The Key is Finding Someone to Love!

I've got lots of clients that are picky. They are often dismissing the opportunity to meet quality introductions that I'm suggesting on a snap judgment. I was up the other night because I was worried about a particularly picky client and challenged by his lack of adventure when it comes to dating! I remembered a section of one of my all time favorite books - How to Stop Looking for Someone Perfect and Find Someone to Love by Judith Stills, Ph.D.

This book is no longer in publication - if you buy it on Amazon you'll pay a premium. But it has lots of excellent advice for singles. I highly recommend it. Here is an excerpt that has helped me lately - hope it helps you too!

Sarah Kathryn

*****

You walk into a party or a bar and in three minutes (more likely three seconds, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt) you've made a judgment: There's no one here who's my type. They're all jerks. You may even pride yourself on knowing your tastes and preferences so well that you seldom err in your first impressions of potential mates.

I would like to focus your attention on two points. First, if you are a person who takes pride in these lighting-quick judgements of others, I'll bet that you find your judgements are predominantly negative. People who allow themselves to make rapid judgments most often make negative ones because they're very safe. If you avoid someone because, in your opinion, he's a fool or she's flaky, how can you ever really be proved wrong? you can simply chalk it up to matters of taste, pride yourself on your selectiveness, and avoid that person so you never have an opportunity to discover if you're wrong.

Positive attitudes and positive judgments are riskier. They open you up to more people, more experiences, and the possibility of disappointment. Of course, they open you up to the possibility of more happiness as well, but many people cling hard to the better-safe-than-sorry stance.

Please forgive this lecture. It's just that it has sometimes been so frustrating to listen to genuinely lonely people who react critically to a potential partner because of the most trivial idiosyncrasies and based on the most premature of opinions. Most men and women report to me that they judge whether or not someone could ever be a potential partner at first glance. These same people would report that physical appearance is only one, and not the most important one, of many criteria for choosing a mate. Then why screen out so many potential candidates at first sight?

This is the most negative attitude of them all: the perspective that someone else must push all the right buttons and your response is entirely out of your control. Of course, anyone who is so helpless before his or her own negative attitudes has only one option - to wait for magic. The catch is, it can be a very long wait and the magic can be a very short ride.

End of lecture.

Clever Table at Emporium Brasil!

At Eight at Eight Dinner Club, we are huge believers in round tables. They are conducive to conversations and flirtatious winking, everyone can see everyone, and it creates the perfect setting for a dinner party. This is the holy grail of table shapes for us, but sometimes, our clever hostesses create an equally enchanting table all on their own!

Texting takes all the fun out of dating

A recent blog post by Niki Payne of the LA Examiner poses a fascinating question: what place (if any) does the text message have in the early phases of getting to know someone? Payne suggests that the when a woman gives a man her phone number, she expects a call and not a text. She further claims that the text indicates a desire for a "casual encounter" more than an actual relationship.

To be honest, I'd never thought about this one. In my personal life, I use the text message as a quick way to not interrupt someone else's life. If I call you, you may have to stop what you're doing to answer. The text allows you to get back to me when its convenient. However, I'm begining to see where Ms. Payne is coming from. I've railed about the alienation that technology has created in our lives before, so perhaps this is another example of the de-humanizing effects of our Crackberries and email accounts.

Moral of the story: take the time for a phone call. Moreover, take the time for a hand-written note instead of an email. Drop by to see someone and bypass the phone call. Heck, volunteer for a charity one afternoon instead of just writing a check. I'd suggest we might benefit from a bit more human interaction and a little less ones and zeros.