I hate to think of my ex-boyfriend as eligible a month after we broke up. I prefer to picture him as a sniveling wreck, sitting in his darkened living room with week-old Vietnamese food rotting around him, as he musters up the courage to apologize and admit the error of his ways. My fantasy is spoiled by the fact that thousands of single women (and their mothers) will be paying $3 to look at his photo, assessing his net worth and genetic potential and then searching the Internet to get his address and phone number.

As a public service, to spare these women the expense of a background check, I'm happy to provide my insight into one of America's most eligible bachelors.

He officially became eligible last month after he broke up with me to pursue a lifestyle more befitting an up-and-coming screenwriter, soon-to-be millionaire and editor of the hippest humor periodical in the world right now.

He became attractive enough to be eligible months before that, when I became his girlfriend and forced him to stop cutting his own hair and start spending his money on clothes that don't have "MICHIGAN" printed on the chest.

It's harder to pin down when he became the love of my life. Maybe it was our first date. I was an hour late to our meeting place -- the World's Largest Six-pack of Beer (a romantic outing, for a comedy writer). He stood outside in the rain the whole time. When I ran up, breathless and apologetic, he told me that he would have waited all day. Maybe I knew when he drove for five hours -- in a car that would fetch $32 on eBay -- to be with me while I waited for my biopsy results. Or when he suffered through a tense family Christmas with me, when he could have been having a stress-free Chanukah.

Maybe he earned my lifelong love when he arranged for me to meet Jon Stewart, my biggest TV crush -- even though he had spent weeks listening to me exclaim, "He is so cute! So cute! Really the cutest Jewish comedy guy I know ... besides you, honey."

Maybe I never really decided he was the love of my life. I just knew from the way my heart beat when he was around or the way my mouth turned up when I heard his voice. Or maybe it was the way my stomach dropped when I told him I wanted to see him every day for the rest of my life, and he told me he wasn't ready for marriage, and didn't see it in his future.

I felt the same sickness in my stomach when I found out that a photographer would be coming out to take his photo for the magazine. (I was hoping he'd just send in his driver's license photo.) "You're not allowed to wear anything I picked out for you," I insisted, and he reluctantly agreed. I would have made an allowance for the green suede shirt I bought him for Valentine's Day if I had known that all he would come up with was red plaid boxer shorts.

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