As I get older, the friends who indulge me become fewer. I don't know when everyone falls through the hidden trap door, becomes an adult, and magically knows how to refinance their home. At thirty-four, I don't look, sound, or think that different from me at twenty-three. Neither, I reason, would the men I date. Still there's an unwritten rule that women between twenty-five and forty are supposed to like Don Draper. Dudes have got to have a lot of body hair, and you're supposed to spend like the next thirty years combing through it looking for a pot of gold or a sharable 401k plan. You have to hit fifty before dating someone half your age is considered cool, something Diane Keaton would strip off the old turtleneck for.

Of course, the number of young men I check out dwarfs the number I actually date. It is a whole five years and two jobs after the college freshman when I meet the twenty-one-year-old coworker. He sits a cubicle behind me, a part-time data-entry assistant working his way through college. He reminds me of every attractive guy in college I never got to date. The one who's nice enough to pass you the joint but then disappears off into the night to have sex with the annoying girl with the phenomenal knockers.

He seems so much smarter and less spoiled than boys I knew in college, working to support himself while he plays in two bands and goes to school. I am impressed by his knowledge of Middle Eastern politics. We talk about Stewart Copeland versus Sting, girls in the office who annoy us, and my dream where I give birth to a parrot. I attend performances of his jam band, even though watching a jam band ranks up there with sawing my own face off on my list of interests.

I even let a few things go that I wouldn't with men my own age. For one, "cats." The twenty-one-year-old uses the word "cats" to describe jazz musicians. Unless you played with Count Basie and follow it up with the word broads, or you have three teeth and your time on this earth is so fleeting that you are allowed the word cats because you're about to meet the ultimate Jazz Cat in the sky, you cannot use this word. I let it go.

This is just for fun, I say to myself. Fun, I tell others. something to pass the time. Age is just a number. The sweet chick-lit lies start piling up, until I could be drinking a cosmo, reading Cosmo, with my rabid dog Cosmo.

We first kiss after a holiday party. I tell him my age, and he is undeterred. "That's okay," he says, inching closer to me at a work party. "I like cougars." I kiss him awkwardly in the elevator. We make out in the subway on the train downtown. I marvel at my skills of ripe seduction. Jesus, why am I such a goddamn stud? I turn down his initial offer to go home with him. A week later, he calls me to hang out.

But in that in-between week, doubt starts to filter in. Expectations, the serial killer of fun. When we finally meet, I get pissed-drunk in the first hour, to prove I can knock back drinks like, what? A seasoned alcoholic? What is this even? What are you, cowboy? What is that? He brings his friend along to act as buffer, in case he is guerrilla-attacked by my vagina.

Five drinks become maybe a couple more than five. Somewhere along the night, the vadge buffer slides off into the night. It's on. It's so on. It's... oh. Oh wait. Wait. What's this? Things have taken an unfortunate turn. He is more sober than me. We have switched roles. He is the adult, and I am the drunken twenty-one-year old doing a never-ending keg stand.

I run out of the subway car at four a.m. because I think I'm going to throw up on the platform. He chases after. Back at his place, with visions of forty-year-olds who can shoot rainbows out of their vaginas, I give the old passion one last try. "Do you know how many times I'm going to blow you tonight?" I ask. "What?!" he responds. Somehow it sounds so much sexier in my head, like something whispered by brazen women with really bad highlights. I follow it up with "I don't want to be, like, the crazy woman you had sex with," assuring I will always be the crazy woman he had sex with.

The future of our relationship is summed up on the subway ride back the next day. He kisses me on the cheek and utters the words, "It's been real," like we are in a '80s movie drinking cherry Slurpees. He is Val Kilmer, and I am Joan Cusack.

He explains a week or two later why we cannot date. "It's the age thing, and the work thing." He starts to sign off IM with "Awright, dawg, I'm out," a clear sign we will never have sex again. Before, there is sex. Now, there is "dawg." When God is feeling cruel, there are even high-fives. 

The truth is, I want these relationships to work.  I don't want to be the woman who talks with her girl friends later about some young guy's stamina over hyper-pigmented cocktails. That's more depressing than anything I'm trying to escape. At some point, the extremely low probability that these relationships will last makes me want them to happen more. I have an ongoing fantasy about the against-the-odds relationship. Lovers separated by age, time, wars, intergalactic space travel, Bronson Pinchot. We'll be like Harold and Maude, just not disgusting.

I want the parts of these men that are immature to match the parts of me that are immature, superimposed over each other like tracing paper. Except instead of tracing, what I'm doing is more like trying to copy the mouse off the back of the matchbook to get into free art school. It looks like a stoned meerkat.  

It is the younger guys who end it, usually with a slow fade. Despite their ages, they've already figured out what I am still trying to grasp. They don't want to redefine adulthood with me, nor are they blinded by a fantasy of what they want this to be. They're just trying to graduate from college.