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Home group was last night. We met at Barnes & Noble initially then went to Goodberries for frozen custard before reconvening in the B&N parking lot (Hao drove us all to Goodberries), talking for a good long while, and going our separate ways.

It was a beautiful night, cool and pleasant. We stood outside eating our frozen custard (which was wonderful) and talking for a little while. This is a frequent occurence after Tuesday home group meetings–the long conversations, that is, not the custard. I think we hit on the topic of male-female relationships at least once every other week, usually in relation to a particular situation one of us is experiencing, and there’s never a dearth of opinions and advice.

Last night Aaron brought up a situation where he’s hesitating, unsure about whether to pursue a relationship with a girl he’s been spending time with casually during the past couple of weeks. Aaron’s a good-looking, athletic, intelligent guy who is going places in his life and having a girl interested in him isn’t exactly a rare occurrence. He’s fairly capable of defusing most situations himself, so I didn’t think much of it initially, especially when he first brought it up over the table at B&N, but I had to admit my feelings were a bit more complicated after I found out some more specifics.

The girl he’s conflicted about is Sarah, someone we’ve both known for a long time and who I was very intent on dating last fall (1 2 3 4 5). She and he became acquaintances around the same time she and I did, although they were both in the engineering program at NCSU and studied together, whereas Sarah and I only knew each other casually through our mutual attendance of an IVCF small group. From all accounts their friendship was a rocky one back then, and he would sometimes tell me how frustrated they would get at one another–personality conflicts of a sort, I gathered. But I had always maintained, from very close to the beginning, that he should ask her out in spite of the interpersonal friction. It’s one thing to be apathetic towards someone, it’s another to at least respond to them–it shows that they have the capability to provoke your emotions to a degree, and the line between being “frustrated” with someone and outright affection for them can often be very fine indeed. Besides, they’re both very athletic, motivated, confident people, and they both have a similar type of physical attractiveness. He’s hesitated for years, but lately she’s seemed more interested in him and it looks like he’s coming around.

And I am happy for him, even though there are lingering emotions surrounding my pursuit of her last fall. She’s absolutely wonderful and he’s my best friend, so I never had any reservations about recommending her to him back in college, and if anything, I’d recommend her more highly now. I told him as much last night.

She’s always been out of my league. She’s too beautiful, too together, too smart–all in the very best ways. I want somebody whose attributes I complement and who complements mine. It’s hard to explain. If Sarah and I had gone out, I would been overcome with the same insecurities that plagued John Cusack’s character Rob in High Fidelity when he dated Charlie. I would have felt like an impostor, a fraud of sorts, somebody who just got lucky, who didn’t have anything to recommend himself to someone in that stratum and would often (if not always) have in the back of his mind the question of when the inevitable breakup would occur. Granted, that’s something of a worst-case scenario, but that’s how we, as men, think a lot of time.

In terms of compatibility with someone, I tend to evaluate my own situation not on some overarching, global continuum of more attractive/less attractive, but more on a personal, local scale that reflects my own self-image. I’m not the smartest guy I know, but I’m certainly not the dumbest, and while I’m far from physically attractive, I am tall and reasonably thin. I have a direction in life; I’ve read lots of interesting books and I keep up with politics, current events and popular culture.  These are all things I think about and factor into the equation when ruminating on relationship possibilities. And in another sense, considering someone’s compatibility with me, personally, more significant than than some global set of criteria explains how I can say without reservation that I will be able to look at the woman I eventually marry and, without afterthought, consider her the most beautiful woman in the world. My world.

I think most people think this way, but it isn’t often addressed for fear of inadvertently offending someone with an unfavorable comparison. That and the fact that on first glance all it’s just a big navel-gazing session, more focused on our own approach to relationships than others around us. But it’s always there and I think it’s healthy to discuss. It’s said that married couples often start to have a similar aspect after a little while. I have a hunch that’s less coincidental than we think–people want people they look right with, who they can be themselves around, who follow a similar path through life, or at least one they can merge with their own.