Nancy Davis Kho

On the one hand, he kind of broke my heart, during a cold and awkward goodbye dinner at a cheap Ethiopian restaurant in Philadelphia. On the other hand, he proved to me that the unicorn combo of good looks, sense of humor, and brains really did exist in the wild and that I wasn’t crazy to keep my standards high in looking for it.

The dude in question was a doe-eyed guy I briefly dated in college, and the reason I was thinking of him was that I was smack-dab in the middle of a project I undertook years later, to write thank-you letters to people who had helped, inspired, or shaped me up to that point in my life.

I’d knocked off the easy categories of “helping” and “inspiring” people first, writing a single one-page letter every week to family members, my closest friends, teachers, mentors, favorite authors.