>>1
If you haven't yet, I recommend trying out love-romance computer games.

I find the level of emotion I can feel for (semi-)interactive game characters experienced from a first-person perspective is much, much higher than non-interactive cartoon characters watched as a 3rd-person observer.

(Honestly, I've never fallen in love with a character from a non-interactive medium, ever, which does mean I’m probably a little different than you. But in romance games I've fallen hard, it’s just like real life, you can’t get the girl out of your head all day long even when you’re trying to get work done or whatever.)

Obviously this varies from person to person—it may turn out that your internal fantasies built from observed characters as raw material suit you better than romance game scenarios pre-designed by other people, but I think you should check them out at least and see what you think. (And of course, you can extend the game experience with additional internal fantasies.)

The only real issue is, if you don’t know Japanese, the number of such games available in English is really small (you could play every titled released so far a month or two) so if you turn out to like them, you do pretty much need to learn Japanese to keep up with it.