Gary is thrilled to be relieved of having to behave well and maintain the ridiculous pretense of being interested in other families with whom he’s always felt that he has absolutely nothing in common except a child the same age at the same school or one who has a shared extracurricular activity. But it’s different for me. I face the empty calendar every month with sadness—wondering why, when other families routinely have to turn down invitations because of being double or even triple booked, not a single one of us seems to have a social life.

It was always torture for Gary to listen to another dad describe, in mind-numbing detail, an ongoing do-it-yourself project—a bathroom redo or the installation of new kitchen cabinets, or a drain-snaking method found on YouTube to circumvent the plumber. Gary would stare at me over bowls of hummus or plates of bruschetta, making Let’s leave early eyes as he was led out into the backyard like a hostage to see a recently installed firepit or a raised gardening bed using recycled wood, or to hear about some magnificent adventures in organic composting. He didn’t want to see anyone’s reorganized toolshed or a family’s dirt bikes suspended from a garage ceiling; he had absolutely no interest in bending down to inspect a fully insulated cat door lined in felt weather-stripping or hear about how a snowblower could be retrofitted to run on canola oil instead of gasoline. Being forced to interact with people he didn’t necessarily like or care about made him feel trapped and anxious, then angry.

I struggled less with these interactions myself: during Teddy’s elementary school years I was always in demand as a friend—obviously!—my résumé practically guaranteed that I would be the first picked for coffee dates or yoga class invitations—I’d written a children’s book, after all, that had been turned into a PBS animated series! All the women I met had children who read children’s books and watched children’s television. I loved inspecting the reorganized kitchen cabinet project, the newly alphabetized disappearing rolling spice rack, the gleamingly clean refrigerator vegetable bins, the perfect basement home office or home gym—I loved escaping into the fantasy of how such a well-ordered world must correlate precisely to a well-lived and happy life—how women who had been smart enough to pick solid-earners for husbands were now reaping the many benefits of such sage decisions—even though I knew better about all of it. But I couldn’t enjoy any of it, knowing that Gary couldn’t bear it, that as soon as the quinoa was cleared and the gluten-free cupcakes were devoured and the fair-trade decaf was served, he would make it clear it was time to go.