And as far as S goes.... I wound up with her because she persued me. My first reaction was actually that I wasn't interested, because something seemed not right with her. A reaction I should have stuck with. The things setting off alarm bells back then turned out to be what helped drive us apart. Really there's a lot of details about that that only a small handful of people know about, and I won't go into here.
So find someone with less bells.
And I feel like my idiotic mistake cost me the time period where I had the best chance of finding somebody.
Look, as far as I am concerned best chance, worst chance, does not equal no chance.
As I said, find someone with less bells.
Several years ago I met someone online that I had some reservations about (Vastly less balls than you have mentioned with S), not the least of which was that we lived 1,500 miles apart, and why would she be flirting with me anyway? (A sure sign that something was wrong with her.) I took the advice of another couple of female confidants I had garnered in the group, one of whom finally convinced me that I would be better off flirting back. At the very least I would learn to flirt a bit better.
A couple years after that I flew down to visit her. Three months later I bought a minivan and drove to Arizona to move her to Minnesota.
On July 3rd, Windsparrow and I will have been living together 4 years.
Not that we are the perfect couple, but we do okay. After all this time, the only questions about bells are from friends and family asking when they will hear some.