“No, we can talk about it. I trust you. You’re pretty much the least judgmental person I know, so . . . Well, I was well out of college at that point, working as a designer at this web company, living in Manhattan, basically fooling everyone in my life into thinking I totally had everything together. But, really, I was up to my ears in credit card debt and getting by at work through sheer talent, not hard work. I was stressed all the time. Lonely. When I met a new friend or a girl I was clicking with, it would only be a matter of weeks or months before I totally flaked on them and lost touch. But things really fell apart at my college friend’s bachelor party in Vegas.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t . . . kill a stripper, did you?”

“What? Oh, my God! No. JD, if you would stay on the line with someone who would casually drop into conversation that they once murdered someone at a bachelor party then you really need to rethink your priorities.”

“Point taken. So, what happened?”

“Well, his bachelor party included all of our friends from college, so there were both girls and guys there. And I had this one friend, Audrey, who I’d always had a crush on. And about a month and a half before the party, we started dating.”

“Oh.”

“Vegas was like the first official couple thing we did, and we were gonna tell all our friends we were dating. But . . . our first night there, we got really drunk and woke up the next morning with a marriage certificate on the nightstand.”

“What?!”

“Yup. We got married. Like total idiots.”

“Wow. I kinda thought that happened only in movies?”

“It happens in movies and to my dumb ass. Almost immediately our friends found out. Audrey and I were both mortified. I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if my parents and my sister found out that I got married to someone I’d just started dating without them even being there. I mean, it’s not like I want a white wedding or something, but if I were to ever do that for real, I’d at least want my family to be there.”

“What happened with Audrey?”

“We got it annulled right away. But the whole thing was a complete headache and . . . getting a marriage annulled while you’re trying to start a relationship with someone doesn’t . . . work. It’s like, part of the mystique of dating someone at the beginning is trying to see whether or not you have a future together. And by annulling the marriage, we were pretty much saying that no, we definitely didn’t have a future together. It was like we were trying to start and end something at the same time. We didn’t last more than a couple weeks post-Vegas.”

“You . . . were really torn up about it?”