Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

I wished I understood. I wanted to blame his ambivalence on something specific. Yet the truth was he didn’t love me enough to make me his wife, and her love wasn’t enough to change his mind or heart.

When David and I broke up, Judy sent me a handwritten note in the mail telling me she was so very sorry and that she wished me everything I wanted for myself. And with one last “Love, Judy,” my picture was no longer hanging on her refrigerator. I no longer had a place at her table. I was no longer part of her family.

My mother, who by this time had moved to a house in Connecticut, came to live with me for a week. She yanked David’s nightstand and lamp from the wall and pushed my bed up against the window, so I wouldn’t be reminded of where he used to sleep. We repainted my living room, ordered in sushi, and she held me as I cried. Then my father invited me down to Florida. He took me out to expensive steak dinners and let me sleep late. We spent hours watching “Planet Earth” until I couldn’t think about anything other than stalactites and snow leopards. I was grateful to both of them for being there for me, but it didn’t erase a nagging aloneness I felt deep inside, the pain I still harbored over their divorce, over our broken family. I was 35 and mad at myself for still being hung up on a long gone childhood home. It was time for me to create my own home, start my own family. I just didn’t know how to do it.

All I knew is that I didn’t want to spend another five years with another mixed-message guy, only to get a “Dear John letter” from another almost mother-in-law. But like a crackhead who can’t shake her habit no matter how hard she tries, I was a goner the second I stepped foot into Susan’s kitchen.

Paper turkeys and streamers were strewn everywhere. Her house smelled of chocolate babka and apple cider. I could call this place home, I thought, sitting down, not wanting to get up.

It was only my sixth date with Jason. But it seemed longer since we’d spent four years of high school together and had been Facebook friends for the past year. I knew I shouldn’t get too excited, but the fact that he had invited me home for Thanksgiving and that I was meeting his mom so early on made me feel special, like he was really considering me as someone he could spend his life with. When he invited me back for Hanukkah a few weeks later, and my picture was hanging on the fridge, I knew I was in.

Susan and I spent hours in her kitchen frying latkes, bonding over how we both give too much and have short necks. She even confided in me that she had never seen Jason so happy. This was the real deal.

Jason and I didn’t end up making it past New Year’s.

Instead of a note, Susan picked up the phone. “It’s not you,” she said. “You’re wonderful, perfect, beautiful.” She was a poet, and explained to me that a poem isn’t possible if the writer isn’t open to the words in the ether. “I’m sorry Jason isn’t open to the poem.”

I dropped my head into my hands as soon as we hung up and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe I had let this happen. I had once again mistaken a mother’s love for the love of her son. I clearly had a problem and could not be trusted around mothers.

I should have been happy when Ethan didn’t introduce me to his mother immediately. He told me he wanted me to himself for a while before bringing me home to meet the family. But after six months of dating, I found myself fiending. When would I get to sit at Rena’s table? When would I see myself hanging on her fridge?

Rena, Ethan and I made plans to meet up for breakfast around the corner from me on the Upper West Side. I wore my favorite navy blue sweater and made sure to blow-dry my hair. I wanted to look pretty for her.

As we sat in a booth eating overcooked eggs, Rena told me about the Holocaust museum where she worked. I told her about the eighth grade girls I counseled on Fridays. Ethan made jokes.

Then the subject of our future came up.

Rena looked at me directly, and said,  “I’m waiting to love you.”

I almost choked on my toast.

Judy and Susan flew to mind. There had been no waiting with them. Just full on, “Let’s do this!” Then I thought back to something David had said at the end of our relationship that I never understood. “I feel like we’re more brother-sister than lovers.”

Sitting speechless in this poorly lit diner, something clicked.

David was right. By slipping into daughter role with his mother, I had become one of the kids. And while that felt good, to be part of a cohesive family, to feel like I fit in, I wanted to be a wife, not a daughter-in-law or sister.

Rena somehow knew this, that her love and approval couldn’t influence her son — and that if we had a shot, she should stay out of it.

I wanted to hug her and thank her for doing the thing I couldn’t do all these years: Wait, see and then fall.

Last May, Ethan and I exchanged vows under a brightly colored Chuppah that Rena had spent hours sewing together for us. But it wasn’t her love that got me there. It was Ethan’s.

As I stared into my soon-to-be husband’s warm blue eyes, smiling so wide my cheeks hurt, surrounded by a patchwork of friends and family, I no longer felt like a displaced kid looking for a seat at someone else’s table. I felt like a woman being claimed by a man.

Ethan made me his wife. And now, at almost 40, I am hoping he can make me a mother too. Our fridge is waiting.

After we said goodbye and got into the car, John sighed. “Well, that was a waste of 200 bucks,” he said. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand.

We’d been searching for another couple — people to hang out with and take vacations and trade stories about our three nearly grown children — for more than a year. Ever since our breakup with Sara and Greg.

- – - – - -

Those aren’t their real names. But the story is true: It’s about the wonderful couple we fell for and how we were happy for a while and then how our relationship died.

We met at a mutual friend’s and talked for hours. We were all in our 40s. Greg and I had both married — and divorced — young; we each had an adult son with disabilities. John and Sara were devoted stepparents, walking that awkward line between authority and friend. We were all weekend travelers and motorcycle riders. Our tastes overlapped on every level, from Eritrean food to Robert Downey Jr. films.

