this has had some interesting side effects. one of them is that i've developed this flirty personality as my default (of course, the dimples don't hurt); in some sense, though, this is at odds with the romantic idealism. it would be useful for short-term, evanescent relationships, but that's not what i'm looking for; things with no future don't really have much meaning with me. i enjoy flirting perhaps more than anything else, but that's because for basically every new person i meet, i realize that there is some chance, even if it's one in a billion, that she is actually right for me and that we will live happily ever after.
i've talked before about the flaw in my internal probability engine, which is that so many improbable things have actually happened to me in my life that i think improbable things are likely to happen to me. this flaw allows my heart to really jump in these cases, which means i spend a lot of time flirting with people who are not really right for me, and leads to my being disappointed a lot.
but anyway, back to the regrets. because i don't really pick the right people for me, i've come to the conclusion that my friends are probably better at picking out my eventual forever relationship than i am. i kind of want to do the arranged marriage thing, because i seem to not have a whole lot of perspective on what sort of person is right for me; unfortunately, this is so non-standard in american culture that this isn't going to happen either.
but here's the thing. right now it seems that there are two people who could actually be right for me on paper, in this arranged marriage sense, but unfortunately the circumstances are woefully misaligned, and in fact it would be really surprising if they were ever aligned to allow me to date either of them. presumably this happens to other people all the time, but it's unusual for me: usually i don't meet people in the abstract, so i don't really know how to deal with this. i mean, what i really want to do is have an arranged marriage with one of these people, not that it's at all clear that i'm not deluded in these cases either.
when i was a kid, i know what i would have done: i would have blithely ignored the circumstances and catalyzed these things despite the inappropriate circumstances, with disastrous consequences. heck, i did this recently with meredith, one could argue. that's the spontaneous flirt in me. but i know that this is not going to work, and that this will lead to disaster, and so i have to restrain myself. which is, again, difficult, because no matter how much i expect that investigating these possibilities would be disastrous, i'm going to regret not doing so.
i miss love.