Obstacle 1: my take on the meaning behind the lyrics
The meaning of the song just clicked for me this morning, and I'm sharing it now because it's so obvious (at least to me) and for some reason I've yet to see it laid out the way I'm about to.
The singer is part of the problem. He's no longer attracted to the woman in question, but he still loves her, or perhaps more importantly, loves who she used to be, and needs that fantasy to "get it up". Every line is about "play making" and pretending she hasn't gotten older and (in his view) less attractive. He wants to "eat the salt off her lost faded lips," comparing her aging to being close to death.
But "she can read" between the lines. This is where I think everyone gets it wrong: she's not bad BECAUSE she can read. She's interpreting the singer's nostalgic pining as "I used to be good, but I'm no good anymore, I'm bad now, because I'm poor and aging and I'll never see this face (the old me that he actually liked) again." And the saddest part is that she's 100% correct.
The singer, hating to acknowledge the truth, then victim-blames her, accusing her of self-sabotage by thinking this way instead of just allowing his nostalgic advances to play out the way he wants, likening her "interpretation" to "stabbing herself in the neck."
But later he's forced to acknowledge that she's correct, and he's just not fond of "her stories" aka her interpretations of his fantasies because they remove the exciting youthful element, force him to see his current situation, and become boring, doing nothing for his libido.
The painful truth for HIM is, this longing for youthful abandon is how he avoids acknowledging that he lost something he treasured. Every time she's "calling" his bluff (the dead giveaway), she's forcing him to acknowledge that the thing he treasured was so incredibly superficial, makes him feel terribly shallow, which makes his heart heavy: "She puts the weights into my little heart."
And perhaps his "little" heart is the issue: there's only enough room in there for him to love who she used to be. Not enough room to love who she is now.