I hate to sound overly judgy, but the moment I met a dating prospect I’ll call the Super-Nice Widower, the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday” started playing in my head.

The 1967 hit, written by pop-song powerhouses Carole King and Gerry Goffin, sounds sunny while casting a long shadow over suburbia. With jangly guitar and upbeat harmonies, it pokes fun at “status symbol land” and “creature comfort goals.”

The Super-Nice Widower happened to live in Longmeadow, just the kind of pristine suburban town the song seemed to have in mind. Having grown up a rebel in a town very much like it, I took in his preppy clothes and mild manner and immediately thought: mismatch.

And yet, he had the same kind of optimistic bounce as the song. After my previous boyfriend, who’d been hiding his alcoholism from me, his cheerfulness felt like a refreshing change of pace.

“Pleasant Valley Sunday” satirizes suburbia, but it refuses to mope. You can hum along for years, thinking it’s just a summer song about mowing the lawn and firing up the grill, before realizing it’s taking aim at conformity and materialism.

In keeping with the lyrics, the Super-Nice Widower really did care about lawn care. He even used a spray to kill dandelions. I had to hold myself back from telling him I identified with the dandelions and felt personally persecuted.

I tried to fix him up with the friend who helped me buy a lawn mower, figuring they could bond over their yards. But this was COVID-19, and she wasn’t expanding her circle for romance. Plus, she could take care of her own weeds.

So I kept seeing the guy. For two years, he opened the car door for me, made a delicious apple torte, and introduced me to the surprisingly excellent combination of barbecue sauce and mustard. We walked our dogs together, and his little white ball of fluff and my big rescue mutt cozied up to each other like long-lost littermates.

We had real common ground: long, happy marriages behind us, close relationships with our children and a shared love of classic-rock concerts. He turned me on to the TV reality show “Shark Tank,” and we rooted for our favorite applicants as if we had personally come up with the wearable Sherpa blanket or magnetic eyeglass holder. Whenever doubts surfaced, I told myself that niceness was everything.

Wasn’t it? Well, almost.

Most of us have done some version of this. We meet a perfectly decent person and start weighing the evidence: kind, yes; steady, yes; wrong for us, maybe. Is the difference a harmless quirk, the kind every relationship has or is it the thing our judgy side just can’t get past?

Then came the moment I knew, quietly and unmistakably, that I needed to break up with the Super-Nice Widower.

One Sunday morning, I was looking forward to the cozy ritual of two people reading the paper together. I asked him which section of The Boston Globe he wanted. He said he just wanted to look at me. Sweet? Absolutely. If this were a Hallmark movie, the music would have swelled, and I would have melted into his arms. But in real life, I felt myself stiffen.

He’d told me before that he didn’t like to read, but that never bothered his late wife, who loved to cozy up with a good book. I kept telling myself that I should be more like her. For me, though, reading wasn’t just a hobby. As a certifiable word nerd, I found it hard to imagine a day without books, newspapers, magazines and blog posts. My brain gets cranky when it has nothing new to gnaw on.

When I broke up with the Super-Nice Widower, I told him he’d be swarmed by eligible women. A kind, steady widower who opens car doors, builds fires, loves his children, honors his late wife and knows his way around an apple torte puts him at the top of the heap.

By the end, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” had done what good songs often do. It gave me a soundtrack for one judgment, then helped me outgrow it. The ritzy suburb wasn’t the problem. The dandelion spray wasn’t the problem, though my inner weed still objects. Even the feeling that he was a 1950s guy to my 1960s countercultural girl wasn’t the problem. I simply needed to be with a fellow reader.

Judgy? Yes. Guilty as charged.

Maybe, beneath all that sunny jangle, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” is asking us to search for what really matters. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad line for a new dating profile.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a writer who lives in Florence with her two dogs. Sign up for her free quarterly newsletter — complete with links to bonus content such as music videos and fun facts — by emailing her at [email protected].