NATE

I am not a romantic.

I want to be clear about this upfront because what I am about to describe could be mistaken for the behavior of a romantic, and I am not one, have never been one, have in fact spent the better part of my adult life maintaining a specific and considered skepticism about the particular and extravagant claims people made about love, about the way it announced itself, about the degree to which a person could look at two other people and know something about them that the two other people had not yet figured out about themselves.

I am not a romantic.

I am, however,...