Love is Like the Ocean: Salty and Rife with Urchins

Pain surges, swells, crests, ebbs. Love washes, floods, saturates. Different names for a similar tidal effect; our mental castles - those places we build to define our petty, irrational, small selves - drown in hurt as easily as they do in pleasure. Rare is the person who grants unfettered access to the gilded rooms, the mirrored halls, the isolated towers and torture chambers alike. Most of us petition at a suspended drawbridge.
It is not this feudal littoral zone that keeps us forever uniting, ceasing, and uniting again - impulse suffices. Yet somehow we have come to imagine that deep barriers are not only important but intrinsic to healthy sex/love relationships. Women shouldn't like their hubby's friends; men should hate shopping for shoes, or jewelry. (Or, perhaps more telling, Men Shouldn't Cry, among my favorite pastoral perfidies) Outdated mores are no less culturally relevant for their being anachronistic. A long-standing tradition to avoid these sexual detentes has been "the setup," in which two (or three, or four) people get together, decide "We know precisely the set of attractiveness parameters our casual, weekender friend seeks and we will totally ignore those guidelines and select another friend for whom we also care a great deal and yoke them, producing an awkward social melange guaranteed to yield, at best, a relationship built on duty to those same friends who seemed to care," then implement their grand scheme. It's an aged form of puffery that inexplicably survives.
Toward the end of college I half-joked that, for the sake of avoiding blind dates and friend set-ups, men and women should provide their exes with a "sexual resume," formalizing breakup components and agents that stood in the way of relationship progress. Naturally the resume would include an aegis - a comprehensive list of positive, makes-one-eminently-datable traits. Roommates and I drafted several, as a lark, then discarded them to watch Euro Cup soccer. Who could take an idea like that seriously?
These people could. And these people, in a sure-to-be-litigated libelous way. What happened to the shy witticism and awkwardness of a first date, that revelatory moment where social compunction cedes to fancy? Are the last vestiges of chivalry (male or female) - the token, the ever-escalating promise - now merely detritus on Gawain's boot? I think I'm disgusted.