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When last I was with Eileen, she asked why I was interested in her over every other lass in my life.
She asked a good question. There have been a few other women who caught your eye and at least two others who caught your lips, Keilaina and Amanda.
You didn't love Jesus enough for Keilaina, and the promise of a relationship with her wasn't enough for you to pretend at conversion. If you were going to be loved, it was going to be for who you were. This doesn't mean that Keilaina doesn't rank as one of the greatest loves of your life, but she was always a platonic and not romantic one. (There was sexual tension, but that was more than you were two sexual beings. The two of you would not have had a romantic relationship, but there were times where you might have fooled around.)
And there was Amanda, who was just not right for you and whose pressure (and her friend physically forcing that first kiss) compounded the wrongness. I barely know her now and wish that this didn't happen.
There were minor opportunities: Shelly from Earth Traders was most prominent in the recent narrative, but I am sure of others.
You claimed to throw up after Amanda. I remember doing so once outside Kate's dorm, at least a few good heaves and more to credit Kate jerking you around than any other woman. Otherwise, you kept women away from you not because you didn't want the possibility of them, but because you wanted to keep the possibility of Kate well past when it was poison to you.
Yet you wanted Eileen. She was good. That sounds reductive, but I think that was the core of it. She was sweet and clever. She was young enough not to have been too traumatized by the world and old enough that she was not traumatized by her parents. Even when she was your fourteen-year-old assistant at the Children's Museum, she seemed to be a confident person. She knew who she was.
I made this list up slightly after the break up with Kate, because I was not looking for another relationship and wanted to remind myself of impossible criteria so I didn't just fall for the nearest XX chromosomed humanoid in my near vicinity.
I think that you kissed Kei (all of maybe three times in your life) a few days after Kate dumped you. You flipped a coin on whether the two of you should kiss. It said that you should not. You kissed anyway.
A slip, maybe, before you decided that you didn't want someone new. But you did. You wanted some woman to step forward, tell you that you were lying to yourself about not wanting to date, grab you by your shirt, and kiss you. You wanted to be contradicted, you love addicted fool.
Eileen didn't contradict you. Gradually, you came to like her more in online conversations. She was safe enough to try.
Anyway, here is the list, with... say... an ampersand (&) next to the ones I feel pertain to Eileen. If I am not totally sure, there is an ampersand in parentheses. If there isn't one, it doesn't necessarily mean that I do not think she is so, merely that I am completely ignorant or feel she may not be so.
I include these sentences as an explanation for what I do not doubt will be my criticisms below. However, it is also here to demonstrate that love (or infatuation) isn't a shopping list and to show that you might have wanted to get to know Eileen better as a person before getting quite so swoony.
There are certainly things that are not on the list that attract me to her and things I would add now, but I am trying to keep the purity of the moment I made this list (thus why the parenthetical remarks are untouched, the same that originally existed to explain the category).
That is some awareness that Eileen was far broader and deeper than some list you meant to keep you away from the possibility of dating.
&Heterosexual (or bisexual, bordering on heterosexual)
Your next serious girlfriend claims that she is a lesbian, though later marries a man. The girlfriend after that leaves you because she demonstrably is a lesbian and likely always was (but how you loved one another!). Your wife is pansexual.
You do not do well with heterosexual women. I'll leave you to puzzle out why this might be.
(&)devoted (cheating on me certainly will not make for a long relationship)
Of the coming important women: One cheats emotionally and sexually (though you will make out with Kate once, just after the two of you begin dating again and might have cheated again if someone pressed the issue). One cheats aspirationally and mentally, but not in actuality -- she is a lesbian, and college was ending, so can one blame her? One would not cheat if someone put a gun to her head.
¬ damaged beyond self-repair (I'm not looking for a project, I'm done with gluing every piece back)
We are all damaged. You are damaged, though you don't know in what way.
And you will spend years with a project well beyond anything you encountered before, though she will spend much of that time trying to glue herself together while slicing you with her sharp edges.
You don't always get to pick -- or you don't choose what is best.
Able to spend enough time with me, spend the night, shower together
No ampersand. This is the trouble with considering dating a teenager. Had Eileen had a year or two more, there might be a speculative ampersand, and the two of you might have dated longer because you could have built an in-person foundation. However, she didn't, and you don't.
&Loves children, but not be in a hurry to have them
This is fair. I love children. I still don't have them, but I am glad the world contains them.
