The thing with making boxes is that then you have to fill them

Cardboard boxes.

I think only when we are kids do they represent fun. Once we can't fit ourselves in them anymore, they quickly come to represent one of the most hated rituals of adult life: moving.

It starts with procuring the cardboard boxes (no small feat in a city without a car), then taping the bottom, then filling them with just the right combination of stuff so as to not break anything, including your back. Then the filled boxes have to be moved, or stored, and then they have to be unpacked, or in my case, when you move 10 times in the past 10 years, you eventually give up unpacking and they sit in the corner of your living room. Ah boxes!

About a month after leaving my husband I sat down and made a rather extensive list of qualities or character traits that I wanted in a spouse. I was reasonable, I categorized the list into "Must have", "Want to have" and "Would be nice to have". I accepted that I probably couldn't find everything, and I wanted to be realistic about the things I would compromise on and the things I wouldn't.

I tucked the list away in my journal and didn't really look at again until November when I started working on developing a target identification model for potential bank merger scenarios for my client at work. Basically I took a bunch of criteria for banks and weighted the different criteria based on my client's needs and then ran the targets' data through the model and it spit out a score for each target. Of course I was like "Ha ha wouldn't it be totally great if I did this with my own target criteria". (Sick MIT student, sick, sick). Thankfully I got busy with other things, and didn't attempt such craziness. However, I mentioned my casual stroll to the edge of the cliff of nerdom to a classmate (while we were on a date) and we got into a pretty good discussion.

I argued that having a list of boxes that need to be checked is a really good thing, cause it makes you evaluate a potential target fairly and objectively before you fall (or jump) off the cliff. He argued that while having criteria is good, usually for him there either is chemistry or there isn't, and you may have really great chemistry with someone who doesn't fill all the boxes, and you may not have any with someone who does, that is just the way love goes.

At the time, I thought "Silly boy who hasn't had a relationship with LOTS of chemistry for the first year with someone who didn't check any of the boxes completely destroy your life." But now I find myself wondering if he was on to something....

continued in next post....