The Solution

Sometimes you go back to the house.  

Or, as my friend S.A. would say, you take the house's number, so you can call it for the conversation while you keep walking onward.

Or, as I would say, you add it all up and realise that never going in the house again will cause

you more distress than sitting there and not getting everything you want.  So you go back to the house and let its positives outweigh the negatives.  But you leave the door open, in case another traveller appears.

His way of putting it is, I think, more elegant.

I reflect, not for the first time in my life, that being an adult sucks.

I said to the FTT, "People should just love each other."  He said, "Yes, and they should be able to just have sex.  In the future, people will ask each other to have sex like now they ask each other if they want a cup of tea."  Which struck me as so funny that after I got home I laughed and laughed.