I’ve been falling in love with the same woman my entire life.
She’s had different names over the years. She’s had different faces. There have even been very real differences between her incarnations. But at the core, she’s always been my latest and most mature understanding of “the Ideal Woman.”
The ideal woman doesn’t exist any more than the ideal man exists. I know that. But it’s the best phrase I have for this abstract idea. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it’s constantly been on my mind for the last week. I need to talk about it. Maybe I’ll have a point. Maybe not.
Think about a product that goes through generations of change over years, but it’s still recognizable as the same product each time. If you compare the first iPhone from 2007 with the current model, it would seem radically different. But if you compared the first iPhone to the second, then the second to the third — and so on, including last year’s model to this year’s — you recognize the same idea and same product. But the latest is radically different from the very first.
If you compared my first Ideal Woman with my most recent, you would see differences, but the core elements — the ideal parts in each of them — are startlingly similar.

Vile human cost of war ignored by Americans playing political games
Playing it safe isn’t good enough; I have to do things that might fail
Time and maturity have changed
What if Jesus was serious about commands he gave his followers?
Galt’s Gulch? I can live without that, but I need my own ‘Akston’s diner’
If you’ve gotten on the wrong bus, nothing changes until you get off
We live in Reverse World, where black is white and good is evil