“He’s divorced. Brief marriage, right after college, no kids, but still. Who needs that? Better to start fresh with a first-timer. Someone with no history of failure.”

I shrug. It doesn’t feel like a deal breaker to me. In fact, the idea that he was married once means he might marry again. That he can commit. So this is actually good news. “What else.”

“He used to drink. And there may have even been a few visits to rehab in between temp-stints here. But to be fair, it’s because of his anxiety and the musician lifestyle: you stress about money, whether you’re any good, whether anyone’s going to show up to hear you play, what the reviews will say. And you drink. Self-medication as opposed to simple degenerate behavior. There’s a difference, of course.” She is only half-kidding.

Addiction doesn’t run in my family and I have never dated an alcoholic. But I’ve seen some on TV and in the movies who have successfully quit, like Paul Newman in The Verdict, and I believe strongly in the power of change. I’m undaunted. “And?”

“And, he’s Catholic. And you need a Jew. I’ve met your parents. You’re their only child; their parents were survivors. You have one job in life and that is to marry within the tribe and perpetuate your people.”

That may have been true at one time, but it isn’t true anymore. All they want now is for me to bring home someone decent and kind, someone good-looking, and someone taller than me because they’re of that generation that does not go for a nontraditional differential in height. Gary would fit that bill on all counts.

“Look,” Glenn says. “I love Gary—you will not find a kinder more hilarious guy on the planet. But, he struggles. Which means you’ll struggle. I just want you to have an easier time than I did.”

She has been married twice—the first time to an alcoholic she’d met in graduate school who died a drinker long after their divorce—he simply could not stop drinking—and the second time to an editor who died young of Parkinson’s ten years into their marriage. By the time I meet her she is single and living alone, like me. “Both times I thought I could handle it, and both times I underestimated what I was taking on. I’m not saying I regret either husband, but they each took a lot out of me. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had chosen differently.”

I get it but I don’t get it. I’m still young enough to believe that we don’t choose who to love—love chooses us. I’m drawn to Gary’s troubled past, attracted to it even. I want to save him. I’m a giant cliché, but I don’t care. I’m also reading the tea leaves of his past and future differently: that as someone who’s struggled, he’s resilient, a fighter, a survivor. Couldn’t that be the story that will eventually unfold?

And so against Glenn’s advice, when I run into Gary a year or two after his last temping stint, I say yes when he asks me to go bowling. We meet on a snowy night after Thanksgiving when almost no one is back in the city after the holiday. He teaches me how to bowl with the big balls and big pins, even though he grew up in New England, like me, candlepin bowling, with small balls and tall narrow pins. He stands behind me, almost a whole foot taller, shows me how to put my three fingers into the three holes and swing my arm back and then forward and up. He models it for me, vamping up and down the lane like a pro bowler on TV. He looks ridiculous, but he hits strike after strike, while I throw mostly gutter balls. In between strings we talk about people we used to know at work and we die laughing. We close the place down. With our coats on, heading down the stairs to the street, I congratulate him on his victory.