Can people not see the futility of falling in love? Yet, against all advice, they do it over and over, time and again. Had Brockett Runyon not read the mirror-image memoirs by lovers Graychild and Williams? Had he not poured over the empirical data from the pivotal study by the team at MIT throwing Masters and Johnson under the bus? Had he not devoured The Trinitarian Foundation of Human Sexuality as Revealed by Christ According to Hans Urs Von Balthasar: The Revelatory Significance of the Male — Priesthood by Robert A. Pesarchick?

Had he not spent months distilling these lessons into visuals ready to go viral on his social-media account? Yes, yes, yes, and damn yes. Upon seeing them, did anybody care enough to change their bad habits? No, no, no, and hell no.

The most he got was thumbs-up. Once a visual was shared. He thought he would keel over from excitement until he saw it was his mother. His mother! When your mother shares or comments on your posts, well that just ruins a man’s authority right there. He thought of unfriending her, but what would her friends think?

Brockett was desperate. He bought ads on social media feeds. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Pinterest, for God’s sake. But other than a bunch of people paid by the click in Indonesia and India (home of the best practical advice on love: The Kama Sutra), he got nothing. He set up a website, got search engine notice through Google Console, then set up a Google Adwords account working the Keyword Planner to within an inch of its life to clean and clarify his SEO to more easily track campaigns’ conversions.

Before Brockett built his site and began his promotions, he thought he knew the face of desperation. But when he did everything asked of him that he was told would guarantee notice by the world at-large. When every day he checked his Google Analytics against his SM campaign schedule and found no uptick in site visits to indicate that increased notice. When reports showed the only hits he was getting were from countries in that block previously known as the USSR.

Yes, now Brockett knew desperation and it felt like a college hottie with all-natural breasts posing in white boots, skimpy lace everything, shaking pom-poms just begging for it, and he felt himself to be a lucky, lucky man, only…she was looking past him, over his shoulder, ogling his roommate — the glistening, half-naked sophomore tight end.

Angela K. Durden (Durden Kell, fiction pen name) is a Sisters In Crime author, songwriter, and more.