So my wife and I took our niece out to see Wonder Woman today. It was my wife’s second time and our niece’s fourth, but I’d never seen it before. It was far too late for there to be any surprises but I don’t generally care about spoilers. I just like a story well told.

And I really enjoyed the movie. As I’m a middle-aged, white, cishet man, no one’s starved for my opinion but I liked it. We all had questions and we each noticed things and we had a nice conversation about it in the car. But during the credits, my wife recognized the screenwriter’s name and had to look him up. After some research she discovered this writer was the same person as her “first love,” a childhood friend who’d grown up to do big things. She wondered whether she should bother to reach out and say hello to him on Twitter.

“I can see where this is headed,” I said. “You’re going to rekindle your acquaintance with him, and then you’ll have a fast friendship, and then a close friendship, and then there’ll be phone calls and maybe a flight to the coast.

“And then one day you’ll announce to me you’ve had enough of my crap and need some time alone to think about things. Which is reasonable, because I’m a crappy husband: I don’t do chores, I’m a child’s toybox of psychological and emotional issues, and I’m selfish about my interests. Why would you want to stick around for more of that as my body slowly falls apart, out here in the Midwest?

“Whereas with him, you’ll get your creative space. He’ll hook you up with a robust community garden. You’ll return to painting and music and dioramas. And you’ll finally get your fantasy of a medium-height, dark, curly haired Jewish man with glasses.”

She thought a moment, then said, “I don’t like dark hair that much.”