Someone like you

When I was in the ninth standard many moons ago, a fellow scholar did ask of me the reason for my lack of a gentleman-friend.
'Liquifier my dear,' she said, 'it is IMPOSSIBLE that you are alone. Someone like you! '

Someone like you!

This sentiment was repeated many times through the next few years, pausing briefly during the J-months, resuming, and pausing again during S. The weird part is that nobody ever asks me my relationship-status when I'm actually in a relationship.
So anyway, the most recent 'someone like you!' sentiment came from Sameer when we met last month. And it's got me thinking. Why can't 'someone like me!' (yes it has to be italicized and exclamation-marked) not have a guy in my life?
I'd like to think that it refers to my vivacity and lusty love for life, my irreverent charm or maybe my oh-so-cuteness but well....it could just be that my biological clock has been pointing to 'TOO LATE' since ninth std.
Let's be honest. I love those relationship-status-type relationships. I love flirting and over-analyzing every word, every gesture with Weed and RS and P and M and Shibs and Boss and..well...whoever happens to be around and is nice enough not to have me committed (heh!).

I even enjoy the raw terror that springs up in my throat when the relationship status actually reads 'in a relationship.'
'Someone like me' is a lot of boogeymen. A lot of 'go away, this is my book-and chips time!'
It means you're gonna materialize in every poem I read or write. That some place on my body will remember you for a pretty long time. And it especially means that you will be deconstructed extensively by all my girlfriends and me.
It's pressure, baby!

I'm a hopeful romantic! One who's seen divorce and bitterness and the hard, hard work that goes into making relationships work. J and I had a hard-driven, almost painfully bright romance. The kind where you haven't a clue what you're doing, but just hurtling on desperately hoping it will work out. With S, it was a softening and a toughening. But neither of us were ready to give as much as was needed. If a splitting apart can be tender, ours was. I think we gave each other more during our break-up than during our romance.

Technically, I've been single for the last two years.
I have been lonely a few times, wistful a few times more. With the abysmally long time I take to get over relationships, the first year and half of the second was spent teary and obsessive. In fact, till January this year, I was in 'getting over phase.' Then the Mars Bar came along, and I woke up to the fact that there were still men out there who could make me smile by waving their hands around and telling the class that 'St. Augustine was a sensually fulfilled man.' I came back to Singletonhood with a vengeance which simply means that my battle-worn emotional self was ready to play again.
The thing is, almost all those people who asked That Significant Question knew a little bit of me. They saw the bad jokes, the good writing, the perpetual normalcy. They didn't know about the boogeymen. Didn't know how much it takes to make a tie with me. Or how much it is worth.

' Someone like me.' Are you listening, Universe?