I’m a numbers guy, so, as much as possible, I like to reduce my life to numbers. They are reliable (two is always two), though probably more comforting to me than they should be. As a computer programmer reminded me years ago, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

I also like to put my relationships into categories and then assign numbers to each category. My scale ranges from 1 for awful to 10 for perfect.

For example, I had a relationship with a coin dealer for many years. In the entertainment categor...