“Your subscription has been successfully adjusted.”

That’s the response I got when I “unsubscribed” from a site called Trip Trivia. [1] For some reason, it made me think of my early dating years. [2]

There were girls I wanted to “go with” who, after a brief experience with me decided they would rather not. That was when I got this kind of message. I dated some very nice girls, but none of them had the generosity or breadth of mind—to say nothing of the vocabulary—to tell me that my dating requests had been successfully adjusted.

It’s hard not to be happy about succeeding. I wanted to do something—stop some of the clutter in my inbox—and they told me I had been successful.

On the other hand, “successfully adjusted” doesn’t quite capture the flavor of “I really wish you would stop hanging around and asking me for a date.” It works the same way, I have to admit. Her relationship with me has been successfully adjusted in the sense that it has been decisively ended.

On the other hand, Bette successfully adjusted our early relationship when she found my first two emails to her—both of which were celebrations of our first date—in her junk email box. Her spam filter had looked at my authorship and found it unfamiliar. Bette successfully adjusted my subscription by changing the spam filter so that my emails to her got through. [3]

[1] The word “unsubscribe” is in quotation marks because I didn’t ever subscriber to it.
[2] For those of you who don’t know me, the early years were my late teens. I had to go back to it in my late 60s.
[3] I can’t help thinking of Ellis Lacey, the principal character in the film Brooklyn, who, when asked for a first date, said yes for two dates on the grounds that the first one might no go very well.