Quoting Aurorin2:

A friend of mine from work, let’s call him the JÌbaro, thought it would be good to get some friends together to celebrate my promotion on e Thursday night after work. He invited another friend, to whom I’ll be referring as Mr. S, who brought with him two other guys, Silent Bob and Nelly, to the bar where we had agreed to meet. A third guy, The Bearded Baby or BB showed up much later in the evening. Other than the JÌbaro and Mr. S, these were all strangers to me. We sat in this bar together, they with their foreign beers and I with my cranberry juice (I don’t drink), and as I looked at them, the Flyboys, really looked at them, they were all nice men. They were all good men. They were all attractive men to whom I felt no attraction, but there was no doubt that I perceived their presence was part of my dating dilemma.

I contemplated each man from head to toe. One by one. I had long ago zoned out their conversations about work, their latest international trips, or the person whom they thought had the sexiest body in the room. I allowed myself to get lost in my thought. I considered their heads— hair described in flavors and textures: salt and pepper, strawberry blond, and smooth and in various stages of balding; I looked in their eyes whose colors were like kaleidoscopes in blues, greens, and browns. There were beards and goatees, as well as smooth faces. Thick luscious lips as well as thinner ones. Physically, if I could take a piece of each one, I might have the chassis of the perfect man in my eyes. It was not that the Flyboys scared off any men that may have wanted to approach me. I think it was obvious to anyone with eyes that though we were together, we weren’t together for various reasons. The most apparent one was that four of the men I was with, those to whom I referred as “Flyboys” were gay. After a couple of beers, the guys weren’t just aggressive, they were loud and obnoxious, whistling and otherwise coming just shy of sexually harassing the men in the bar and even a police office on the street outside the bar. I sat there among them asking myself “Why am I here?” and I could see that B.B. was probably thinking the same thing. That’s when the two straight people at the table realized (better late than never) that we had been set up. Mr. S (and S is for Sassy) decided to force us to meet. Mr. S is a work friend, so he knows the part of me I want my colleagues to know. He figured out that I like younger men, in that way, his selection of B.B. was appropriate, but he didn’t know that I have no attraction to the unemployed. How little my friends think of me! This is a sad state of affairs when my friends feel they have to secretly set me up. I had no one but myself to blame.

This uncomfortable situation with the bearded Baby made me want to change my approach to dating. Before, my dating persona was what I thought men wanted. I tried to be quiet and a bit submissive and “girly”, but that’s really not me. I don’t like sports, for the most part, but most of my friends, for most of my life have always been men (some would say, in spite of my feminist values). I like to say that I am a “textbook Leo”—though I am not really devoted to astrology—in that I find the description of the personality of those under the sign of Leo is quite accurate for me. Years ago, someone advised me to take the positive characteristics of my sign and apply them to my professional life to ensure success. That was great advice! In dating, I was just the opposite: entirely too agreeable, less opinionated, unassuming, and passive. This behavior has not brought me dating success. Yes, I ended up with long-term relationships, but they were relationships that I ended after years of being miserable. I was suppressing who I really was, as best as I could, to be the person that man had originally met. I have determined that that did not work for me. It seems logical that if I do the same thing every time I can expect nothing but the same results. 2010 is my year!

Why can’t I, then, apply the very same principles that I’ve credited for my professional success towards my social life? In many ways, the pursuit of a long-term, monogamous relationship is very similar to the pursuit of a career. In each, every disappointment and/or bad experience can be a learning experience. And, in the end, success will lead to many years of a generally pleasant experience and after a long time in one place, they usually give you a big part and a gold watch, or some other piece of expensive jewelry. Ultimately, you know you’ve succeeded when after your party, you have no further responsibilities and its just smooth sailing and years of laughing and living with the one you love while you go around the world spending every last cent of your children’s inheritance.

What follows are the five principles for professional success that I have lived by and have worked for me. These are the very same principles that I am going to apply to my dating life in 2010. * The sixth principle is good for any occasion.

Make yourself available to the type of man you want to attract.
Surround yourself with positive and supportive people.
Don’t put meaning where there is no meaning.
Know what you want and don’t lower your standards.
Be prepared to fail at least once, and then try again.
The best revenge is living well.

I guess for most these are no-brainers, but as I said in a previous blog entry, I am a “serial monogamist”; so, I have very little dating experience. I have been very successful in my career, and these principles were those I lived by. Why wouldn’t they work in this situation too?