Things got intense really fast. Greg and Sara came by with takeout twice a week. We showed up at their place with wine every Saturday night. When we were apart for more than a couple days, the texts between us flew.

I based the sardonic-yet-loyal best friend in my  new novel on Sara and sent her the manuscript the moment I finished a draft. Then I waited a tense week for her to read it. I was ecstatic when she approved.

On our anniversaries, which happened to fall on the same autumn weekend, we rented adjoining cottages at a bed and breakfast. I’d been injured earlier that week, trying to help my autistic son get dressed. So I arrived with three cracked ribs and John, Greg and Sara took care of me, lifting me from the booth where we had our celebratory dinner and — when we got back to our cottage — settling me gently into a chair with pillows to support my aching side.

We stayed up that night drinking port and eating apple slices and sharp cheese by a slow-burning fire. Quite late, Greg began speaking in a broken voice about my injury and our afflicted sons. He wept.

“It never gets easier,” he said. “I wake up at night wondering what’s going to happen after I die. But then I think of you guys, in the same situation …”

Sara nodded, leaned over to kiss her husband and put one thumb to the tear rolling into his silver beard. “Finding you two has been … healing,” she said.

Then they hugged us both and left for their own cottage. John ran a hot bath and eased me into it, holding me carefully so I wouldn’t slip. We climbed into our pedestal bed that night, with Greg and Sara next door. And I felt as safe and cared for as I ever had in my life.

I assumed we would take this friendship to our graves.  But shortly after that weekend, small fissures began.

- – - – - -

Look back at any relationship that’s splintered and you’ll probably see a series of wrong turns leading up to the end.

My first marriage, for instance. There was no defining event: no affair, no beating, no fight so cruel it couldn’t be taken back. There were, instead, a number of bad decisions whose consequences we suffered together until there was simply too much difficulty between us. So it was with Sara and Greg.

We talked about everything, from condo association problems in the building where John and I lived to employee hassles at the cafe Greg and Sara owned to parenting decisions involving our five collective kids. Looking back, it’s clear this was a problem. We definitely overstepped and overshared.

Take the bitter fight that John and I had over a $12,000 plumbing bill. It was a horrible episode — the biggest rift ever in our marriage — that somehow escalated to a point where John stormed out of the house and stayed gone for several days.

While things were still heated, we made the colossal mistake of airing the fight to our friends. Sara immediately took my side; Greg was stoic, but it was clear he skewed toward John’s. Once the episode was over and our marriage repaired, Sara asked me over for dinner, alone, to talk.

“I still love you,” Sara said, “but I’ll never feel the same way about John. So far as I’m concerned, you never should have taken him back.”

Greg was quiet for a moment. Then he said simply: “Sara and I disagree about this. Please give John my best.”

We resumed as best we could, Sara bristling and John on edge. It wasn’t like before, but I was determined to get back that perfect foursome we’d been in the cottage on that dark September night.

- – - – - -

It was as if something invisible had broken. On the surface we looked the same, but now nothing quite worked.

It had long been our habit to meet for dinners where Greg and Sara would cook and John and I would supply the wine. But suddenly, the invitations were waning. So I tried switching it up, inviting them to our place and stirring risottos until my hand went numb. These were awkward events, full of silences; neither of them could hide their disappointment in my lackluster meals.

Also, now that they were coming to our house more frequently one of my teenagers had revolted, saying it was fine to have one stepparent but too much to have three. “Greg and Sara are your friends, not mine,” she said. “I don’t really want their opinions about my life.”

Gradually, our dates grew farther apart and we talked less in between. During a rare walk in spring, Sara told me they were cutting down their social circle. “We’re excising the B list,” she said. Then she paused. I felt an icy sense of dread.

There was one more dinner — a potluck that was weird and strained. Greg and Sara had decided to move down South, help take care of her aging parents, and start life afresh. They were leaving in a couple of months. They said they hoped we’d stay in touch.

But when I sent an email a few weeks later, it went unanswered. I followed with a text message, forgetting I was using a new phone. “Who is this?” Sara texted back. “It’s Ann,” I keyed. “Sorry. Forgot to give you new #.” Silence followed, reproachful and complete.

I thought about begging, calling their voice mail to say: “I miss you. I love you. Can’t we try again?”

I didn’t, for two reasons. The first was my pride — but I could have gotten over that. The second was that John no longer wanted to try; so far as he was concerned, the relationship was dead.

We limped through months of bad dates, with couples we found at John’s workplace and at mine. But some element of the four-way chemistry was always wrong. There was a brief relationship with an editor and her longtime boyfriend. We had hopes for them until the night they showed up for dinner, grim-faced, and told us they’d broken up earlier that day.

Meanwhile, I stalked Sara and Greg online, where they posted news of their going-away party, their older son’s wedding, and their new home. They looked so happy in the photos! Each time, I welled up with affection. But they were gone and our weekend nights were empty. I was sure we’d never find friends like that again.

- – - – - -

Shortly after our dinner with the boat captain, a close friend of mine who’d been widowed announced that she’d reconnected with her high school boyfriend and they were planning to marry within the month.

John and I went in wary. Expectations were very low and, sure enough, our first dinner as a foursome was strained. I don’t know what made us try again. But over the next year, something quiet and comfortable grew. Each of us is equally invested and every permutation works; in other words, no one’s taking sides.

