One of the Accounting Kids started dating someone new a couple of weeks ago, and he asked her to come over so he could cook dinner for her. �Oh, that�s very cute,� I said. �He wants to be your boyfriend!� As soon as it came out my mouth, I thought I am dating someone who, after five months of dating me to varying degrees, still can�t decide whether he wants to be my boyfriend. After all this time and all the thousands of thoughts I�ve had about Gemini, that single thought captured the entire situation and made it perfectly clear to me.

Five months is more than long enough for him to know. I�m not kicking myself, though, for letting him take this long, because apparently I needed those months to learn something myself. There are a few things I know for certain now, things that feel like bedrock under my feet. I know what I deserve, for starters.

I deserve every penny of my raise and bonus, and then some. I took a huge risk by moving into a completely unfamiliar industry, taking a newly-created position and making it mine. I work my tail off, coordinating endless details and maintaining relationships with eighty hedge fund managers. People do rely on me, and their reliance is not misplaced. My mistakes are very few and far between, and I�m always looking for ways to improve my processes. (Yo, I set more annual goals for myself than my boss did.)

I deserve to be with someone who will say to himself, �Nancy is a very cool chick, I totally dig her, I�m all about treating her right, and I want her to be my girlfriend.� (Or words to that effect. He might be a very articulate sort of fellow. One never knows.) What I have right now--essentially a murky, tentative thing with someone who suspects that something better might be waiting for him out there but wants to feel me up on a regular basis nonetheless--is a great deal less than I deserve. It is so much less, in fact, as to be completely unbefitting a woman of my caliber.

And that�s that. It really is that simple, finally. Finally.

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