I hired a cleaning lady because my apartment had seen better days. She was going through my closet and found a bra in there. She made some good-natured joke about it and put it aside. It was the property of a woman with whom I had been engaging in relations on a roughly weekly basis. So, that weekend, the bra’s owner came over late at night and as she was packing up to leave the next morning, I said, “Oh, by the way, you left your bra here last time.” “I did?” “Yeah.”

I fetched it and handed it to her. Oh god, the look on her face. “That’s not my bra!!” She threw it back at my head.

Now, listen. It’s not unheard of for me to be a two-timing son-of-a-bitch if relations are just casual, as were these. But in this particular instance, I totally wasn’t. I just hadn’t cleaned out my closet in such a long time that a bra remained from a former fling who had moved to Eastern Europe six months prior. I explained how the bra’s occupant had been out of this hemisphere for over a demi-year and how it had been even longer than that since I cleaned my filthy closet.

Somehow, that didn’t help my case. And the once-a-week thing became a once-a-month thing, then a never-again thing. Sometimes you just can’t recover from a dating flub.