I was reflecting today, rather quietly, about how things went with Entropy.

I’ve wondered for quite a while how he managed to do what he did and still be able to look himself in the mirror. Cultivate a woman’s trust for months. Become one of her best friends. Give her emotional support when she needs it, so she comes to count on you. Know that she has been celibate for a long time and doesn’t want to have casual sex. Know that she’s looking for something meaningful.

So you pour it on thick. You talk about marriage and living together and creating a life together. You tell her how it’s safe to be vulnerable with you, safe to trust, safe to have sex. You do and say everything you know will get her to have sex with you, and you know full well she’ll fully be expecting a long-term relationship.

You get her to trust you completely.

And then you get what you want. She has sex with you.

Suddenly, you get scared. Suddenly, you “need to be present” with your girlfriend, when previously you and your girlfriend were basically “over,” she was moving to another continent, and you had no need to “be present” with her for five months before that.

Suddenly, you have issues with “long distance relationships,” when previously you’d said “it’s a small world” and talked about moving to be with her. Suddenly things are “complicated” when they never were before.

Suddenly, you have all kinds of issues that never once came up during the months when it was sooooo important that you have sex with this woman. Suddenly you think you can turn a woman who told you she has no interest in casual sex into a “friend with benefits.”

Suddenly, you find yourself saying the coldest, cruelest, most judgmental things that any human being has ever said to another. Ala John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons.

Wow. Pretty gut wrenching, no?

It reminds me of when I was in college in my “player” phase. How I got a really amazing guy to fall in love with me, and as soon as he got too close, I got scared and bailed. I didn’t even have a good reason. There weren’t any “problems.” I was just scared.

Three years later, I ran into him at the student union. This was a really hot, super successful fraternity guy. He sat there and cried for what I had done to him and his sense of trust in women.

I felt floored. I had no idea what impact I’d had on his life. I felt paralyzed. I felt ashamed.

But mostly I felt regret. The three intervening years would have been far more amazing if I had stayed with him instead of chickening out. He was an amazing, wonderful, very sexy guy. That’s an opportunity I never got back. My life is less for it.

It’s not my loss or his loss. It’s our loss.

Karma is a bitch.