In junior high, I was not thinking about love.
In high school, love was for everyone but me.
In undergrad, love was only for the Bad Boys.
In grad school, I was delighted to realize that good guys could find love, too.
And now, I am tempted to believe that love is surprisingly, frustratingly, completely random.
The Rational Me yearns to apply logic to love, typically less out of need than pure intellectual curiosity. Do [x] and you will find love. Be [y] and you will find love. Or, most simplistically and IMHO reasonably, be a Good Person and you will be well-deserving of love and will be correspondingly likely to find it.
And yet, despite seemingly having many data points, I fail to find many firm correlations, much less prerequisites or guarantees.
What triggered this musing? Well, I was out last Saturday night and bantering with two acquaintances I much admire. Both professed almost matter-of-factly that they were single and—despite wishes to the contrary—expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. They had, at least for the time being, pretty much given up on men. And to stave off the anticipated finger-pointing, no, I am not a decent match due to some rather solid reasons. And further pre-empting unwise contributions from the peanut gallery: no, blogging on a Friday night does not a loser make, and commenting on such timing can hardly make one an erudite pundit. ;-)
Anyway, these women are quite bright, athletic, artistic, thoughtful, friendly, and attractive. “Good people.” And single.
And yet, in painful contrast, I have the displeasure of too-frequently encountering masses of woefully mismatched pairs… of dense men with brilliant women, supercilious women with kindly men, and so on. Ah, and given a recent (outstanding) California event, let me add, in timeliness and fairness: slothful men with industrious men.
Where once I bitterly rued a chasm of inopportunity (unopportunity?) in the world of dating and love, now I see delicious opportunity tinged by capriciousness and chaos. Certainly a marked and personally-much-appreciated improvement, yes, but undeniably annoying when considering the greater scheme of things. Yes, not everything can or even should be quantified, analyzed, predicted, even explained… but a bit more karmic matching would be nice. If somehow the Good folks could consistently win in the game of love, Darwin might not be appeased but we’d likely have a kinder, more productive, and happier society long-term. And as a refreshing bonus, I’d not be stuck in awkward conversations trying to defend the lameness, timidness, or simply cluelessness of my male brethren.
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