Don’t ask me why or how, but I keep dating guys named Evan. Without exception. It’s actually kind of eerie and disconcerting the more I think about it, which is probably a good sign to quit. Thinking about it, that is. I’m not sure I can quit dating Evans, since I never actually set out to date guys named Evan in the first place.

I thought I had broken my streak once, back in 1997, when I started to date a guy named Charles. Then two months into the relationship I met his parents and discovered that his real name was Evan. His friends just called him Charles. For short? For long? I don’t have any frickin’ idea. His middle name wasn’t even Charles, it was T-Fal. Don’t get me started on that one.

Things went predictably downhill from there.

Things went sour between the previous Evan (Evan 7) and I after he wrote a column about Columbine called “Revenge of the Nerds,” which I thought was unforgivably tacky. And he wasn’t even writing for the commune! I’d thought that dating a fellow columnist would solve a lot of those normal career-relationship problems, like living with someone who doesn’t understand your need to move in with a tribe of Kalahari Bushmen for a month to research a piece you’re writing on teen pregnancy.

Turns out I was as wrong on that as I had been about my hot stock pick for that year: “Fat Camps” for bulking up underweight kids. Turns out you can’t legally force-feed a child peanut butter through a tube, plus the chunks tend to clog up the tube. But that didn’t much matter in the end, since my second-choice stock had been for a company developing man-sized Furby dolls as companions for the elderly, and that whole enterprise went south like a snowbird after some old bag in Kansas tried to feed hers soup and it blew the power grid for half of North America.

The first Evan I dated was probably the best, and in retrospect I should have quit while I was ahead. Sure, it was high school, but if I had known what was to come I would have gladly called it a romantic career at 16. Truthfully, I don’t remember that much about Evan 1, but he smelled nice and that went a long way in high school. I think he was on the soccer team; either that or he just took shin safety very seriously.

It was a quick luge-run downhill from there, since Evan 2 pretty much spent all his time drinking Zima and crushing the empty Zima boxes against his forehead as a joke, which meshed surprisingly well with his job as an toll booth operator. People love a little levity when they’re fishing through their seat cracks and underwear for 35 cents. And he did pull down a decent wage, mostly through selling Zimas to thirsty motorists. That eventually led to his downfall, of course, since one day he ran out of Zimas and had to leave his post to run to the Liquor Barn, which resulted in that story you heard on the news about those 200 people who got into the state of Illinois for free. Evan’s boss was pretty pissed and wanted him to pay those lost tolls out of his own pocket, but never the math scholar, Evan jumped out the window instead and never looked back, not realizing he’d just left a lucrative Zima-distribution job over $70.

Evans 3 through 6 weren’t worth remembering, or at least I don’t remember them anyway, and numbers 9 and 10 left me for each other, so I won’t be glorifying them with a more detailed mention. But on the bright side, I just started dating a new guy named Elvin, which I consider to at least be a step in the right direction. Unless he’s really just another Evan with really sloppy handwriting, in which case I’m doubly screwed since I’m not sure if I’m supposed to meet him tonight at the boathouse or a bathhouse. I’m hoping it’s the boathouse, since I’m tired of gay boyfriends always using up all my expensive makeup. Wish me luck.