Making yourself available: this just means to be where you would find the type of man you would want and it’s best if that place is a place you would normally go anyway. There’s no point in pretending to be something you’re not. Case in point.. some religious friends, a couple we’ll call the Missionaries, believe the only place to find a good man is in church. They are missionaries for matrimony. Everyone should be married and every married couple should have children, according to them. It is a difficult for the husband to accept that his wife has one friend who is neither married or has (or wants) children: me. He can’t understand that a church would not be the ideal place for me to find the man who would be right for me. As I see it, if I find him in church, he’ll expect me to continue to go to church. Neither of us should be disappointed. So, let him find a good church girl, and let me look elsewhere. Similarly, if I am doing what I would normally do and I should meet someone who enjoys the same things, neither of us would have to change to please the other. Both of us would have quite pleasant demeanors and would be attractive as well as attracted to each other.

Surrounding yourself with positive people: this just means that bad energy begets more bad energy. Nobody likes that one person in the group who is so desperate for attention that s/he has to have something to complain about all the time. You spend your time trying to convince this person to stay or cheering this person up instead of having a good time yourself. This person is driving away anyone who might be interested in getting to know you. The same goes for the obnoxious and loud friends. Leave them all at home when you’re actively looking. If you think that you don’t have any friends that fit this description, then that negative and/or obnoxious person is YOU.

Putting meaning where there is none: this is something many women are guilty of doing. You have a few good dates with a new guy and afterwards you go home and call a friend with whom you share every detail and the two of you interpret everything he said and did since you’ve known him as signs that he likes or dislikes you. I stayed with the wrong person (read was engaged) for a decade because the two of us believed we were destined to be together because we met coincidentally on my birthday. This ridiculous fact kept us together for the first few years and afterwards, we kept re-interpreting little insignificant things until we found a reason to stay together. Sometimes, a date is just a date and a coincidence is just that and nothing more. There’s less pressure if you just accept the event for what it is and not imagine it to be more until the two of you discuss it and decide to make it more.

Knowing what you want: (another no-brainer) before we enter the jungle we need to know what animal we’re hunting or we’re likely to shoot at anything and everything in sight. I can speak with confidence when I say that I have chosen to be alone over being in bad company. If your goals are realistic, then you can certainly find what you’re seeking. The problem is that many of us aren’t very specific or aren’t realistic at all. In the evenings, after everyone else has gone home, I often sit in my office chatting with a married male friend, we’ll call him Ali B, who is never in a hurry to go home. The other day I told Ali B about my desire to meet someone and to get married and his response was simply to just find someone and get married. I told him that it’s not that simple, that I am looking for a man with very specific qualities. When I told him the list, he didn’t have a problem with it, but when he suggested I just have my family or friends set me up (hence my interest in writing this essay) I wanted to scream. He told me that life would be simpler if we educated women would just accept a “traditional marriage”. I managed self-control when I asked him how he defined a “traditional marriage”. He explained that arranged marriages have been the norm for hundreds of years in many cultures in the East and that educated women in the West today would not go unmarried if they could rely on their relatives to match them with the appropriately educated and employed men. I didn’t want to debate arranged marriages with him, but I did want to stand up for a marriage based on love. He could not control his laughter. Sadly, he doesn’t believe in such a marriage; he doesn’t think they exist and that love makes a good marriage. (BTW, his wife has an entirely different take on this topic. She thinks they are madly in love.) I told him I’d rather remain unmarried than to marry just to fill a social and or religious obligation and I meant it. If marriage alone were my goal, I could have been unhappily married long ago. He told me that happiness is an illusion and that divorce is a result of people going into a marriage with the unrealistic expectation of a life of happiness. He expected to be miserable, so he is. I’m not looking for perfection. At that moment, I knew for certain that I am on the right track.

Failing and trying again: everyone has had a broken heart, I think. They’re no fun. I have been heart-broken and disappointed and I have disappointed a few people in the past. It’s perhaps the one thing all of us have in common. We have all loved and lost at least once and then, we eventually tried again.

Revenge? Often when people are hurt, they want to hurt someone else so that they suffer equally or more. I fantasize about those things too, but I have found that having that person who hurt me see me doing well is a much better way to get under his skin. In your professional or personal life, I promise you, the best revenge is the psychological effect. Sadly, I learned that first from seeing someone I once loved survive without me. Gloria Gaynor told us that in 1970s and it still rings true.