We meet once a month or so to talk about almost everything: Our careers, our plans, the puzzlement and joys of our seven collective adult kids. But we don’t get emotionally tangled in each other’s intimate lives or occupy each other’s homes.

I still miss Greg and Sara, but in the way you do a youthful romance so fierce and consuming it burned itself out. We needed them too much; the power dynamic in our relationship was off. What we have now is less dramatic but more durable — much like the marriage John and I built when we came back together.

As a couple, we finally grew up.

Slovenia is a gorgeous country, lying just east of Venice and south of Vienna. Full of cliff-top castles, mysterious caves, waterfalls and alpine fields, it looks like the backdrop for Grimm’s fairy tales. The most culturally and economically advanced of the former Yugoslav Balkan states, it weathered the Balkan Wars unscathed, and thrived within the Habsburg and Napoleonic empires, under which it was known as Illyria. Slovenia’s prosperity earned it the EU presidency in 2008, and its adherence to tradition and government-protected industry makes it, both economically and socially, the sort of unprepossessing country that Western powers may come to envy.

But centuries-old traditions still lurk in the idyllic mountains, some more ominous than others. It’s not unheard of during prenuptial celebrations for one’s “friends” to tie the groom naked to a wooden cross and smear Tabasco sauce on his balls. Needless to say, I didn’t invite any Slovenes to my bachelor party. But on the morning of my wedding I was faced with an ordeal of my own, known by the menacing title of the šranga.

Šranga (pronounced “shranga”). The name conjures up some Polynesian tribal tattooing ritual or a horror movie involving saws. Neither image is far off.

Three hundred years ago, a stranger coming to a village, intent on marrying the local beauty, would have had to prove his mettle and competence as a provider. In the remote alpine settlements of the 18thcentury Habsburg Empire, that meant being a woodsman. I should say that I’m not particularly good with my hands, aside from typing, which definitely doesn’t count. As a soft-palmed American city boy, my idea of a big adventure is to order an extra shot of espresso in my mocha frappuccino. So I was pretty darn nervous, as I approached the scythe-wielding villagers blocking my path to the Baroque church, framed behind them by precipitous white-capped mountains.

My experience of Slovenian wedding customs began the week before our big day, when the next-door neighbor and a band of followers came over by tractor, dragging two enormous pine trees. They proceeded to shave the bark off the pines, with my help (my first tree-shaving experience, though not the last), then drilled holes in the earth and erected the shorn trees on either side of the driveway. The “Erection of the Pines” at the home of the bride is a long-standing, and almost certainly Freudian, tradition. As with most Slovene customs, it was followed by a long night of homemade schnapps-fueled revels, and the consumption of much illegally produced smoked pork, prepared by the next-door neighbor who, disconcertingly, always seems to be laughing maniacally.

On the wedding day, flanked by 100 wedding guests who watched from the roadside, and aided by my four groomsmen (none of them particularly handy with a hatchet) I stopped before the roadblock. Six burly villagers, all dressed in dark green hunting uniforms, their hats incongruously decked with flowers, stood with their arms crossed. They looked like a rugby team whose bender had been rudely interrupted. Behind them I saw the instruments of my impending tests, the ax and scythe and saw: the Slovenian equivalent of hot coals across which I would walk.

It’s easy to see the šranga as a sort of preparatory exam for the rigors of married life. Instead of ax wielding, maybe in this digital age we might swap in a test of word-processing, programming a Web page, and cheating on your taxes. But whatever I had to do, no matter how difficult, was a rite I was eager to endure, if it meant that I could marry the love of my life. The goal would be not to lop off any useful body parts in the process.

Bring it on.

I was led first to perform the žaga, “the sawing,” in which I would have to team up with my best man, a skinny Spanish lawyer, in splitting a thick log with a rusty saw. Testing our powers of observation, the villagers presented us with the saw upside-down. I may not be the sharpest tack in the box, but I could tell we weren’t going to get too far with the saw-teeth facing upward. We flipped the saw over and sunk it into the log, beginning the surprisingly difficult rhythmic sawing that was required. Those saws want to bend when we wanted to thrust (there’s an analogy to married life in there somewhere). The villagers lubricated our efforts with white wine, first poured over the saw and then into our mouths. I remembered wondering if wine stains and wood shavings can be dry-cleaned out of a $2,000 Ralph Lauren Black Label suit.

Whatever. I was in the zone. The first test was passed.

Now came the sekira, or “the chopping,” in which my ax-work was put to the test. As I am only slightly more coordinated than a drunken orangutan, this had both the villagers and the guests worrying. An ax was lodged in a tree stump in the middle of the road. I would have to whack the stump in half, preferably without losing any of my own limbs in the process. After five or six mighty hacks, the villagers decided to take it easy on me, and allowed me to move. Had I been obliged to cleave the stump in two, the wedding would have had to be rescheduled for the following Tuesday.

A pine tree had been felled across the road and suspended on two wooden horses, and I was next obliged to shave off its bark — good thing I had practiced during the “Erection of the Pines” a week before. A good 10 minutes of tree shaving, and I’d developed quite a sweat, which was almost certainly staining my Ralph Lauren suit. But it must be said that Ralph designed a surprisingly comfortable suit, with good freedom of movement, ideally suited for shaving pines. My confidence was rising. Three down, two more to go.

