At a certain point you need to give yourself a break and be positive.  Your intentions were good.  Execution might have failed miserably, but your heart was in the right place.  Buddhists get a bad wrap in relationships and pretty much everything else, accused of non-action.

The main action in our lives is that we were created as who we are.  We don't have to change anything about ourselves, but develop into the higher being we're meant to be, a part of the clear consciousness.  It's too easy to become obsessed with the obvious things, to not explore the depths of karma.

How do you speak to a world so certain of itself, the world of military versus terrorist strike, feuding nations, the grab for resources, the competition considered over basic human decency.

You meditate, and your world slowly and steadily improves.  You begin to do things more in accordance with yourself, being more in control of your emotions.  You live a cleaner more organized life;  you address things more directly, more as you should given the totality of your being;  you stop lying and doing the counterproductive things.  Initially, this takes great concentration.  Maybe that's why some of us come across that through the sense of things not going right and being down and beaten.

But it's all confusing, a long process of education, to not be drawn into an issue as other people see it from the usual worldly perspective of seeking comfort and an absence of pain, the craving that follows from a consciousness hypnotized by the illusion of a concrete self.

Love has to be approached, in the purely Buddhist sense, of a uniting with the larger, with the correspondent part of creation, with a fuller realization of karma.  And this takes morality, which may be how some political figures achieve a truer stature, through the taking up of a moral issue, becoming a deeper expression of themselves, just as a writer, a novelist like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy might through the lush and non-judgmental worlds of their fiction and accounts of humanity.

It makes you wonder, were we born with the enlightened knowledge of who we should be, that by needs we should fall and fail before picking up again, in our maturity believing in the higher purpose and working to manifest it in our own little way?   Is that how focus comes?

What then of the things we've missed, of the opportunities we did not seize?  How would Buddha tell us to think about these things?

Is this why the rules of courtship, of how to behave in society are found to be irksome to some of us? Some can connect A to B, quite simply, then see if it works out, and then some of us are in a point of exploring the depths of one's own karma and the way to the betterment determined from within.

The spell of a first romantic meeting broken by the distracting call of a family visit, to be seen as the interference that caused everything to go wrong, or somehow the call of karma, of making amends for a previous life's shortcomings, or did that visit then create new ills through the bad choice of not getting back to the romance as soon as one possibly could?  Difficult to account for simply and cleanly, I think anyway, just as a Chekhov story is complicated, though, I admit, often a tale of the thwarted, like the shy soldier who gets a kiss in the dark.  Is that thwarted quality itself part and parcel of the tender Buddhist message that ultimately unites us all, as if like a Sherwood Anderson story in which people are finally reunited after much woe to cry and keep each other tender company after too many years gone by.

It's not easy to find and follow one's karma and the dharma.  There is much distraction to be avoided, and we have to learn this the hard way.