The latest unanswerable question came while I sat at the table on a visit home.

"Are you in love with him?" my sister asked, referring to my boyfriend of nearly a year.

I thought for a moment. The idea hadn't ocurred to me in such concrete words, more a general wondering.

"Not really. No," I said, shaking my head. "But then, I've never been in love. I wouldn't know what it feels like."

I asked a guy friend if he'd been in love before. "What's it like?"

"My insides would explode everytime i thought about her, (mind you she was around all the time)," he said. "I would float all over the place. She would touch me and electricity would go up my spine.

"Those feelings i had were soooooo strong, there were times i felt i could fly...though the ground preveted that of course."

I told my mom it seemed like a logically sound decision to be with him. But she didn't like the sound of that.

"You can't just make a logical decision about this. You don't sound like yourself, like who you've been all your life."

And so I wonder. What is this "thing" that's in the way? Where did I get the idea that smart people don't fall in love, that to be in love is to be synonymous with spacey, ditzy, unproductive, and useless? How much of this is my own stuff to work through, and how much is because he just isn't all that I've been looking for? And how much is my own idealism that is rarely fulfilled?