@milkshark I think back in that time Chris was not so interested in getting a grill yet. He did appreciated his gal pals and just now he retroactively has upgraded them to heartsweet material.
A quote from the CWCki:
According to Chris, the genesis of the Love Quest was his twenty-first birthday, 24 February 2003. On this date, he was kicked out of his college English class after a dispute with his teacher. While waiting for his next class, Chris sat and cried his eyes out, realizing there was no one to comfort him like when he cried at his graduation. Shortly thereafter, he resolved that he needed a girlfriend.
After leaving high school and moving to another city, he lost a lot of day-to-day basic social contact. Community colleges are not usually the easiest places to meet new friends. People come, take their courses, and leave. If they hang around, it's usually with people they already know. So he had no replacement for the gal-pals.
The way he describes it, he had a moment of crisis. He wanted someone to talk to about it, and realized he had noone. That launched the sweetheart search.
It seems like there is one question that spins out of that.
Suppose he had been able to maintain a social group somehow. Maybe he stays in Richmond and goes to community college with a couple gal-pals. Maybe he meets some fellow PVCC people at the GamePlace. Maybe he joins a PVCC anime club and meets some pity acquaintances. When he gets kicked out of English class, there are a couple people to pat his ass for 10 minutes until he calms down. It was his birthday, so maybe he has some pity friends who are planning to take him to McDonald's for dinner to celebrate. None of those things are out of the realm of possibility, particularly since this was a pre-sweetheart search, less sex-obsessed, less creepy Chris.
Would he have launched the sweetheart search then, or would he have been happy just to muddle through life with some "pals" around. Think how much stuff could have been avoided.
I am not saying it is as simple as that one kicked-out-of-class moment. But the sweetheart search seems to have been launched by a sense of loneliness. Loneliness he didn't seem to feel when he was in high-school. Then the loneliness led to the sweetheart search, which led to creepiness and desperation. Which led to more loneliness. Which led to more creepiness and desperation.
It's a vicious circle that is spiralling to this day. I wonder how inevitable it was that he end up in it, or if there were a few little things that could have gone differently 10-15 years ago which would have denied us the treasure trove that is Christory.
