Me or the thought of me?

I have the unfortunate task of quoting John Mayer as an introduction to this entry…but what the heck, this isn’t a sermon…it’s just a blog ;) Not a significant lyricist by any means, but he’s got it so right when he asks: “Who do you love, me or the thought of me?”

I’ve thought about this a lot, and even in hindsight, my perspective is less than 20/20. When you begin to be interested in someone, are you really interested in who they are or do you simply find the “idea” of them attractive? Girls like to say that some guys are good on paper…and indeed, are we living in a society where ‘good on paper’ is all we need to get by? When glancing at a man’s resume, are “Looks”, “Reputation”, and “Career” all that we need to see?

It’s certainly easy to get carried away by a guy’s resume, so to speak, and it happens too often that our imagination gets the best of us. My personal weakness is faulty assumption-making: since this person treats their friends like this, this surely is the way in which he will treat me....right?

A different perspective to this “me or the thought of me” problem is (this applies to both men and women more generally than what I discussed above), does a person’s interest in you garner them extra brownie points in the game of attraction? If you aren’t revolted by them in any measure, do they become more attractive once you know that they are attracted to you? At the crux of the question is - when looking for love, are we just hoping to share affection or are we wanting to find someone genuinely compatible (given that there is such a thing) for us?

Two very different questions to ponder...but feel free to ponder aloud!