Bales of hay had been scattered across the road, beside a rickety horse-drawn cart. I was handed a wooden pitchfork, one of those diabolical two-pronged numbers that looks like it might’ve fallen out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. One of the villagers hopped into the cart and began to push out the hay as I scooped it in. Feeling brash, I dumped my next load of hay onto his head. Then I froze for a moment, wondering if I had just made a faux pas that would result in him practicing the sekira on my clavicle. The villager turned beet purple and burst out laughing.

The hay back in the cart, I was faced with the last test: I had to sharpen a dulled scythe with a hammer and anvil. This might have proved a real challenge, but I had been given some covert training. A group of family friends pulled me aside at a barbecue some weeks before the wedding to give me the lowdown on scythe sharpening. Now I was totally in the groove, and even clanged the hammer down in rhythm to the live accordion polka music that provided a memorable, if not pleasurable, soundtrack to the morning’s events. Maybe I could make it as a Slovenian woodsman after all?

The final step before I could enter the church and wed my beloved was the barantanje, “the haggling.” I had to buy my bride from the villagers — easier said than done, when I had to negotiate in Slovenian.

I didn’t like the sound of this “wife buying” business from the start. Having to buy your wife brings to mind mail order catalogs and, of course, prompts the sticky question: Exactly how much is she worth? $12.99 per pound? That was the cost of the outstanding illegal smoked pork provided by the neighbor, who had been laughing maniacally throughout my šranga. It’s an awkward idea to fit a price to the love of your life, but it’s even weirder when you’re also expected to argue the price down.

At least my future wife didn’t seem to mind being considered a tradable commodity. So if the tradition called for me to buy my wife, then, darn it, buy her I would. But not before driving down the price. The trick was to convince the villagers to cut me a deal without belittling the bride in the process, and risking that she might shave my pine tree when we got home.

My best men and I developed a strategy. I brought a Lonely Planet guide to Slovenia with me that morning, and I began the negotiations by stating that, according to my guidebook, the villagers were obliged to pay the groom in order for him to take the bride off their hands. In my opening gambit, I said firmly that I would not marry her for less than 300 euros.

The best defense is a good offense, and this had the desired effect. Normally the groom is meant to squirm and argue about the sorry state of the village pavement or the odd odors from the fertilized corn fields or the fact that farmers are always laughing maniacally at nothing in particular, and thereby lower the price. But grooms regularly pay around 1,000 euros, despite their protestations. I insisted that my guidebook explained the tradition very clearly: The villagers were expected to pay me. When they tried to convince me that it was the other way around, I had two Slovene wedding guests step forward and say that everywhere else in Slovenia the villagers pay the groom — this local village must have had it backward for the past few centuries.

My ploy wasn’t going to work forever, but it did sow confusion among my opponents. In the end I relented and gave them the sum I’d intended to pay all along — exactly 300 euros, plus another 12 that I found in my trousers. Not a bad price, considering that I was acquiring the love of my life (and only $2.36 per pound, if you’re keeping score).

The barantanje completed, and a not insignificant portion of my wife’s grandmother’s homemade schnapps (first prize in this year’s village tasting competition!), I was carried in victory up to the church, in the cart I had so recently filled with hay. Having survived the šranga, a little tipsy, a little sweaty, and covered in a lot of sawdust, the wedding could proceed.

While finding true love and maintaining a happy marriage are certainly tricky, getting married in this modern era can be all too easy. We just pop down to city hall, or drive to Vegas on the spur of the moment to be married by someone dressed as Elvis. Gone are the days of earning a girl’s hand through valiance, chivalry and attrition: of the future King Charles I of England galloping incognito across bandit-strewn 17thcentury Europe to woo the Infanta of Spain, of slaying minotaurs and climbing through fields of poisoned thorns. While I’m not sure how well I would do if it came to minotaur-slaying, I am grateful that I could prove my love through sweat and feats of manliness, both to the villagers, who would finally accept me as one of their own, and to my beautiful wife.

Lots of people say that they would “do anything for love.” But there, on that alpine hillside, with a sharpened scythe in my hand and a freshly shorn pine tree at my feet, I can truly say that I did.

His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn’t want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that’s when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Tom Waits. I was a musical theater fanatic in high school. My friend Catherine and I drove around in her Ford Explorer singing three-part harmonies to En Vogue and the “Grease” soundtrack. But I wanted to know Tom Waits, because I understood that knowing him was a tunnel to Jon, just like Ionesco, and Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong were also tunnels to Jon. I wanted as many tunnels as I could get. So I listened with reverence, and nodded, and hoped that I could discover some element that would explain Jon to me, or help him find me irresistible. But if I’m totally honest, what I thought the first time I heard Tom Waits was: This is awful.

- – - – - -

A 2002 GQ profile describes Waits’ voice as a clown crossed with a cherry bomb. Waits’ music can be lovely or it can be shot through with carnival menace, but it’s his voice that is his most distinctive quality, a love-it-or-hate-it growl that is sometimes comic in its desperation. It got wilder as he grew older, and his voice serves as a kind of carbon dating system: The early ballads are a boozy baritone; the later stuff is feral. My reaction to his voice at the age of 19 was similar to my first sip of Scotch. My face puckered. I wondered how anyone could drink this stuff. But after years of listening to Tom Waits, I have come to crave that kind of brutality. (After years of listening to Tom Waits, I also came to crave Scotch.)

