Wanda from Flagstaff, Arizona

A lovely question, Wanda. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed a shared dessert meant something.

You wrote in asking whether it's alright to order the most expensive thing on the menu on a first date, or whether that marks you as forward, grasping, unrefined — a woman who doesn't know her place at the table. Wanda, darling, sweet Wanda from Flagstaff, order the lobster. Order two lobsters. Order the tasting menu and the wine pairing and a second dessert to go, because I promise you, whatever a man thinks of your entrée choice will not save you from what he is actually capable of, and I learned that lesson from a falconer named Dennis at a Renaissance faire outside Sedona, and I have never fully recovered.

It was October. The leaves were doing that thing leaves do, the golden hour was doing that thing golden hour does, and Dennis — Dennis with his leather gauntlet and his kestrel named Gerald and his absolutely devastating jawline — leaned in over a plate of nachos I had generously agreed to split fifty-fifty, and he said to me, "Priscilla, I have never met a woman who understood the ancient bond between hawk and handler the way you do." Wanda, I wept. I wept into my nachos. I thought: this is it. This is the man who sees me. Six weeks later I discovered he had three other kestrels, three other Renaissance faires, and three other women who also believed they understood the ancient bond between hawk and handler. Marjorie in Tucson. Denise in Prescott. A woman known only as "The Falconress" in Cottonwood, whom I never met but whose existence haunts me to this day, largely because I do not know if that was her real name or a title she had earned.

Do not make my mistake, Wanda. Do not split the nachos. Splitting the nachos is how it starts. It seems so small — a gesture of equality, of modernity, of not wanting to seem high-maintenance — but what it actually communicates, to a certain kind of man, is that you are willing to compromise on the fundamentals. And once you've compromised on the nachos, Wanda, you will compromise on everything. You will compromise on the falconry. You will compromise on the fact that he keeps a second phone "for work." You will compromise on the fact that his mother calls him "my little kestrel" in a way that should have been the whole ballgame right there.

Order the lobster. Let him see, immediately, plainly, on the first date, whether he is a man who flinches at the check or a man who says "of course, get whatever you'd like" and means it all the way down. This is not a test of his wallet, Wanda. It is a test of his face. Watch his face when the check comes. I did not watch Dennis's face at the Renaissance faire, because Renaissance faires do not have checks, they have wooden tokens you purchase in bulk at a booth shaped like a castle, and in hindsight, Wanda, that should have told me everything. A man who conducts his romantic life in castle tokens is a man who has already left himself an exit.

I want to be clear that I did not learn this lesson only once. I want to be honest with you, as I am always honest with my readers, even when the honesty forms a shape I cannot quite reconcile with my own timeline. Because there was also 2007, at my own housewarming party, in my own home, with my own onion dip, when a man I believed to be entirely unconnected to falconry turned out to also be Dennis — or a man enough like Dennis that I have simply never separated the two of them in my memory, and Wanda, I have decided that is fine. I have decided that some griefs do not need a filing system. Some griefs are just Dennis, generally, everywhere, always arriving with a bird on his arm and leaving with a piece of your capacity for trust.

What I am telling you, Wanda, dressed up as advice about a menu, is really a philosophy of self-protection, and I want you to take it seriously because it has served me so well. Here is what I have built, in the years since Dennis and the nachos and the castle tokens: a home with a moat. Not a metaphorical moat, Wanda — I want to be precise, because precision is a gift I give my readers — an actual shallow decorative moat, four feet across, that a very nice man from a landscaping company installed for me in 2011, and which I have stocked with two koi and a great deal of resolve. I do not let anyone cross the moat who has not first demonstrated, over a sustained period, that they will not itemize an anniversary dinner down to the shared bruschetta, which is a separate betrayal, from a separate man, that I do not have room to fully unpack today but which taught me that itemization is its own kind of cruelty, a cruelty with a calculator.

I have also, in these years, cultivated three reptiles — a tortoise named Bartholomew, a bearded dragon named The Colonel, and an iguana I decline to name because naming is how they get you — and I want to tell you, Wanda, that I trust these three animals more completely and more peacefully than I have trusted any man since roughly the Clinton administration. Bartholomew has never once claimed to understand the ancient bond between hawk and handler. Bartholomew has never asked to split anything. Bartholomew simply exists, slowly, honestly, on his own schedule, and Wanda, some nights that is the whole of what I want from love: someone slow, honest, and entirely uninterested in nachos.

I have three aliases now too, for reasons I will not fully get into, registered at three different post office boxes in three different counties, and I say this not to alarm you but to show you what a woman can build when she finally, finally stops waiting for the check to be split fairly. I am, Wanda, by every meaningful measure, thriving. I have the moat. I have the koi. I have Bartholomew. I have never been happier, and I want that for you too.

So order the lobster, Wanda. Watch his face. And if his face does the thing — the small flinch, the recalculation, the sudden interest in whether you two might "just get apps" — get up, thank him for his time, and go home to something that has never once let you down. A tortoise, perhaps. Or a moat of your own.

Learn from my mistakes, Wanda, and you can be exactly as happy as I am.

— Priscilla, who orders the lobster and answers to no one