I once almost married a man who, when he ran out of toilet paper, used coffee filters. He wasn’t lazy so much as uninterested, at least in regard to domestic necessities. He still had furniture from his days as an undergrad—milk crates for ottomans, sun-bleached, lumpy leather couch. He was forty-three when I met him. I was twenty-four.

He was a professor of Composition and Rhetoric. When he spoke in class, he could make, as my grandmother would say, a body forget their years. I met him when I was getting my Ph.D. in Literature, which I never did. “Never mind,” he said, you can make a living as a salad chef.” My salads were really nothing special, but he had never seen anyone use purple cabbage or make their own dressing, and he regularly exclaimed over my ingenuity. Maybe I should have been insulted by what he said, but it was so ridiculous, and he so clearly didn’t think less of me for dropping out, that I laughed. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I did feel that he’d given me permission not to write “The Power of Coin: Domestic Economies in the Victorian Novel,” the temporary title of my nonexistent dissertation.

I don’t think the coffee filters and furniture and batik throws on the windows qualified him as a cliché. He wasn’t absent-minded—in fact, he was meticulous about his environment, just not in a way that seemed very hygienic. He used one pale orange hand towel in the bathroom, washed and rewashed, till, holding it to the light, you could see through it.  He always had five or six legal pads scattered about his sagging apartment, each covered with his chicken scratch, and if I moved one, say from one end of a table to another, he grew tight-lipped and sullen.

I adored him. He may have looked like a lost cause, but he was the smartest man I’d ever met, big and booming, with a basso voice and a slightly lewd, crooked smile that made me understand the phrase weak in the knees. He smelled of coffee and cigarettes and shaving cream. He was a patient, attentive lover. His self-deprecating wit made me laugh. With him, I felt like a real grownup.

He was an ex-alcoholic—recovering, he taught me to say—which he said explained the legal pads. They were a hodgepodge of journal entries, shopping and to-do lists—I did my best to decipher them when he fell asleep. Writing on different pads at different times of the day gave him structure, he told me.

When we started, he was only three years sober from a lifetime of drinking—like since he was ten—and he was still as untutored in lifeskills as a toddler. Six months into our relationship he was promoted and didn’t know what to do with the extra money. I gave up suggesting a house—or at least an apartment that didn’t scream keg party—It made him jittery to talk about something more permanent, the way he used to feel when he was drunk, he said, and would throw furniture at his two young sons or chase his ex-wife out of the house. So I took him to my bank to open a CD. Not that he couldn’t have done it himself, just that I knew he never would.

Another time he decided to get a new car—well, I talked him into it two years in, declaring that I’d no longer ride in his truck, with its palpable coils in the seat and the reek of the five-years-worth of cigarettes he smoked to help him keep sober.

He walked into a Buick dealership and pointed to a blue Le Sabre. Then he sat down to write a check for the sticker price. Luckily, he called me in the middle of the transaction and I spent my lunch hour haggling for a better price. I was working in a bookstore then; until I met him I had hardly thought of myself as a financial wizard.

He liked to eat in old coffee shops with torn Naugahyde booths and bitter coffee in glass pots served by waitresses out of central casting. I liked that until I didn’t. To please me, he would sometimes take me to a nice fish place near my apartment, but he was curt with those waiters and always ordered the same thing: fish and chips, no matter how fresh the daily special was. Smoking in restaurants was phasing out then, but the old coffee shops were the last to go.

After three years he told me that I was the best thing that ever happened to him. He suggested moving to a new place together. He promised to stop smoking and buy new furniture. I was so happy.

But then he found fault with every place we looked at. When I grew frustrated, he said it had been a busy semester. He needed to pay off his credit cards. He had missed too many AA meetings.

“But this was your idea,” I said, hearing the desperation in my voice.

He hugged me, kissed the top of my head. “I was wrong,” he said. “Just be grateful I’m not drinking. I can’t do more right now.”

I told him I wasn’t grateful for something I already expected.

He shrugged.

Why didn’t I leave him then? At the time I would have said I couldn’t stop wanting him just because he kept disappointing me. Now I know I stayed because I mistook what I wanted for what I needed.

I was twenty-eight, but I was still so young.

Eventually I did leave, though too late to spare me enduring anguish. He pined for me but didn’t try to stop me. After him, I whittled away at what I expected from love, till finally, I expected almost nothing. No man I’ve been with since, even the one I eventually married, has ever disappointed me.