I can’t stand my best friend’s boyfriend. Please don’t look at me that way: I’ve heard all the Psych One ideas. Believe me when I tell you I am not jealous. No way do I want that slob. And I’m not lusting for my bff either. It would be convenient if I were gay – that would satisfy my Lesbian friends’ aspirations for me and certainly my dance card would never be empty – but orientation is not a choice. I may be a gay woman trapped in a straight body, but if so, I haven’t come up with an escape idea.

No, I don’t like Jerry and I never have. And it isn’t even the sort of interesting dislike that might spark into something else sometime. It’s way too boring for that.

Jerry and Jane met a year ago. He’s the second cousin of a friend of her brother’s, and the introduction occurred at their parents’ house. Everyone gathers there at holiday time and Jane’s brother brought some guy from his place, and that guy brought his visiting cousin. Jane’s brother lives in a big shared house near campus and it seems like there are always extra guys around.

I would have been there for the initial meeting except that my parents took a place in Hawaii and hauled all of us over there. Picture me: full-grown and climbing a short hill to 30, traveling with my parents and sibs. I couldn’t turn the trip down. It was an unusual plan for my parents to hatch, and they treated it as some sort of emotional pilgrimage.

By the time I returned, Jane and Jerry were a couple. I never had an opportunity to make the sort of disparaging comments that might have turned her interest away from him. She came over for dinner and announced that she’d met her future husband (!). She introduced us the following day and a week later he moved into her place.

Jerry is not good looking. He is overweight but his fat is not covering lovely (or even big) bones. As it is, he is so doughy that his face fat compresses his features and his fingers look swollen. He has big arms but they start at pillowy shoulders and they end in wrists as creased as a baby’s, so if they’re strong they are hiding that quality. He tucks a big black T-shirt into tight cuffed jeans and he looks like a lollipop. Even if he lost a hundred pounds he’d still have small close-set eyes, a bulbous nose and a boring mouth.

But I’m not small-minded. I can get past the physical specifics. My contempt for Jerry has structure and depth.

The guy’s an undereducated moron. He decided when he was about 14 that no one could teach him anything, and then he dedicated his future to proving that’s true. I have never met such a combination of ignorance and arrogance.

He believes in conspiracy theories. He tends to blurt out stupidities and then try to cover them, if he’s challenged, by acting like he didn’t mean his words – he was just provoking his interlocutor, or “testing the Internet,” depending upon his venue at the time. He mumbles predictions daily, usually about such momentous subjects as fashion trends or burgeoning revolts against “the man,” and he is almost always completely incorrect. But Jerry only remembers the statements he’s made that turned out to be true (“why, I predicted that studs would come back a year before they showed up on the runways!”), and even a broken clock is right twice a day.