Well, let me first set the confused little scene for you.

It's Nick's living room. The lamps are ambient glowing points of glitter in their softened luminescence, the wooden surfaces are reflective and brilliantly polished. There is a hanging fragrance in the air from our dinnertime candle, and the rain taps the panes in a hypnotizing mix of the thrilling and the subdued.

Now screech the melodic vinyl from the turntable and there is the TV strobing the room with the colors of The 40 Year Old Virgin, I am lazed back on the couch nursing a mudslide, and Nick is twisted on the floor with a basket of unfolded laundry, drinking water on the rocks from a pint glass. This is the meterosexual life.

I look over with guilt. I begin to ask if I can help him fold, but stop myself before I've asked it all the way. I know the answer...Nick, you see, has been a bachelor for long enough that he has a particular way of doing things, folding laundry included. It is one of the more unsettling qualities about Nick.

He's not a normal man—he's self-sufficient.

Nick agrees with me on the laundry. I would be of no help, no help whatsoever. I would just ruin everything, rust over his well-oiled routine and wrinkle the starchiness of his life. It's important to know one's place. But, near the bottom of the basket, he throws articles my way, knowing I do desperately want to help, to rust, to wrinkle. Cloth napkins and hand towels cascading over my lap, I ask if there's a particular way that I should fold them to fit properly in his drawers. He answers as as the truth comes to me crisply. No, it didn't matter, it couldn't matter, or he wouldn't have entrusted me to the task.

Ouch.

And, suddenly, I feel most apologetic to every man I have dated and one step further—every human being with which I have shared residence. I finally have a taste of what it was like to be you, the klutzy screwball.