meet you at the corner of math and love

i think kate was the first person to hear me prattle about "five"s in terms marriage and love and i also distinctly remember explaining it to someone outside the SAS cafeteria sophomore year. anyway, tonight while i was lying sleeplessly in bed, i started thinking about it and something occurred to me- what if your "four" loved you more than your "five"? would that be enough to push them over the top? technically, if your four loved you more than your five, your five wouldn't really be your five.. and so there's a flaw in this progression because my "five" theory, if you can even call it that, isn't a rating system, but rather a way to illustrate relativity. i guess i should explain what my "five" theory, i want to find another word because it's not a theory, is. basically it's about how there's more than one person in the world who could make you happy and as happily married as my parents are i'm sure there are other people in the world who could make them just as or potentially even more happy, so how do you know if you've found the person who you'd be the most happy with- your "five"? because maybe you think found your five because it's the best you've come across yet, but you'll never know for sure until you come across something better at which point it's too late.. so maybe you think you found a five but then you find someone better and you realize, oh that was a four, but wait.. someone even better comes along and you realize that that first love you thought was a five was in fact a three. and yeah, i realize how flawed that is and it's not so simply linear.. especially tonight. what if there's someone who is everything you want but you can't have them, or you can maybe have them, but if you hold out and wait for them you could end up with nothing, whereas there is someone who is almost everything you want.. but you can have them. shouldn't the fact that they love you back count for something? like maybe a "times two" or a "plus two" or something.. so maybe there's mr. or mrs. right and they're an almost perfect 9 (veering away from the whole relativity "five" thing) because i don't think anyone can be a sure-thing 10, and then there's this other person that you could see yourself loving and there are many things you do love about them and they love you back but they aren't quite mr./mrs. right so they're an 8.. but the fact that they love you, if it's worth plus 2, would put them up at a 10. and so now, on paper, this other person should take the cake and you'll live happily ever after with them, right? but. will that be truly enough? will my heart buy it?