Everyone Falls In Love

I wonder—if everyone wrote out a list of people they had been romantically drawn to throughout their lifetimes, would most of the names on the list belong to fictional subjects?

First of all, you have straight-up fictional characters. Mr. Darcy, Clark Kent, Julian Bashir, etc. (Are women more likely than men to fall for a character from a novel? Are women more likely to fall for fictional characters in general?) In some cases, you have fictional characters who may have been written by people imagining their perfect match. Interesting concept.

Secondly, you have celebrities, people viewed from a great distance. These people are often very good-looking, or very talented, and as such are quite probably good people who, if they only knew, had a soulmate sitting alone at a computer screen surfing for pictures to put on their screensavers.

Finally, of course, you have the fictionalized "real" person, someone you construct elaborate fantasies around and who generally turns out to be someone very different. I wonder if people who majored in things like science or math have as much trouble with fictionalizing people as those of us who majored in English and theatre do.

Do lots of people have really long lists? If you actually wrote down all the names you could remember, would you see patterns? And would the patterns be a sign of what you need, or what you need to avoid?

I don't know about the first two, but I strongly suspect that for that last one, the answer...is no.