I have an important theory about love. My theory is that if you fall in love with your best friend, or if your best friend is everything you’re looking for in a guy (and the list is a long and complicated one, so there are only—like—three guys on the planet who would be eligible for the position of “Mr. Perfect” anyway)…and if you fall in love with him and he doesn’t fall in love with you…he should at least have the decency to be gay.

Seriously.

But Michael D. Hammond III (“D” for short) is not gay. He’s smart, good-looking, and can be charming when he wants to be.

By that I mean that I’ve seen him be charming with other girls. And when I whine that he’s not nearly so charming to me, he holds my hand and smiles like I’ve said something darling, like he’s a proud parent and his little girl just said a bad word without knowing it was a bad word and isn’t she precocious? And then he’ll say something devastating like “Darling, you’re my soul mate; I’d never lie to you that way.”

And then he’ll kiss me on the forehead and I die. But on the surface? I just roll my eyes and say something bitchy to keep him from seeing how much it kills me when he says tuff like that.

Which makes me sound like a pathetic loser.

But the truth is that D knows how I feel about him, so the reality of the situation is that he’s a jerk, I’m a masochist, and we’re best friends.

And in a perfectly girl-psychotic manner, I feel the need to date and obsess over other guys in front of him. To taunt him with the idea of losing me to some other guy—not just my friendship but the wonderful future I’ve created in my imagination in which he realizes my brilliance, my charm, my wit, the something that makes me special.

I waste all my charm and flirting and brilliance on other guys, always for his benefit. I’ve perfected the art of getting the guy I don’t want, which most people find amazing, considering the fact that I’m a size 10 (okay , 12, whatever). And when you’re “fat” you’re not supposed to get guys. But when you’re desperately in love, anything is possible and although I couldn’t give a fig for these guys…they are there, litter on the ground, dust in my wake, casualties of unreciprocated love. Theirs, mine, ours.

I know that as long as D’s around I will never be able to look at another guy without thinking that he isn’t the one I want. And I wonder if I’ll ever fall out of love with D.

If only D had the good sense to like men. All of this could’ve been avoided.