a difficult man

As has been heretofore related, Malfred was a difficult man to have as a friend, and of his acquaintances, only his rare lovers ever stuck around for long.  This was a dissatisfactory arrangement for all parties, but he was a sort of maven of misery, so anyone associated with him for any length of time would have wound up miserable anyway.

The problem with lovers, Malfred thought, was that they got his hopes up.  He'd long grown accustomed to distance from the people around him.  He had a handle on that sort of loneliness, he'd grown up with it, and around it, like a tree can grow comfortably around a metal pole.  The metal is wrong and off-putting, but the tree couldn't imagine life without it.  So it was for Malfred and his malaise, but for the women he loved.

By the time of his final separation, his tripartite romantic life seemed to him to be very sadly repetitive indeed.  For a pattern of events to occur once, he thought, was unique.  Twice was coincidence.  Three times, though, indicated a trend line which he did not at all like to ponder.  The bulk of his employment was spent in the thorough creation and study of trend lines, in a cold warehouse office with a concrete floor and a single bare light bulb to see by, and though he was well compensated for his excellent extrapolations, they never did him any good when he drew them from his own life.

He concluded, not unreasonably, that future relationships were likely to follow the same path.  An initial excitement would sweep away his concerns.  A prolonged period of intense discovery and elation would follow.  Eventually, those bursts of radiant joy would grow dimmer and quieter, and his new love would come to see him in his totality.  She would evaluate him, and herself with him, and see something, somewhere, that she did not like.  She would utter words of sincerest regret, and disappear like smoke into a dark, concave ceiling.

Malfred believed that he could not handle this happening again.  For someone of his unmatched jinxedness, he maintained a relatively sunny disposition, and was never prone to extreme thinking.  Even so, he trusted the trend line, and the trend line predicted that all future relationships would fail.  Some men, denied their fondest desire, will immolate themselves rather than accept anything less.  Malfred, clearly, was not one of them.

He swore off love.  Nothing so dramatic as a grand, vain statement in the theatrical tradition.  He simply adjusted his manners such that, even were a chance to present itself, he would respond in no way favorable.  No woman, he resolved, would ever again get close enough again to cause him any further pain.  He'd had his fill of it, and he was ready to carry on as he had, without investing his emotions into any other who might only go away again.

What a fool!  He should have known there are better ways to give up, and more likely to succeed.

But women always caught Malfred off guard.