My friend and I are eating fresh pasta carbonata from a GQ recipe — it’s good, actually — and laughing about how sucky relationships can be. It really is pretty funny. Some people just have a knack for dating strange ones. We both tend to do this, but she takes the cake: she just broke up with a vampire.

The reasons it’s funny are three fold: vampires are really in right now, she does date some extremely unique individuals and her ex thinks he is a vampire.

She told me this one night at The Ram in Northgate. After a porter, a cosmopolitan and a blueberry lemon drop — the latter recommended by our waitress, and coincidentally an immediate personal favorite of my drinks-and-appetizers companion — she informed me that her boyfriend of two weeks was rather occult.

I scoffed, thinking that such was to be expected from a young man covered in tattoos. Actually, the three of us spent Halloween together — at the U-Village Ram — and all I noticed was that he stared a lot as she and I slipped farther into horrid British accents and occasional bursts of shamefully simple French.

Anyway, she insisted that he really did believe that he was a vampire. This guy’s staring at us on Halloween wasn’t a result of how weird we were getting: he was feeding off of our energy and stuff.

My friend has dated beer snobs, computer geeks, drug addicts, a guy who added sound effects to everything, self-obsessed runners, Republicans and people who lived in houses with alarms to prevent their going out at night. She claims that her mother has dated weirder people — one of her exes was a mortician who later killed his girlfriend before committing suicide.

We don’t scoff at the diversity of humankind. Instead, we appreciate the complexities of character that make society vibrant, fresh and consequently inhospitable to the search for your other half — and, most of all, how some of us find the other half in people nothing like us. Anybody I’ve ever dated can probably come up with some pretty great stories at my expense.

After I stopped laughing and wiped the Hefeweizen from my new alpaca knit hoodie from the Gap, I stared at her, trying to see if she was kidding.

She blankly stated that her guy told her he would not expect her to be a blood donor ... yet. She added that he did, though, have high school friends who donated their blood to him. It had been a while since his last feeding, as it turns out. (That, actually, explains her recent penchant for fashionable scarves and turtlenecks.)

I started laughing again and lost even more beer as she sipped distractedly on a blueberry lemon drop and nibbled some nachos. I finally collected myself enough to suggest garlic. “Just throw some at him,” I said.

She nixed that; the garlic is an old wives’ tale, and her guy apparently loves marinara and spaghetti. She pointed out that it’s basically all he eats. Other suggestions included confronting him with a mirror and driving a stake through his heart.

I really liked the idea of her claiming to be a wood nymph, but in the end, she simply told him that her schedule was too full for a boyfriend. It was depressingly anticlimactic after the huge deal we made about him. It was even a little sad, since he’s kind of needy and clingy.

She solved that problem by Facebooking him to say he could just mail her the pearl earrings she left on his coffin-side table.

So she’s single now. If you’re a werewolf or breed raccoons in your dorm room, she might be the one for you — after all, she and I need more people to talk about at our drinks-and-appetizers outings.

Reach columnist Matthew Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.