How not to date

I'd always been partial to the siren song of attractive women. It was just part of being Alfie Norton, I thought. And I'd never been able to resist it, until that talk in my hotel room with Ratione.

That night, as I looked back over the years and examined my romantic past, I realized that I always seemed to fall in with odious women. I began to think I might be masochistic.

Years later, I said to a girlfriend of mine, 'I'm dating you because I hate how happiness feels.' She gasped, and promptly slapped me.

(Her sister was an ever less sympathetic character than she, and so, needless to say, several weeks afterward I promptly began dating her.)