USING A SMARTPHONE matchmaking app that hadn’t existed the last time she’d been single, Liz embarked on a series of dates that were neither terrible nor particularly promising. The fifth man she met for a drink turned out to be someone with whom she had gone on one date seven years earlier, though neither of them realized it until they were seated across from each other at a restaurant on East Thirty-sixth Street and had been talking for ten minutes. The man’s name was Eric, and he was now living in the suburbs of New Jersey, divorced, and the father of a five-year-old and a two-year-old.

He was a perfectly pleasant person, but as they spoke, all the things that had bothered her the last time around bothered her again, with only the slightest particulars changed. She hadn’t been aware of storing this list of Deterrents to Dating Eric Zanti in her brain for seven years, but once it got reactivated, there was no denying that it was there: He didn’t read much, he said, because he was too busy. He enjoyed small-game hunting, though on a recent guys’ weekend with his buddies, he’d taken down a 150-inch whitetail deer. He thought his ex-wife spent too much time on Facebook.

In her twenties, Liz had lived with a roommate named Asuka who loathed grocery shopping; she said that looking at all the food in the aisles, thinking of the meals she’d need to fix, day after day and year after year, filled her with despair. Parting ways with Eric outside the restaurant—they kissed on the cheek, and Liz stifled the impulse to make a joke about seeing him again seven years hence—Liz understood Asuka’s despair, except with men instead of food. Even before she returned to her apartment, she had deleted the matchmaking app from her phone.