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was willing to spend anything on his search for the right woman. He was certainly more than attractive enough, but now that he was in front of her, Suze felt a vague sense of loss. Gone was the magic of not knowing anything. The mystery of a man who had no features and no form. The unknown had been more intriguing than this real person sitting before her. Suze instantly saw it as a flaw in the process—he’d built himself up to be a god and then exposed himself as a mere mortal.
    “I’m Brendan,” he said. “You must be Suze.” He looked down at a piece of paper. “I know a lot about you from this, but is it okay if I ask a few questions?”
    “Of course,” Suze said. “That’s what I’m here for. And, by the way, hi. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
    “It’s nice to meet you, too.” He flashed a quick smile. Not unfriendly, but somehow too businesslike. “Would you be open to telling me about a past relationship—preferably the first one that springs to mind?” He paused, then added, “Maybe it will help for me to tell you why I’m asking, so it isn’t such an open-ended question?”
    Suze shrugged flirtatiously. “This is a pretty open-ended experiment anyway.…”
    Brendan laughed. “I know it. A bit crazy, right? Thank you for bearing with it. Okay, so the reason I’m asking is simply because the way we talk about love says so much about how we see ourselves and what we hope for in life. In some ways we are driven to repeat our relationships. We are attracted to the same qualities. We make the same mistakes. We make choices that are reactions to what we’ve learned in the past. When you talk about an important relationship, it’s a good way for me to absorb all this stuff about you.” There was a sparkle in his eye. “Plus, I might learn the way into your heart.”
    “You just might,” Suze said. He radiated confidence, this man. She could see why he was so successful. Her initial hesitance faded. Brendan was definitely her type. Maybe he was onto a good thing with this elaborate blind dating. She was willing to take it seriously, for now at least. “Okay, so, I’m a serial monogamist. I had a high school boyfriend, a college boyfriend, and a postcollege boyfriend. Approximately four years each. I swear that wasn’t a deliberate plan, even though I’m sort of a control freak. Each of them was, I have to say, a very good match for me. They were all high achievers, like I am, but thoughtful and loving. I really can’t complain.
    “My postcollege boyfriend, Craig, is the one I’m going to tell you about because I really thought we’d get married. We met in business school, and we were both very driven. Just completely and obviously well matched. When we started dating, nobody noticed. Literally. Like they’d assumed we were already together. Plus, he was half Korean, which would have made my mother happy. Not that she gets to decide whom I marry. We were both really hard workers who thought the whole work-life balance concept was completely silly. Love what you do and you don’t need to worry about balance. For the most part.”
    “Yes!” Brendan said. “That’s what I’ve always said—kids hate school and adults hate work. That’s where we go wrong—making work into a chore. We need to find our passions.”
    “Right! Except of course there are jobs it would be very hard to love. I mean, personally I would hate being a sanitation worker,” Suze said.
    “Oh, right. Me, too,” said Brendan. “We need to—”
    “We need to check our entitlement.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Anyway, Craig and I were focused on building our careers, and along the way we went out to dinner and on trips and did all the things that happy couples do together…and we were happy.”
    “But?”
    “It was too…easy. Flat. We had settled into life, and I could see us going on like that for years. Adding in kids, buying a house. It was a cookie-cutter life in the making.”
    “So no cookies for