Strangely, though it was long an idiosyncratic domestic fantasy of mine that I would sit with my partner and do the Times crossword together—so much so that for years my Internet-dating personal ad name-checked Eugene Maleska—I hadn't broached the possibility with Slim in the nearly two years we've been dating, probably because the eight previous years of dating was absent of anyone up to the task and I had largely forgotten about it. So it was a pleasant surprise picking up an International Herald Tribune in Switzerland for a long train-ride, tackling the crossword puzzle for the first time in years after running out of articles to read, and discovering that Slim and I could complete the Thursday (and then the Sunday) puzzles together, and now we're doing a puzzle almost every night.

On the same train-ride, Slim belittled my use of sudoku to pass the time, but within 36 hours, she'd expropriated my book and ended up spending most of the sixteen-hour trip home working on puzzles.