Loser, winning near the goal

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Like the rest of you, I suffered through Keats' "Grecian Urn" during my junior or senior year in high school. With enough woo/love/leave episodes under my, uh, belt at that time to constitute a pattern, it's remarkable that I missed his mini-ode-within-an-ode here to Hunter's Complex—or Sagittarian Syndrome, as one of my sisters calls it. Two centuries before the universal attention deficit diagnosis, Keats knew that The Thrill Is In The Chase.

In (brief) relationship after (brief) relationship, I can remember the exact moment that I lost interest, and it invariably came with the realization that I'd won her. Not to be confused with I kissed her (although that tended to be more characteristic of its nascent stages), this awareness came following an act or an expression or gesture that said, "You have conquered my heart."

Eventually, I caught on to this, as did my best friend, who wrote me a monolithic work, "Your Relationships: Five Simple Steps," which was hilarious, scathing, and spot-on...and got deleted when a server crashed back in e-mail's stone age. Merely catching onto it didn't do much to break the cycle in most cases, although I was able to overcome it—or at least delay its otherwise-inevitable appearance—to nurture a few longer and more meaningful relationships along the way.

I've heard this behavior ascribed to the variety of low self esteem reflected in a quote attributed by Woody Allen to both Groucho Marx and Sigmund Freud, which is something to the effect of, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."

In grad school, an observant roommate gave me her copy of Cosmo, bookmarked to an article about "The Three Month Man," which offered a variety of other explanations, most of which applied to me in some form or other. It blew me away: How did they figure me out?! I haven't managed to track that one down again (it was sometime in late '96 or early '97, if you want to check your extensive collection of back issues), but I did find this article that seems to be a warmed-over rehashing of the Cosmo one, and still accurate. (In case the link changes, the title is "Are You The Next Three-Month Man?" by Andre Cross, at AskMen.com.) Don't skip the quiz at the end—at any given moment between ages 16 and (skip 19-21) 26, I would have scored at least 80%.

In any case, the Hunter/Conquerer/TMM psyche isn't the most receptive ground for the deep roots that a long-term commitment needs to cast down.