A friend of mine from work, let’s call him the JÌbaro, thought it would be good to get some friends together to celebrate my promotion on e Thursday night after work. He invited another friend, to whom I’ll be referring as Mr. S, who brought with him two other guys, Silent Bob and Nelly, to the bar where we had agreed to meet. A third guy, The Bearded Baby or BB showed up much later in the evening. Other than the JÌbaro and Mr. S, these were all strangers to me. We sat in this bar together, they with their foreign beers and I with my cranberry juice (I don’t drink), and as I looked at them, the Flyboys, really looked at them, they were all nice men. They were all good men. They were all attractive men to whom I felt no attraction, but there was no doubt that I perceived their presence was part of my dating dilemma.

I contemplated each man from head to toe. One by one. I had long ago zoned out their conversations about work, their latest international trips, or the person whom they thought had the sexiest body in the room. I allowed myself to get lost in my thought. I considered their heads— hair described in flavors and textures: salt and pepper, strawberry blond, and smooth and in various stages of balding; I looked in their eyes whose colors were like kaleidoscopes in blues, greens, and browns. There were beards and goatees, as well as smooth faces. Thick luscious lips as well as thinner ones. Physically, if I could take a piece of each one, I might have the chassis of the perfect man in my eyes. It was not that the Flyboys scared off any men that may have wanted to approach me. I think it was obvious to anyone with eyes that though we were together, we weren’t together for various reasons. The most apparent one was that four of the men I was with, those to whom I referred as “Flyboys” were gay. After a couple of beers, the guys weren’t just aggressive, they were loud and obnoxious, whistling and otherwise coming just shy of sexually harassing the men in the bar and even a police office on the street outside the bar. I sat there among them asking myself “Why am I here?” and I could see that B.B. was probably thinking the same thing. That’s when the two straight people at the table realized (better late than never) that we had been set up. Mr. S (and S is for Sassy) decided to force us to meet. Mr. S is a work friend, so he knows the part of me I want my colleagues to know. He figured out that I like younger men, in that way, his selection of B.B. was appropriate, but he didn’t know that I have no attraction to the unemployed. How little my friends think of me! This is a sad state of affairs when my friends feel they have to secretly set me up. I had no one but myself to blame.

This uncomfortable situation with the bearded Baby made me want to change my approach to dating. Before, my dating persona was what I thought men wanted. I tried to be quiet and a bit submissive and “girly”, but that’s really not me. I don’t like sports, for the most part, but most of my friends, for most of my life have always been men (some would say, in spite of my feminist values). I like to say that I am a “textbook Leo”—though I am not really devoted to astrology—in that I find the description of the personality of those under the sign of Leo is quite accurate for me. Years ago, someone advised me to take the positive characteristics of my sign and apply them to my professional life to ensure success. That was great advice! In dating, I was just the opposite: entirely too agreeable, less opinionated, unassuming, and passive. This behavior has not brought me dating success. Yes, I ended up with long-term relationships, but they were relationships that I ended after years of being miserable. I was suppressing who I really was, as best as I could, to be the person that man had originally met. I have determined that that did not work for me. It seems logical that if I do the same thing every time I can expect nothing but the same results. 2010 is my year!

Why can’t I, then, apply the very same principles that I’ve credited for my professional success towards my social life? In many ways, the pursuit of a long-term, monogamous relationship is very similar to the pursuit of a career. In each, every disappointment and/or bad experience can be a learning experience. And, in the end, success will lead to many years of a generally pleasant experience and after a long time in one place, they usually give you a big part and a gold watch, or some other piece of expensive jewelry. Ultimately, you know you’ve succeeded when after your party, you have no further responsibilities and its just smooth sailing and years of laughing and living with the one you love while you go around the world spending every last cent of your children’s inheritance.

What follows are the five principles for professional success that I have lived by and have worked for me. These are the very same principles that I am going to apply to my dating life in 2010. * The sixth principle is good for any occasion.

Make yourself available to the type of man you want to attract.
Surround yourself with positive and supportive people.
Don’t put meaning where there is no meaning.
Know what you want and don’t lower your standards.
Be prepared to fail at least once, and then try again.
The best revenge is living well.

I guess for most these are no-brainers, but as I said in a previous blog entry, I am a “serial monogamist”; so, I have very little dating experience. I have been very successful in my career, and these principles were those I lived by. Why wouldn’t they work in this situation too?