&have had wonderful life experiences
I couldn't tell you a single life experience Eileen had at that point. She has done amazing things since, working for Vice and attending Cannes. At nearly seventeen, she was all possibility.
&unconventionally beautiful
She is beautiful. I'm not sure about unconventional. She is a fair-skinned, thin brunette with bright eyes who reminds you of Uma Thurman.
The world loves those.
&eloquent
She is given to pretty phrases. That might have done a lot to help you to want her.
&sexually pure (doesn't sleep around or treat sex as anything other than a beautiful conjoining of souls)
I don't know, but I also have no room to contradict this. You had the face Eileen showed you. A few years after this, you will work a summer program with a woman who claimed to have been Eileen's friend at this point. She will insist that Eileen was all but the town bicycle, something that seems laughable. No matter who Eileen may have slept with (or, I maintain still, not slept with), that was not Eileen as you knew her.
&understands why I love Katie, Sarah, Conor and Stevehen
Why do you? Attachment? Why these four?
The men do not speak to me and have not for a decade at least.
Did you love Stevehen? His company was enjoyable, though you will later say that he was a great friend to have when you were both eighteen. However, when you were twenty-five, and he was still eighteen, it was awkward.
Kate and I have a distant, respectful relationship.
Sarah was a force of nature to you, but you loved her as a story, not a person. In person, the few times you were, you didn't click.
I suspect that you don't know why you love them. I wonder, too, at the people you did not add to this.
(&)like my friends and be liked by my friends
I think they would have liked her. She might have better than tolerated most of them.
&Loves American Beauty
Kevin Spacey is credibly accused of raping several boys -- including Anthony Rapp, who played Mark Cohen in RENT -- and that does erode the film's rewatchability.
It is disingenuous to slag off the film now, with the benefit of hindsight, but it is pretentious and superficial enlightenment. You took much from it, but it was like Richard Bach books. Not worth your projection.
no intimacy issues (thus actually WANTS to be with me. I have quite enough people that love me to death but can't and won't be with me.)
No ampersand. Eileen doesn't want to be with you, but I can't call that an intimacy issue. I don't recall you holding this decision against her much.
Did she have intimacy issues in general? No idea. She decided that she did not want a man who made the mistake of admitting that he thought he was falling in love with her.
&having a tied destiny (no meeting and then her being shipped off to an Australian convent for the rest of her life)
adventurous
From what little I know of Eileen, her destiny was far greater than yours, and her adventures were many.
&within my age group 15-25
A 15-year-old is not in the same age group as a 20-year-old. A 25-year-old only barely is, though more so by far than the former.
I remember now, surely for the first time in fifteen years, a 25-year-old named Trish who wanted you. She was all teased hair and leather jacket, back at community college for some reason. She was a 1980s metalhead transported to the late-1990s. You resisted her because you could not see the woman beneath the persona and found her version of 25 a world different from you.
understand why I watch Buffy and Angel
&Like the Simpsons
You will find that overlaps in media are far less significant than you seem to believe. Media provide identity only for those too unsteady to trust themselves to form ones of their own.
This means that looking down on people who have done nothing wrong because they like or don't like something is nonsense.
Kate disparaged you for liking Ani DiFranco (or Tori Amos. I don't recall which). Years later, she took to wearing out one of her CDs. When you called her on it, likely seeking something like an apology for making you feel bad about music you loved, she held fast. The way you listened to the music was still wrong. The way her new roommate JB did was beautiful. The same songs, but your enjoyment of it was still lame.
Incidentally, Buffy and Angel are tainted by the unsurprising revelation that Joss Whedon abused his actresses. Also, you must admit that there are weak episodes, and near whole seasons one can skip in either show.
The Simpsons is still on. I doubt I've seen an episode in a decade, and I don't miss them at all. I don't know anyone who still watches the show and, though memes fly about, all of them are confined to things that happened in the first ten seasons. Yet, it persists.
So, again, don't judge people on their media intake because you shouldn't want the same light shone on you. You are more than what is on television.
Yes, were I to consider this the potential beginning of a new relationship, I am stupidly and blindly rushing like a well-oiled freight train with no brakes. But this is the evolution of a prior one.
Your reasoning here, though specious, is not entirely without weight. I don't think that you would have pursued Eileen if you didn't know her already. You didn't chase people who presented themselves before you without prior context, even though the matches made more sense on paper than a young woman who was still in high school.
It doesn't work out, but it might have in a slightly different universe.