..Points to ponder..

Women these days aren't all naive little Cinderellas waiting with our bare, manicured foot stuck outside our front door, toes painted chilli red and pointing up, like the stiff red flag on a mailbox, signaling our desire to be picked up.

We're more resilient in fact than the mailman, because no matter how much rain, sleet or snow pummeled our naked foot, we refused to bring it inside until the prince arrived, with his slippers, preferably Jimmy Choos.

However, and let's face this candidly, we're not exactly thinking rationally when we're in love. Our bodies are flooded with chemicals when we first fall in love; it's like being on Ecstasy and suddenly everything the other person says or does is blissful, perfect. But let's face it, most likely when you wake up from that little high, all you're going to be stuck with the next day is a bottle of asprin and a gallon of water instead of a government-backed certificate uniting you to the snoring stranger next to you for the rest of your happy little lives.

Finding true love should follow the unwritten rules of going to the grocery store. Any fool knows you don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry, much less starving. You'll throw any old thing into your cart if your stomach is in the throes of a grumbling delirium. But the second you get home and get a little something into your system, you're going to think - why the hell did I buy Cajun pork dumplings, garlic soy sauce and wheat-infused pesto-rainbow raviolis?

You know why you did it, you were starving and delirious. The real question is - why didn't any rational, satiated fellow shoppers stop you? Even if they feared you'd get violent, they could have at least kindly removed the bizarre items from your cart when you weren't looking.

People 'in love' should be locked in a cage together until they get a glimpse of what it will feel like to truly hate each other. We should all be forced to spend time with several of the ones-of-thousands-of-potential ONES, locked in a Waiting-to-Hate-You-So-I-Can-See-If-I-Can-Love-You-Cage with them, and after being held captive with fifty or so men, the one you hated the least would be the one you could grow to love the most.

But what if you did find the guy you hated the least, and after a couple of decades of lukewarm bliss, he dies in a freak accident and you still spend the majority of your life alone because you lost him in old age, at a time when neither the cloak of beauty nor the burden of loyalty was there to protect you? Funny how similar love was to the stock market. No matter how wisely you invested, you just couldn't predict whether your portfolio was going to grow steady and pay off, or crash and burn.

But if you didn't invest at all, you didn't even get a chance. Zero investments yield zero profits. Yet can you stand the heartache of losing completely everything? If spreading out your investments were your safest bet, what does this mean when it comes to love?

You can't exactly keep several other men waiting in the wings in case Mr-after-spending-twenty days-locked-in-a-cage-with-you-i-hated-you-the-least doesn't work out.

Could you?

There are hundreds of thousands of potential ONES. But it isn't exactly conducive to romance to start lining up men and locking them in cages, like securing your stock portfolio.

Unless you trade on mutual understanding that you were simply using each other as a backup in case your preferred cage-mate's stock plummeted. *sigh* No wonder we're so messed up when it comes to matters of the heart. With so many variations and question marks, it isn't surprising that even the most gifted of psychics can't predict the millions of love permutations in a given portfolio.