You and I have always differed on the viability and validity of directly submitting works to publishers. My position on that hasn't changed and has nothing to do with negativity.

As for moving in, it's certainly true that there is absolutely no foreseeable way for us to move out of this basement and get married.

I never said anything about directly submitting your work. You prefer an agent. Didn't you tell me that you found one and submitted something somewhere but got rejected? Or did you send it to an agent and he/she rejected you before it even had a chance to be sent to a publisher?

This is you not answering my questions, which leads me only to assume that the answers are: "Yes." "I gave up." "Yes." And then, "No." In which case I'm just going to have to side with Mel on this one.

That wasn't a nonanswer, that was me misunderstanding the level of information you had. I went through an entire database of agents, actually. I don't know how many it was know, but I'd be willing to guess it was around fifty all told.