That GQ story is my favorite profile of Waits. It’s written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to pen a blockbuster memoir about eating and praying and loving. But back then, she was a magazine writer fascinated by masculinity. She wrote a few books on the subject, which I’ve heard are good, and her piece on Waits fits into that puzzle, because he is an off-center, darkly poetic masculine hero. Before I ever loved Tom Waits, I loved guys who loved Tom Waits, and they had certain qualities in common. They all smoked cigarettes (often unfiltered). They loved booze (often whiskey). They drank coffee (black). They had flourishes of eccentricity: A fedora worn to the grocery store, a chain wallet, a deceptively casual method of cupping a flame as they lit a cigarette against the wind. They were reckless and tender and sullen and, good god, they were beautiful. The chips were stacked very high against me back then.

In my sophomore year, I fell in with a guy who practically worshiped at the house of Tom Waits. He and his gang of angry young men (which is what we called them) moped around campus with creative facial hair and a disaffected slouch that marked them as different from other kids who came from the suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque. “I’m interested in the commodification of violence,” one of those guys told me, stabbing the air with his smoking hand, and I went home and wrote it down, because it sounded so cool.

I listened to 10,000 Maniacs — classic, awesome nerd-girl band — and around that time Natalie Merchant recorded a cover of Tom Waits’ “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and the first time I heard it, my breath caught in my throat. It was so fragile, so perfect. “Well, I hope that I don’t fall in love with you / ‘Cause falling in love just makes me blue.” That’s exactly how I felt about the guy, who had sidled up to me at a party, and we had fallen into each other’s bodies in that slumping, slightly meaningful way, and the next day I woke up newly tangled about him, experiencing deep revelations about how gorgeous his eyes were, etc., etc., and all I could think was: No no no, not this again.

That song is one of the greatest ever written about the fleeting romance of last call, the way a dim bar and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s can conspire to make you believe you have lived lifetimes without ever rising from your seat. At the time, I did not quite understand this, but I would spend the next two, 10, 15 years of my life figuring it out.

The guy scoffed at the Natalie Merchant cover. How could a woman like her sing about drinking stout, about “these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand”? I swapped Natalie Merchant’s version in my five-CD changer for the soft grumble of the original, and I never looked back. The guy and I didn’t work out. But I had it bad for Tom Waits.

- – - – - -

I scored points with my next boyfriend for name-checking Tom Waits in an early conversation. The right guy would fall to his knees if you told him your favorite song was “Ol’ 55.” The acquisition of such knowledge was the upside to these botched romances. You would go into a relationship one person — an English major with a kink for Tom Wolfe and ’70s soul — and you would exit with a new list of names piled on your coffee table: Frank Sinatra and Joan Didion and the Violent Femmes. Your heart might be dripping from between your fingers, but hot damn, your CD collection was good.

This boyfriend was the guy who truly made me understand Tom Waits. Not because he explained him to me — the way he explained how to line up a shot in pool, or how to blow a smoke ring — but because I was crazy about him, and he broke up with me a month after we moved in together, and in the six months — OK, a year — after he left, Tom Waits became the soundtrack to my sadness. All those weepers about loving someone who left, leaving someone you still love, all the ragwater and bitters and blue ruin.

I listened to female singers, too. They were a pipeline to rage and melancholy — Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Billie Holliday — but I didn’t seek catharsis so much as I sought to understand, to sift through the wreckage and find some lesson here. Why did he leave me? What had I done wrong? And so on the nights when I felt like running my fingers over those scars I listened to Tom Waits, “The Early Years, Volume One.” I listened to the last track, “Old Shoes and Picture Postcards,” on repeat.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me, dear, and your tears cannot bind me anymore

And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes, and I’ll kiss you and then I’ll be gone

When I listen to that song now, I hear the same desperado cliches I know from a hundred country ballads. But back then, the words were a revelation to me, the final piece of a complex algorithm. You guys, you guys, I got it: He had to leave me, it was destined somehow, locked in our DNA that I would be the one standing on the balcony in my bare feet with tears streaking my face and he would be the one driving off into the sunset in his 1995 Honda Civic, flicking a Camel Light out the window. (This never happened, by the way.) Of course, there were other reasons for our rupture: He had quit drinking, and I had not. He was out of college and finding his way in the world, and I was pouring beer on people’s heads at my birthday party. He needed space, and I longed to be smothered.

But at the time, it was unfathomable: He kissed me, and then he was gone, and I spent the next six months — OK, a year — sleeping with him anyway, trying to get back some of the sunshine and safety I’d felt in his presence and feeling let down all the time. I wrote and produced a play inspired by losing him — it wasn’t about him, but then again, it was entirely about him — and every single night before the curtain rose I would comb the audience from backstage trying to find his face, waiting for the sick electric jolt I would experience when I saw him sitting there. And every single night he would not be there, and I would experience a wave of rejection before the show even began.

