If someone asks you if they are your dreamgirl, as my fiancee did just the other night, then you the accused have but one recourse: to answer yes, of course.

Do so emphatically. There’s no other way to around it. And you are still damned if you do, because then you are smack in the middle of the listing phenomenon–those discussions that send you back-back-back through every girlfriend you ever had, always weighing their considerable and undeniable charms against present company.

Lucky for me, my fiancee really is my dreamgirl: smart, beautiful, funny, and kind in all the best possible ways. But there was another one once, a girl who almost retired with the title because she was also the first girlfriend I ever had. Which is not to diss anyone who came between the first and the last of my dreamgirls. So are they all, all honorable women: with beauty of all kinds between and among them.

So I told my fiancee about my first girlfriend, as I have before, the story of meeting her at 14 when I was 16, of meeting her again two years later, and of staying with her in some form for three years in all. It ended badly, and I still feel bad about that, because I wanted so badly to be with her at that tender age. Now I think back and it’s one of my life’s great regrets: why couldn’t I just let her go?

Answer: because I couldn’t.

She is married, with a husband and two kids and a house in New Jersey, and we haven’t spoken in years. If I called her, she and I might feel like I still can’t let her go, and I don’t want to make her feel that ever again. So there it sits.

Meanwhile, the next morning, my fiancee came down with her hair pulled all the way back off her forehead in a way she never has before–in exactly the way my first dreamgirl used to wear her hair. She looked beautiful, as she always does, in a way that needs no makeup, but she also looked very much like the first dreamgirl I ever had, a brunette of a certain height at a certain time in my life. If I am in fact dreaming, then I hope I never wake up.