Our argument was peppered with the paradoxes of love and liberalism. What did it really matter what Chloe’s shoes were like? There were so many other wonderful sides to her, was it not spoiling the game to arrest my gaze on this detail? Why could I not have politely lied to her as I might have done to a friend? My only excuse lay in the claim that I loved her, that she was my ideal—save for the shoes—and that I therefore had to point out this blemish, something I would never have done with a friend, whose departures from my ideal would have been too numerous to begin with, and about whom the
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