After the last performance, I got wasted on a Sunday afternoon. What else could I possibly do? I wanted to know. I fucking wrote a play about him, and he did not come. It seems obvious now: Of course he would not come. Of course he did not want to interrupt his busy life as a newly minted chef to sit in a drafty auditorium and watch some bizarre simulacrum of our time together. But I wrote with the idea that the sheer force of my desire could change his mind. I wrote short stories. I wrote letters I never sent. The thing is when we’re wounded everyone’s a bit insane, Tom Waits sang, and I lived it, man. And what I never stopped to appreciate amid all the soggy tissue and melodrama was that he had given me something far more extraordinary than a college relationship. Fifteen years later, the framed poster for that play still hangs in my hallway, one of the proudest moments of my life. That guy — I think I have his photo in an album, somewhere.

- – - – - -

Waits is such a guy’s guy that it takes a certain kind of woman to love him. I grew up in awe of my older brother — his music was the first guy’s music I ever learned — and part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)

It was hard to find my place in those songs, and in the macho novels I was obsessed with (books about war, books about madcap travels, books about drink and damage). What I never realized — what never occurred to me — was that Tom Waits’ greatest collaborator was his wife, Kathleen Brennan. A former movie executive wary of the spotlight, she has co-written much of his work since “Swordfishtrombones” and in his rare interviews, he speaks of her with genuine warmth. “I’d be working in a steakhouse if it wasn’t for her,” he says in the GQ article. “I wouldn’t even be playing in a steakhouse. I’d be cooking in a steakhouse.”

Maybe that’s what I needed: my own Kathleen Brennan. And where do you find them, anyway? Waits attributes Brennan to cracking open his sound, but it was no doubt her stability that enabled such a grueling, decades-long career in the sideshow. Every sinner needs a saint, or something like that. For a guy who used to fall off piano benches, Tom Waits looks pretty healthy in his old age.

In 1999, I saw him when he played at SXSW in the most-coveted showcase of the year. To say it was a spiritual experience feels too small. It was the best live music show I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine I will ever see a better one. I sat in the first balcony with a spectacular three-beer high — not drunk enough to be gone, just drunk enough to be right there — and I remember thinking how booze and music and storytelling were like God. Or maybe I should say: If that’s all God was, it was still a lot.

At 28, I fell in love with a guy who listened to Tom Waits. Of course I did. I assumed that every man I ever loved for the rest of time would be as besotted with Tom Waits as I was, just like he would be as besotted with booze, and cigarettes I could bum from him, and impulsive late-night trips to nowhere in particular, a night and a hangover we could share.

- – - – - -

The next boyfriend was the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend. He was a homicide detective in New Orleans. He was handsome and solitary. He told me stories about prostitute sweeps in the French Quarter and what it felt like to touch a brain. Decades of kneeling at the altar of such grimness was no doubt part of why I fell for him in the first place. I love gangster movies where everyone dies in a hail of bullets. My favorite show of all time is “The Wire.” It was one of a hundred reasons our romance felt written in the stars to me, but the funny thing about the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend is that he had never actually heard of Tom Waits.

He liked the Eagles. “I can’t stop listening to this song ‘Hotel California,’” he said to me once. “Have you heard of it?”

“In the seventh grade, baby,” I said, and ran my hand across his cheek, and he gave one those twisty little grins he offered when he felt slightly self-conscious. He didn’t pay much attention to music, or movies; they were necessary distractions from the soul-suck of the murder police. During the holidays, he kept the radio on the Christmas music station all the time (it drove his partner crazy).

But I knew he would love Tom Waits, just like I knew I would move to New Orleans and we would get married and have adorable babies with twisty little grins. I sent him “Small Change” with a note that said, “I am honored to give you your new favorite album.”

I went even further than that, actually. The first time I visited him in New Orleans, he took me to a bar where the cops hang out. (“Don’t mention you’re a journalist,” he said, which was a joke, but not really.) It was one of those epic nights. The whole bar singing to the Pogues. And when I got back to New York, I sent a gift to the guy who runs the place. Two Tom Waits albums, because the jukebox had a few empty sleeves, and I wrote something like, “These CDs are looking for a home in a smoky dive bar in the French Quarter. Maybe you can help them out.”

I was so pleased with myself, but it didn’t go the way I planned. The guy who runs the bar is a big Irish cop with a mustache — he is exactly the person you see in your head when I say “Irish cop”  – and the next time I saw him at the bar, he said to me, “Yeah, I listened to those CDs you sent. They sucked.”

I laughed, but I was scrambling to cover up my embarrassment. How could I have misjudged this so badly? I clapped my hand on his shoulder. “I feel like I’ve given you a fine Scotch, and you’ve pissed all over it.”

He looked around. “Do you see any fine Scotch around here?” He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. “Van Fucking Halen,” he told me, and walked off.

So there you go. There is a world of difference between the men who love Tom Waits and the men who live the life he writes about. When the detective broke up with me, four months later, it occurred to me I was on the wrong side of the divide.

- – - – - -

In 2006, Tom Waits appeared on “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I was struck when I met your wife, your family, how unbeaten by life you are,” Jon Stewart said at the top of the interview. “I used to listen to your music and think, boy, I’d like to lie in the street nearly dead with that guy.”

Waits nods. “It’s an act,” he says.

