"There is no such thing as the wrong man," says Marianne Faithfull in her song, "The Blue Millionaire." In 1964, when Faithfull first hit the British airwaves, her voice was a sugary but thin soprano. By 1979, four years prior to "The Blue Millionaire," it had undergone a staggering transformation - from stock songbird's warble to shredded baritone clef; a voice kicked down and rubbed raw by more than a decade of drugs and hard living. Few would call it a beautiful voice, but it's a deeply interpretive one - a voice that bruises even the sunniest of lyrics. In the "The Blue Millionaire," that voice might as well be saying, "there is no such thing but the wrong man." My life is peach fuzz compared to Faithfull's, but after three weeks in the dating pool, I'm beginning to agree with her.

Listen to Marianne Faithfull's "The Blue Millionaire."

I knew I wasn't ready for a relationship with Match Man. In fact, I'm not sure I'm ready for a relationship at all. (In high school I remember hearing that the period of recovery from a breakup lasts half the length of the relationship. If that's true, I certainly don't have the math on my side.) I had similar reservations about H and his love of Middle Earth, but in both cases I could have been wrong. Hadn't Ex resisted me in the beginning, sleeping with me (several times) but hemming and hawing when it came to actually making a commitment? I wasn't his "type." We didn't have enough in common. I had doubts, too, but we still managed to love each other for the better part of 12 years, no matter how fumbling or clingy that love sometimes was.

Why did we squelch our misgivings? The answer probably has less to do with overpowering romantic chemistry than extraordinary stubbornness. I wanted a boyfriend, damn it, and he was sick of calling out a new man's name every nine to eleven months. Our stubbornness was extraordinary, but it was also youthful, pure, tremendously optimistic - the kind of hardheadedness that descends from Mount Sinai, from total commitment and belief. This was the stubbornness that inspired hippies and poets to fight for free love and revolution in the 1960s. This was the stubbornness that resulted in a 12-year union between a self-fashioned swan and a book nerd.

Sometimes I still fancy myself a revolutionary romantic at heart, but most men my age - men in their 30s - seem less inclined to this particular breed of stubbornness.

Take Match Man. I treated him to dinner for our second date and, after dessert, planned to accompany him back to his apartment to return his generosity in the bedroom. But the meal left us both feeling stuffed and sleepy, so instead we parted with a kiss, he heading uptown on the subway and I, back to Jersey on the PATH. Over the next few days we texted skimpily back and forth. Then, last night, feeling guilty for not having communicated more verbosely during the week, I e-mailed him. My opener: "So - I haven't spoken to or seen you in awhile, and that makes me ansy. Are we doomed to the post-second-date doldrums?" His response: "I WILL admit I have been doing a lot of thinking about our dates this week. Both were absolutely lovely - I had a great time during both, and I meant everything I said, as I know you did. (And I don't just hop into bed with anyone, you know.) But I am starting to realize there are one or two things which mean we're not so compatible after all..."

The "one or two things" in question are 1. my smoking, and 2. "nothing [he] can really put my finger on, just a gut feeling." I know what Match Man means; I, too, had that feeling, but I suppressed it partly out of a sense of obligation (the man made me come, after all) and partly because the feeling in your gut can change. Once upon a time my gut craved Ex like food; now it turns at the thought of him. Throughout the relationship, occasionally it would insist on greater variety, grumbling for different men in unknown flavors. Less often it would call for a fast: no Ex, no relationships, just me sitting alone at an empty table, immersed in the introspective silence of hunger. I ignored these rumblings, and I'm glad. I can't remember if they occurred in the months leading up to the breakup. If they did, only then do I regret not taking heed.

I believe in the bubbling of the spirit, the fizzing of the blood, of a chemical reaction between lovers. It's the reaction I discovered with Ex, but not at first - at least not in its purest form. The distillation of our respective elements, the perfection of our chemistry, resulted from trial and error - from sex, embarrassment, laughter, hesitation, awkwardness, acquiescence; in short, from intimacy. Perhaps two people really can fall wildly in love at first sight, but the right combination of elements can also develop slowly, sometimes simply by virtue of the chemists' own stubbornness.

So says my revolutionary romantic side. The realist concedes there probably wasn't much worth fighting for with Match Man. Ditto with H. "Eh," shrugs my inner-realist. "Sure, there was a physical connection, at least on your end, but how much longer did you really want to pretend to be fascinated by Dungeons and Dragons?" Granted, in neither case do I recall hearing this voice until after I was rejected, but my inner-realist can be proactive as well, spurring me to do the rejecting.

Two weeks ago I had dinner with a Malaysian-American accountant at his Brooklyn apartment. To borrow Match Man's words, I couldn't "put my finger on" what exactly wasn't working. It may have been that he was too eager to please, or that he kept kissing me an inch below my mouth and grazing my chin with his teeth. ("What, no tongue on the first date?," he teased in his whispery, boy-man's voice.) For dinner he'd cooked pork tikka masala; I'd brought two bottles of wine and, to thank him for his cooking, a bouquet of miniature yellow roses. The pork was tender and the flowers sweet-smelling, but from the moment I laid eyes on him at the beginning of the night, I knew there would be no second date.

Were I all realist and no romantic - or were I simply braver - I might have said this. As it was, I tried to disregard my first impression - my "gut feeling." I even went so far as to joust tongues with him, probing for chemistry inside his mouth. But no amount of coaching from my inner-romantic could change how I felt. At the end of the evening, as I put on my coat, he asked if we could see each other again. I said I would call him next week, knowing full well I wouldn't.

I shouldn't have said I would call him. Match Man was honest with me - both in his affections and, two weeks and one date later, his decision to look elsewhere. H, too, was honest. He wasn't sure what he wanted, but ultimately he and his gut decided it wasn't me.

Perhaps I should give up searching for the "right man," at least for now. Perhaps, for now, I don't want a new relationship, just sex. Relationships I've done, but I've never had one-night stand, never played the role of gay Odysseus journeying homeward through the Land of the Zipless Fuck. Psychopaths and STD-carriers aside, perhaps only in the land of indiscriminate fucking is there truly "no such thing as the wrong man."