[Serious] Relationships: Finding your perfect match and then losing them.

[tackattack]

You don't expect to have time in your entire life for more than 10 meaningful relationships. I get that. 10 out of how many possible relationships could you have 100,000? The ting about a "meaningful relationship" is it's not an object that starts that way. It starts off as a relationship and grows more meaningful.

It's not which of those 10 meaningful relationships was the perfect/best one. It's which of those 100,000 relationships did you invest enough in to make it meaningful.

Thank you for the thoughts but I am still not following. I still would like to know if it's a fair assessment of what you're saying to point out that you see the 10 relationships branching off into 100,000 possible ones because you're not a determinist.

Because to me, as a determinist, if I can expect to have about a maximum of 10 actual relationships then I can expect to have about a maximum of 10 possible relationships.

well I am a soft determinist on a lot of things.  Let me see if I can be more precise. You expect to have a maximum of 10 actual relationships. It doesn't necessarily follow that the maximum possible relationships are 10 as well. You're not factoring in the time to build relationships or the opportunities that you are probably blind to. 

I'm positing that there are 100000 possible relationships you could have, but you only have time and energy to devote to making 10 of those actual and meaningful relationships. If you find building relationships to be meaningful, as an exercise and of itself, then there can be joy in exploring the 99,990. It might surprise you how many people out there could be a match. One of the things hunkering down in a relationship and a routine does for us is it focuses our attention on the person to improve qualitative communication. This addes blinders to the quantitative possibilities outside our current focus. I hope that clears up my stance and I hope you're not too depressed about your situation.