Things happen when you least expect them: a lesson murder has taught me about love

Obviously the last thing I wanted to do (apart from lose a limb, be wrongly accused of embezzlement, start a political movement based on the principles of Scientology, etc) was to fall for some man while in Cape Town. And as everyone tells you there are between 5 - 6 straight men to every straight woman in Cape Town I was pretty much on target for this. Add to this the fact that I am the kind of woman who is approached by a man roughly every decade, and then only because it's a really busy bar and I'm the shortest woman at it so he has to talk to me as he reaches above me for his drinks, and you get the lifestyle of one of the most undesirable women, at least of my acquaintance, if not on the planet.
My undesirability has its upsides: I very rarely get hassle from drinkers in bars/workmen on the street/my friends' husbands when everyone else has left the room. In fact, I am the kind of woman women I have only just met confidently leave their husbands with while they roam a party: they know that everything will be alright. Neither have I ever been pressurised to do anything the least bit jiggy in order to get a job. I was recently talking to an utterly gorgeous young woman, having just seen her do a really good job on stage. We were agreeing vigorously that doing sexual favours to forward your career is not on. I pointed out to her that she was far more principled than I as I have never had the chance to test my ethical stance on this one - no one has ever requested anything from my yard, whereas she regularly gets demands for her milkshake which she turns down. Respec. Oh, and I live a wonderful life of diagonal sleeping, surely the king of sleeps, and not available to those with a nocturnal companion.
It also has its downsides, one of them being that if a chap, who is not concurrently seeing one or more other people and who can actually look me in the eye, does show any interest in me I either miss it entirely (I'm putting this category in because although I'm not sure it exists, it's good for my ego to think that there are more people out there who find me attractive than the handful I've been aware of during these 40+ years), presume he is joking or, well, fall for him.
Of course, in the end, nothing came of this thing between this rare heterosexual man in Cape Town and me. I say of course because, well, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this if I could be going to the cinema/planning a weekend away/sitting in confusing silence with a fella who thought I was of some passing interest. And I found it not going the way I wanted pretty... devastating. That's one of the problems of being thunderously undesirable: I have so little experience of the  ebb and the flow of things 'romantic' that even now I have no understanding of what is going on or any substantial resilience. Give me a bereavement and I reckon I have a fighting chance, but a bloke not wanting to be with me when I fancy being with him, well, I'm defenceless. I know no one understands these things, but I don't understand these thing on another level entirely. I like to think I'm touchingly foolish, but I fear that I'm just irritatingly dense.
People with whom I discuss these matters often opine that I am too choosy when it comes to men. Where they get this idea from I cannot imagine. One day I'll do the True Life blog about the numerous internet dates I've been on with men who tell me on the first date about the brutality of their soon-to-be-ex wife's divorce demands, burst into tears about the way their mother beat them as a child or tell the story of how much the other patients enjoyed their guitar playing during their post-suicide attempt stay in the mental ward. There is nothing, intrinsically, wrong with any of these stories, but they are curious fare for a first date. Incidentally, I don't judge any of these men - they just happened to need to talk about those things at that time, and, after all, they often get to hear that my sister was murdered.
So, you know, I'm really not choosy, unless you call wanting someone who's single, has a sense of humour and can name the capital city of Mexico choosy.
Often friends then say I want to meet someone too much. This happens about 50% of the time. The other 50% they say I do not make enough effort.
Want it too much, not enough. Oh blah blah blah. If only they'd just shout "IT'S YOUR FAULT YOU'RE ALONE, BOZO!" and have done with it.
And a great deal of the time they tell me that I will meet someone when I least expect it, which is odd as I have never met anyone while having a bra fitting at M&S.
As I struggle with my dose of heartbreak, I long for my sister. You'll probably realise I do that a lot anyway, but she would have had that great angle on this. She was of totally different cloth to me, desirable in an utterly mysterious and devastating way, she got all of those genes, but she also received her fare share of heartbreak. And she got me, on every level. And I knew, whatever happened, I'd always have her. Der. Although, now I come to think about it, she was in love, preparing to marry, full of hope an passion for the future when the last thing we all expected happened with the aid of just the one bullet... maybe there is something in that theory after all.