Love Quest
The Love Quest is the ongoing, real life saga of Christian Weston Chandler to obtain a girlfriend. The stated purpose of the Love Quest (or "sweetheart search") is to meet the person who will be his true love and will solve all his problems and father his children. However, Chris believes all of this will be assured upon his first successful sexual intercourse with a woman, and so for all practical purposes the true goal is to lose his virginity.
The Love Quest began on February 24th, 2002[1], and was apparently intensified by Christian's intense jealousy upon learning that his childhood gal pal Sarah Hammer was romantically involved with Wes Iseli. Chris is known to have had crushes on girls prior to 2002, but the Love Quest represents a focused effort to do everything in his power to achieve romantic fulfillment. He has often linked the Love Quest with what he claims to be visions from God and Jesus commanding him to father a daughter, as well as the means to proving that he is straight; at times these seem to be the only actual reasons Chris wants a lover.
At some point early on in the Quest, Chris developed an intense, socially crippling fear that all women have boyfriends. Since his autism causes him to approach social tasks in the starkest terms possible, it can be assumed that his initial approach was to bluntly walk up to women and ask if they would go out with him. It may be further inferred that Chris's unrelenting persistence made it extremely difficult for a woman he liked to get rid of him, short of claiming to have a boyfriend. In any case, Chris quickly lost nearly all of his confidence in talking to women and developed an irrational hatred of boyfriends (i.e., all men everywhere except himself and his father). Since this time, he has always specified that his potential girlfriend must be a Boyfriend-free girl, as if this were not already obvious.
Strategy
Since he is too nervous to initiate contact with women and too ignorant to do so effectively, Chris has spent most of the Love Quest thinking of ways to get single women to approach him. For several years this primarily involved devoting a portion of his day to "Attraction Time," which he would spend loitering at public places ("Attraction Locations") while trying to call attention to himself with such brilliant tactics as:
- Pacing around a lot, playing videos on his Game Boy Advance
- Shouting at walls, or "singing random songs from memory now and then"
- Leaving a Red String of Fate lying on the floor, leading to himself
- Literally holding up a sign that reads "I am a 25-Year Old, Single Male, seeking a Boyfriend-Free, 18-25-year old, caring, smoke-free, non-alcoholic white Single Female Companion" with an ARROW POINTING TO HIM
In addition to these schemes, Christian's entire creation of the Sonichu's News Dash and the Sonichu comic series may be viewed as passive-aggressive attempts to get women to talk to him, since both projects are laden with references designed to alert the reader to Chris's romantic plight.
In general, Chris believes that it is impossible for him to directly approach a woman and that he must derive some procedure that is guaranteed to cause one to become curious enough to come to him, at which point she will learn how lonely he is and take pity on him. He takes on faith that any single woman who will tolerate his presence for more than five minutes can and will be his sweetheart, and he will immediately get ahead of himself trying to perform every public display of affection he can think of.
Progress
To date, Chris's Love Quest has resulted in absolutely no progress in finding a woman who will have sex with him, although amazingly he has managed to get in trouble (if not banned outright) from every one of his Attraction Locations. Interference from authority figures objecting to his misguided efforts has led to him depicting them as villains in his imaginary world, specifically Mary Lee Walsh, the Jerkops, and the Manajerks. Refusing to accept that he is simply not allowed to sit around in public holding a sign begging women to go out with him, Chris has determined that the entire Commonwealh of Virginia is out to prevent him kissing a girl.
Chris's methods make him far more likely to get trolled than get laid, and by his own admission he was tricked by Hannah, a girl at the mall who was put up to asking him out for coffee. He was able to at least make friends with Anna McLerran, although she nevertheless mocked him behind his back in The Tale of the Crazy Pacer.
Upon meeting Megan Schroeder and determining that she would inevitably reciprocate his feelings, Chris summarily abandoned his notions of pacing around the mall and carrying the attraction sign, dismissing these ideas as dumb in Sonichu 6.
Internet Love Quest
Since losing Megan during his edit war with Encyclopedia Dramatica, Chris has taken his Love Quest onto the internet, proclaiming that his true and honest sweetheart is Blanca Sarah Jackson Sarah Cassandra McKenzie, Julie, Emily Ivy.
With each sweetheart he meets Chris follows a predictable pattern, demonstrating what he had always intended to do with any woman he met in real life. He begins with a series of proclamations of his true love, and then begins planning out how the woman will travel to his home. Chris fervently believes in John Tesh's rule that sex is out of the question until the third date, but since he expects every romantic encounter to end in total success he makes it clear--as gentlemanly as possible--that he expects sex at the woman's earliest convenience. Amazingly, as each successive internet gal pal proves to be a troll, Chris becomes more devoted to the next one, to the point that within a month of meeting Ivy online he began planning his marriage to a woman he has never even seen face-to-face.
When addressing the question of why Chris readily takes each new troll at face value, his own mindset must be taken into consideration. Chris's prospects of finding a girl locally are virtually zero, and he knows this. At the same time, the internet seems (from his point of view) to be an endless cavalcade of single, attractive women who are fascinated with him, making it an irresistible resource in his Love Quest. By now Chris is fully aware that each woman he meets online could be a troll, but each time he readily accepts evidence that she is not and dismisses out of hand any suggestion that she is because he wants to believe she's real; the alternative is to surrender to despair.
Future
In Chris's final chat with Sarah May, he revealed that he is giving up looking for a sweetheart online, and is planning to find a girl in local Charlottesville. Trolls everywhere rejoiced, for this can only mean one thing - a return to the fabled Attraction Sign and the days of his exploits against the Jerkops and his other IRL misadventures.
On 10 March 2009, Chris confirmed he would be venturing off back into the real world to return to his days of stalking women IRL, this time armed with the flirting advice from a 9 year old boy. Unfortunately, that 9 year old boy is still older than Chris is mentally.
On 24 March 2009, Chris seems to have fallen off the wagon after being scared shitless when the Man in the Pickle Suit stole his date and returned to find true love on the Internet from a girl named Ivy.
Promotional Images
During his Love Quest, Chris produced some "sexy" pictures to attract the ladies. Needless to say, it had an opposite effect.
