Please, friends, I don’t need you to complete me

“So I may have done something really lame.” That was the subject line of the e-mail at the top of my inbox.

Just below it was another message with this subject line: “Mayrav has suggested a match for you!”

Yeah, I thought, you have done something lame. And I didn’t yet know the half of it.

Using Friendster, the six-degrees-of-separation Web community, May was trying to set me up with someone I didn’t know.

Thing was, May didn’t know this woman either. She was just cruising through Friendster when she came across someone from Anaheim she thought was “the kind of cute you don’t pass up.” So she suggested, via Friendster’s set-up-your-buddies feature, that we get to know each other.

In effect, my friend was attempting to create a double-blind date. I figured I should at least be polite, so I sent a somewhat sheepish e-mail to the woman. I didn’t hear back from her, and I can’t say I blame her. I chalked it up as a learning experience: Double-blind methodology is great for testing pharmaceuticals, not so good for that other kind of chemistry.

This was not the first time Mayrav tried to set me up (and it probably won’t be the last), even though she has admitted to me and to others that she’s really not very good at it.

Usually, I give her romantic suggestions the benefit of the doubt. But these circumstances actually upset me. Was she feeling sorry for me? Did she really think I was that lonely? Couldn’t she find a cute girl who lived less than 50 miles away?

I needed to find out why she thought she could set up me up with someone neither of us knew.

“When I came across her, something just clicked in my head,” May tells me via instant messenger.

Fine. But why, in general, would you want to do such a thing?

“It’s a sickness.”

OK ...

“The thing I fear most is being alone. I can’t stand it. And I can’t stand the thought of people I love being alone.”

It’s hard to stay angry with someone who says that to you. But Mayrav is seeing “alone” where there isn’t much aloneness.

The thing is, she’s married. She and her college sweetheart, another close friend, have been married for 6 1/2 years, and they dated for several before that. So she hasn’t really been single for, oh, a decade. And yet, like several of my married or coupled friends, she has a lingering urge to eradicate singlehood.

But while the desire is there, the execution is lacking.

There was the college friend, for instance, who wanted to set me up with her boyfriend’s neighbor. We were to meet at a bar as part of a group. The woman brought her brother. Not a date.

There was the soon-to-be-married couple who introduced me to a woman in their building. That meeting was so brief that when the couple mentioned her name again a few weeks later, my response was, “Who?”

You get the idea. Mayrav calls this being “snob married” -- afflicted with the notion that being part of a couple is so fulfilling that everyone should try it.

My would-be-matchmaker friends are all involved in healthy relationships and I’m continually impressed by that fact. But they’ve been in them so long they’ve forgotten that it’s possible to be happily unattached. They’re trying to cure to something that isn’t a disease.

And for that, I blame Tom Cruise. It’s his line in “Jerry Maguire” -- “You complete me.” He’s telling Renee Zellweger how much he loves her and wants her back, and it’s a wonderful, romantic line in a fine movie. Like so much else in pop culture that shapes our view of relationships, however, it carries the message that someone isn’t whole without a partner. I find that hard to take.

My friends try to be encouraging, but even that suggests that I should be working harder at coupling up. In my experience, it’s better to be complete on your own than to look for someone else to fill the holes in your life. I’ll grant that it is nice, if you’re at a New Year’s Eve party, to know who you’re going to kiss at midnight. There’s a lot to be said for waking up in the morning to find the person you love smiling at you.

A time will come when I have all that again, I’m pretty sure. In the meantime, though, life -- family, friends, work, whatever -- feels pretty complete.

Freelance writer Rick Porter can be reached at weekend@ latimes.com.