Buddah Mind:
I've had many of the same ponderings as you, and I think it's totally natural at this stage in life. Rollo and Jitterbug hit some really good points, in their own way. Like Jitterbug I've spent the better part of the last year trying to make sense of matters like this in my head. And, as is often the case with an enigma, the "mystique" only lies in your mind. The genius of the riddle is that there is no riddle....it's an illusion of the mind. I know that sounds really nebulous and cliche, so I'll simplify it: Stop trying to figure women out. Stop trying to figure relationships out. When you do this, the biases and scars and influences you have in your mind will be out of the equation, and things will make themselves clear sooner or later.
Women want you to believe in their "mystique" because it is advantageous for them. It's not much different than when a man had a woman buffaloed with his charm--it helps him get the outcome he wants. Same with women--they are calculating, but not in the systematic, scientific way that men are. They intuitively behave in certain ways that will help bring them the outcome they want. They would like us to believe it's a "mystery". It isnt. What they do makes perfect sense in their own minds, just not always to us. A lot of guys take a dark turn here and view male-female relationships as adversarial; a battle to be won. Well if you view things this way that's what your life will be, a never-ending war.
We live in a world of hurt. By that i mean that everybody on this planet acts out of their own hurt and pain, in some capacity. In many ways we mirror what was done to us, and we try to seek what we did not get from people who cannot give it. This is the cycle of humanity, the cycle of hurt. That guy who who killed those people in Tuscon? He was acting out of his own pain, wherever it came from. People like to call him a Monster, a Psychopath; but they have no idea what was going on in his head. I guarantee you he was hurting more than anyone ever knew, and anger is the evidence of pain. In no way does that excuse what he did, nor make it any less tragic, but anybody is capable of anything, and if you dont believe that you are deluding yourself.
I guess the point I am making here is that 'women' are no more to be figured out than 'men' are to be figured out. PEOPLE--their scars, pain, motivations, and desires--are to be figured out. Women just take things in a different direction than we do, and we cant act all baffled when they do. People are much like trees, in that a tree is composed of ALL the rings of its years, not just what you see. Past events and behavior will always be the most reliable way to truly know what someone is about, and why they do what they do.