And I remember feeling weirdly betrayed by that. I mean, I knew it was an act, but maybe I didn’t? Nobody can ravage their body the way he purported to and then stick around for four decades. So of course Waits was sober. Of course he no longer smoked. But it was impossible to imagine him without the neon glint, the clang of empty bottles in the background. Consider: Tom Waits on a treadmill. Consider: Tom Waits juicing. Consider: Tom Waits, happy family man.

It was impossible to imagine my life without such wicked accouterments, too. I put off quitting drinking for as long as I could, but in 2010, I had to stop before my life tipped into parody, the 36-year-old drunk woman all dressed up and falling down. Since then I have been forced to wrestle with so many false delusions, like the one in which every romance comes with a pack of smokes, or the one in which I spend each night sinking into a vodka tonic, cold and fizzy and fantastic.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I loved Tom Waits so much. I talk to cool women who defined themselves by the riot girl sound, or Patti Smith, and I think, why wasn’t I like that? Maybe the embarrassment I feel isn’t about Waits at all. It’s about the girl who tried so hard to be someone she wasn’t, the girl who languished in her own self-pity, who posed so many ways for those boys to see. Those boys are all nearing middle age now. They have wives and children and mortgages and, if I had to guess, some nicotine gum lying around somewhere. I’m still friends with most of them. I wonder what they hear when they listen to Tom Waits.

I’ve heard that Waits doesn’t like those old songs, the songs pre-Brennan, and I wonder if what he feels is the tweak of regret and loss we all feel when we stumble on old pictures of ourselves. Not long ago I found a cache of them — me with a Marlboro Light in one hand and a giant margarita glass tilted dangerously in the other, me with a Dos Equis wearing a see-through undershirt staring at the camera like I’m trying to start a fight — and I laugh at those pictures at the same time I feel grief, and this is one of the qualities in Tom Waits I have long appreciated, the way a good feeling can get wrapped up with a painful one. I feel sad for all that I didn’t know then, but I feel grateful that I forged ahead anyway. I feel sad that it’s gone now, but grateful that I had it. I feel sad that I spent so many hours wanting those guys to love me in a certain way — all that time and energy and agony wishing the world could be something it was not — but I feel grateful that they did love me, all of them, in the way they knew how.

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

In our small Cape Cod junior high school, I didn’t know a single openly gay teenager. As a 13-year-old feminist who didn’t shave her legs, I was the closest thing most people got. Before my best friend, Jessica, and I started kissing each other, most of our classmates assumed we already were. In truth, all of my early sexual encounters were with men: thrilling and frightening interactions, marked by my inability to say no. I had the body of a 20-year-old before I even got my first period, and being mistaken for sexually precocious by my peers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My early exploits with older boys garnered me a reputation as a slut in middle school. Compared to that harassment, it was easier to let people assume I was gay. Being a slut implied an unwieldy desire, an essential vulnerability to sexual need. Whereas being gay just implied a rejection of men. But kissing girls came with its own complications

Bisexuality made sense to me, in theory, before I ever kissed a girl. And this was pre-Madonna kissing Britney Spears, pre-“Girls Gone Wild” (at least in my house, where we watched only PBS). My conception of girls kissing girls was not defined by a male gaze; I grew up with books like “Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism” on the shelves. My mother was a Buddhist therapist, and I had known before our landmark conversation that she not only identified as bisexual but moreover understood that being one was largely unremarkable. It seemed logical to me that people were bisexual until proven otherwise.

My brother and I lived in a house where sexuality was treated with no aura of shame, no tinge of the illicit. There was never any reference to the proverbial “birds and bees,” but our lexicon did include words like “fallopian tubes” and “ovulation.” We were both born at home, and I was even present for my brother’s birth. If I had been a different sort of 4-year-old, I doubt my parents would have allowed this, but in the pictures, I am far from traumatized by my mother’s cries. I am strutting around the birthing room, a toy stethoscope dangling from my neck, and perched between the midwives, attempting to take my mother’s pulse.

Unfortunately, this wholesome experience of the human body couldn’t prevent me from hating my own. By fifth grade, the attention that my precocious figure attracted from men scared me, but it was better than feeling freakish and fat, which was how I’d come to see the C-cup chest I’d exhibited before any other girl my age. And my pulse whirred to the feeling of breath on my neck, hands on my waist; I liked being wanted. Everything that followed those flirtatious entreaties, however, left me numb and ashamed. After a year of crude gestures and loud whispers in school hallways, exploring my nascent attraction to girls seemed a safer path.

In junior high, instead of Katy Perry’s early ’90s equivalent, I was listening to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Like Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics — Rebel girl you are the queen of my world … I know I wanna take you home / I wanna try on your clothes — my desire for girls was, at first, more romantic than erotic. My lust was meshed with other kinds of longing, with the devotion of friendship and admiration. Jessica and I had a more intimate relationship than any I’d known, and I’d always had intensely intimate friendships with other girls. Kissing seemed, in some ways, not a far leap from cuddling.

And when Jessica kissed me, on the sunlit bedspread of my childhood room, I felt the same delicate churning in my abdomen that I had when the older brother of a friend pressed his lips against my bare shoulder and squeezed my hip with his broad hand. I wished I was gay, that I could elect to direct my body in that seemingly less perilous direction. But when Jessica wearied of being different from everyone else at our school and started spending more time with the soccer team than with me, I wished I didn’t miss her so much, that I could believe a boyfriend was the solution to my heartache.

