“I just don’t know if I can continue in this relationship if you keep acting this way,” I told Janet. 

“When you really love someone,” she said, echoing our therapist, “you have to make sacrifices and accept them for who they are, warts and all.”

We were lying in bed, talking in the same circles as usual. I was staring at the ceiling, thinking about how perfect she was for me in every way but that one that she couldn’t control.

I looked her in the eye and said, “But I can’t accept that you’ve been eating all my friends.”

“Oh please!” she said, pushing me away. “You keep blowing this out of proportion! I have not been eating ‘all’ your friends. You make me sound like some kind of monster.” She stormed off and slammed the door. 

I’ve dated a few kooky women—a klepto, a narcissist, a personal injury lawyer—so I was used to strange. But this, this was something else. 

For the record, she had eaten two of my friends. The first was Freddie, who was visiting from California. He sat on the sofa in a Hawaiian shirt, strumming a guitar and singing Beatles’ love songs. After he disappeared, she played dumb. When I found him—or rather, found his bones, stashed in his suitcase—I confronted her. She apologized and promised to never do it again. She nestled her head on my shoulder, wrapped her arms around me and said she loved me. Those magic words calmed me down.

But not long after, I caught her devouring the fresh corpse of another buddy of mine, David, who had come over for dinner. I’m certain David had in no way consented to being dinner. I told her again to please stop doing that. 

“You’re holding me to an impossible standard,” she said. “Yet you give yourself a pass every time.”

“A pass for what? Not doing the dishes?”

“You think you’re so perfect? You do questionable things, too.”

“Like what?”

“What am I supposed to eat?” she said, as tears started running down her cheeks. “You know I don’t like regular food. And I get so hungry. I feel like I’m gonna starve to death.” 

With David’s blood and guts smeared all over her face, she actually looked quite pretty in the golden evening light streaming through the window. She had such a sweet look in her eyes. I took her bloody hands in mine, kissed her, and said I loved her.

I did stop inviting friends over, which made her irritable. She would snap at me over the slightest thing. That’s when we went to couples therapy to try to work through this like mature adults.

“I just want a partner who doesn’t eat all my friends,” I told the therapist. “Is that so much to ask?”

“There he goes again wildly exaggerating,” Janet said, turning to the therapist. “He’s always making me feel like I’m a monster. It’s not fair.”

He nodded at her a bit too sympathetically and turned to me. “It sounds like you’re trying to fit Janet into an idealized mold,” he told me. “But here’s the thing: everyone has flaws. Whether they’re gamblers or workaholics or attention-challenged, loving someone means accepting all of their flaws. Think you can do that for Janet?”

After the session, we kept bickering. Janet grew distant and stayed out late without explanation. I apologized for making such a stink and promised I would do better. But I felt she was slipping away.

And then I found an envelope taped to the refrigerator one morning. She was leaving me, she wrote, because she’d found someone who could accept her for who she really was. And that man turned out to be our therapist. 

I wanted to move on, but I missed her and was willing to accept anything to get her back. If she had to eat my friends or anyone, including me, then so be it. I finally understood what it means to make sacrifices for the person you love.

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Daniel Krieger lives in New York. His fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, Flash Fiction Magazine, Scaffold and BULL. Read more at danielkrieger.net.