Snatch 22

Personal life update: I am no longer seeing the sex-for-comfort girl. It ended (about a month ago - I keep forgetting to write) with a rather frank series of admissions on both of our parts - for her, that she'd started seeing someone else and had lied to me about this and a couple of other details on several occasions, and for me, that I really didn't care enough about her to bother being anything like a boyfriend. Or, for that matter, a friend - she proposed that we keep in touch but I flatly refused, declaring that she didn't offer me enough as only a friend to be worthy of taking up any of my time. A little harsh, but ultimately true.

So that would make me single again: oh, you lucky girls - now you can look forward to either my feigned and contrived arrogance in intoxication or my mock-apathy, awkwardness and self-ridicule in sobriety. What a marvelous catch...

I often wonder exactly what I'm looking for in the opposite sex. For one thing, I obviously want somebody who is capable of being a best friend, or else I would begrudge electing to spend time with her over other, closer friends. The problem here is this: I make real friends neither quickly nor easily, and even when I do, I'm terrified that I can't sustain the kind of constant contact with them that they seem to share elsewhere, either with their other friends or with their partners.

So what qualities would those people capable of being a best friend to me have? What qualities do my closest friends have? Independence; confidence and self-esteem enough not to adversely affect their day-to-day living; loyalty; reliability; humility; the capacity for abstract thought (a phrase admittedly stolen from a chat with CM); the capacity to either encourage or ignore my erratic, occasionally tiresome sense of humour... But this is not all.

I have recently been seduced by the theory that relationships are made significantly easier when they are between individuals of a similar outlook and understanding. How might two people happen to have a similar outlook and understanding? At this time, I really do believe that my best shot at a decent relationship would be with somebody of a similar background to me, as this would imply (but not guarantee) that their outlook and understanding would be similar. I also believe that the more unique somebody's background, the more difficult it is for them to connect on anything beyond a superficial level with another person.

So, ok, what defines my background? My religion and culture are a good starting point: on a general level, I was raised as an informed free-thinker in an ethnic/ religious-minority family, in which the level of religious observance has decreased exponentially over the last two generations. The traces of guilt caused by this decrease in religious observance have also diminished but are still recognisable, even within me. In addition, there is a persistent, Damoclean obligation to appease the tight-nit, exclusive and judgmental community from which it is almost impossible to escape.

Were it my religious and cultural background that substantially defined me, things would be fairly simple, but most of the women I meet of a similar religious and cultural background remind me of those esoteric religious and cultural stereotypes from which I recoil.

On the other hand, there has always been a barrier between me and those women who do not share a similar religious and cultural background: I have always felt marginalised from the Anglo-Christian culture because I grew up knowing that I was different and that we didn't participate in their culture. Examples I have cited in recent conversations include: having Sunday lunch, celebrating Christmas, and calling one's Grandma "Nanna".

The same is true in reverse: my Anglo-Christian (girl)friends did not grow up with the customs which were and still are a part of my life, and so they will perhaps feel a little alienated when I am either carrying them out or discussing them, especially with friends of a similar background. For some, the process of learning about my religious and cultural background and its psychological implications has proven difficult, and in any case, I honestly don't think I can go through educating another girl as to why I do this and that, what one should say to family when a relative dies, what to do at a wedding, what certain foods are etc.

This is partly the debris of a childhood which, while it encouraged cultural identity (which I would never attempt to portray in a bad light), was also steeped in an us and them mind-set.

Moving on, I am also defined, in terms of background, by: my privileged education, recycled philosophies and Socialist ideals, albeit pock-marked by the familiarity of comfortable, Capitalist living; the loving, occasionally overbearing and reciprocally guilt-ridden relationship I have with my family; my father's illness and my impotence to help him, myself or my family deal with it emotionally...

There are certainly more aspects of my background to consider, but I am already setting a specification so detailed that it would be impossible to match. In any case, I said similar, not identical.

Does anybody out there match up? If so, could I lose the veil of vanity currently obscuring my vision in order that the contents of her mind alone made her sufficiently attractive to me?

It's going to be funny looking back on this series of thoughts in 20 years, as I'll either be single, bitter and lonely, or married and inevitably enduring a degree of compromise. The question is, of just how much compromise am I capable?