Making yourself available: this just means to be where you would find the type of man you would want and it’s best if that place is a place you would normally go anyway. There’s no point in pretending to be something you’re not. Case in point.. some religious friends, a couple we’ll call the Missionaries, believe the only place to find a good man is in church. They are missionaries for matrimony. Everyone should be married and every married couple should have children, according to them. It is a difficult for the husband to accept that his wife has one friend who is neither married or has (or wants) children: me. He can’t understand that a church would not be the ideal place for me to find the man who would be right for me. As I see it, if I find him in church, he’ll expect me to continue to go to church. Neither of us should be disappointed. So, let him find a good church girl, and let me look elsewhere. Similarly, if I am doing what I would normally do and I should meet someone who enjoys the same things, neither of us would have to change to please the other. Both of us would have quite pleasant demeanors and would be attractive as well as attracted to each other.

Surrounding yourself with positive people: this just means that bad energy begets more bad energy. Nobody likes that one person in the group who is so desperate for attention that s/he has to have something to complain about all the time. You spend your time trying to convince this person to stay or cheering this person up instead of having a good time yourself. This person is driving away anyone who might be interested in getting to know you. The same goes for the obnoxious and loud friends. Leave them all at home when you’re actively looking. If you think that you don’t have any friends that fit this description, then that negative and/or obnoxious person is YOU.

Putting meaning where there is none: this is something many women are guilty of doing. You have a few good dates with a new guy and afterwards you go home and call a friend with whom you share every detail and the two of you interpret everything he said and did since you’ve known him as signs that he likes or dislikes you. I stayed with the wrong person (read was engaged) for a decade because the two of us believed we were destined to be together because we met coincidentally on my birthday. This ridiculous fact kept us together for the first few years and afterwards, we kept re-interpreting little insignificant things until we found a reason to stay together. Sometimes, a date is just a date and a coincidence is just that and nothing more. There’s less pressure if you just accept the event for what it is and not imagine it to be more until the two of you discuss it and decide to make it more.

Knowing what you want: (another no-brainer) before we enter the jungle we need to know what animal we’re hunting or we’re likely to shoot at anything and everything in sight. I can speak with confidence when I say that I have chosen to be alone over being in bad company. If your goals are realistic, then you can certainly find what you’re seeking. The problem is that many of us aren’t very specific or aren’t realistic at all. In the evenings, after everyone else has gone home, I often sit in my office chatting with a married male friend, we’ll call him Ali B, who is never in a hurry to go home. The other day I told Ali B about my desire to meet someone and to get married and his response was simply to just find someone and get married. I told him that it’s not that simple, that I am looking for a man with very specific qualities. When I told him the list, he didn’t have a problem with it, but when he suggested I just have my family or friends set me up (hence my interest in writing this essay) I wanted to scream. He told me that life would be simpler if we educated women would just accept a “traditional marriage”. I managed self-control when I asked him how he defined a “traditional marriage”. He explained that arranged marriages have been the norm for hundreds of years in many cultures in the East and that educated women in the West today would not go unmarried if they could rely on their relatives to match them with the appropriately educated and employed men. I didn’t want to debate arranged marriages with him, but I did want to stand up for a marriage based on love. He could not control his laughter. Sadly, he doesn’t believe in such a marriage; he doesn’t think they exist and that love makes a good marriage. (BTW, his wife has an entirely different take on this topic. She thinks they are madly in love.) I told him I’d rather remain unmarried than to marry just to fill a social and or religious obligation and I meant it. If marriage alone were my goal, I could have been unhappily married long ago. He told me that happiness is an illusion and that divorce is a result of people going into a marriage with the unrealistic expectation of a life of happiness. He expected to be miserable, so he is. I’m not looking for perfection. At that moment, I knew for certain that I am on the right track.

Failing and trying again: everyone has had a broken heart, I think. They’re no fun. I have been heart-broken and disappointed and I have disappointed a few people in the past. It’s perhaps the one thing all of us have in common. We have all loved and lost at least once and then, we eventually tried again.

Revenge? Often when people are hurt, they want to hurt someone else so that they suffer equally or more. I fantasize about those things too, but I have found that having that person who hurt me see me doing well is a much better way to get under his skin. In your professional or personal life, I promise you, the best revenge is the psychological effect. Sadly, I learned that first from seeing someone I once loved survive without me. Gloria Gaynor told us that in 1970s and it still rings true.