Instead, I found a solution in Lila — my first official girlfriend. A couple of years my senior, Lila had ceased attending our local public high school in favor of what appeared to be a liberally defined home schooling. She had short, messy hair; didn’t wear makeup; and introduced me to Otis Redding and Kristin Hersh. Years later, I discovered girls who dressed like boys, and thus discovered my true type, but at the time, she was a revelation. When my little brother starting dating Lila’s little sister, Maya, the four of us would spend afternoons riding ramshackle bicycles down the rural miles between our homes, cooking vegetarian meals, and then making out in our respective bedrooms.

If this post-’60s Rockwellian teenage vision makes my hometown sound like some kind of East Coast Berkeley, it is a misconception. Our town was a liberal one, relative to other small towns, but we were the exception, not the rule. I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my school, and tired of school altogether, which I’d already decided was not the quickest way to become a writer — my plan since childhood. I officially dropped out after freshman year, and replaced it with my own reading list, and Lila.

But if I’d thought that removing myself from the mainstream would solve my sexual conflicts, I was wrong. Lila had conflicts, too. Under the covers of her bed, I grew to know a certain shadow that would fall over her face — a look that often preceded tears. Neither of us ever fully articulated those doubts, but I knew that something in our sex scared her. I thought I recognized the tinge of shame. Perhaps the teenage girl secure in her sexuality is a chimera altogether, but being queer in a homophobic society tends to present special challenges, regardless of your background. The fear I felt kissing Lila in public caught me off guard. There was a part of me that wondered if I wasn’t really just straight. Did I have a choice? Was being straight the easier choice, in the long run? How much had my mother’s experience influenced me? When not dry humping each other’s legs to Tori Amos, Lila and I were often crying, without really knowing why.

But despite the drama that infused our relationship, there’s no way I can dismiss it as experimentation. What part of love is ever not an experiment, however high the stakes? And I was in love. Being with girls was a safer place to explore my feelings, partly because they also seemed to have a lot of them, but it was also sexually exciting. There were so many prescriptions for how to love men, and how to screw them. Or rather, be screwed by them. The sexual passivity that I had been surreptitiously socialized in did not apply to sex with women. In my childhood bedroom, I had lifted Jessica’s T-shirt, moved my mouth down her chest, squeezed her hips with both hands. Lila and I might have had a maudlin relationship a lot, but we also spent most of our time together in bed. The excitement that had always been cut short by actual sexual contact with men went on for hours with her. Looking back, our love seems almost chaste — no toys, no talk, incidents of head I could count on one hand — but it was my first introduction to a desire that my body was able to consummate. I didn’t orgasm with a lover until the girlfriend after her, but it was with Lila that I first experienced my body (and hers) as a pleasurable place to inhabit.

It was also a lot easier to convince my dad to let my girlfriend sleep over on school nights.

My father is a sea captain, and so would often return after a three-month voyage to find me considerably changed. After one such return, he pulled into his driveway (my parents had split years before) and turned up the radio. “I Kissed a Girl” — Jill Sobule’s folky precurser to Katy Perry’s club hit — filled the minivan: I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/she was just like kissing me.

“So,” drawled my dad, with an awkward smile. “I hear you’ve been doing some of that lately.”

“Daaaaad!” I rolled my eyes, and unclasped my seat belt.

I was mortified, having no clue how lucky I was. A far cry from disturbed by my broad view of potential romantic partners, my father seemed to find it somewhat charming. Though he never knew the sexual harassment I suffered as a result of my earliest sexual experiences, it’s easy to see how much safer Lila must have appeared than the sketchy older boys I had a penchant for. Also, I think he probably associated me with my mother, whose bisexuality he also found unthreatening. Understandably, I think he’d have rather seen both of us with women.

To that end, I’ve been asked more than once if I think it’s hereditary. I don’t. I try not to be offended by the suggestion. On the Kinsey scale, my mother and I probably both hover near a 3. Of course, it’s not for me to exclude a genetic component with any certainty; I’m a writer, not a scientist, though I strongly suspect that it has a lot more to do with nurture than nature.

Since those days, I’ve been in love and lust with close to an equal number of men and women (not excluding a few who identified as somewhere between the two poles). At 31, I spend very little time entertaining definitions of my own sexuality. Thank god. I do not miss those early days of wishing I could be one thing or another, of wondering if I had an obligation to push myself in either direction. There was an important moment, a few years later, when I came to the startling understanding that I fell in love with people, that individuals’ personalities, pheromones and even fashion sense were more compelling to me than their gender. This is a cliché, of course. But I came to it on my own, and in the vacuum of my own experience, it was a true revelation.

Arriving at such a revelation, at such an age, and greeting it with the happy satisfaction that I did, requires a freedom that I had the privilege of taking for granted as a young person, though I know better now. Most of us circle back around to the models we were given in our formative years — not in terms of who we love, but how we love. It sounds stupid, but I am good at falling in love. That is, I do so with abandon, free of any reluctance born from shame. I feel entitled to love whomever I do, and as an adult, I have always fallen in love fully and frequently. Perhaps this is an innate human quality; I suspect so. But it is also a delicate, malleable impulse. We love as we have been loved, and as love has been shown to us. And I was loved with great abandon, and earnestly encouraged to love whomever my heart called for. And I know whom to thank for that.