Like most people, I have many sides, many selves. I’m the honest, open, insightful analyst of life. I’m the peace loving negotiator. I’m the introverted people watcher. My mother says I’m a sentimental romantic,that I am a woman who has been shaped by poems, Jane Austen novels, and old school chick flicks. She’s the one who flung three pennies in the Trevi Fountain, the one who prayed before the heart of St. Carlos Borromeo for another heart out there.

Moms know their stuff.

In talking to a best friend, I muse on what it is we seek. Not just me, but all of us. Not just women, but all people. Is it fame? Fortune? Success? Love? Fun? Adventure? We seek fulfillment but what does that mean? It’s going to be different for everyone–and each of our multiple selves. Where do I find fulfillment for the career woman, the writer, the traveler, the mystic, the sage, the lover? Is it possible to find it? Is it in one place, one situation, one relationship? As much as I’d love to help others reach it, I can only seek it for myself. I want someone to love.

I know what I want but it’s not the tangible list I often recite. I won’t find him on Craigslist or Catholic Singles. He won’t be at happy hour or on the dance floor. There may not even be a him. But I can’t stop waiting and hoping that he exists. I am told I am getting older, that it is time to settle (down). I would rather hold out for the top of the Empire State Building magic. I look back at my dating commandments and I see that they are about passion. I seek La Boheme crescendoes, the expansiveness of the sea. I want to feel like I did walking in Manhattan rain, looking out of the Dome of St. Peter, those moments of bliss. If I can’t find that, then it won’t happen for me. I can live with that.

“For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.

It would be better to be untethered and open to possibility, living for the exhilaration of meeting someone new, of not knowing what the night will bring.
We seek momentous meetings.” from the book QuirkyAlone