Then, came Abi. He met Abi at a business event that I was also at, schmoozing furiously to help promote his photography business. Abi was round and gorgeous, and he was immediately smitten. Just as immediately, all our boundaries went out the window. He texted her constantly, texts about how he thought he could fall in love with her if it weren't for me, and she texted back how much she wished they could really be together. How do I know what the texts said? Because she sent them to me, with a "Just thought you should know" note.

He was so calm and reasonable-sounding, it had never occurred to me that he was completely full of shit. But as he started sneaking out to see Abi and pretending he was going to business meetings, as he lied to me about how much time they spent on the phone, I became more and more confused. We were in a non-monogamous relationship: he could fuck whoever he wanted, love whoever he wanted, and I was okay with it. So why was he acting like the cheatin' guy in a cowgirl song?

Dating Matt was like EXXXTREME DATING; it came with loud rock music and bright colors and a guy in a garish ski-suit snowboarding off a mountain in slow motion. He was fun, weird, and engaging: he glued a rhinestone to his front tooth and wore hand-tailored Italian shirts, went on impromptu road trips to the Mojave desert, adored a wall-sized oil painting of a man clubbing a baby seal that we found at the Pasadena flea market. He had so many friends and people came to him for advice on everything from their career to their grandmother. He put on a great performance of knowing exactly what he wanted and being able to ask for it: such a great show that I was leading the standing ovation in his personal audience. But as soon as I sat down, stopped clapping, and asked him what the hell he thought he was up to, everything fell to pieces.

I started calling him on his boundary-pushing. He got defensive, cried, got angry with me. At some point, he showed me the Excel spreadsheet he made to keep track of his sexual partners; crammed with designations like "hooker in Reno" and "French girl 1", had more than 170 entries. I felt cold. I didn't really care how many people he'd had sex with, but this seemed like compulsivity, the kind of frenzied drive for fucking that would edge out the desire for anything else. His behavior bore this out: it was more important to him to have whatever girl he wanted at that moment than to fulfill the agreement of our relationship. Once that became obvious, I ended it. He was still protesting to the last that he couldn't understand why I had said I was okay with open relationships, then tried to tell him what to do. He just had to be free, man.

Confused and reeling, I left for Australia to study at university. Matt was my first addict; despite his key-ring full of sobriety chips, he exhibited all the classic signs of someone who's just moved his yearning from Special K to boobs. I found myself suspicious of anyone who fiddled with their phone a lot, and I was always watching for hints of uncontrollable sneaking around: was that a lie? Were you really at a business meeting? I am naturally trusting -- some might say naive -- and after a while, the reminders of Matt and his manipulative, erratic behavior slowly faded.

Except for one thing. Matt was a musician, with two albums produced entirely with other people's money...mostly women he'd charmed and fucked somewhere along the line. They're all love songs. When I first met him, in the throes of that post-Burning Man intensity, I believed every line of the sweet professions, the sad demands for an explanation as to why she left. By the end of our relationship, not only was I one hundred percent certain why every one of those girls had ever left him, I couldn't even listen to the songs anymore.