NOTE: This is a first person exploration of personal frustrations- somewhere between a rant and a look at personal attitudes. I am concerned in this post with my personal satisfaction. I do not mean to imply that the personal satisfaction of the person I'm with doesn't matter. It only doesn't matter (or is secondary) for the purpose of this post. Moreover, I often use truncated descriptions of complicated interactions to try and evoke a sense of my problem. One should not take my general descriptions as precise descriptions of some particular date or another.

So I'm attracted to a very particular type. I like women who are intelligent and emotionally deep- who feel a lot of very strong emotions and can articulate them really well. They're usually introverts or pseudo-extroverts (these are the best, since they have explicitly figured out how people see then, which requires a very complex understanding of other people, and they are often driven by some kind of insecurity that they're just dying to have someone to open up to about). Sometimes they're artists or bookworms or graduate students, but you can never quite tell just by the crowd they're in. Plenty of bookworms read shit or read good stuff superficially. Plenty of "artists" are very run-of-the-mill doodlerers, who just like to make pretty pictures. Etc.

Ultimately I love these kinds of women because both sexually and in a relationship I have a strong head game I want to carry out. I want to talk with her about how we're feeling together in a complex way. I want to be able to talk about different kinds of pleasure and pain. I want to have a complex story were telling about our lives. Etc. It's this kind of interaction with someone that really lifts up ordinary dull things into bright vibrant experiences.

When I go looking for these women, I often get sidetracked by one of two false positives: (1) "smart" women who are emotionally shallow or (2) "fucked up" women who have big emotions but are often either not adequately stable or turn out to be too hard to keep engaged with.

1 wastes my time because when I meet her she seems to be articulate and she can follow my conversation, but after a few weeks of seeing her when it becomes easier to start talking about difficult things (How do you feel about having to please others to get ahead? What's your highest aspiration? What about this book, that play, or this film really grabs you?), it becomes really obvious that she doesn't feel anything of interest and she's ultimately banal. This girl is often some kind of career girl with a superficially smart job- lawyer, schoolteacher, lecturer -whose entire intellect is really just geared to anal retentively being "perfect" and jumping through all the hoops they need to "be good at their job". They work too much and feel nothing but stress.

Example: I'm seeing this young schoolteacher and the fact that she's an English teacher who studied literature in college seemed promising. I put in some work, chat her up, get her comfortable with me, and eventually start to try and open her up. Turns out there's nothing there. She's the literary equivalent of an accountant: all she knows how to do with books is break them into a hundred easily digestible little factlets easily communicable to 16 year olds. I would share a poem or a play or a difficult story with her, and you could just watch her struggling with it knowing I wanted something, wanting to give it to me, but not knowing how.

"Do you think you can relate to the ambivalence in Hamlet? I've felt something like that at so many crucial points in my life." "Huh?"

Had to break it off.

2 wastes my time because you can talk with her about a difficult story- sometimes something hard in my past or hers -and you can often get her really into nature or some bit of art, and it seems promising, but then slowly it comes out that, like, she sometimes does meth or she can't hold down a job more than three months or else she starts engaging in bizarre or excessive behavior like fawning over me or promising to be my whole world immediately after we sleep together. Other times she starts out good and then withdraws into some kind of pit I have to fish her out of. This works for a little while- I get to be savior -but it can't be the whole relationship. These usually fizzle out after a week or two. Super fucked up girls usually don't keep it hidden very long.

So, as you can tell, I've got the beginning of an understanding about who I want and where I go wrong trying to find them, but I don't have a good approach to actually getting what I want. The closest I actually came was my last ex who was a brilliant artist, but she turned out to be bipolar and mutual bad behavior sent us into a tumultuous spiral that ended in heartbreak all around. It taught me a lot about what I want and what I don't want. And some of the things I learned in our early interactions (take her on a spontaneous mini-vacation very early on, read together, open up and relate about your dark spots early, be personal not superficial in conversation, try to make things into adventures, share things that really work you up emotionally, talk to her about sex and what it means and feels like, etc) will certainly be very useful in the future, but I met her by sheer chance, and I'm not going to sit around waiting for lightning to strike twice.

What should I do to try an look for this type of girl while filtering out both 1 and 2. I sort of know the general idea- bookstores, coffee shops, museums, art shows, etc -but I don't know how to avoid getting sidetracked by 1 and 2 in these settings.

Thoughts?