I have never thought of myself as an introspective person. Introspection means looking inward, and I have always preferred looking out. At other people. Sorting them. Filing them away in little drawers in my head, each with a label. It is a habit, the way some people crack their knuckles. Meet someone, assess, assign a category, close the drawer. It saves time. It means I rarely have to wonder about anyone.

It started in college, the first year, when a fraternity invited me to rush. I remember the physical recoil, my shoulders actually pulling back. I had heard the stories. Hazing. Humiliation. Pledges made to do things they would spend the rest of their lives not talking about. I could not picture what anyone got out of it. So I said no, and went back to my dormitory and my people.

My people were easy to categorize because I was one of them. Engineers, all near the top of the class. Slightly above average looking, if I’m being generous, which I usually am about my friends. Shy around girls. Loyal. Funny in a way that took a while to notice. I filed us under Friend, and I never felt any need to reopen the drawer.

I did go to one fraternity party. Not joining was a principle; going to a party was only curiosity. I lasted three hours, most of them spent holding a plastic cup of beer that tasted like bitter sparkling water. By the end I had a new category. The frat brothers were loud and certain, and they moved through the rooms the way men move through a shop. A lot of the girls seemed to have come to be shopped for. On my way to find a bathroom I opened the wrong door and saw a girl on the bed with three of them. She was not in any trouble. She was the one giving directions, loudly, and she looked back over her shoulder at the guy behind her and told him not to stop. I closed the door and stood in the hallway feeling like I was the one who had been caught.

What stayed with me wasn’t her. It was them. All three had the same face. The face of men who take what they want and expect to be thanked for it.

Arrogant. That was the drawer.

Fast forward a few years and we were all married, even my shy friends. Apparently there were women out there discerning enough to see that the arrogant ones made poor husbands. I met mine in my mid-twenties in Atlanta. Jenny. My college friends scattered to other cities, and Jenny and I built a new circle in our adopted one.

And there, in the backyards and birthday parties of our thirties, my drawers multiplied.

There were the nice guys, like me. There was the occasional arrogant one who had never grown out of it. And then there was the type I found most interesting: the reformed. Men who had been the brothers at that party and who, somewhere around twenty-five, had looked at themselves and flinched. They were a little embarrassed about who they used to be. They didn’t tell the old stories.

The wives sorted just as neatly. There were the discerning women, like my own wife, who could see through the swagger and had never considered those men for the long term. There were the women who married the reformed, and I privately thought they had done best of all. Those husbands had decided who they were, and they were grateful in a way the rest of us maybe weren’t.

And there were the women who married the arrogant ones. Or I should say ex-wives. The story was almost a template. Two children. A prenup, or a postnup, or some kind of nup the husband said his job required. Then one day she was out of the house and he was setting up shop with a twenty-five-year-old blonde. We all felt terrible for them. We told them to find a nice guy next time. One of us.

I had a drawer for everyone. I had my wife filed under Discerning and myself under Chosen, and I never once thought to check the labels.

What I hadn’t understood was that the discerning women came in two kinds. Some were exactly what they seemed. Others had loved the arrogant boys in college, loved them thoroughly, and then grown up and done the arithmetic. Marry that, and you get the divorce and two kids. So they talked themselves into the nice guy. The nice guy was a house. A family. Stability.

I learned this the Sunday Jenny hosted a luncheon for her sorority sisters.

They had flown into Atlanta the day before, checked into a hotel, gone out dancing and drinking like it was twenty years ago, while their children were looked after by their nice-guy husbands back home. They arrived late in the morning, loud and a little hungover, and I was cheerfully shooed out of my own living room.

I didn’t mind. I could not imagine anything more painful than two hours of women in their late thirties, none of whom I knew, discussing their children and their husbands and their jobs. I went upstairs to read. The bedroom door was open a crack, and their voices came down the hall. I don’t think they realized how loud they were.

Jenny and I had never talked much about who we dated before each other. I didn’t care, honestly, and she never asked about mine. She dated me, married me, had two daughters with me, and that was that. Our life faced forward.

So I wasn’t listening, at first. Then I was.

It was the stories. The parties. The fraternity house. Somewhere around the third story, the drawer I had them in slid open and I realized they were not the discerning women at all. They were the girls at that party. Every one of them.

“Remember that night at Sigma Tau,” one of them said, “with the four of them? God. I wish I could still do that.”

I set my Kindle face down on my chest. I had heard that women did that. I had not known they liked it. I had certainly not known they reminisced about it over quiche.

Then my wife’s voice. I knew it the way you know your own front door.

“Oh my God, yes. Remember Chad? The big blond linebacker from Arkansas? He’d hold me down for hours. I don’t think I’ve ever come like that before or since.”

They all laughed, and the conversation moved on to someone else’s best night, and I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

I am a rational man. For the next several days I said rational things to myself.

That last one I had to repeat more than the others.

But a worm had gotten into my brain, and it would not stop turning. It went like this. If Jenny was the second kind of discerning woman, then she had loved that life and given it up to be with me. Which, on the first pass, made me feel better. She had sacrificed something for me. That is a kind of love.